By Jun Zubillaga-Pow
[This essay was first published on Trans Asia Photography on fall 2021.]
“We don’t have to spend our lives standing on street corners in high heels and bright lipstick, in the rain and cold. Enough of that.” – Silvana Sosa1
In one of many revelatory photos from Grace Baey’s Living Choices, we see Zeck, a Burmese transgender teenager standing with arms folded.2 Flanked by four golden Buddha statues, he wears a black long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows with a maroon patterned longyi, making him appear rather powerful and smart-looking in front of the splendid temple altar. Accentuated with the sunlight shining on his face, there is an air of confidence about him. Yet, like all postcolonial Asian societies, the people of Myanmar continue to frown upon any form of sexual and gender deviations. Trans people, like Zeck and his wider community, have to weather everyday discrimination and stand up for themselves. Standing, as a transient gait, becomes in itself a statement of social presence and corporeal existence. Standing in the face of power becomes itself a performance of power.
Public images of trans people, whether well-known or unnamed, are often represented as standing steadfastly on their feet. From Teresa Bracamonte’s Lima Intrarrosa to Robert Kalman’s Transgender Israelis, many of the recent photos featuring trans people around the world reveal exactly this startling phenomenon of erect poses.3 They could be smiling or subdued; oblivious to the camera or staring right into it; being shot with an advocacy agenda or intended for mass entertainment. Yet transgender models in a full body feature are often portrayed in an upright framing from head to toe, or part thereof. Why then do trans people mostly stand (and stand out) in photography? Or redirecting the question to the photographers, why are trans people always captured as upright objects to the roving eye? To get to the bottom of this observation within the discipline of modern art history, we have to return to the origins of the portrait and its photographic adaptation to understand the way humans have been represented visually in the past.
In the seventeenth-century Spanish empire, aristocratic members were often painted in a standing position with one hand resting on the back of a chair or other furniture. One can see such portrayals in Anthony van Dyck’s Self-Portrait (1622-23), as well as Diego Velázquez’s La infanta Margarita Therese en rosa (1654) and El infante Felipe Próspero (1659). In other paintings showing families in a domestic setting, the senior figures would be seated in the middle, while their spouses, children and the occasional servants would stand around them. The purpose of commissioning these solo and family portraits had been to serve the practical functions of command and communication.4 Copies of the pictures were hung in palaces, while others were distributed throughout the empire across Asia and the Americas to convey the power and authority of the kings or queens.5 Subordinates were reminded of their loyalty to the crown through the portraits of the royals; guests and distant relatives, on the other hand, were assured of the well-being and well-attired appearance of their grandchildren or cousins on receiving these paintings.6 Imperial portraiture strived to show the subjects in the best dress and best state of health. The vertical positioning of the body, aligned with the forces of gravity, allowed for the torso and the elaborate costumes to be exhibited in the most dramatic and powerful fashion.
Fast forward to the early twentieth century, black-and-white images from various photo studios in the British settler colony revealed a very different story.7 If there were one chair, the matriarch would occupy it; if there were two, it would be the wife and her husband who were assigned the seats. Most probably a direction from the photographer, such an arrangement would become standardized regardless of the family’s ethnicity–Chinese, Indian or Malay. Their children, sometimes as many as ten, would stand around their parents. Apart from the more elaborate sartorial choices, two other bodily observations could also be made. Firstly, almost no one would be smiling in these photos and, secondly, for the few people standing next to a chair, they would most likely rest their elbows on its back. These facial and manual behaviours seemed to be subtle indicators of the socio-economic status of the family members who were made to stand. Those who exhibited such postures were more often the young and female members, that is, the lowest ranking in the family.
Thereafter, when trans people in the early twenty-first century take centre-place in the long history of the portraiture, it is a clear indication of changing artistic and social statuses. In my previous article on the aesthetics of transgender portraiture, I compared the changing attitude, dressing, and bodies of Singaporean models between the 1980s and the 2010s.8 I stated that the transgender models often displayed a demure, fierce or natural look in front of the camera. The range of expression seemed to span a wider spectrum than the typical high-end fashion shoot. In comparison, the poses taken by the transgender models appeared to be either overly dramatic or subtly evocative. The semantics used to decipher these transgender figures appeared to be multi-layered, as their facial and bodily expressions revealed and concealed the social and sexual experiences in their everyday life.
The aesthetics of trans photography is however showing signs of clearer authenticity in recent years. Shahria Sharmin is a Bangladeshi photographer whose project Call Me Henna documents the existence of hijras, a term used in her birth country to refer to “people designated male or intersex at birth who adopt a feminine gender identity”.9 In her 2017 photographic exhibition, she adopted an aesthetic that presented a remarkable austerity of colour and expression. Relying on a box camera that captured only the black-white spectrum of monochromatic hues, her pictures accentuated the contours of the visage and clothing through the play of chiaroscuro lighting, whether natural or imposed.
To the extent that the deliberate erasure of subdued or eccentric emotions stands in stark contrast to the earlier colonial familial configuration, the poignant expression in these artworks was delineated through position and composition. Whether coincidental or prearranged by Shahria Sharmin, many photos in the collection featured a cis-trans couple with the cis person being a relative or lover of the trans person. For example, in the image featuring two standing feminine-looking figures, there are distinct similarities and differences in the artistic composition of the two sisters, Nishi and Rozy.10 The older of the two, Nishi, is draped in a coloured sari with what appear to be flowers on her head and a bracelet on her wrist while her sister, Rozy, stands beside her with a completely pale façade from top to toe.
If we remember the Spanish Baroque affective style as espoused by Velázquez and his contemporaries, this vertical positioning of the entire torso plus limbs signals to the viewer a sense of authority and authenticity. Each of the trans characters in the photographs has to successfully “pass” the critical surveys (as well as surveying critiques) of patrons, casual and connoisseur alike.11 Not dissimilar to the members of aristocratic echelons, they stand in front of the camera’s gaze with all of their histories and life experiences–pride as well as shame–captured within the frames.
Herein, not only would viewers compare the cisgender and transgender subjects (with each other) in the images, but they would also refract their judgments against the socio-normative gender binary. Regardless of the viewers’ own gender identification, a superlative reading of sexuality thereby becomes the very register on which appraisals get affirmed whenever trans people are oriented to stand next to cis people. It is, however, highly unlikely for trans people themselves to pretend to present their own physical or psychological selves in any excessive form beyond normal sociality or sexuality.12 Despite this, the structural discrimination has remained cast in their visual representations and being rendered as “monstrous” and “(hyper)sexualized” in excess of all of their feminine connotations, especially so for the case of present-day male-to-female trans photography.13
How the Bangladeshi hijras and Burmese queers stand apart from their Western trans counterparts is also complicated by the ramifications of their postcolonial genealogy, socio-legal or otherwise. By choice or by force, Asian trans are expected (and shown) to be integrated into everyday society as opposed to, say, Western trans-of-colour portraitures, such as those produced in New York City and Paris around the same milieu and in a similar chiaroscuro aesthetics, one that seemed more insular and antagonistic.14 The contemporary artworks discussed in this critical reflection are undeniably spearheading an aesthetic, or trans-aesthetic, that shifts from the subservient “performative” toward a more empowering “authentication”.15 The projection of standing trans figures, as contended in this brief critical reflection, shares a structural affinity to the power play of aristocratic and late colonial portraitures. Juxtaposed with their stoic facial expressions, the models and their photographers are capitalizing on the creative medium to wield certain powers to authenticate their full existence and experience not without but within everyday life and society.
Jun Zubillaga-Pow (he/him) is a cultural historian and musicologist specialising in gender, media and technology in twentieth-century Malay World and Europe. He was awarded research fellowships in Asian Heritage and Digital History at Leiden University, the National Library of Singapore and the National Museum of Singapore. His research interests lie mainly in the Indonesian angklung in the world and Malay popular music in the twentieth century. He obtained a PhD in Historical Musicology from King’s College London, and is published in South East Asia Research, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific.
Notes
1. Silvana Sosa, quoted in Emily Schmall, “Transgender Advocates Hail Law Easing Rules in Argentina”, The New York Times, May 24, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/world/americas/transgender-advocates-hail-argentina-law.html (last accessed July 31, 2021)
2. Grace Baey, Living Choices (2018), https://www.gracebaey.com/living-choices (Last accessed June 19, 2021)
3. See Teresa Bracamonte, Lima Intrarrosa (2014), http://teresabracamonte.com/index.php/project/lima-intrarrosa-2/ and Robert Kalman, Transgender Israelis https://www.robertkalmanweb.com/gallery.html?folio=PORTFOLIOS&gallery=Transgender%20Israelis (Last accessed June 21, 2021)
4. Cf. Amy M. Schmitter, “Picturing Power: Representation and Las Meninas”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 3, 1996, 255–268.
5. Natasha Eaton, “The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics, and Empire in South India, 1750-1795”, Cultural Critique 70, 2008, 63–93; Tara Allen-Flanagan, “The Face of an Empire: Cosmetics and Whiteness in Imperial Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I”, Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal 3, 2020.
6. Mercedes Llorente, “Portraits of Children at the Spanish Court in the Seventeenth Century: The Infanta Margarita and the Young King Carlos II”, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 35, no. 1, 2010, 30-47.
7. See, for instance, Gretchen Liu, From the Family Album: Portraits from the Lee Brothers Studio, Singapore 1910-1925, Singapore: Landmark Books, 1995.
8. Jun Zubillaga-Pow, “‘In The Raw’: Posing, Photography, and Trans* Aesthetics”, Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 3, 2018, 443-455. See also the photos of Alain Soldeville, Bugis Street (2014), http://www.soldeville.com/en/gallery/bugis-street/, and Grace Baey, 8 Women (2015), https://www.gracebaey.com/8-women (Last accessed July 21, 2021)
9. Shahria Sharmin, Call Me Heena (2017), https://shahriasharmin.com/call-me-heena-new/.
10. See photo in Karolien Wilmots, “Does Passing as a Woman Define Being One? Part Two”, in Foto Femme United, June 1, 2020, https://www.fotofemmeunited.com/article/204 (last accessed August 1, 2021)
11. Cf. Thomas J. Billard, “‘Passing’ and the Politics of Deception: Transgender Bodies, Cisgender Aesthetics, and the Policing of Inconspicuous Marginal Identities” in: Tony Docan-Morgan (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Deceptive Communication. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 463-77.
12. Studies on the desire to normalize one’s socialized sexuality remain globally prevalent for people who identify as lesbian, gay or transgender. See, for example, Jordan Lee, “‘This is Normal for Us’: Resiliency and Resistance amongst Lesbian and Gay Parents”, Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review 5, no. 2 (2009), 70-80; Yau Ching, “Dreaming of Normal while Sleeping with Impossible: Introduction”, in Yau Ching (ed.) As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010; Austin H. Johnson and Baker A. Rogers, “‘We’re the Normal Ones Here’: Community Involvement, Peer Support, and Transgender Mental Health”, Sociological Inquiry 90, no. 2 (2020), 271-92.
13. Sara Ahmed, “An Affinity of Hammers”, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, nos. 1-2 (2016), 29; Becky Francis et. al. “Femininity, Science, and the Denigration of the Girly Girl”, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38, no. 8 (2017), 1098.
14. Mark Seliger, On Christopher Street: Transgender Stories, New York: Rizzoli, 2016; Kader Attia, The Landing Strip, London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2019.
15. Cf. Tan Qian Hui, “Orientalist Obsessions: Fabricating Hyper-reality and Performing Hyper-femininity in Thailand’s Kathoey Tourism”, Annals of Leisure Research 17(2), 2014, 154-55.
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