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Queering the library: Gender and bodies

Gender and bodies

A selection of photobooks, exhibition catalogues, and monographs which feature transgender and genderqueer artists and subjects:

 

Becoming / Yishay Garbasz

7 GARB (ARTISTS’ BOOKS)

2010

"I was born a woman. I am a woman now. I will die a woman. On November 18, 2008, I had gender clarification surgery. For one year before and after, I took photographs of myself every week to document the subtle changes my body underwent. In total there are 911 pictures. Only 87 have been selected for the book. Each photo is a building block. Their meaning cumulative." --artist's statement.

Body alchemy / Loren Cameron

7 CAME  LOR

1996

A collection of photographs and writing by Loren Cameron which documents the process of transition and everyday lives of the author and other transmen. It remains a milestone on the subject of FTM documentary

Bordered lives: transgender portraits from Mexico

7 ARNA KIK

2014

A richly evocative collection of photographs by internationally renowned photographer Kike Arnal, Bordered Lives seeks to push back against the transphobic caricatures that have perpetuated discrimination against the transgender community in Mexico. Despite some important advances in recognizing and protecting the rights of its transgender community, including legislation against hate crimes targeting transgender people, discrimination still persists, and the majority of the often appallingly violent attacks against the LGBT community are against transgender women. In the highly personal profiles that make up Bordered Lives, including the first transgender couple to be married in Mexico and one of the country's most high-profile transgender entertainers, Arnal looks at seven individuals in and around Mexico City.

On Christopher Street: transgender stories / Mark Seliger

7 SELI SEL

2016

On Christopher Street there are all kinds of sexual orientations and gender identities, endless possibilities of potential selves: transgender, transsexual, non-binary, genderqueer, femme, butch, cross-dresser, drag kings, drag queens, and many other identities that shift, adapt, and challenge our understanding of gender. This street nestled in the middle of New York City’s Greenwich Village is heralded as the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Today, the intersection at Christopher and Hudson Streets has been renamed “Sylvia Rivera Way,” after the pioneering trans-activist and the annual LGBTQ pride parade ends its procession on Christopher Street, where the revolution began at the Stonewall Inn. Renowned photographer Mark Seliger, best known for his portraits of celebrities, musicians, and artists, has called the West Village home for nearly two decades. For his latest book, On Christopher Street: Transgender Stories, his curiosity inspired him to shoot a handful of portraits—documentary style—in hopes of capturing the color, flamboyant characters, and theatre of a famous, but vanishing neighborhood.

Crossing the line / Sara Davidmann

7 DAVI SAR

2003

As social attitudes change, an increasing number of individuals choose to redefine their gender. Davidmann focuses on individuals cross-dressing from male to female and involves the participation of transvestites, drag queens and transsexuals. Cross-dressing involves the creation of an illusion—a total, if temporary, transformation. Nevertheless, the illusion often retains clues to the underlying gender base and the resulting image appears to exist somewhere between the polarities of male and female—containing elements of both—as if a third gender has been created. Working over a period of three years in clubs, bars, individuals’ homes and in the studio, the images are a true collaboration between photographer and subject

The drag king book / Del LaGrace

7 VOLC DEL

1999

A collection of photographs by transgender photographers Del LaGrace Volcano. The book profiles many different variations of the drag king, among them San Francisco's larger-than-life- Elvis Herselvis, and New York's Mackdaddy Dred, and presents interviews with Drag Kings alongside descriptions and analysis of actual shows

Frank Gaudlitz: A Mazo, die Amazonen des Amazonas

7 GAUD GAU

2015

Between 2013 and 2015, German photographer Frank Gaudlitz (born 1958) lived among an Andean community of transsexuals for several months and documented the time in this photobook.

Genderqueer and other identities

7 NAZ GEN

2014

A collection of portraits taken by photographer Dave Naz who set out to document transgender and genderqueer people. In Genderqueer, Dave Naz explores the gender spectrum in an entirely new way -- by turning his camera on transgender, intersex, pangender, and every shade in between. Helping to add to the current global discussion on the structured nature of gender identity, Genderqueer is an eye-opening musing on all of the people who don't fit neatly into a convenient box.

I and I / Tomoko Kikuchi; curated by Michiko Kasahara

7 KIKU KIK

2015

Tomoko Kikuchi, one of the most promising photographers in Japan, has witnessed the rapid changes in China's society and social awareness while simultaneously exploring her own situations. In her series 'I and I' she focuses on the subject of transgender people in China."

In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives / J Halberstam

7.049.1 HAL

2005

In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don't Cry, Halberstam turns their attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. Halberstam examines the "transgender gaze," as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others.

Just so you know #1, #2 / Joey Alison Sayers.

7 SAYE (ARTISTS’ BOOKS)

2009

A perzine illustrated comic documenting the author's experience of coming out as transgender and transitioning to live her life as a woman

The other side / Nan Goldin

7 GOLD GOL

1999

In this collection of photographs, Nan Goldin warmly portrays her friends of the "third sex" - people who, by nature neither male nor female, have crossed the boundaries of gender definition. Some of the people portrayed in this book have had, or plan to have, a sex-change operation; some live fully as women while others openly identify themselves as transsexuals. Some dress up only for stage performances, living as gay men during the day, and some make no attempt to fit in to any category at all, drifting daily from man to woman and back again. Nan Goldin's images show people who are positive about their sex, and who have broken down the traditional barriers of "man" and "woman".

Transcuba / Mariette Pathy Allen

 7 ALLE MAR (OVERSIZE)

2014

For more than 30 years, New York based photographer and painter Mariette Pathy Allen has been documenting transgender culture worldwide; in 2004 she won the Lambda Literary Award for her monograph The Gender Frontier. In her new publication, TransCuba, Allen focuses on the transgender community of Cuba, especially its growing visibility and acceptance in a country whose government is transitioning into a more relaxed model of communism under Raúl Castro's presidency.

Transformations: crossdressers and those who love them / Mariette Pathy Allen.

7 ALLE MAR

1989

This is a pioneering book of photographs and interviews with subjects who identify as crossdressers and their loved ones: wives, children, and other family members. The focus is on presenting the subjects in daily life, in positive settings and relationships. The photographs sensitive, sometimes beautiful, and the text offers insight into the differences between sexual orientation and gender presentation

Transgender warriors: making history from Joan of Arc to RuPaul / Leslie Feinberg

305 FEI

1996

Feinberg examines use of language, perceptions of the body, the status of clothing, and the structures of societies that welcome or are threatened by gender variance, uncovering persuasive evidence that there have always been people who crossed the cultural boundaries of gender. The portrait gallery that closes the book contains photographs and capsule biographies of contemporary transgendered people

Walk on the wild side / Jeanette Jones

7 JONE  JEA

1995

Photobook of portraits by photographer Jeanette Jones who photographed drag queens and transgender artists at London cabaret venues such as Madame Jo-Jo's and the Black Cap

You only live twice: sex, death, and transition / Chase Joynt

305 JOY

2016

With the discussion of the work of the experimental filmmaker Chris Marker as a starting point, Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom engage in a dialogue based on their own life stories, comparing experiences before and after life-altering events, their "first" and "second" lives. You Only Live twice explores two artists lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive. In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call second lives: Chase s transition from female to male and Mike s near-death from AIDS. Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might mean to find love and hope through conversation across generations