Auto-ethnography elective module

Composing Experience in Performance

In the introduction of: What a woman can do with a camera (1984), Johnston poses:

‘There is a split between the fictitious woman represented publicly and how we know our daily and our private selves to be. How can we as women tell stories that eradicate the disparity between how we are seen and what we feel? How do we present who we really are in terms of images? And why does it matter that we do?’

I think this narrative extents to nonbinary and trans* individuals as well. There are many fictitious narratives going around on who we are, what we do and what dangers we pose. I question how can we use the camera and image making to present who we really are? How can we use image making as a tool to predict who we may become? Claiming our own identities and finding and highlighting the beauty in them that is so often overlooked.

Disclosing ourselves to ourselves

To try and find an answer to these questions I went into a series of image making and reflecting on them, which spurred me along in my research. Deeper exploring my own identity and how I relate to images, perception, and society through it. This also encompassed my understanding of image making (or lens-based-work) and I formulated the following statement on my lens-based collaborations:

We need to be generous, loving, and gentle with how we handle a camera.

We need to consider our own actions, while collaborating with another person and a camera, in a way that is neither aggressive or perpetuating oppression, nor presenting ourselves as some kind of savior or overly romanticizing the act of image making.

We need to establish a collaboration through the camera, where both parties have agency in the image that is created. Both hold responsibility and both have power to change any aspect. It’s not one person taking a photo of a helpless object. If this collaboration is approached with trust, gentleness, and appreciation for the other I believe it can be a beautiful experience of creating together, where we disclose ourselves to ourselves and the other.

We live in a culture shaped by media, where trans*gender identities have been, and continue to be, demonized for decades. Scrolling through social media it's easy to find hate speech, thinly veiled as worries for the state of society. Right wing politicians, conservatives on YouTube, Instagram or Tik Tok, the message is everywhere and is clear; trans*gender people are depicted as pedophiles, groomers, rapists, extremists and terrorists. (Brett Cooper, 2023 / Matt Walsh, 2023 / Thierry Baudet, 2023)

And we live in a time where these images are fired at us faster and faster. Evelyn Wan describes this as the Algorithmic condition (2018), where information is created and processed faster than humans can comprehend, but we are still living in the real time consequences of those digital actions.

These high speed, negatie depictions of trans* identities have a massive impact on the way trans*gender people are being treated in society and on the laws and regulations currently being spoken into reality.

Images and image making play a central role in this narrative around trans* identities due to the visual nature of our online experiences. If image making can have this adverse affect in society in the depiction of trans* people, surely it can also be reversed through image making?

So I question, how can image making be used as a tool to create truthful, whole understandings of trans*identities? How can I, as a nonbinary person, use image making to understand my own identity better and see a possible future for myself and my body? Especially considering the vast difference in temporal experience within my body that is in a state of waiting and preparing for transition.

And so I start creating images, photographs and video's, attempting to meet these criteria I set for myself. They are made in collaboration with Vicky Maier, establishing trust and equity through and with the camera. They are an attempt to show my current state of identity, of (in)visibility, of vulnerability and of transformation. They are an attempt at changing the narrative, the societal expectations, and my own. They are created and processed slowly, honoring the temporality of my body and current state of being.

The experiment started by a small exercise; write down your name, as many times as possible, and see what emerges. (Zoya Sardashti, 2023)
My name started to look like a scar, and I considered how I was wounded by my old name, and how my chosen name soothed the pain. While at the same time, waiting for other scars.

To write your name, is to claim something as yours. We (in western society) are thaught to show what is ours by putting our name on it. Starting with writing our names in the backs of our shoes and backpacks as toddlers. Then on lunch-boxes, water bottles, books, toys. Going on to tests, documents, contracts, packages.

We sign our name if we agree that something is ours, that we understand the information, that we owe (or own) our dept. We state our name to claim our identity, answering to it’s call and speaking it when we introduce ourselves.

So to write my name, my chosen name, my true name, on my chest is an act of reclamation. Reclaiming something that I’ve felt detached from in many ways. Taken away my agency over how to live with this body-part. Taken by doctors who have to approve my trans-ness to allow me to change my body how I need to. Taken by men commenting on how I would look better if I dressed more effeminate, because I’m so pretty and have such a good body. Taken by policies that have me waiting for 3 years to get to the healthcare that I need.

Writing my name, in this place, in this way, creating the scars that will decorate my chest in the future. Calling to life a future that I claim as being mine. Because I put my name there, I signed for this to come true. My chosen name, the name of my future.

Put into an image that will last, like a contract, a promise to future and past me. A promise to the ones like me. That this is already there, that it always has been there. That we are not invisible. That we refuse to be invisible. Even while waiting. We are here, and our future versions are waiting for us.

Lastly, I came back to a metaphor that seems to haunt me. The caterpillar, metamorphosis, butterfly journey as a metaphor for trans* identities and transition. A gross simplification of reality, a romanticization of a complex lived experience, strictly linear where identity is all but that, and seemingly a chase for beauty in the eye of society. Everything that I don't want my story to represent. And still, sometimes I feel like that caterpillar. Trapped inside a cocoon, waiting for transformation, waiting to be free.

After some more in depth questioning I found aspects of the metaphor that I deeply love. The caterpillar holds Imaginal discs, clumps of cells that contain the DNA blueprint for what the butterfly will look like. The body of the caterpillar literally imagines the future physical manifestation.
I've always said I want an intuitive transition. I want to trust my body to know where to take me, like the caterpillar does.

With deep gratitude to Vicky Maier for the collaboration in the images, and to Zoya Sardashti for the beautiful conversations and warm provocations.

REFERENCES:

Dailywire (2023) What is a woman? Available from: https://www.dailywire.com/news/i-underwent-gender-transition-surgery-heres-what-the-media-doesnt-tell-you [accessed: April 6th 2023].

Forum for Democracy International (2023) predatory gender ideology [twitter]. April 3rd 2023. Available from: https://twitter.com/FVD_Intl/status/1642892800403423233 [accessed: April 6th 2023]

Middlestorb, F. and Impressions Gallery of Photography (1984) Frances Benjamin Johnston: What a Woman Can Do with a Camera. York: Impressions Gallery of Photography.

Sardashti, Z. (2023) Writing: Writing about self [Lecture]. Autoethnography: composing experience in performance. ArtEZ Hogeschool, January 30th.

The Comment Section (2023). The predators online are not even hiding it [vlog]. March. Available from: https://youtu.be/ypXt3wJin-g [accessed: April 6th 2023]

Wan Pui Yin, E. (2018) Clocked!: Time and Biopower in the age of Algorithms. Zwolle: Probook.