Review of Wrongly Bodied by Jeffrey Bruce

The International Review of African American Art, Volume 22, No. 4, 2009

I did not think that a book focused on the documentation of a gender change from female to male would hold my attention. I got that gender identification/reassignment was a big issue, but it was not my issue, and I doubted if I would be able to connect to it or the individuals involved. I was wrong. Wrongly Bodied is an artist book. In it Sligh documents, through text and straightforward photography of the body, the three-year long transition of Deb McBee into Jake McBee. What helped me to participate in, and come to appreciate, this unique, and at times pretty unsettling journey was Sligh’s juxtaposition of Jake’s journey to physical and psychological harmony to that of the story of Ellen Craft, an enslaved black woman who disguised herself as a white man in order to escape. This intellectual device had particular resonance for me because I work at the Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia, and the story of Ellen and William Craft’s escape is one of the backbones of the Tubman’s educational programming. By paralleling Jake’s process of transition with the historic journey of the Craft’s, Sligh fits Jake’s story into the larger context of the struggle for freedom against oppression. In the end I understood the enormity of Jake’s undertaking and appreciated the sophistication of Sligh’s artistry.

Jeffrey Bruce is deputy director for exhibitions at the Tubman African American Museum. http://www.tubmanmuseum.com

The International Review of African American Art, Volume 22, No. 4, 2009 is a publication of Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia.

http://museum.hamptonu.edu/iraaa_publication.cfm

Haverford College “Jake in Transition” Exhibition and Round Table Discussion, April 4, 2008.

Visual pleasure and FTM passing in Clarissa Sligh’s Wrongly Bodied Two

Excerpt from paper presented by Gayle Salamon, Costen LGBT Postdoctoral Fellow from the Society of Fellows in Liberal Arts, Princeton University.

“… I would suggest that there can be (at least) two distinct types of visual pleasure involved in looking at transgendered bodies.  The first is the pleasure of beholding a hyperrealized masculinity or femininity:  this is the pleasure of drag or of spectacles like the trans beauty pageants held in Manila, Singapore or Las Vegas, or Bravo’s reality series Transamerican Love Story. This kind of visual pleasure often stems from the seamlessness or persuasiveness of the gendered performance.  But it is no less true of representations of gender in general, since gender so often resides in the gesture….”

For the complete text of the Gayle Salamon presentation go to:

http://www.haverford.edu/HHC/story.php?id=11931&u=11

Interview

MARIE STEPHENS’ INTERVIEW WITH CLARISSA SLIGH

August 6, 2009

Clarissa Sligh with Marie Stephens

M:  How did you get interested in the subject of transgenderism?

C: I had been photographing men and began to look for women to photograph for my Masculinity Project. Having been given Deb’s name, I contacted her. She was very interested. When we met she said that she was going to change her gender from female to male. I asked her if she was still female at that point. Since she said yes, I could her include in the project. But looking at it in retrospect, I could have included her anyway. But at the time, I was thinking now I’m looking for women to photograph or now I’m looking for men to photograph.

M: Did you ever write anything about the Masculinity Project?  Was it just a photo exhibit?

C: In addition to exhibitions, the photographs of the black men became the basis for my MFA thesis at Howard University. By narrowing the focus, I could see that I was subconsciously challenging my father’s construction of masculinity.  It had made our family life difficult. But I was not aware of that when I made the photographs.

M:  So Deb was just one of many people that you photographed for the masculinity project?

C:  Yes. However, it was not easy to visualize the concept “masculine woman” without making them into a stereotype of a male. If a woman was small-boned and not dressed in a military or athletic type of uniform, I usually failed in my attempts to make a photograph that related to the image that I had in my mind.

I was hesitant to directly ask a woman if she saw herself as being masculine because I was afraid she might perceive it to be a negative thing. I was simply looking for strong powerful women. It had nothing to do with sexuality (did it?) or sexual preference. Whenever I asked for referrals, it was interesting that most people thought of masculine as butch lesbian.

In Dallas, I saw a motorcycle policewoman with long red fingernails. I wondered if the red fingernails were a way of saying that she might be a cop but she was also very feminine. Since that time, I’ve seen the long red fingernails on women bodybuilders and have noticed them in other contexts.

There are a lot of straight women who look masculine or women who don’t identify as homosexual who look masculine and there are a lot of women who do not look masculine but who see themselves as masculine. Photographing Jake as he transitioned from female to male helped me to understand more about gender ambiguity and duality and to be more open to it.

M: So when Deb had the change of sex operation then she was really no longer exploring that ambiguity that you were so interested in?

C:  As Deb and certainly as Jake, he didn’t like and wasn’t interested in the ambiguity. He wanted no part of it. He’d spent his life having people look at him and wonder “what the hell are you?” He wanted you to look him and see a man.

M:  But isn’t there also a group of younger transgender folks, especially in the colleges and universities that celebrate that ambiguity?

C: Young people often see differently. Today, many enjoy gender blending.  In ten to twenty years it might be something else. Who would have thought that corsets would come back?

Jake’s gender change had nothing to do with being revolutionary or radical.  For him it was about wanting to be seen as normal within mainstream society.

M:  He saw himself as being abnormal?

C:  Right.

M:  It gets even more confusing now when you think about it that way.   Well let’s go on.  So you photographed Jake (Deb at the time) for the Masculinity Project and then he contacted you later and asked if you would be interested in documenting his transition.

C:  Yes, he had already asked two of his photographer friends before he asked me, but they declined.

M:  Do you know why?

C:  No, I never learned why.

M: Well, it’s a huge undertaking in a lot of ways because you are going to see things that are unpleasant, uncomfortable and painful to look at.

C:  I don’t know if those were considerations, but I was more concerned about the appearance of “speaking for others.”

M: Did you know what to expect?

C:  No, but I read everything I could get my hands on. Jake wanted the photographs to be a resource for other transgender people. I tried to honor that, but regardless of your intentions you don’t know how people will interpret your pictures. I also wanted the photographs to be accessible to a wider group of people who might not know about gender transitions. I wanted the images to convey the human aspects of a gender transition, not the dramatic or newsworthy aspects of it.

Initially, I focused on making photographs that showed changes in his body. Six months into the project, I asked some my photographer colleagues for feedback. What they said was, “I don’t get anything about who he is or the kind of person he is, or why he’s doing this.”

That’s when I realized that the video interviews that I had been doing with him, as part of my education (so I could understand his motivation for wanting to change his gender), needed to become part of the project.

M:  Originally then, it was just going to be a book of photographs and then you said no I need the words as well?

C:  Originally, I saw it as a series of photographs. But the images alone did not show the intensity of the process. Words were needed. Additionally, texts could help with my efforts not to romanticize Jake’s process, because it cannot be taken lightly.

M:  Your book does not do that and yet the photographs are not stark in any way.  There’s an aesthetic quality to them that makes them soft and easy to look at.  Even the photographs of the scars weren’t like looking at medical pictures.  It was like looking at this person going through the experience of their life, rather than a medical procedure.   So what was the first photo session like?

C: I felt like I was on thin ice.  I used a view camera, which meant that I could think about how to photograph him while I set up the camera and the lights. I am not a documentary photographer. I usually make “constructed images” from pictures in my mind.  Now, suddenly I was trying to be objective, to produce evidence.

M:  And just have the pictures speak for themselves?

C:  My intention was to be objective.  Bit by bit, I began to face my subjectivity.

M: I remember from my studies in archaeology that even what one labels as “evidence” is a subjective matter. There’s politics and bias involved in what gets labeled evidence and what gets discarded as irrelevant. What was it that you tried to do or tried to avoid in that first session to stay as objective as you could?

C: My goal was to gather and present evidence of a physical body. So I wanted the body without clothes as a point of departure. But this was the first time he was to be nude in front of me. We were in his bedroom for privacy because others were in the house. I photographed him on the bed but through the mirror in part because both the bed and the mirror took up most of the space and because they are symbols and metaphors for many things.

M:  Self-perception?

C: There are many narratives that say that the mirror reflects back to us who and what we are.

M: The fact that you took photographs through the mirror seems to suggest more subjectivity than taking straight on pictures to document a person’s body. Would you call it a technique? Was it a statement that Jake was trying to make?

C:  Jake could not articulate exactly what it was he wanted but neither of us wanted the images to be prurient or pornographic. The mirror also gave us a certain degree of space and distance from each other.

For me the question was, “If you don’t begin with a body, how are you going to show the changes to it?”

But I saw that for Jake it was a huge deal to show himself in a female body. I had trained as an artist and had spent countless hours in numerous classes looking at and drawing the nude body, so I focused on trying to help him feel comfortable.

C:  My looking at him through the camera through the mirror and not through the camera directly helped him relax a bit.

M: How long did that first session last?

C: With dinner and setting up the camera and lights, maybe about six hours. It definitely required an investment of time.

M:  View cameras have a hood you get under in order to shoot the picture right? That put even more distance between yourself and your subject so it’s interesting, from a photographic and psychological viewpoint that the choice of equipment was so integral to this project.  That the camera that you used determined at least to some extent, how comfortable Jake could feel.

C:  For the first 6 months I used the view camera, later but I switched to 35 mm.

M: What about Jake’s  girlfriend at that time?  Was she present while you were taking the photographs?

C:  She wasn’t in the room.

M: Did she have issues with you taking pictures?

C:  No, she was all in favor of it.

M: How did you walk away feeling about that first photo session with Jake?

C: Anxious. Jake was going to have a double mastectomy soon and there would be no time to rephotograph him in that bodily configuration.  I checked and double-checked everything but the lens had given me problems previously and despite having shot Polaroids, I hoped my film exposures were good.

A few days later when he saw the photographs he said he had asked himself whether the surgery was a real option.  Was this something that will really get him where he wants to be or was he going to end up messing up his body and becoming incontinent? He said there are no guarantees, that the surgery was different for everyone. He joked about it, but he felt quite vulnerable.

M: You just don’t know do you? Especially something as complex as that.  It’s not like you are getting a nose job. You don’t need to take hormones for a nose job so you can see why people are required to go through therapy for two or three years. How in the world did he afford it?  Insurance companies I’m sure would consider it elective surgery don’t you think?

C:  I think he had to borrow a lot of the money.

M: So the financial considerations added to the stress, which was already there due to the fact that Jake didn’t know if he was going to be massacring his body.  He must have also known that he might be looking at more surgery later on.

C:  Yes, he knew there would be more surgeries.

M: So they took things out and moved things around progressively but at some point you are finished aren’t you?

C:  I don’t know because when I last saw him in Dallas in the spring (2009), he was talking about wanting to go back for more surgery. He explained how surgeons can now do in one operation what previously required multiple surgeries.

M: The other thing that crosses my mind has to do with Jake’s desire to be a “normal man”.  It strikes me hat he is still not normal in the sense that he doesn’t have fully functioning equipment.  I mean he can’t have an erection right?  He can’t ejaculate can he? I would think this would make him into a different kind of man.

C: This is an interesting point, but is it relevant? The history of this kind of bottom surgery goes back to it being devised for men who came back from war. Would you say that a man that came back from the war with missing body parts is a different kind of man?

M: Still, that individual would have been a biological man “from the get go” so I don’t know about the analogy.

C:  You’re saying that because he can’t ejaculate?

M: Yes, because he’s not going to be able to do that.

C:  But aren’t there genetic men who cannot ejaculate?

M:  Right but at some point they did, or at some point they had.  There is always the issue of people born with malfunctioning organs that never work, or women that can’t become pregnant but there’s a difference between that situation and someone who is going through a sex change operation where the genitals which have been surgically reconstructed are still not fully functioning genitals.  I’m thinking about how important it was to Jake to be normal. I’m assuming Jake can’t have an erection because it’s impossible to make the clitoris the same size as a penis, it’s not as big as a penis. This issue of normalcy seems to be less of a problem with transgender individuals going from male to female than female to male But it does bring up the whole definition of what constitutes maleness and femaleness.

C:  Yes, but are erections maleness? Are small penises less male? Those questions certainly help to sell products. But from the stories that I’ve heard from women who have been with men who use Viagra for example, it’s not so simple. It requires discussion between the two people or it runs the risk of not working. Yet penis erection enhancers and testosterone are two of the biggest drugs selling on the internet. But it’s not only about getting an erection, it’s also about feeling the energy associated with masculine virility. When Jake started taking testosterone, he said his physical energy shot up and he was “horny” all the time.

M: So if masculinity isn’t about erections, what is masculinity about then? Did you get a changing sense of that as you went through this project?

C: What I became more conscious of was how fluid and amorphous masculinity and femininity are, that it might have to do with the type of energy a person has than the kind of genitals they have. Since I was working on the masculinity project at the same time, I thought I might learn something about the construction of masculinity, but my perceptions of Jake swung widely from day to day, week to week. Questions came up not only about Jake, but also about how I saw myself. Can we say that because Jake, as Deb, loved being in the Army and loved being in a war, meant that Deb was a man?  I would say no, but Deb might say yes.  But as Jake moved more into his construction of masculinity through his attitude, gestures and artifacts like clothing, he sometimes overdid it, but that’s probably normal.

M: I’ve never quite understood why I’ve never heard of a male transitioning into a female who chose an androgynous look.

C:  How do we know?

M: From outward appearances (how they look) it seems that male to female transitioners go for external things like red nail polish, a big hairdo, makeup and that sort of thing.  Even though we know that doesn’t make us female and that those are just props, it still seems to be important to them.

C:  A few things come to mind: 1.) This may have no relationship to what we’re talking about, but some of my colleagues who have converted to religion as adults seem more religious than those who grew up in the religion.  Are gender conversions similar? 2.) There were times when Jake seemed to be over the top macho and insensitive while transitioning but after a couple of years he calmed down. It was something that he had wanted for so long, so when he actually began the process he was going to have the biggest penis, he was going to be “it.” 3.) It might be a phase that a person is going through, but some of the people we notice might be extroverted and get great pleasure out of being flamboyant and standing out in a group. Generally, how women dress and perform gender is more a matter of how they see themselves. It’s difficult to “see” transwomen who have chosen to fit in as anything other than women.

M: How did your perception and understanding of masculinity change?

C: At that time the arguments about nature versus nurture were in high gear and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was the bible. She wrote, “Gender is performed!”

Even though Jake saw himself as a man before he transitioned, he had to actually learn to “act like a man” as the surgery and hormones and the weight training made him appear more masculine. Although he wore pants and shirts, now he had to add different shirts, a tie and a jacket to his wardrobe.  He had to learn to walk with something in between his legs. He had to learn what young boys learn about being male and get to the point where his movements were “natural.”

He would joke, “How can a five foot two inch male be dominant?”

As I traveled, I begin to observe the way that men interacted with each other in the airports. Shorter men often projected a toughness that was absent from taller men. But I could relate to it. One of my brothers was short when we were growing up. Bigger boys often picked on him, but they would soon learn that was like messing with a hornet’s nest. As the fourth child in a big family he had learned to take up for himself.

M:  Some things have changed culturally but as far as gender expectations of height and stature, I think it’s pretty evident how our society wants men and women to look.

C:  Not just look but behave. When I was photographing men for the masculinity project, I was surprised that some wives did not like it that their husbands refused to take on “aggressive postures.” There was one guy I photographed who was a stockbroker or trader. When his daughters were born he moved home and did his bond and stock trading over the phone from home. His wife had a job that she could not do from their house. But to me it seemed she felt it was a reflection on her as a woman that the girls turned to him instead of to her for comfort.

M: Is this thing so threatening? How huge a shift in consciousness for society will it take to move along concerning gender and gender roles?  Now that you’ve met a few other transgender people, I wonder what you think about this. Some people think there is a gene for homosexuality – that homosexuality is biological  — that homosexuals are just born that way. What I wonder is if there is any evidence of chromosome hormonal factors in people who don’t identify with the body that they have.

C:  It is not an area that I have looked into.

M: The whole issue of nature versus nurture leads me to question what it is that is responsible for gender identification.  I mean it has to be partially biological right?  Taking hormones seems to be an important part of the gender transition.  Didn’t we have a conversation about how testosterone strongly changed Jake’s personality. What is it that makes one person so profoundly uncomfortable in the body that they have?   Was there anything about Jake’s body that looked specifically male?

C:  No, Jake had a beautiful female body. Some people have asked me, “What is the disability in gender dysphoria?”

M:  The disability?

C:  How does the disability of gender dysphoria manifest itself? How does it make a person disabled?

M:  Getting back to nature vs. nurture, I’ve noticed that people are so much more comfortable if they believe that your homosexuality is related to something you can’t control, like a family gene or something.  It reminds me of the issue of who could call themselves lesbians.  That issue came up in the mid 1970’s because the idea that you could choose to be a lesbian was in its heyday.  Your lesbian identity was primarily political not necessarily sexual.  That led many to ask the question, does one have to have sex with a woman in order to consider herself a lesbian which led to the question of exactly what is lesbianism – how would we define it? If it’s a matter of a choice, it’s much more threatening and revolutionary than if it’s a matter of biology.

For those transitioning, the technology is there to enable the body to match the identity that the individual claims, so why not use it.  Additionally the biological explanation, if it applies to transgender individuals, seems to increase the level of acceptance one receives in our society. Going back to something I said earlier the construction of masculinity must involve the inherent rejection of everything that is female or feminine. Do you think that we define masculinity as that which is not feminine or by a rejection of the feminine?

C: When I looked up masculinity and femininity in the dictionary I found that there were many more meanings for masculine than for feminine.

M: Really!

C: Masculinity is seen as a more positive trait or characteristic whereas femininity is seen as more negative.

M: And do you think that’s how Jake saw it? I mean his masculinity was dependent upon a rejection of the female parts of himself.

C:  He said he did not like himself as a woman and that it was not because men were better, but that they were different. I say, “It’s not simply Jake. Look at all the women who hate women. They say they don’t, but they have internalized sexism to the extent that they don’t even think about it. Look at how they accept ‘bullshit’ from  men that they would never accept from women. Look at how they buy into the concept that women don’t have the right to make choices about their own body. Look at those who say they’d rather have a man than a woman for a boss. Why?”

M: I’m wondering about the psychological. Did you see psychological changes in Jake as time went on?  Was there anything feminine about him when you first met him that then changed?

C:  He had a feminine body. But putting gender aside, when you change physically, you change psychologically and other people respond to you accordingly!

M:  So those things that we culturally call masculine like strength for example were so positive to him that they enhanced his self-esteem?

C:  Becoming a man was very important to him and he talks about how it enhanced his self-esteem near the end of the book.

In reflecting on your question though, I would say that it was his success in over-coming his fear that enhanced his self-perception. Yes, Jake’s goal was to became a man but look how powerful women look when they are successful and they know that they did it on their own terms.

Copyright 2009 Clarissa Sligh

Marie Stephens is an adjunct professor who teaches courses in ethics, writing, critical thinking and women’s studies at Warren Wilson College, A-B Tech and Surry Community College and the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a M.L.A. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina in Asheville, NC.

Photographs Reproduced

Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images, Terry Barrett, McGraw-Hill, 2006, 4th edition, New York, NY, pp. 70-71.

Hayden’s Ferry Review, Issue 36, Spring/Summer 2005, pp. 79-81. A publication of The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

PHOTOGRAPHY PAST FORWARD: Aperture at 50, R.H. Cravens, Aperture Foundation, 2002, New York, NY, p. 151.

Contact Sheet, #112, 2001, pp. 11-15. A publication of Light Work, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.