Dr Sara Davidmann: Acts of Resistance: Photographing Transsexual Private and Public Lives

Date: 17 March 2010, 17:00h
Location: Beech Grove House

Gender Studies Seminar Series

Title: Acts of Resistance: Photographing Transsexual Private and Public Lives, Dr Sara Davidmann, Research Fellow, London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London

This seminar examines some of the findings from an AHRC-funded postdoctoral photography research project carried out in collaboration with ten transsexual participants.

It is widely believed to be a fact of life that human configurations of sex are divided into ‘females’ and ‘males’. A further commonly held assumption is that gender follows biology. Nonetheless, the participants in this project all self-identify beyond the two-sexes/two-genders systems.

In this seminar I shall explore the personal experiences of four of the participants with regard to how they negotiate their everyday lives. The differences between private and public presentations of the self and some of the outcomes of being visible or invisible as a transsexual person will be discussed. The ways in which the re-enforcement of the female/male gender model in the broad public domain affects each person will be considered. Further, three of the participants are becoming increasingly involved in what I suggest are ‘acts of resistance’ in response to the dysfunctional dialogue that exists between their lived experiences and mainstream society.

In the light of this research I argue that gender constitutes a more complex set of relations than the female/male categories would allow and reveal a very different version of what it means to be a transsexual person than the stereotypical model that is frequently portrayed in the mass media.