Visualising the Transexual Self: Photography, Strategies, and Identities

This study explores the role of the visual world in negotiations of gender, selfimage, the body, and the social domain, and the impact this has on the visualisation of transsexual gender identities. These issues are brought into sharp analytical focus through the personal experiences of transsexual people.

The inquiry brings a new approach to trans gender studies by using visual research methods that reflect specifically the centrality of the visual in negotiations of gender in society. This thesis is a practice-based PhD that uses the methods of photography and interview in dialogue with theoretical approaches. In this photography constitutes both a methodology and a form of evidence in the research. The social expectation of photography is that it reproduces reality. Yet, it also offers a form of communication, one beyond the spoken or written word. The research builds on these concepts, while exploring photography's potential to be used collaboratively and reflexively. What emerges, I shall argue, is a highly discursive and performative 'photo space'.

The core material is presented in four case studies that explore the key themes that came to the surface through the inquiry. These are: the impact of the visual world in negotiations of gender, the role of images in transsexual selfvisualisation, the capacity for photography to reveal insights into the transsexual self-image, and the dysfunctional dialogue that exists between atypical gender identities and social gender categories. A context for the structure of the argument is provided by a review of historical and cross-cultural transgender identities, intersex conditions, the emergence of the transsexual identity in a medical sphere, and social visibility.

Two significant areas of concern and exploration involving the visual world previously ignored in research into transsexuality: 'seeing' the body and 'being seen' by others, emerged in the inquiry. These concerns have been central to the debates around the construction of gender stereotyping in society in general and in particular with regard to the media. However, in transsexual discourses these issues become heightened and self-consciously performative. It is this heightened awareness of the visual realm with regard to gender that is the focus of this thesis. The issues of 'passing', the performance of gender, and 'the wrong body', which are central to the understanding of transsexual experiences to date, are examined in relation to these areas of concern because they provide important new perspectives on these concepts.

The research demonstrates that gender is not necessarily contained within the binary categories, that the genitals are not always the defining feature of transsexual gender identities, and that surgery is not a necessary outcome of trans sexuality. The evidence that surfaces in this study contests the widely held belief in the two-sexes/two-genders system, founded on the assumption that gender follows biology. Following this, I suggest that photographs of the atypically gendered body have the potential to question pre-conceptions of gender and the body, contest the boundaries of the binaries, and present a challenge to the gender system.