Transistence: The Politics of Trans Representation

About

This Radar event will take the exhibition What Makes This Image Trans? as a starting point to explore the politics of trans representation. It will explore the practices and methods trans people use to selectively share their lived experiences, and the agencies involved in doing so. Resisting the gaze of cisnormativity, the event will have a particular focus on photography and personal narrative. 

The event will feature an introduction to What Makes This Image Trans? by two of its contributors: Isaac Scott Briggs and Oskar Marchock. They will situate the exhibition in relation to the workshops out of which it developed, in which the politics of constructing and sharing trans narratives through photography were explored.

It will also feature contributions from L. Zachary DuBois and Alpesh Patel, who will be Visiting Fellows at Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in 2021/22, during which time they will contribute to ‘Transitions’: a festival exploring transition across the personal, societal, political and ecological realms. DuBois will offer a reflection on the exhibition’s themes through the lens of his lived experience as a transgender man, and his anthropological research which focuses on embodied inequalities, stress, and trans resilience. Patel, meanwhile, will connect the discussion into his research into how artworks exploring the relationship between abstraction, the body, and (moving) image-making create vibrant spaces for transgender visibility.

Together, these contributions will create space for a discussion of the strategies, possibilities and power relations of narratives by and about trans people, with a view to individual and collective liberation.

Photo credit: Isaac Scott Briggs