From
LGBT+ History Month (February 2023)
To
International Transgender Day of Visibility
31 March 2023
Happy Trans Day of Visibility 2023! For this 31 March, our LGBT+ History Month book display has been rearranged to cast a spotlight on the trans artists included there. As part of this change, I have also added Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), which features many and varied trans artists and theorists presenting interesting and nuanced arguments about the meanings and consequences of visible transness. This book is currently on display open to a page featuring artist, activist, and trans man, Reed Erickson. I thought the title for his self-portrait particularly appropriate for Trans Day of Visibility: I am fire, I am Wind, I AM BEING All that YOU IS SEEING.
I have also opened the volume Queer!? (Zwolle, 2019) to a page about the trans masculine Russian-Hungarian performance artist and painter, El Kazovsky; and, from Jonathan Weisberg’s Art after Stonewall: 1969-1989 (2019), I have centred an image of Marsha P. Johnson alongside a conversation about her between filmmaker, Sasha Wortzel and writer and trans activist, Tourmaline. While the relationship of drag performers like Marsha to transness is complicated – some identify as trans and some do not – their importance to trans movements cannot be denied, and their representation of fluid gender performance complements this theme.
Similarly, beginning in the 1970s, Nan Goldin, represented in this display through Nan Goldin, by Guido Costa (Phaidon, 2005), drew the attention of the art world to drag queens and transgender life. This book features on its cover her photograph Jimmy Paulette & Misty in a Taxi, NYC (1991) – just one of the many images she recorded of her drag queen friends.
Then, while explicit trans representation is extremely difficult to find in ancient history, I thought that the page entitled ‘A Gender Changing Goddess’ from Richard Parkinson’s A Little Gay History (2013) provides a concise introduction to ancient evidence for gender variance.
I hope that you too have enjoyed this brief look into trans representation in the collections at the Sackler Library!
Ashley Parry, Library Assistant
Sackler Library, Bodleian Libraries