Réappropriation de la peinture et de la photographie

This article explores ways in which portraits by the artists Sadie Lee and Del LaGrace Volcano can be read as reappropriating existing approaches to the representation of butch and transmasculine subjects. Sadie Lee’s painted portraits of butch lesbians* open a space of representation that resists the logic of the gaze embodied in works by cis-masculine painters who portray lesbian* bodies. Lee shows masculinity as spectacle as something singular to each of her subjects while simultaneously giving expression to her own queerness. Del LaGrace Volcano’s photographic portraits provide a marked contrast to the violent and violating representational practices exemplified by 19th century photographs of “deviant” types that were produced in the context of early sexology. Volcano’s images of the transmasculine body register this intrusive and humiliating history yet ultimately sublimate the differences which justified such taxonomic photographic projects, becoming instead a celebration of lives which escape the rigid binarity of gender. Throughout, the article fosters dialogue between masculinities in an effort to signal identity as something fluid and also to insist on the porosity and variability of butch and transmasculine as categories.