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Trans* Archives and the Making of Meaning

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-3815117

2328-9260

KC Councilor,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Artist and photographer Sara Davidmann's book Ken. To Be Destroyed is a visually stunning and provocative project. The book is a processed and curated archive, one that has been augmented with artworks and essays, itself now an artifact for analysis. Like all good art, it offers more questions than answers and makes demands of the viewer. The project brings up issues important to archival work generally—about ethics, ownership and rights, private lives in public light, truth and interpretation. Perhaps one of its most powerful appeals is that it opens rather than forecloses meaning and interpretation.Davidmann had been photographing and recording oral histories within transgender and queer communities in the United Kingdom for years before her mother, Audrey, revealed that Ken, the person she had known as her uncle, was transgender. It was only later, cleaning out her mother's house after she had moved into a nursing home, that Davidmann found the letters, envelopes, and album that compose this archive. Most of the letters were between Audrey and her sister Hazel, Ken's wife, but she had also kept early correspondence between Ken and Hazel, as well as Ken's papers, his research on transgender identity and notes on the effects of his estrogen therapy. The book comprises photographs and reproductions of the archive in various forms—stacks of letters tied with string, reproductions of photos and forms, handwritten notes. Davidmann has also created a large new set of photographs from the originals, images she produced using photo chemicals, chalk, paint, ink, and markers, producing what she has termed more paintings than photographs.This is a complex story, and like the stories that emerge from most archives, necessarily incomplete. Because of the nature of the archive—letters mostly between Ken's wife Hazel and her sister Audrey, and letters between Ken and Hazel mostly from the courtship stage of their relationship in the early 1950s—the central figure, Ken, is largely absent. What becomes clear is that Ken's gender is not his alone. It is variously a marital issue, a secret, a problem, a tragedy, a burden. It is a medical question, a legal one, a social one. As cartoonist and writer Lynda Barry has said, “We are gender mutual”—our genders are wrapped up in one another, relative and contingent (pers. comm., February 11, 2014). We are gendered by other people, and it is a façade that we are the sole authors of our own gender (or that our gender is natural and therefore authorless). This is often quite clear for those of us who are transgender or gender nonconforming. It is painfully true here, as the most vivid part of the archive is Hazel's letters to Audrey depicting her intense struggles with Ken's transgender identity. Present are so many secrets—a secret stash of money so Hazel could leave on a dime if her sanity depended on it, false-bottom drawers of women's clothing, research on annulment, a spylike collection of evidence about Ken's gender, and the insistence on keeping this a secret. Yet always present too is love and respect between Ken and Hazel.The compromise Ken and Hazel came to was that Ken would be a woman in the house and present as a man outside it. There are few glimpses of Ken's female self, and they are fleeting and indirect. In one letter, Hazel mentions feeling jealous of this other woman in her house, and that as a woman, Ken loved doing housework. There are Ken's own handwritten charts about the physical effects of estrogen therapy. Yet while most of the archive orbits around Ken, Ken is most often an object of conversation and analysis—even his own. In a section titled “Correspondence,” Davidmann produces a beautiful two-page spread of envelopes laid out in a grid, different shades of neutral, some with one stamp, others six, some torn, some from the front and others the back. The images ask us to consider the idea of containers, how our most private messages and selves move through public spaces.Davidmann plays with the archive's absences. There are few photos of Ken in her archive or family albums. She takes the photos she does have and makes them into art materials, canvases. She manipulates images to see them differently, creating one series of prints that are so zoomed in that we see the photos on a cellular level: their original subjects unrecognizable. She focuses on the mold and the tears in the photos, uses bleach and photo chemicals as a way to ask questions of the images. Davidmann's manipulation of images echoes Ken's handwritten transcription of a letter he received from a professor at a psychiatric clinic about his “condition,” with his own annotations written in red ink, commentary like a dialogue with the professor. Both practices are ways of owning or understanding something better by putting it in your own hand.Davidmann uses K as a name for Ken's female self in the absence of a name she actually used. In a section titled “Looking for K/Finding K,” she writes, “I wanted to visualize how Ken might have looked as a woman. . . . The hand-coloured images gave a fictional vision of Ken's or K's life. He was not able to dress as a woman outside the home, and I wanted to give him the freedom that he was never able to have in his lifetime” (98). Few of the photos are manipulated seamlessly—most of the images draw attention to the process, to their constructed nature. They are poetic repetitions on a theme with different tones. Davidmann makes a reasonable argument based on the evidence of the archive that Ken would have related to the photos he took of Hazel. In some images, Davidmann superimposes Ken's face onto pictures of Hazel's body. This artistic choice is a provocative one. In a series titled “For Ken,” Ken's face is placed on a photo of Hazel in her wedding dress, each print differently marred with photo chemicals. Davidmann's creative and intimate artistic work leads one to question, Who is the author of this story? Is it true? Fiction? Neither? The book also centrally raises questions about how to write about trans* subjects in the past. Davidmann calls Ken's female self “K” and creates images that place K in female form, yet she maintains “he” pronouns.1The book raises other troubling ethical questions, and to her credit, Davidmann doesn't obscure them but foregrounds them. From the very title of the book, readers are told they are being invited to read something that was intended to be destroyed; the page that precedes the title page is an image of a manila envelope with Audrey's writing on it: “Ken. To be destroyed.” Here we are, invited to look into the envelope that wasn't meant for outside eyes. The last page in the book is the envelope from the other side—the book's pages are bookended by the envelope that held its contents. Even the beautiful, textured blue endpapers are prints of the bag that held some of these materials. The reader, too, then, is implicated through the act of opening the book and turning the pages.The desire for secrecy is hypervisible even as the book itself exposes the secrets. Throughout Ken. To Be Destroyed, we see three blown-up images of typed words from letters that read “secret,” “secretly this plight,” and “Once again for pity's sake don't tell anybody.” Davidmann writes that her mother likely kept the letters for a reason, knowing their significance, even as she insisted they remain secret. Whose desire for secrecy was it, and how does this matter? Davidmann has written of the project, “My mother said that I was to keep this a secret and not even to tell my siblings—both of these I refused to do. I was upset by the fact that there was such shame in my own family attached to someone being trans*” (Brown and Davidmann 2015: 191). Davidmann inherited the archive, so there's no question that it's hers to make public, but does the public value of the archive outweigh the desires of those at its center that it remains private, even if they have passed away? Does today's social and political context render their mid-twentieth-century desires for privacy irrelevant? If the desire for secrecy is rooted in shame, is revealing it then a form of liberation? How do concerns around privacy and confidentiality shift when the person calling for it is not the trans* person themselves?Ken. To Be Destroyed is a rich artifact that trans studies scholars will find useful in thinking through the complexities of trans* archival work. As a creative project, it will likely inspire new methods and modes of engagement with trans subjects and communities. Davidmann's book highlights the central role of art and the artist in trans studies and queer communities more broadly. It is an example of everyday documenting, both ordinary and extraordinary; it has historical value as a record of “ordinary” people navigating transgender identity in the 1950s and 1960s. The collection brings up perennial questions of value and currency in whose materials are considered worth archiving. Davidmann's book makes this archive meaningful and shows us the fragility of collections like these, as there are untold numbers of similar archives that have been lost or destroyed.Ultimately, one of the project's gifts is its complexity, its rejection of simple answers and tidy narratives. One poignant example of this comes in a letter Ken wrote to Hazel four years before he died. He wrote, “Thank you, Hazel, most sincerely, and humbly, for sharing your life with me, and giving me so many of your years. . . . I am truly sorry that I have not been able to give you a better life in every way. It was not for want of trying to do so. I guess the dice were just too heavily loaded against us” (24). As cultural historian Anjali Arondekar has proposed, the draw of this archive is beyond the retrieval of an identifiable truth. “There is always a politics of the archive,” she writes, “because it is rarely a simple matter of revealing secrets waiting to be found” (2009: 20). Ken. To Be Destroyed shows how much is not revealed even in the revealing of secrets.