Transcrip Study: Affect, Pathology, and the Trans Gaze in Leo Xander Foo’s Photography

Keywords: crip theory, trans studies, visual culture, affect 

Abstract

This article proposes transcrip study as an intellectual approach and embodied intellectual practice through a recontextualization of disability within trans studies. This practice of thought becomes articulable by turning away from Discourse in two ways. First, theoretically, by thinking transcrip study through the relationship between disability and transness as affect as opposed crip/queer theory’s gravitational center: identity. And, second, textually, articulating the trans gaze as rooted in embodied change as shown in Leo Xander Foo’s photographs of Lane Rogers, also known as Blake Mitchell, doing Foo’s T shot. 

after Robert McRuer 

Butler’s queer theories of gender performativity could be reinscribed within disability studies. 

— Robert McRuer, Crip Theory 

The transsexual reveals queer theory's own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its favored terrain of gender performativity. 

— Jay Prosser, Second Skins 

---

Trans Crip 

One path to transness, one means of coming into a trans selfhood is out of queerness.[1] Put another way, sometimes people come out as gay, lesbian, queer before they come out as trans. Queer becomes a holding place, a sojourn for some. What if crip is ready to come out as trans? What if the crip in crip/queer has wondered if it too could, following feminist disability studies, question a staunch steadfastness against the medical (Price 2015, Patsavas 2014, Kafer 2013)? Or, after Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s deployment of Eve Sedgwick, wondered if there’s something beyond pride and desire that makes room for “bad crip feelings felt cripply” (New York Times 2016, Garland-Thomson 1997: 22, Sedgwick 1993: vii, 250, Stryker 1994: 246, and J Logan Smilges 2023: 8)? This article builds on existing work at the intersection of trans and disability scholarship to articulate transcrip study—a crip study rooted in trans studies that imagines queer theory as a point of departure. To put it simply, let’s trans crip [2]Though, this shouldn’t be considered teleologically; rather, I hope we can imagine a proliferation of becoming with new modes and forms. I use the syntax of transcrip for two reasons. First, because while this study represents a different theoretical vehicle from that of Judith Butler and Robert McRuer, it also utilizes some schematics from McRuer; I’m not building from scratch. Therefore, a parallel syntax styling is taken up as a citational practice aimed towards more coalitional work. Second, I hope that congruous syntax will enable a way of doing and naming transcripqueer thought with denser and richer entanglements that more fully grapple with lived experience. That we move from queer to trans is not a finality but rather an embrace of the potentiality of embodied change into the future. I am thinking about narrative doubly then: the narrative of crip theory’s emergence from queer theory and the emergence of transness out from queerness. This paralleling offers us the opportunity to imagine transness and trans living as a “structuring and educated mode of desiring” —an “affective position” (José Esteban Muñoz 2009: 1, Brady James Forrest 2020: 78).  The value of deploying this reading practice, alongside the entanglement of trans and disability I propose here, is in what it allows us to collectively imagine (Juana María Rodríguez 2014: 26, Lavelle Ridley 2019: 485). The imagining of a futurism for trans, crip, queer people defined not by identity but a shared feeling (Kafer 2013, Smilges 2023a, Malatino 2022, Awkward-Rich 2022, Forrest 2020, Muñoz 2006, Cvetkovich 2003) is a disidentificatory practice (Smilges 2022b: 158-163, Joshua Chambers-Letson 2018: 15, 149, Muñoz 1999: 168-179), one that attends to “silence” and is attuned to “quiet” (Smilges 2022a, Kevin Quashie 2012). To explore this new transcrip study, this article turns away from Discourse in two ways.[3] First, theoretically, by routing transcrip study through the relationship between disability and transness as affect as opposed to the identity-centric crip/queer theory that results from its investment in performativity. Second, textually, by articulating a trans gaze through Leo Xander Foo’s photographs of Lane, his cis caregiver, doing his T shot. I turn to these photos because despite beginning with a mirror scene, which is “traditionally…pathologizing,” the photos that follow offer a site rich with affective potential (Keegan 2021: 497).[4] Rather than existing as a “symbol of the transgender subject’s wounded affect,” I read this scene as beginning a narrative of transgender becoming and care or what Cáel M. Keegan describes as “moments of phenomenological encounter that sustain transgender poiesis” and “a crease in meaning where reality and fantasy collide, where trans desires for a different and inverted world collect to leak” (Keegan 2016: 37, 30; Keegan 2021: 497).[5]  In the epilogue to Second Skins, Jay Prosser positions narrative, especially trans self representation, as a foundation for constructing trans selfhoods which make askew both gender performativity and the medico-discursive. Prosser explains “[i]f the theoretical figuration of transgender has left out the ways in which transgender is literally embodied and lived, photographs of transsexuals in the autobiographies promise, even more than the texts themselves, to recover what has been transubstantiated” (Prosser 1998: 209) Within Foo’s photos we are brought into a relational becoming where a sense of self comes into being not contingent on the bounds of identity but rather the porosity of embodied feeling.[6]

“In [trans] studies it is a well-established critical practice to remark on [gender’s] supposed [performativity]” (McRuer 2006: 1, Feinman 2024) [7]We might remark further though.[8] If, as articulated by Robert McRuer, “[Judith] Butler’s queer theories of gender performativity could be reinscribed within disability studies,” then a recontextualizing of disability within trans studies is required as, ultimately, thinking transness through crip theory, both the monograph and the field it grounds, could only create a “queer trans[crip] theory;” I set out to articulate a “transexual[crip] theory” (McRuer, 2006: 9; Awkward Rich 2022: 120).[9] Rather than arriving at a configuration like “severely disabled/[remarkably trans],” I turn to affect which proves so central to the paradigmatic examples of a crip working the weakness in the norm listed by McRuer: “the ‘army of one-breasted women’ Audre Lorde imagines descending on the Capitol; the Rolling Quads, whose resistance sparked the independent living movement in Berkeley, California; Deaf students shutting down Gallaudet University in the Deaf President Now action; or ACT UP storming the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration” (McRuer: 375).[10]A transcrip study acknowledges the way identity operates as a dominant social ordering and the subsequent material consequences while also opening up ways to consider disability not as a social category we are compelled to perform but as an affective position we share. 

ReContextualizing Disability 

 In her famous polemic on transgender rage, Susan Stryker proclaims “the transexual body is an unnatural body” and joins the critical theory fray that observes that the “increasing numbers of words have indeed forced themselves on our attention, so that an inquiry into not just the marginalized identity but also the dominant identity has become necessary” (Stryker 1994: 238, McRuer 2013: 370). Writing on Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” — a foundational text to McRuer’s configuration of crip theory — C.L. Cole and Shannon L.C. Cate note that Rich’s piece was “devoted to denaturalizing heterosexuality” (Cole and Cate 2008: 279). Likewise, here Stryker aims to denaturalize cisnormativity. Throughout “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” Stryker offers different approaches to understanding the dangers and intensities of living in a cisnormative world as a trans person and, throughout, offers not only a response but a mode of responding: rage. Stryker articulates affect as one way of understanding and coming to be trans as opposed to a particular identity category brought about through interpellation and strategic visibility. This becomes critical as her child is subjected to and by “a gendering violence” as the child’s literal father, Law of the Father incarnate, proclaims: “It’s a girl” (Stryker: 250). Stryker uses this moment to interrogate and outline the force of this performative. Stryker, noting the ways she was entangled with this ceremony, explains that “this was also the act that enjoined [her] complicity in the non-consensual gendering of another” (250). Stryker continues, “I stood for a moment between the pains of two violations, the mark of gender and the unlivability of its absence. Could I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I felt could best be survived?” (Stryker, 1994: 249, 250). Rather than completely capitulate herself to those conditions, she argues for a transgender rage that “furnishes a means for disidentification” as it exposes the constructedness of the concept of “natural” (249). Stryker, speaking as a monster herald of the extraordinary, ends the Monologue section of the piece with a cautionary portent: “Hearken unto me, fellow creatures, I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie” (240). Ultimately, Stryker acknowledges the hegemony of what Judith Butler would describe as Discourse, most pointedly the heterosexual matrix, but rather than “working the weakness in the norm,” she means to expose and act against Discourse through the non-discursive register of affect (Butler, 1993: 26).  

 Since publishing “My Words” decades ago, the article has become one of the founding texts within transgender studies and its attention to the entanglement between power, affect, and embodiment remains a touchstone for more contemporary works. Transgender rage “might seem to be an unlikely place to begin contextualizing disability” but a growing collection of work has begun thinking of transness and disability enmeshed (McRuer, 2013: 301). One important example of this is Cameron Awkward-Rich’s careful attention to sickness in The Terrible We to interrogate the way Susan Stryker, and others, intentionally “disavow” themselves from disability and disabled people through a reification of pathologizing understandings of disability and social conformity (Awkward-Rich, 2022: 15).[11] Awkward-Rich, along with other scholars at the varying dirt road intersections between trans studies and disability studies, shows the ways that transness and disability, with their entanglements with the medical industrial complex, social stigma, and a similar mainstream embracing of respectability, are ripe to be positioned not towards distance but coalition. One mode of understanding such a coalition could be through a social category such as is articulated by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s idea of a minority model of disability. I turn, however, to expand the field away from identity and towards affect and argue for it as a shared form of meaning making and worldbuilding. 

The notion of imagining affect as otherwise has a growing tradition—José Esteban Muñoz, in “Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” explicitly offers affect as distinct from, not a “placeholder” for, identity (José Esteban Muñoz, 2006: 677); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's oeuvre is full of feeling but Jay Prosser directs us to the 1992 NYC pride parade in the forward to Tendencies and describes it as a “trans gendered traversal that in its queering (skewing and unraveling) of apparently normative heterosexuality is simultaneously a movement across sexualities” (Jay Prosser, 1998: 23); or, in Sedgwick’s words, “it feels queer, and good” (1993: vii). From this tradition, the article argues that understanding a transcrip study through affect offers a proliferation of thinking towards the realization of a transcripqueer coalition.

Sick and Trans

In his introduction to The Terrible We, Cameron Awkward-Rich offers two examples of a public trans repudiation of sickness, one by the mother of a trans child and another by Susan Stryker. Awkward-Rich deftly connects sickness here as entangled with disability and the pathologization of trans people through successive versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) while noting how “Susan Stryker uses [this anecdote] to introduce The Transgender Studies Reader, the anthology that ‘gave a name to the field’” (Cameron Awkward-Rich, 2022: 2). To craft a transcrip study this deployment of the term sick, with its explicit negative—if messy—evocation of disability, must be attended to. Rather than viewing these two scenes as reminiscent of each other, I juxtapose them to focus on the way the two examples diverge from one another. I do this through a consideration who is being declared as “not sick” and how that comes to be. The first example is within an explicitly medical/legal context, a workshop “part of the 2010 Transgender Lives: The Intersections of Health and Law conference...focused on the preliminary draft revisions to [gender identity disorder] that were, at the time, available for public review and comment” (Cameron Awkward-Rich 2022: 2). Awkward-Rich recounts hearing a mother declare, make so via speech act, “my son is not sick!” and the entire room suddenly agreed “this woman’s son was not sick” (Cameron Awkward-Rich 2022: 2). Stryker’s situation rings different to my ear as she recounts how she was at a microphone at a Q&A for a panel at CUNY’s Lesbian and Gay History conference as a gay man asserted: 

“Transsexuals had started claiming that they were part of this new queer politics, which had to be stopped, of course, because everybody knew that transsexuals were profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes and held reactionary political views, and they had been trying for years to infiltrate the gay and lesbian movement to destroy it and this was only the latest sick plot to. . . ” (Stryker 2006: 1).

  “One need go no further than the Oxford English Dictionary to locate problems with the meaning of [sickness]” under examination here (McRuer 2013: 370). The Oxford English Dictionary, Revised 2005, defines sick as “mentally weak; impaired” but in both instances there is additional social meaning attached to this term in relation to particular groups of people. The distinction that I make here follows Awkward-Rich’s unease at these two instances. There is the “righteous invocation of a well-adjusted, well-supported, white trans child” by the mother that I argue is also laced with cultural understandings of children as paragon of innocence (Awkward-Rich 2022: 3). However, there is no such innocence in the exchange between Stryker and the transphobic man; rather, Stryker is the location for the displacement for conservative vilification. Stryker must defend against transphobic medicalization alongside the implicit accusation of what Cameron Awkward-Rich would describe as “trans maladjustment” (4). Notably, according to this recounting, the man does not call Stryker or trans people sick but rather it is the plans of psychopathological, which is to say disabled and not transgender, individuals that he finds sick. This distancing reifies the individualistic medical model, refusing Stryker an identity in favor of a diagnosis. Sickness then is located as the explicit plan of “psychopathological individuals” to infect and denigrate a “new queer politic.”[12] The possibility of a trans future becomes impossible when the trans community becomes a population in need of cure. Here, trans politics are always sick. Further, what I see as the rhetorical tactic of this man is to distance gays and lesbians from the true “pathological individuals” who have “sick plans” that ultimately can only oppress with gender conformity.[13]This deflection of pathologization from gays and lesbians to trans people becomes moralized as the right thing to do. Therefore, Stryker isn’t arguing just against the literalness of a diagnosis but also against the pathologization that is being deployed against her particular bodymind using medical language to help shroud transphobia; the diminution of transness through the foreclosure of disability futures. The pathologizing force behind Stryker’s claim to health brings attention to the ways sickness and health are understood within particular contexts and the difficult entanglement with diagnostic modes of knowing that have come to, in part, constitute a lived reality of transness. Ultimately, Stryker isn’t disputing difference; rather, she is asserting her particular embodiment as unremarkable rather than deviant or abnormal. Within disability studies this encounter could be described as a type of “enforced normalcy” rooted within the same deployment of moral dogma also used against other struggles for life such as ACT UP’s fight against AIDS (Davis 1995: 1-2).[14]

 “A critique of [pathology] has similarly been central to the disability rights movement and to disability studies, with—for example—[Eli Clare’s careful attention and critique of what they refer to as ‘ideologies of cure’] or [Carrie Sandahl’s assertion that ‘the mixing of crip and [trans] identity markers confuses what the disability performance scholar Petra Kuppers calls the ‘diagnostic gaze,’ or the scrutinizing of disabled bodies for symptoms of pathology in search of a ‘true’ diagnosis’ (Clare 2017: xxiii-17; Sandahl 2003: 46]” (McRuer 2013: 371). Thinking with both trans and disabled approaches to pathology we can find common cause not just in the opposition to pathologizing forces that steal what feminist disability studies scholar Catherine Prendergast articulates as “rhetoricability” but also a vested interest in an ethical healthcare system able to offer care without abiding by a medical model of disability or diagnostic gaze.[15]One example that highlights how we can better engage with trans people and theories without the repudiation of disability can be found in J. Logan Smilges’ articulation and deployment of neurotrans to examine the circulation of Thorazine. Through this example Smilges traces the ways this drug began being deployed against trans and disabled people, notably Marsha P Johnson. Further, neurotrans directs attention to the overlapping, co-constituting, or jointly embodied systems of control rooted in medical authority and social stigma (Smilges 2022: 639-640). As Smilges argues “neurotrans as an analytic illuminates how cissexism and ableism are not only interwoven but co-constitutive, working to ‘correct,’ cure, or otherwise eradicate forms of bodymind nonconformance” (Smilges 2022: 636). 

Taking up the ways neurotrans schematizes transness and disability beyond strict identity categories enables other ways of articulating how power becomes operationalized and to what political ends. In Queer Silence, Smilges’ incisive reading into the place of disability in queer theory and activism, they move towards and offer their understanding of José Esteban Muñoz’ concept of disidentity: “an anti- identitarian identity politics grounded in ‘communal structures of feelings.’ To disidentify is to reject racialized identity categories while simultaneously embracing the affective opportunities afforded by identification with others.” (Smilges 2022b: 158). These affective opportunities can be found elsewhere within disability studies in ways that align with the centrality of rage for Susan Stryker. One such way to contextualize the cause for Stryker’s rage within disability studies and further examine the systems and realities Stryker faces is to turn to Jasbir Puar’s deployment of capacity and debility (Puar 2017: xiv-xviii). In response to the gendering of her daughter, Stryker reaches an impasse: “A gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity; having a gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one’s personhood cognizable” (Stryker 1994: 250). What Stryker describes here is the ways in which gender identity acts as a capacitating form of legibility. “In a nutshell, you either have [a gender], or you don’t” (McRuer 2013: 371). One way to imagine a livability through debility and the absence of legible and affirmed identity is through affective opportunities and, throughout “My Words,” Stryker offers us glimpses of how a deforming rage enables us to think about a life outside of identity. As she proposes, “Perhaps if I move furiously enough, I can deform it in my passing to leave a trace of my rage. I can embrace it with a vengeance to rename myself, declare my transsexuality, and gain access to the means of my legible reinscription” (Stryker 1994: 250). It is through rage that Stryker not only sees a future for herself but also the opportunity for a better future for those who must come after her. Stryker’s rage creates the potential for a coalition of the affected rather than a sense of community restricted to identity. 

  Staying with Puar’s deployment of debility and capacity poses a quandary as, “like [cisnormativity] then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over, with the appearance of choice, a system in which there actually is no choice” (McRuer 2013: 371). Here, however, it is not only the lack of choice centering on having an able body (or be labeled disabled) but also whether you can be understood legibly in any social category at all. Just as Robert McRuer deploys what Susan Wendell calls “the disciplines of normality” to attend to the way the compulsion to fit within the “normal” identity category “emanates from everywhere and nowhere,” this article imagines the compulsion to legible identity category as a call for capacity.

When Stryker thinks of her child being nonconsensually gendered the problem quickly becomes the way that gender capacitates us into the social, cultural, and juridical world. When addressing the globalization of disability as an identity Puar places pressure on the way identity becomes the dominant mode of capacitation: “identity through human rights discourses contributes to a standardization of bodily usefulness and uselessness that discounts not only the specificity of location but also the ways bodies exceed or defy identities and subjects” (Puar 2017: xiv). Thinking Stryker alongside Puar enables us to imagine other, better ways of building a social world that accounts for the ways “bodies exceed or defy identities and subjects” (xiv). This imagining of affect as excess, as Stryker examples, sits alongside my previous work on affect in “Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip” where the titular term attends to the way that disability identity and affect are not only differing modes of social organization but also that some embodied affects precede and define disability identities or, put differently, identity acts as a domesticating force on affect. As an echo of Stryker’s rageful response to gender identity, I explain that “crip feelings/feeling crip points toward the Muñozian feeling as a means of coalition building through shared positions and critique but also indexes the ways that crip can be a position from which certain feelings follow, or an affect in and of itself” (Forrest 2020: 79). It is this call for coalition rooted in an emerging structured feeling that I see as critical for a transcrip study accountable to trans, crip, queer people and the vagaries of their lives. 

Susan Wendell’s writings about becoming disabled and her subsequent coming into a disabled consciousness “exemplify some of the ideological demands currently sustaining [capacitation]” (McRuer 2013: 312). In particular, Wendell focuses on the new difficulties in her personal and professional life and explains how her academic discipline, philosophy, was seemingly unable to think beyond two questions: “Under what conditions is it morally permissible/right to kill/let die a disabled person and how potentially disabled does a fetus have to be before it is permissible/right to prevent its being born?” (Wendell 1989: 104). I see these questions and Wendell’s rightful depression towards this reality as being about capacity as these questions ultimately revolve around someone’s ability to survive in our society, or not. Under this rubric it is not simply that “you have an able body, or you don’t” but rather that your ability to receive a body or continue to have a body must be decided based on what you could contribute and some speculative idea of quality of life (McRuer 2013: 371). It does not end here for Wendell, however, as another question “became a difficult, conflict-ridden business: How are you?” (Wendell 1989: 111). I focus on these questions from Wendell because it is the question form where Robert McRuer locates instances where compulsory able-bodiedness is expected and desired as well as the citational repetition with which they are asked; the questions and framings and topics are all different but ultimately they all demand the impulse to ability: “Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me” (McRuer 2013: 372). Wendell’s questions offer us another position from which to understand the social realities of both trans and disabled people through what I describe as the requirement of capacity.[16] As Wendell explains, answering “became a difficult, conflict-ridden business” because “disabled people learn that many, perhaps most, able-bodied people do not want to know about suffering caused by the body” (Wendell 1989: 111). It is through this banal question that the dynamics of ability/debility and capacity/debility can be further nuanced. Because while Wendell, and many others, might be disabled and might be experiencing pain, shame, anxiety, or any other bad feelings, her feelings and identities don’t change the desired, expected, required answer for not just able-bodiedness but also capacitation. This requirement of capacity does appear with the same quality of repetition as those questions evoked by McRuer however Wendell’s “how are you?” is not some desired future that can be the natural conclusion of ideologies of cure; rather, it solicits your capacity in that precise moment. The reality of your bodymind is not what is actually being asked but rather your overall condition and disposition within the world, your availability for incorporation into hegemonic structures rooted in abledness but also identitarian capacitation into the category of the human. [17]To respond “good” to the question is to perform and affirm your position as a “good subject” (Sami Schalk 2013). 

 Rather than focus on a repetition of questions that aim to reinforce compulsory able-bodiedness, the question Wendell receives potentially invites an affective narrative but in reality forecloses the very possibility of anything but the affirmation of capacity. It is this requirement to affirm capacity and thus legibility that brings me to Jay Prosser’s work on transness and narratology. In Second Skin, Prosser explores the meaning of trans people being made to remark upon themselves, to narrate themselves before medical authority to come into social, medical, and legal legibility. Their ability to remark and relation to remarkability requires abiding certain configurations of power that enable conditional forms of rhetoricability via pathologization. Prosser, like Stryker, is attuned to what it means to not only feel as a response to Discourse but as an alternative place of origin asserting “transsexuality reveals the extent to which embodiment forms an essential base to subjectivity” (Jay Prosser 1998: 7). This attention to embodiment and affect offers a different starting place to think about transness and disability that emerges not from the coldness of Discourse but from the warmth of our bodies. Both in the instance of her child being gendered and her assertion that she is not sick, Stryker fights against the way that the diagnosis that enables her trans becoming also disqualifies her from the rhetoricability needed to chart a path for her child other than cisnormative understandings of gender and the Law of the Father. Further, both Prosser in Second Skins and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “Feminist Disability Studies,” two important texts for trans and disability studies, evoke memoir and autobiography as the locations of trans and disabled knowledge and a means of advancing emerging modes of thought. This shared approach becomes critical as both trans people and disabled people have historically been the objects of study rather than the ones doing the studying. The approach I articulate here builds from Julie Alvril Minich’s assertion for disability studies “as methodology rather than a subject in order to recommit the field to its origins in social justice work” (Minich 2016). Ultimately, a transcrip study considers imbrications, the context, between method, sources of knowledge, and attention to the ways embodied affect provides the opportunities to come to the world differently. It is through a serious consideration of our affective positions and their historical situatedness that a transcrip coalition can proliferate the ways of knowing and seeing our world. 

The Trans Gaze 

There’s something pretty standard about Leo Xander Foo’s Instagram account, like many younger creators there are various themes that inform the aesthetic of the page that come and go. As of writing this the post that I analyze here is no longer featured. I imagine this approach to curating a visual projection of self as one that is ever changing; for a period of time Foo’s page was full of color, with multiple pictures featuring one color that collectively form a rainbow as you scroll through. One type of post that remains seemingly regardless of aesthetic are photographic self-portraits, selfies. There is an entire series of posts featuring his chest, both before and after top surgery, that Foo edits before posting such that his chest is obscured or altered in some way. The photos of interest for this article, posted December 12, 2021 and captioned “Lane doing my T shot 11/22/2021 [bandaged heart emoji]”, features this kind of photo as the sixth in a series of six photos organized in three rows and two columns, all black and white. While this sixth picture caught my eye it is the first and second of the series that I will turn to conclude. The first photo is of a mirror such that it is the condition of possibility into this scene. Foo sits on a chair, his camera aimed at the mirror, opening a door for us, and in focus is the T shot (a syringe with testosterone in it) in Lane’s right hand, closer to the mirror than to Foo. 

Rather than “conscripting the audience into collective witness of the body's reality” or “undesired reflection,” Foo, as both photographer and photographic subject, provides the opportunity for the viewer to join him in being both witness and witnessed (Keegan 2021: 497). As we continue to gaze, we see the edge of the mirror so, if we look closely, we see evidence of the way our presence is conditioned on Foo actively choosing “exposure, vulnerability, and receptiveness” (Nguyen: 2). In the second photo we inhabit Foo’s perspective and see Lane sitting in a chair at the same height as and perpendicular to Foo and the viewer. The photo is taken just after Lane has pushed down and administered the shot and before he removes the needle with his right hand. His left hand is placed just above Foo’s knee.  

In “Beyond the Gaze,” Nicole Morse and Lauren Herold take stock of the ways that the gaze has been theorized in relationship to the camera through a positioning together of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze and bell hooks’ oppositional gaze along with Joey Soloway’s female gaze and J. Jack Halberstam’s transgender look (Morse and Herold 2021).[18] Building from this I offer another approach to seeing—the trans gaze. The aim of constituting the male gaze is to manage anxiety, a particular bad affect. [19] If the medium doesn't change and the audience continues to lose power, what would the aim of the trans gaze be? What is a trans response or relation to the absence of power? If it doesn't feel good to not be in control and, for the male gaze, scopophilia helps ameliorate that, what are the technologies of affect that this gaze would elicit or engage in? To consider these questions through Foo’s photographs also necessarily brings attention to Foo’s embodiment as a trans man of color. To root the trans gaze in Foo’s positionality thus requires an engagement with the role of racialization and racialized viewing practice as Foo, of Chinese and Peruvian descent, is in stark contrast to Lane’s carefully curated “All American” brand of whiteness.[20]

To attend to this confluence of racialization and gender, given the intimacy—and nudity—that Foo captures, Tan Hoang Nguyen’s work developing a “new framework for oppositional politics” of Asian American bottomhood proves generative to this end (Nguyen 2014: 2). In The View from the Bottom, Nguyen advances bottomhood as both “a sexual practice and a worldview” through readings of visual culture centered on gay Asian American men, primarily pornography (Nguyen 2014: 2). This oppositional position contends with the centrality of vision in modern knowledge formation and rather than attempt to rehabilitate gay Asian American men, Nguyen explains that “instead of shoring up our sovereignty by conflating agency with mastery, adopting a view from the bottom reveals an inescapable exposure, vulnerability, and receptiveness in our reaching out to other people” (Nguyen 2014: 2). The trans gaze offers much, but important for this article is this disidentificatory potential to build a social world full with difference through intimacy and feeling. A gaze attuned to the “transformative political work” to “include, include” further aligns with Nguyen’s specific attention to visuality and race as his “deployment of gay bottomhood exploits the deviancy attached to Asian American masculinity in order to affirm and celebrate an altogether different paradigm of gendered, racial, and sexual subjectivity” (Sedgwick 1994: 255, Nguyen 2014: 19). 

With these considerations, I see Foo’s photographs taking up a pedagogical form such that, as one looks through the photos, the viewer takes on and learns to see through the trans gaze by way of an embodied, non linguistic, self. This gaze, as it anchors the viewer to Foo’s embodiment, makes porous the distinction between Foo and the viewer and the viewer and Lane. Foo’s trans gaze does not only produce a scopic field but also an affective one. Foo’s six photos, in total, offer the space to wonder not simply what the experience of bodily transition or change feels like but what it is to experience change collectively, to have your own becoming affected by another. What we see is an affirmation of trans embodiment through intimate touch. In these and other photos, the viewer is invited to consider not only a gaze but the sociality of trans embodiment through something like Laura Marks’ “haptic visuality” “where looking is not about power but about yielding” (quoted in Nicole Morse and Lauren Herold 2021). Further, as opposed to the male gaze or diagnostic gaze, I align the trans gaze with J. Logan Smilges explication of trans silence: “a relationship with the medical- industrial complex should be premised on the knowledge that people change: our bodyminds change, our names change, our pronouns change, our identities change” (Smilges 2022b: 171). [21] That this has the potential to be a way of imagining a disabled life helps us approach this instance of medicine without a telos of cure. 

Staying with the trans gaze does take intention; it does not have the same presumption of default as the male gaze and as such it takes our collective work to stay with Foo without the aim of capture, domination, or identification. In the first photo, we are brought into Foo’s world and enabled to remain through the shared visual field produced by Foo’s camera and mirror. His gaze does not interpellate us but rather brings us into a space of incommensurable potential. Through his gaze we too are allowed to consider our own transition or relation to hormones and gender as it places us in his position such that, through the visual tricks of the overlapping technologies of the mirror and camera, we see two T shots. One for Foo physically in the room and one in the mirror, potentially for us viewers who also share that interstitial space of the mirror. I posit that this photo blurs the line, ensuring a distinction between different individuals such that it is not only Foo who receives Lane’s doing. We come to share Foo’s position and too must contend with what Lane “does” to us. 

Building off the first photo I suggest that it and the second constitute a gaze inaugurating shot reverse shot that places us within Foo’s trans gaze. Foo, and now the viewer, are now seated and looking down towards our thigh to see Lane’s right hand holding and giving us the T shot as his left hand is placed just above our knee to stabilize our leg. My reading of this photo is attentive to the specifics of Foo’s gaze, namely the way he uses his camera to create a punctum. While we might first imagine that the shot being administered is this punctum, it is out of focus and it is to the space created between them and Lane’s left hand that Foo directs our focus. This framing enables us to consider touch as “the unnamable detail that pricks us, gestures to a rhetorical landscape outside the discursivity of the studium, it ‘is a kind of subtle beyond— as if the image launche[s] desire beyond what it permits us to see’” (Smilges 2022b: 78).  

Eve Koskofsky Sedgwick’s work on “texture and affect” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity advances this connection (Sedgwick 2003: 13). Sedgwick, thinking with Renu Bora, explains, “I haven’t perceived a texture until I’ve instantaneously hypothesized whether the object I’m perceiving was sedimented, extruded, laminated, granulated, polished, distressed, felted, or fluffed up. Similarly, to perceive texture is to know or hypothesize whether a thing will be easy or hard, safe or dangerous to grasp, to stack, to fold, to shred, to climb on, to stretch, to slide, to soak” (2003: 14). As the audience sees through Foo’s gaze there is the opportunity to hypothesize about Lane and the shot. Foo’s second photo acts as a provocation: what does collective transition feel like? Do we imagine the prick of the needle entering our thigh as we gaze? Can we do more than imagine the warmth of Lane’s touch but potentially reminisce about the affirming warmth of another’s comforting touch in a moment of change. The audience is thrust into a position where they need to have “instantaneously hypothesized” whether this injection and touch will be “easy or hard, safe or dangerous” to have done (14). Through Foo’s photos we see a relational transgender becoming where there is the potential to find a sense of self aside from identity and begin to question how disability too is available for a becoming constituted through this mode of touching and feeling. 

It’s likely that Foo usually does the shot on his own, so what more does Foo produce through the photographing of Lane’s “doing”? I argue that while the literal fact of testosterone being administered is critical, so too are the conditions of its administration. Like many younger content creators, Foo shows his T shot and other happenings of transition within intimate private settings rather than medical ones. [22]As such, Foo’s photographs constitute a counter archive of transition which challenges the cisnormative imaginary and its preoccupation with medical intervention performed by medical authorities. This doing of the T shot by Lane helps to not only bring about a less pathologized trans future but examples a way through which queerness and transness can co-constitute one another as opposed to queer theories of performativity abstracting trans people away. Shifting perspectives to challenge pathology enables this coalitional work. Further, this pairing instantiates not only their gender and sexual identities as we’d expect but a sociality rich with affective potential towards other ways of understanding difference beyond identity categories. Thinking on what she identifies as queer narrative theory, Teagan Bradway offers language for this through a consideration of Maggie Nelson’s autotheoretical memoir, The Argonauts. Bradway focuses on Nelson’s notion of “the gifts of gender-queer family making” of which the primary one is “the revelation of caretaking as detachable from—and attachable to—any gender, any sentient being” (quoted in Bradway 2021: 719). What is created is not a couple formation but rather a “nuptial,” an “outline of a becoming” (quoted in Bradway: 720, italics in original). So, Foo could do his own shot but, instead, the shot becomes the conditions of emergence for this nuptial that codifies, sustains, and renews a social bond between them. If Judith Butler broadly describes the relation between “heterosexual” and “queer” through their respective ceremonies—the “I do” of the wedding and “queer!” as interpellative slur—then I propose this nuptial and this mode of becoming as a kind of trans ceremony. It gains force not simply through repetition but through the accrual of “hapticality”—physical and visual (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney quoted in Vourloumis 2014: 236). This kind of becoming does not require a particular identity but rather a willingness to become “differently together” (Smilges 2022b: 184). This becoming offers a different kind of capacitation than that of identity; it offers “capacity to be the means for each other” (Vourloumis: 236). As we are invited into this happening of Foo’s trans gaze we are given the opportunity to imagine the rich potentiality for change, for plurality, for a future. 

---

Notes

[1] Susan Stryker, for instance, asserts that “[b]y becoming queer first, I found I could then become transsexual in a way I had not previously considered” (Stryker, 1998: 151). 

[2] I see generative potential for transdisciplinary work and pleasure in the opacity and multiplicity that this configuration (trans crip) provides in the way “trans” and “crip” can be verbs, adjectives, and nouns. Here, is “crip” being trans-ed? Is trans offering a particular descriptor to crip? If so, crip (noun) or crip (verb)? Within crip theory, “crip” is often and usually understood as having the potential to become a verb following the way “queer” has been taken up in queer theory (to queer). Within trans studies, “trans” is taken up in a range of manners often positioning it as an adjective (highlighting its distinction from the “queer” as verb in queer theory). For more on the functions of “crip” and “trans” see Carrie Sandahl’s field defining article “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” Susan Stryker’s “The Transgender Issue: An Introduction,” and Jacob Lau’s “Trans” entry in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. In “The Transgender Issue” Stryker proposes “that transgender can in fact be read as a heterodox interpretation of queer, that it is a conceptualization of queerness based on the understandings of people who contest naturalized hetero- normativity in ways that might include, but are not limited to, homosexual orientation or object choice. Transsexuality, by extension, can also be queer…The root of my conviction that transgender, transsexual, and queer need not be mutually antagonistic terms is shamelessly autobiographical, a result of my lived experience during the early 1990s when these words were undergoing rapid evolutions in meaning” (149).  Lau identifies the overlap in more contemporary trans studies and its relationship to the approaches of queer theory and subsequently crip theory noting “recent developments in the field involve asking if trans can behave as a verb like queer. That is, scholars have asked if like ‘queering’ literature, film, history, or visual culture, one can ‘trans’ them too.” While Lau explains the ways “trans” moves away from identity and towards “a political positionality in opposition to normative regulations of embodiment,” I see turning to normativity, “according to the model that [Butler] elsewhere calls performativity,” cedes too much to queer theory’s discursive undertakings (240; Warner 1999: 156). Rather than move from trans theory to queer theory to crip theory through this attention to normalization, it might prove fruitful to also begin with trans studies and subsequently move through disability studies and then queer studies with analysis and critique of pathology as the connective tissue. Lau concludes that “it may be more helpful to think about trans as an adjective rather than a verb, as a modifying descriptor of a figure, object, or field of knowledge rather than an action, state, or occurrence” (240). So, let us crip transly. 

[3] A succinct starting definition for Discourse can be found in Judith Butler’s citation of Michel Foucault for the epigraph to “Critically Queer”: “Discourse is not life; its time is not yours” (Foucault in Butler 1993: 17). For more, see Foucault’s “Politics and the Study of Discourse.” 

[4] Much has been written on the relationship between the mirror and trans people/psyches. See Jay Prosser’s “Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography” and “Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography—Fielding the Referent” in Second Skins, AJ Ripley’s “‘Feeling-Seeing’ in Transparent:Using the Mirror to Reflect beyond In/Visibility,” Nicole Erin Morse’s Selfie Aesthetic: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art, and Cáel M. Keegan’s “Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don’t Cry.” 

[5] On “transgender becoming” see Cáel M. Keegan’s “Revisitation: A trans phenomenology of the media image.”  

[6] For more on feelings as being porous see Deborah Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS and Hil Malitano’s Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. Gould’s concept of emotional habitus is taken up by Cameron Awkward-Rich in The Terrible We with Awkward-Rich explaining how “[t]rans…has become widely legible as a par tic u lar set of feelings (gendered unease, restlessness, suicidality) that necessitate a par tic u lar set of narrative movements (self- discovery, coming out, transition) for the health and persistence of the trans protagonist/subject within the terms of the liberal- imperial state. In this rendering, trans is a feeling that precedes, requires, and so justifies the proj ect of medical or social transition, of living a trans life; for this reason, much ink has been spilled over the question of ‘what transsexuality feels like.’ Although [The Terrible We] is undoubtedly another entry into that rec ord, I conjoin it to a related question. Namely, ‘What does trans studies feel like?’  After all, fields are a matter of affect, feeling, and desire at least as much as they are a  matter of certain procedures of knowledge production” (Awkward-Rich 2022: 9-10). Awkward-Rich continues explaining, “[i]n partic u lar, founding scholars’ disavowal of sick both enabled transgender studies and produced a par tic u lar mood—an emotional habitus, a space of shared pathos— that has delimited the horizons of the field” (Awkward-Rich, 2022: 15).

[7] This sentence and more engage in the practice of “substitut[ion], by bracketing” (McRuer 2013: 304, italics mine). “A remix, if you will” (Rodríguez, 2014: 118, italics mine). For other examples of this see Muñoz’sDisidentifications, Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, McRuer’s Crip Theory, Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, and my “Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip.” Though more common in poetic works, my opening notation, after Robert McRuer, is an acknowledgement of the ways this article comes after McRuer’s foundational work as it also builds an alternative framework. When these frameworks are incongruous their shared structure attests to the still there yearning for coalition even through incommensurable difference. As such, the sections titled “ReContextualizing Disability” and “Sick and Trans” in this article are meant to be read alongside and against the “Contextualizing Disability” and “Able-Bodied Heterosexuality” sections in McRuer’s “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” Many thanks to E Feinman for articulating this iteration of the sentence.

[8] The configuration of this sentence in relation to the previous aims to offer a productive parallel to the framing of the insufficiencies of Foucauldian genealogy offered in the opening of Sadiyia Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.” I do not view this as analogous or as ruse but rather as congruent in the way both recognize dominant power’s organizing of political and epistemological horizons back onto itself. 

[9] Cáel M. Keegan’s work nuancing and distinguishing queer and trans theory is invaluable. See “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?” and “Against Queer Theory.” 

[10] I deploy “remarkably trans” as a continuation of the concepts of critically queer and severely disabled in which the weakness in the norm of a given identity constituted through performativity and the discursive field is “worked.” For more on remarkability see J. Logan Smilges’s “On Being a Remarkable Trans.” To position “remarkably trans” within trans studies proves laden with pitfalls but one way of grounding it is through Jay Prosser’s distinction between the “transexual body” and the “transgendered subjects” (Prosser: 27). This is built upon by Cameron Awkward-Rich in The Terrible We with a distinguishing between “transsexual studies” and “queer trans theory” (120). One reason to turn away from the [adverb identitarian noun] formation is that there are those, for instance, whose disability is always severe or there isn’t consent from the person for this severeness. What is the utility of “severe disability” to someone who experiences a psychiatric crisis and is forcibly held? Put differently, “what is the utility of queer theor[ies of gender performativity] on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of trauma?” (Johnson 5). For a way trauma studies has informed disability studies see Margaret Price’s “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” For more see Angela Carter’s “When Silence Said Everything: Reconceptualizing Trauma through Critical Disability Studies.” See also Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures for an influential example of how affect and trauma are considered within queer theory. Another way of thinking about the way publicness and recognition function for disabled people is offered through Tobin Siebers’ concept of “masquerade” as a compliment Siebers offers to Erving Goffman’s “passing” and “covering.” See “Disability as Masquerade” in Disability Theory. Notably, Siebers builds on what Heather Love describes as “underdogs,” those theorists working before and leading into the beginning of queer theory whose work was not being taken up as readily in the new forming canon. Love offers her studied attention to this in Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory. For more on the relation between this work by Siebers and McRuer see J. Logan Smilges’s “‘It’s not gay, nor bad, it’s SSAD:’ Queerness and Masquerade.” 

[11] One example that contains both the focus on the questioning of disabled people and the disavowal of sickness and which complicates the coherency of the category of disability is Judith Heumann recounting her first moment coming into a disability consciousness as a child when asked: “are you sick?”. In the 2020 documentary Crip Camp, Heuman explains, “I recall that I meekishly said, no, I’m not sick. But I remember I wanted to cry. I get that feeling a lot even as an adult. I’m kind of in between being shocked by the question, maybe being angry by it, but having to center myself. It was an awakening that people saw me not as Judy but as someone who was sick” (Lebrech and Newnham, 16:18). Identity, or even a positive declaration of what Heuman is if not sick, is not Heuman’s primary concern here but rather her relation to sickness and her intense emotional response. While this instance, with Heuman “centering” herself, examples ability and affect trouble, the tension produced here blurs the lines between what constitutes her disability and her emotions. For more on the enmeshment of disability and emotions see J Logan Smilges’ Crip Negativity, my “Crip Feelings,” and Alyson Patsavas’ “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse.”  See also Cameron Awkward-Rich’s The Terrible We with particular attention to the ways Awkward-Rich identifies the creation of a particular emotional habitus related to sickness at the founding of a field (10, 14-15). 

[12] This “new queer politic” has been critiqued for the ways it refuses forms of difference other than sexuality. See Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.” Also at the heart of this “new queer politic” is the ableism on display by both the man and Stryker. J Logan Smilges’ Queer Silence attends to this ableism. “It is only in the absence of disability, [Smilges] suggest[s], that queer remains coherent” (10). This claim is bolstered by Michael Warner’s assertion that “[t]he gay movement came into being only when the assumption that homosexuality was pathological was suddenly resisted” (151). I argue this is differently true for trans. 

[13]  It is of note that this phrase mirrors the originary language deployed by medical professionals to diagnose trans people as pathological as much as “sick.” In “Second Skins,” Jay Proesser explains, “[t]he transexual was not officially ‘invented’ until 1949 when David Cauldwell diagnosed as a ‘psychopathic transexual’ a female who identified as a man and wrote to Caudwell seeking treatment with hormones and surgery” (Prosser: 9). The medical field deploys discourses of capture through logics of discipline and control such that capture is understood as an affirmative individual identity; concurrent to this expansion of the criteria for incorporation within the system, this diagnostically constituted identitarian capture produces the very identity that is then in turn used as justification for forms of exclusion. 

[14] Notable, though, as analyzed by J Logan Smilges in Queer Silence, is that this fight against AIDS was organized through a queer framework and not a disability framework resulting in normalcy as ableism constituting a core component of gay and queer activism and organizing. More work is needed to attend to the way normalcy and pathology each offer a different schemata for organizing and doing disability studies. I would speculate that the economic, political, and embodied reality of scholars inflects how (and how much) they engage and contend with each. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “feminist disability sitpoint theory” is generative here. See “Feminist Disability Studies” and “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” 

[15] See “On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability.”

[16] This would amount to just the beginning of an engagement with capacity as the term is deployed across multiple fields with allied meaning. A consideration of Calvin Warren’s deployment of the term in Ontological Terror (Warren 2018: 61, 164) would prove, I think, especially fruitful when considering the relation between blackness, transness, and disability. See also “Calling into Being: Tranifestation, Black Trans, and the Problem of Ontology.” What happens when capacity is required but, at every turn and every instance, impossible? Warren’s body of work considers a version of this question as it relates to embodied difference and blackness. Stryker directs us to one answer in “My Words”: “The stigmatization fostered by this sort of pejorative labelling is not without consequence. Such words have the power to destroy transsexual lives. On January 5,1993, a 22-year-old pre-operative transsexual woman from Seattle, Filisa Vistima, wrote in her journal, ‘I wish I was anatomically ‘normal’ so I could go swimming. . . . But no, I’m a mutant, Frankenstein’s monster.’ Two months later Filisa Vistima committed suicide” (239). Another answer can be found in the introduction to Calvin Warren’s “Onticide”: “In March 2000, New York City police found Steen Keith Fenrich’s dismembered body in Alley Pond Park, Queens” (391). 

[17]  Though it may be more accurate to say that capacity is the availability for the fracturing violence of identity which yields recognition and legibility. 

[18] “Transgender look” and a subsequent “trans gaze” have been theorized by J Jack Halberstam and Joshua Bastian Cole. A critical distinction between the trans gaze offered by Cole and the one offered here is their relationship to Halberstam’s transgender look. Cole accepts, deploys, and continues Halberstam’s work while this article does not. As Cáel M. Keegan explains, “[t]he transgender look represents trans subjectivity as a divided body fragmenting within a single time” (2021: 500). This article aims to think otherwise to subjectivity and the continuity of the individual within a discursive field. Halberstam opens “The Transgender Look,” the fourth chapter of In a Queer Time and Place, explaining: “I begin with a study of the transgender gaze or look as it has developed in recent queer cinema (film and video), and then in the next chapter, turn to photography and painting to examine the clash between embodiment and the visual that queer art making has documented in vivid detail. Gender ambiguity, in some sense, results from and contests the dominance of the visual within postmodernism” (76). In articulating his understanding of the trans gaze Cole, like Halberstam, frames the films Boys Don’t Cry and Mulholland Drive queerly: “Queer trauma plays a central role in both Boys Don’t Cry and Mulholland Drive, and fragmentation is key to their narrative structures, character development, and aesthetics” (89). While I am invested in the relations between queer and trans scholarship and cultural production, this centering of queer analytics in their approach to transness is emblematic of “queer trans theory” (Awkward-Rich 2022: 120). Cameron Awkward-Rich offers a useful delineation: “[w]hereas queer trans scholarship has tended to value trans  people and culture insofar as they can be idealized as potent sites of counterhegemonic political and theoretical possibility, transsexual theory has tended to focus on the always already politically compromised mundane of trans life” (120). I am also disquieted by the seeming centrality of sensational trauma or violence as the preconditions for the emergence or activation of the transgender look/gaze. 

[19] In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Laura Mulvey explains, “Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star)” (13-14).

[20] My thinking on this juxtaposition between Foo and Lane is informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on Félix González-Torres and his work. See “Performing Disidentity” in Disidentifications Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics. 

[21]The male and diagnostic gazes have operational congruities which should be understood and contextualized through legacies of visual knowledge regimes as analyzed by, for instance, Robyn Wiegman’s explication of visual modernity in American Anatomies. The mutually constituting nature of these two dominant gazes speaks to the need for coalitions across forms of difference variously subjected to/by these gazes. Given the imbrication of identity and the ongoing reign of visuality as undergirding modernity, doing this work through identitarian means inevitably reaches its discursive limits. 

[22]There is a growing body of work that attends to the way trans people consume and produce photographic and video content on various social media platforms related to their transness and the ways this content has formed new cis- and transnormalizing (counter) imperatives. See Hil Malitano’s “Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum” in Side Affects, Tobias Raun’s “Archiving the Wonders of 

Testosterone via YouTube,” Jordan F. Miller’s “YouTube as a Site of Counternarratives to Transnormativity,” Enrique Zhang’s “‘I don’t just want to look female; I want to be beautiful’: theorizing passing as labor in the transition vlogs of Gigi Gorgeous and Natalie Wynn,” Cáel M. Keegan and Tobias Raun’s “Nothing to Hide: Selfies, Sex, and the Visibility Dilemma in Trans Male Online Cultures.”and Nicole Erin Morse’s Selfie Aesthetic: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art. For attention to medical settings and a medical/diagnostic gaze deployed against trans people see T. Benjamin Singer’s “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations.” 

---

References

Awkward-Rich, Cameron. 2022. The Terrible We. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Butler, Judith. 1993. “Critically Queer.” GLQ 1: 17-31. 

Carter, Angela. 2021. “When Silence Said Everything: Reconceptualizing Trauma through 

Critical Disability Studies.” Lateral 10 (1). 

Chambers-Letson, Joshua. 2018. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. New York City: New York University Press. 

Clare, Eli. 2017. Brilliant Imperfection Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press. Cohen, Cathy. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 1 (3): 437-465. 

Cole, C.L. and Shannon L.C. Cate. 2008. “Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence: 

Adrienne Riche’s Queer Possibility.” WSQ 36 (3&4): 279-287. 

Cole, Joshua Bastian. 2018. “Passing Glances: Recognizing the Trans Gaze in Mulholland Drive.” Somatechnics 8 (1): 79-94.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy. New York: Verso. 

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II: Revised Edition. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Forrest, Brady James. 2020. “Crip Feeling/Feeling Crip.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 14 (1): 75-89. 

Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Politics and the Study of Discourse.” In The Foucault Effect, Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, 53-72. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: NYU Press. 

Johnson, E. Patrick. 2001. “‘Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (1): 1-25. 

Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Keegan, Cáel M. and T. Raun. 2017 “Nothing to Hide: Selfies, Sex, and the Visibility Dilemma in Trans Male Online Cultures.” In Sex in the Digital Age edited by Paul G. Nixon and Isabel K. Dusterhoft, 89-100. New York: Routledge. 

Keegan, Cáel M. 2016. “Revisitation A trans phenomenology of the media image. MediaKultur 61 26-41. 

Keegan, Cáel M. 2018. “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?” Journal of Homosexuality 67 (3): 384-397. 

Keegan, Cáel M. 2020. “Against Queer Theory.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 7 (3): 349-53.  

Keegan, Cáel M. 2021. “Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don’t Cry.” 

In The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema edited by Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo, 491-510. 

New York: Oxford University Press. 

Lau, Jacob. 2021. “Trans.” In Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by the 

Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, Kyla Wazana Tompkins (managing editor), Aren Z. 

Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Karma R. Chávez, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Jamilla Musser, 237-241. New York City: NYU Press. 

Lebrecht, James and Nicole Newnham, dir. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. 2020. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix. 

Shanley, John Patrick, dir. Joe Versus the Volcano. 1990; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD. 

Love, Heather. 2021. Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

Malatino, Hil. 2022. Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York City: New York University Press. 

McRuer, Robert. 2013. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard Davis, 369-378. New York: Routledge Press. Miller, Jordan F. 2019. “YouTube as a Site of Counternarratives to Transnormativity.” Journal of 

Homosexuality 66 (6): 815-837. 

Minich, Julie Avril. 2016. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral 5 (1): online. 

Morse, Nicole. 2022. Selfie Aesthetic: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational 

Art. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Morse, Nicole and Lauren Herold. 2021. “Beyond the gaze: seeing and being seen in contemporary queer media.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 60. 

Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6-18. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2001. “Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance.” In Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off Stage, edited by Jane 

Desmond, 423–42. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” 2006. Signs 31 (3). 

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York City: New York University Press.  

Nguyen, Tan Hoang. 2014. The View from the Bottom. Durham: Duke University Press. Patsavas, Alyson. 2014. “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective 

Tissue, and Feeling Discourse.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): 

203-218. 

Prendergast, Catherine. 2001. “On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability.” In Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, edited by James C Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, 45-60. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. 

Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284. 

Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Quashie, Kevin. 2012. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 

Ridley, Lavelle. 2019. “Imagining Otherly Performing Possible Black Trans Futures in Tangerine.” TSQ 6 (4): 481-490. 

Ripley, AJ. 2021. “‘Feeling-Seeing’ in Transparent:Using the Mirror to Reflect beyond In/Visibility,” GLQ 27 (2): 201-231. 

Rodríguez, Juana María. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York City: New York University Press. 

Raun, Tobias. 2015. “Archiving the Wonders of Testosterone via YouTube,” TSQ 2 (4): 701-709. 

Sandahl, Carrie. 2003. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ 9 (1-2): 25–56. 

Schalk, Sami. 2013. “Coming to Claim Crip: Disidentification with/in Disability Studies.” DSQ 33 (2): online. 

Sedgwick, Eve Koskofsky. 1994. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Sedgwick, Eve Koskofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Siebers, Tobin. 2008. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 

Singer, Benjamin T. 2006. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-normative Body Images,” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge Press. 601-620. 

Smilges, J Logan. 2018. “‘It’s not gay, nor bad, it’s SSAD:’ Queerness and Masquerade.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 7 (2). 

Smilges, J. Logan. 2020. “On Being a Remarkable Trans.” TSQ*Now. 

Smilges, J. Logan. 2022a. “Neurotrans: Thorazine, HIV, and Marsha P.” Trans Studies Quarterly 9 (4): 34–52. 

Smilges, J. Logan. 2022b. Queer Silence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Smilges, J. Logan. 2023. Crip Negativity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ 1: 237-254. 

Stryker, Susan. 1998.“The Transgender Issue: An Introduction.” GLQ 4 (2): 145-158. 

Stryker, Susan. 2006. “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1-18. New York, NY: Routledge Press. 

Thomson, Rosemarie. Garland 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York City: Columbia University Press. 

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 2002. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14 (2):1–32. 

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 2005. “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs 30 (2):1557-1587. 

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 2016. “Becoming Disabled.” New York: New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/becoming-disabled.html. 

Vourloumis, Hypatia. 2014. “Ten theses on touch, or, writing touch.” Women & Performance 24 (2-3): 232-238 

Warner, Michael. 1999. “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage.” GLQ 5 (2): 119-171. 

Warren, Calvin. 2017a. “Calling into Being: Tranifestation, Black Trans, and the Problem of Ontology.” TSQ 4 (2): 266-274. 

Warren, Calvin. 2017b. “Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and Surplus Violence.” GLQ 23 (3): 391-418. 

Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Wendell, Susan. 1989. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability.” Hypatia 4 (2): 104-124. 

Wendell, Susan. 1997. The Rejected Body. New York and London: Routledge. 

Wiegman, Robyn. 1995. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Wölfle Hazard, Cleo. 2022. Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 

Zhang, Enrique. 2022. “‘I don’t just want to look female; I want to be beautiful’: theorizing passing as labor in the transition vlogs of Gigi Gorgeous and Natalie Wynn.” Feminist Media Studies 23 (4): 1376-1391.

---

About the Author (From university website)

Brady James Forrest is adjunct faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University where they specialize in transdisciplinary approaches to visual culture, fine art, and literature. Employing a reparative hermeneutic, their manuscript in progress proposes three structures of feeling through which to reimagine the bounds of trans, crip, and queer sociality. To do this the project considers the worlding potential of embodied affect and the nuptial form within minoritarian cultural production from the early 20th century to the present across a range of genres including participatory installation art and sculpture, retrospective queer film, and intimate trans portraiture. They received their PhD in English from the George Washington University specializing in Crip/Queer Studies and American Literature and Culture.