Introduction JULIAN B. CARTER, DAVID J. GETSY, and TRISH SALAH his issue of TSQ explores trans both in relation to and as a form of creative T practice—a project that repeatedly brought the editorial team face-to-face with some fundamental questions. What does trans look like? Must it be apparent or easily legible? Through which strategies might we articulate the significance of the many ways culture makers explore and express issues of form, content, medium, technique, duration, reception, authenticity, and originality in relation to trans aesthetics or sensibilities? How should we approach the vexed politics of trans representation, with all the issues they raise about accuracy, inclusion, and accountability? How long a history can we imagine for what this issue of TSQ is calling “trans cultural production”? Gender expresses culture, and cul- ture transforms the material world, including the materiality of our bodies; at what point, then, does it become analytically necessary to distinguish a particu- larly “transgender” creativity from a more pervasive drive to create cultural forms, including embodied selves? Who knows? We can’t say, after all, what dreams animated the artists who outlined their hands on cave walls by blowing pigment through hollow reeds. The materials gathered here respond to these questions and open others, collectively embarking upon debate about the relationship of creativity to embodied experience in the contemporary world. One of our first editorial decisions was to focus on the present and the recent past, because we are currently witnessing an explosion of creative and critical work on and by trans subjects. It is too soon (and the phenomenon is too multiform and widespread) to venture a synthetic analysis of that work, but we can offer a few observations. First, we want to draw attention to a persistent tension between, on the one hand, the construction and representation of individual trans subjects and, on the other hand, concerns with making and representing trans collectivities. Second, we wish to stress the exciting range of divergent perspectives, methods, and priorities that are driving both practitioners and critics. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Number 4 * November 2014 469 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2815183 ª 2014 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/4/469/485080/469.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 470 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly The bounded individual self is a cultural product of the modern West that has artifactual counterparts in the related creative forms of autobiography, por- traiture, and the novel. One of the founding works of transgender cultural studies was Jay Prosser’s 1998 Second Skins, which interpreted twentieth-century trans- sexual autobiographies as metaphors for and materializations of the narrative process of transition. Another was Susan Stryker’s (1994) “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” in which Stryker spoke back, in the first person, to the narrator of Mary Shelley’s fictional autobiography. More recent literary scholarship suggests that the modern novel took shape in part through fictional autobiographies purporting to document the lives of people who transed gender (e.g., Saxton, Mance, and Edwards, forthcoming). In this view the narrative conventions that have dominated both subjectivity and fiction in the West since the eighteenth century have been entwined with representations of transgender experience—to the point that both the modern English-language story and the modern Anglophone self could be interpreted as inflected by trans cultural productions. If we understand modern Western modes of becoming trans as manifestations of a long cultural concern with self-creation and the resulting problem of interface between the individual and the collective, it makes sense that some of the foundational analyses of cultural production from a transgender-studies perspective drew so heavily on autobiography: the genre of autobiography takes the singularity of experience as its organizing principle and foregrounds the lone voice of its solitary self-creating subject. Yet at the same time, such narratives perform that voice’s reach into the broader social world. To take a classic instance, the 1968 paperback edition of Christine Jor- gensen’s autobiography (orig. published 1967) soon sold over 400,000 copies (Stryker 2000: ix). The proliferating story of that earnest trans self, told publicly and directly, contradicted widespread cultural ascriptions of “sex change” as an anticreative, nonreproductive cul-de-sac that doomed its practitioners to isola- tion if not social death. Jorgensen’s autobiography and similar midcentury narratives drew on long cultural traditions of celebrating self-creation to create persuasive positive accounts of trans being. Such testaments to existence and survival helped to generate shared trans identity, community, and debate. In the visual arts, photographic portraiture mobilizes a similar gesture, and the pho- tograph also played a central role in the cultural visibility of twentieth-century Western trans subjects. Indeed, many trans autobiographies include photo- graphic illustrations. By the end of the century, trans and genderqueer photo- graphers (e.g., Loren Cameron and Catherine Opie) were actively constructing an archive of affirmative images of themselves and their communities. An important contributor to this archive was Del LaGrace Volcano, whose more recent work is the subject of a new analysis by Eliza Steinbock in this issue. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/4/469/485080/469.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 CARTER, GETSY, and SALAH * Introduction 471 While trans autobiographies are shaped by generic conventions that work to isolate the trans subject as a unique individual, trans photographic portraits often function as evidence of a particular person’s physical presence. However, photography’s indexical function places the trans body in a double bind: it must declare its visibility, but in doing so, it initiates the diagnostic gaze that demands that the temporal process of transition be legible on the body. Alongside the legacy of the Enlightenment investment in self-creation, then, both auto- biographies and photographic portraits reflect the diagnostic texts and images that powerfully shaped much trans becoming in a mid-twentieth-century med- 1 icalized Western context. While autobiography and photography remain major practices of trans cultural production, they have increasingly been joined by other concerns and modes. Self-creation and self-representation are not the whole story of trans cultural production. In this issue, filmmaker Jules Rosskam, curator Jordy Jones, and conceptual artist Tobaron Waxman describe their explorations of form as direct rejections of the dominant expectation that trans artists will depict trans bodies and lives in uncomplicated realist or narrative modes. If the tale of the intrepid individual transsexual autobiographer emerged as the dominant figure for transgender cultural production, that is perhaps because, as Joanne Meyer- owitz (2002: 67) suggests, the genre of transsexual autobiography, with its nar- rative of individual struggle against adversity and for self-actualization, is par- ticularly expressive of the values of late modernity in the United States. There are other histories one could tell. Meyerowitz’s work details the collective develop- ment of support networks, community newspapers, and magazines in US trans communities from the 1950s onward. In Quebec, Viviane K. Namaste (2004, 2005) has documented histories of trans women’s individual and collective labor in burlesque, vaudeville, and other entertainments that today are associated with street life, sex work, and low culture. These are not often recognized as sites of trans sociality and cultural production, aesthetic innovation, and political resi- lience. Such alternative narratives underscore that trans cultural production also takes place at the local level and in ephemeral forms less easily recuperated and less frequently archived than the (often sensationalist) autobiographical narra- tive. Subaltern cultural production of this sort may nonetheless participate in other economies, as is evidenced in this volume by the subtle transvaluation of symbolic and economic capital performed by photographs of mujercito sex workers analyzed by Susana Vargas Cervantes. As both the autobiographer and the burlesque dancer know, to produce culture is to demand an audience. The externalization of experience in the form of a film, a dance, an artwork, a poem, or a video calls for an array of viewers and readers—likewise, the artful deployment of an ensemble number, a comic Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/4/469/485080/469.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 472 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly anecdote, or an erotic thrill. Yet the distinction between the maker and the recipient or consumer of culture is not always clear. As Laura Horak discusses, the vernacular form of the DIY transition video has exploded to become what is arguably the first form of truly mass cultural production by trans subjects. Easily accessible via the Internet, the archive of these images and stories grows daily in a collective expression of trans subjects’ presence, difference, and multiplicity. Cultural production is not simply a euphemism for art. Naming the fact that culture is not native or natural, but is