Photography and Trans Visibility

Co-hosted keynote lecture, IHR History of Sexuality seminar series and German History Society Annual Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University.

If you are attending other lectures or panels at the German History Society conference please register separately, further details will be available at https://www.germanhistorysociety.org/conference/

Photography and Trans Visibility

Physicians like Magnus Hirschfeld believed they could attain justice through sexual science, humanizing their patients as citizens deserving of rights and protections. For years, progressive scholars have echoed this call to tell trans history through a medical lens. And yet, as Jules Gill-Peterson has argued, we need to look to other sources to understand how trans people built lives for themselves beyond the control of medical gatekeepers. Another way to approach the history of changing gendered identities is by shifting the focus to the cultural sphere. In this talk, I want to think about the role of fine art and vernacular photography as undervalued sites of trans representation, self and worldmaking. Changes in camera practices, aesthetic styles, and collection provided trans people and their allies new ways of laying claim to the public sphere, while strengthening the bonds of kinship within their communities as well.

Jennifer Evans is Professor of European History at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada, where she teaches about the history of sexuality, photography, and memory. In 2023, she published The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism with Duke UP. She co-edited a Festschrift in honour of her former PhD supervisor and human rights historian Jean Quataert entitled Gender in Germany and Beyond with Shelley Rose and published the jointly written monograph Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape together with Meghan Lundrigan and Erica Fraser for Bloomsbury. Evans's next book, Full Frontal: A New History of the Sexual Revolution traces the role of image making in this period of social and legal change. She is currently researching another book length project on the history of German drag funded by the Humboldt Foundation’s Adenauer Prize. In addition to overseeing a multi- multi-platform big data project on social media, online hate, and the weaponization of history, she is co-curator of the New Fascism Syllabus and a founding member of the German Studies Collaboratory.