“Queering the Trans✲ Family Album”

Abstract

Historian Elspeth H. Brown and photographer Sara Davidmann explore the relationship between the family photograph album, trans☼ history, and queer archives. Describing their queer archival work, they address topics including ethics; intertwined histories of racism, colonialism, and normativity in photography; and the violent erasures of sexual and gender minorities within the conventional family photography album. “Family” photographs, so central to the affective production of trans☼ family, however defined, have not been the site of sustained discussion within queer history. Brown and Davidmann argue that family photography can also be a site of trans☼ family belonging and queer kinship, despite histories of violent erasure. They discuss these issues with reference to two image sets from Davidmann's work: one from her own family of origin (Ken. To be destroyed) and one from her (queer and trans☼) family of choice (the Stephen Whittle family album).

An Instituting Archive for Memory Activism: The Archivo de la Memoria Trans de Argentina

“…However, the family photograph album has historically been “one of the most pernicious of affective technologies” (Brown and Davidmann, 2015: 190): it tends to erase LGBT+ subjectivities, considering them part of an uncomfortable past. For LGBT+ people, family photograph albums are an amnesia archive (Brown and Davidmann, 2015: 195), more than technologies for remembering. Nevertheless, the institution of the family based on biological bonds has been a key legitimizing and strategic resource for activism in post-dictatorship Argentina.…”

“…However, Rizki sees in the tension between “the image’s celebratory iconography” and the exhibition’s title (“This one left, this one was killed, this one died”), which enumerates losses and absences, the space between “images and their [of depicted people] now haunting presence” (Rizki, 2020a: 200). Pictures speak of the violence that “often lurks behind the photographed smile” (Phu and Brown, 2014: 350) and of the “shadow history of corporeal and subjective violence” (Brown and Davidmann, 2015: 193).…”

Familiar grammars of loss and belonging: curating trans kinship in post-dictatorship Argentina

“…Physical transition, for example, disturbs the visual order of family albums as well as their kinship structures – where there was a subject who (more or less) visually cohered as a daughter for 20 years, a son now emerges or perhaps a genderqueer or non-binary subject whose unruly gender presentation defies normative visual logics of gendered inscription. Similarly, trans subjects have historically been erased from family albums and families alike – their photographs destroyed or otherwise removed if they are exiled from their families of origin (Brown and Davidmann, 2015). Such reflections aim to account for trans subjects’ visual representation or erasure within family albums and kinship structures conditioned by family of origin.…”

Decolonizing Family Photographs: Ecological Imaginaries and Nonrepresentational Ethnographies

“…In various ways, these studies address personal and cultural memory, “family secrets” (Kuhn 2002), and the shaping of families by “ideological pressures deployed by the familial gaze” (Hirsch 1997, 10). In recent years, there has been a steady growth of interest, both in scholarship and in exhibitions, in family photos and culturally diverse family forms, with particular attention given to queering family photos and the family album (Brown and Davidmann 2015; Eng 2014) and the connections between family photographs, diaspora, and race (Mannik 2014; Matthew 2015; Phu 2014).…”