Transitory Artifacts
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

            The catalog’s concept is a parody of two books from “real” museums: the BBC/British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010) and The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects (2013). Motha’s “objects” aren’t all objects either. There are the wonderful and captivating artifacts typical of contemporary historical exhibitions: shoes, ceramics, art, magazine and book covers, posters, and ephemera. However, some of the 99 “objects” include significant people and events in trans history. The essays are brief one- to two-page contextualizations of the items, but also include artistic reactions to the objects as well as interviews with trans figures.

     The introductory essays present cutting-edge historiographical and museological analysis in clear, witty, and concise prose. They grapple with questions of who gets presented in museums and the representation of the artists and creators. African-American and feminist critics and curators for decades have struggled to get work by these groups into museums and exhibits. The old excuse, now discredited, was that “There are no great women artists!” However, the less visible trait of sexual orientation continues to be overlooked, as artists are essentially thrown back in the closet when wall text fails to mention their LGBT status. Recent museum initiatives to address “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” have led to major progress in what artists and works make it into museums. Vargas nevertheless also highlights institutional tokenism or cooptation of anticapitalist, antiracist, and post-colonial critiques of museums. (An example of this would be the obligatory “Black History” offering in February.) Christina Liden’s essay is also theoretically savvy, yet approachable, displaying her communication skills as Director of Academic and Public Programs at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. She explores thorny questions of representation: What counts as an “object”? Who is “trans” (especially when “transgender” is only a century-old term)? Most challenging of all is how to represent absence: people or events that have been historically and culturally ignored, suppressed, or violently eliminated.

            The three editors and curators lay out a thought-provoking matrix for this virtual collection of trans hirstory objects of which I can mention only a tantalizing few. Physical objects include the transgender pride flag designed in 1999 by Monica Helms. An archivist has pulled out the mock-up for Dr. Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), which was the book that launched the legitimization of transgenderism as a medical diagnosis along with gender confirming medical and surgical treatments. (See my earlier essay in the Sept.-Oct. 2024 issue of this magazine on his relationship with Christine Jorgensen, who attracted global attention to “sex change” treatment in 1952.)

            We get to face Antonio de Erauso (b. San Sebastián, Spain, 1592; d. Cotaxtla, México, 1650) dressed as a lieutenant of the Spanish Navy, in which he served between 1625 and 1628. The “Lieutenant Nun” confronts us sporting short-cropped hair with a steely, utterly defiant gaze. In 1626, Erauso (née Catalina) petitioned King Philip IV of Spain for a life pension and the right to dress as a man in recompense of their naval service. After the king granted only the pension, Erauso effectively went over his head to Pope Urban VIII, who granted a lifetime authority to dress in male attire. Erauso’s supposed autobiography was published two centuries later (1829) and tells of Catalina’s escape from a nunnery at fifteen and his cross-dressed military adventures in the Spanish New World under various male names. Antonio eventually settled in Mexico.

            Other significant figures include Jorgensen, Candy Darling (a Warhol Superstar), jazz pianist Billy Tipton, and actress Laverne Cox. It also includes less well-known individuals who deserve to be widely known. Reed Erickson is represented by some of his trippy paintings and the educational pamphlets his Erickson Educational Foundation published when he was still funding endocrinologist Harry Benjamin’s sexology research. A box of Clairol’s “Born Beautiful,” color 512 “Dark Auburn” (1975), features the stately Tracey Africa Norman, who worked in stealth when she started her modeling career. Her meteoric rise ended abruptly after she was outed in 1980. It was not until 2016 that she was able to professionally model again, once more for Clairol, on “Nice ‘n Easy.”

            The essays are by scores of leading trans activists, academics, artists, and creative writers. The volume as a whole demonstrates how far Trans Studies has come since it emerged in the 1990s. The editors have undoubtedly done heroic work shaping the individual entries into engaging prose, unburdened by the academic jargon of some monographs in Queer Theory. It should be on everyone’s coffee table, and I hope some generous donor will help motha become the gleaming architectural destination it deserves to be.