Troubling the Lines: Trans Contemporary Art and Cultural Production and the Impasse of Representation

This article-based dissertation responds to the urgency of understanding and critiquing the contradictory representational dynamics of transgender visibility through the prism of contemporary trans art and cultural production.

How can it be possible that we, from one perspective, appear to be living in a time of trans possibility, and, at the very same time, are confronted with heightened trans exposure to violence and precarity? What are the cultural processes making such seemingly contradictory phenomena true at the same time? The dissertation posits that this is not a matter of finding the “right” forms of representation, but grasping that modes of representation themselves may serve as reductive, intrusive, and exposing gestures, harming rather than serving those they endeavor to represent. Located in the overlaps between trans visibility, visual politics, and trans and queer artistic practices of the present, the overarching question running through this dissertation is: how can one – aesthetically, poetically, politically – address the violences of representation without replicating the same violence?

The dissertation turns to three examples of critical trans artistic practice: the poetry collection Havet i munden [The Ocean in Your Mouth] (2023) by Danish writer and artist Luka Holmegaard, the multimedia photography and sound work Policing Gender (2015-2019) by US-based artist Lorenzo Triburgo, and selected examples of the ongoing work in expanded sculpture and video by Brooklyn/Hong Kong-based artist Jes Fan. The three articles perform close readings of the selected works, demonstrating how they thoroughly rearrange, reconfigure, and redistribute the deep-seated meanings and affects animating cultural understandings of transness in the present.