- University of Toronto
Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Toronto, ON M5S 3K7 Canada
Elspeth Brown
University of Toronto, History/American Studies, Faculty Member
- I am an Professor of History at the University of Toronto, former Director of the Centre for the Study of the United ... moreI am an Professor of History at the University of Toronto, former Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States (2006-13), and currently the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory and the Digital Humanities Network, University of Toronto. My research concerns modern American cultural history; the history and theory of photography; queer and trans history and the history of US capitalism. I have received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute; the National Museum of American History; the American Council of Learned Societies; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Library of Congress Kluge Center; the American Philosophical Society, and others. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling, 1909-1983 (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and the award-winning The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005). I am the co-editor of Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014); “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). I have published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks, and others. Brown currently directs the The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a five-year digital history and oral history research collaboration that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans oral histories. I am also co-investigator for the Family Camera Network collaborative research project, where my research focuses on queer and trans family photography and oral history, in the context of global migration.edit
LGBTQ2+ community archives founded in the 1970s and 1980s are not necessarily outside the archival mainstream from the perspective of non-white, and non-cis LGBTQ2+ people. On the contrary, histories of whiteness, settler colonialism, and... more
LGBTQ2+ community archives founded in the 1970s and 1980s are not necessarily outside the archival mainstream from the perspective of non-white, and non-cis LGBTQ2+ people. On the contrary, histories of whiteness, settler colonialism, and cisnormativity within the LGBTQ2+ community archive can create the “symbolic annihilation” of trans and BIPOC people within the queer community archive, if left unaddressed. Our current moment requires an active reimagining of what activism means within a legacy LGBTQ2+ community, activist archive. This article describes my efforts, as a volunteer and board member at The ArQuives, as well as the Director of the LGBTQ2+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, to help bring an intersectional, trans-inclusive framework to an LGBTQ2+ community archive with origins in Canada’s gay liberation movement. The Collaboratory is a five-year digital history research collaboration, funded by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans oral histories. We have four archival partners: The ArQuives (formerly, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives); the Digital Transgender Archive; the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria; and the Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony. In this article, I focus on the Collaboratory’s efforts to bring trans visibility to The ArQuives’ collections.
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From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In... more
From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In Work! Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. Brown outlines how the modeling industry sanitized and commercialized models' sex appeal in order to elicit and channel desire into buying goods. She shows how this new form of sexuality—whether exhibited in the Ziegfeld Follies girls' performance of Anglo-Saxon femininity or in African American models' portrayal of black glamour in the 1960s—became a central element in consumer capitalism and a practice that has always been shaped by queer sensibilities. By outlining the paradox that queerness lies at the center of capitalist heteronormativity and telling the largely unknown story of queer models and photographers, Brown offers an out of the ordinary history of twentieth-century American culture and capitalism.
Cultures of Commerce explores the intersection of business history and the study of cultural forms, ranging from material to visual culture to literature. While both the structural changes in American business and their impact on workers... more
Cultures of Commerce explores the intersection of business history and the study of cultural forms, ranging from material to visual culture to literature. While both the structural changes in American business and their impact on workers have been explored in depth by historians, the broader impact of business on other cultural forms, and vice versa, is only now beginning to be studied.
The collection probes the nationally integrated business culture which exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. Through the development of the modern corporation and the vertical and horizontal integration of production, manufacturing, and commercial advertising, this new market culture became a force of culural and industrial production, participating in the broader transformations in American culture occuring during the early twentieth century.
Contributors to Cultures of Commerce include Jean-Christophe Agnew, Angela M. Blake, Regina Lee Blaszyck, Elspeth H. Brown, Shannan Clark, Anna Creadick, Clark Davis, Jill Fields, Tiffany M. Gill, Catherine Gudis, Andrew Hoberek, Patricia Johnston, Roberta Moudry, Marina Moskowtiz, and Woody Register.
The collection probes the nationally integrated business culture which exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. Through the development of the modern corporation and the vertical and horizontal integration of production, manufacturing, and commercial advertising, this new market culture became a force of culural and industrial production, participating in the broader transformations in American culture occuring during the early twentieth century.
Contributors to Cultures of Commerce include Jean-Christophe Agnew, Angela M. Blake, Regina Lee Blaszyck, Elspeth H. Brown, Shannan Clark, Anna Creadick, Clark Davis, Jill Fields, Tiffany M. Gill, Catherine Gudis, Andrew Hoberek, Patricia Johnston, Roberta Moudry, Marina Moskowtiz, and Woody Register.
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My first book project examined the intersection of photography as a mass technology with corporate concerns about efficiency in the Progressive period. In the late nineteenth century, corporate managers began to rely on photography for... more
My first book project examined the intersection of photography as a mass technology with corporate concerns about efficiency in the Progressive period. In the late nineteenth century, corporate managers began to rely on photography for everything from motion studies to employee selection to advertising. This practice gave rise to many features of modern industry familiar to us today: consulting, "scientific" approaches to business practice, illustrated advertising, and the use of applied psychology.
I explored these intersections through a variety of examples, including racial discrimination in hiring, the problem of photographic realism, and the gendered assumptions at work in the origins of modern marketing. I argued that the goal uniting the various forms and applications of photographic production in that era was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies that sought to redesign not only industrial production but the modern subject as well.
The Corporate Eye has been reviewed in several journals, including American Quarterly, Business History Review, Business History, Technology & Culture, Human Resource Management, The Journal of Consumer Culture, and American Studies. Winner, 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing for the best book in Business, Management and Accounting, given by the Association of American Pubishing.
I explored these intersections through a variety of examples, including racial discrimination in hiring, the problem of photographic realism, and the gendered assumptions at work in the origins of modern marketing. I argued that the goal uniting the various forms and applications of photographic production in that era was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies that sought to redesign not only industrial production but the modern subject as well.
The Corporate Eye has been reviewed in several journals, including American Quarterly, Business History Review, Business History, Technology & Culture, Human Resource Management, The Journal of Consumer Culture, and American Studies. Winner, 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing for the best book in Business, Management and Accounting, given by the Association of American Pubishing.
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Co-authored with Thy Phu and Andrea Noble
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This essay offers a queer history of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lyne’s photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of a numerous gay and/or queer,... more
This essay offers a queer history of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lyne’s photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of a numerous gay and/or queer, pre-WWII photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Paris, London, and Hollywood in the years before WWII. I historicize what Lynes called “the amorous regard” of his fashion photography through an analysis of his male nudes, and the sexual history for which they are a visual record. In this essay, I show how both Lynes’ fashion images and his male nudes emerged from a market-imbricated queer kinship network to produce a discourse of interwar glamour that accommodated both dominant readings of heteronormativity and resistant readings of queer, white, belonging.
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Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic... more
Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on refugee policies, Cold War dislocations that result from the push of violence and the pull of economic oppor-tunity, queer and trans families, family reunification, and transnational adoption. We outline the state of the field when it comes to family photography, and explain how The Family Camera addresses issues that arise in contemporary debates in this area, namely addressing some of the limitations of visual studies (which do not sufficiently attend to the multisensory registers of this genre) and oral history (which treat images as means of eliciting memories).
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Introduction to a special issue of Photography and Culture
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This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering... more
This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering some reflections concerning how prior work in transgender ethnography and poststructuralist history are helping to shape contemporary approaches to trans oral history. Projects discussed include the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, the Transgender Archives (University of Victoria), the Digital Transgender Archive, the New York City Trans Oral History Project, the Trans Oral History Project, and the Transgender Oral History Project, Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries.
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Sara Davidmann is a photographer working in London, and Elspeth H. Brown is a US cultural historian who lives in Toronto. Both of us are engaged in the creation of queer archives concerning recent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,... more
Sara Davidmann is a photographer working in London, and Elspeth H. Brown is a US cultural historian who lives in Toronto. Both of us are engaged in the creation of queer archives concerning recent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) history, with an emphasis on trans* and queer archives. Brown is currently describing trans* activist Rupert Raj’s collection for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA) as a volunteer, while also conducting an oral history project concerning the histories and experiences of partners (cis and trans*) of trans* men in the United States and Canada. Davidmann has been photographing her queer and trans* community in London for fifteen years, while also interviewing her image collaborators about their lives. Together, we developed a few questions that allowed us to address the intersections between our various projects. The conversation that follows concerns our ruminations concerning archives, photography, ethics, queer methods and bodies, and trans* lives.
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I served on the Advisory Board for this exhibition in 2015-16.
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Organized by Elizabeth Wolfson (Brown) with Lisa Cartwright (UCSD). As the title suggests, this symposium has been organized as a response to the 2014 publication of my co-edited book, Feeling Photography (Duke, 2014) and includes... more
Organized by Elizabeth Wolfson (Brown) with Lisa Cartwright (UCSD). As the title suggests, this symposium has been organized as a response to the 2014 publication of my co-edited book, Feeling Photography (Duke, 2014) and includes scholars and artists from throughout the US. Papers are intended for a special issue on this theme in the Journal of Visual Culture [invited].
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The Toronto Photography Seminar is a group of scholars and curators from Ontario institutions who have been meeting regularly since 2004 to read, produce, and edit collaborative research concerning the history and theory of photography.... more
The Toronto Photography Seminar is a group of scholars and curators from Ontario institutions who have been meeting regularly since 2004 to read, produce, and edit collaborative research concerning the history and theory of photography. We are basically a closed seminar, with occasional public events. Guests who have presented public lectures, as well as workshoped pieces in the seminar, have included John Tagg, Carol Payne, John O’Brien, Laura Wexler, Shawn Michelle Smith, Clement Cheroux, Roberto Tejada, Peggy Phalen, Mark Haworth-Booth, Martin Berger, and Carol Mavor, among others.
As a group, we research themes in common and publish scholarship individually and as a group. We have collaborated on a guest issue on “circulation” for the History of Photography journal (guest editors, Thy Phu and Matthew Brower, summer 2008), and on a guest issue on “Affecting Photographies” for Photography and Culture (guest editors, Thy Phu and Linda Steer, October 2010). We produced an international conference entitled "Feeling Photography" in 2009 (forthcoming as a book from Duke University Press, with Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, eds.) Our work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (International Opportunities Fund; Aid to Conferences and Workshops; and most recently, Partnership Development Grant, 2011-2014) and York University (faculty development grant). Our group also workshops the papers of colleagues from other universities, who also present a second aspect of their work in a public forum.
For more information, please contact: info@torontophotographyseminar.org
As a group, we research themes in common and publish scholarship individually and as a group. We have collaborated on a guest issue on “circulation” for the History of Photography journal (guest editors, Thy Phu and Matthew Brower, summer 2008), and on a guest issue on “Affecting Photographies” for Photography and Culture (guest editors, Thy Phu and Linda Steer, October 2010). We produced an international conference entitled "Feeling Photography" in 2009 (forthcoming as a book from Duke University Press, with Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, eds.) Our work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (International Opportunities Fund; Aid to Conferences and Workshops; and most recently, Partnership Development Grant, 2011-2014) and York University (faculty development grant). Our group also workshops the papers of colleagues from other universities, who also present a second aspect of their work in a public forum.
For more information, please contact: info@torontophotographyseminar.org
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This is a project devoted to exploring (and historicizing) the experience of partners of trans* men. More specifically, I've been focusing on partners who were with their partner before and during at least six months of the transition,... more
This is a project devoted to exploring (and historicizing) the experience of partners of trans* men. More specifically, I've been focusing on partners who were with their partner before and during at least six months of the transition, however defined (the couple does not have to be together now). I am also using this page as a site to gather resources that might be of interest to partners of trans guys, since there is currently so little information available for partners.
Number of completed interviews in the US and Canada: 48
In terms of materials I'm gathering: I've been focusing on oral history interviews, which I've been conducting in person and on the phone. If you know a partner, or are one yourself, please be in touch at elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca. The identity of all interviewees is protected through confidentiality and pseudonym protocols. I am also gathering representations from digital and media culture concerning partners; this is something that Jenna Caprani an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, is helping me with. Many thanks to Talia Linz, former MA student, and Jenna Caprani, current undergrad student at the Univerity of Toronto, for their work on this project.
For further information about this on-going project, please visit my website at: elspethbrown.org/page/transpartners-project
Number of completed interviews in the US and Canada: 48
In terms of materials I'm gathering: I've been focusing on oral history interviews, which I've been conducting in person and on the phone. If you know a partner, or are one yourself, please be in touch at elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca. The identity of all interviewees is protected through confidentiality and pseudonym protocols. I am also gathering representations from digital and media culture concerning partners; this is something that Jenna Caprani an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, is helping me with. Many thanks to Talia Linz, former MA student, and Jenna Caprani, current undergrad student at the Univerity of Toronto, for their work on this project.
For further information about this on-going project, please visit my website at: elspethbrown.org/page/transpartners-project
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The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is a five-year research project that connects archives across Canada and the U.S. to produce a collaborative, digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans*... more
The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is a five-year research project that connects archives across Canada and the U.S. to produce a collaborative, digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans* oral histories. We received funding in April 2014, and are beginning the project in the summer of 2014.
The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is the largest LGBTQ oral history project in North American history, connecting over 200 life stories with new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice. This team-based project is organized as a "collaboratory," by which we mean a virtual working space--a cooperative laboratory--through which team members will come together to share work, ideas, and new knowledge concerning the creation of LGBTQ oral histories in the digital age. The Collaboratory is supported by a five year research grant from the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Our project seeks to answer a number of research questions about LGBTQ lives, archives, and digital history. How can oral history, as a methodology, intersect with queer theory, trans studies, and critical race theory to ask new questions of LGBTQ lives? In what ways can we historicize some of the key categories of twentieth century LGBTQ history, including older terms such as "gay," "femme," and "butch" and newer ones such as "aggressive," "trans," and "queer"? What kinds of activism have been effective, historically, in improving the lives of LBGTQ people? And finally: how can scholars and LGBTQ community members best provide access to, and engagement with, historical artefacts central to LGBTQ lives?
The collaboratory has been covered in Oral History Association's Podcast, the CBC, and in the TSQ: The Transgender Quarterly.
“Trans/Feminist Oral History: Current Projects.” TSQ: The Transgender Studies Quarterly vol. 2 no. 4 (November 2015), pp. 666-672.
The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is the largest LGBTQ oral history project in North American history, connecting over 200 life stories with new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice. This team-based project is organized as a "collaboratory," by which we mean a virtual working space--a cooperative laboratory--through which team members will come together to share work, ideas, and new knowledge concerning the creation of LGBTQ oral histories in the digital age. The Collaboratory is supported by a five year research grant from the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Our project seeks to answer a number of research questions about LGBTQ lives, archives, and digital history. How can oral history, as a methodology, intersect with queer theory, trans studies, and critical race theory to ask new questions of LGBTQ lives? In what ways can we historicize some of the key categories of twentieth century LGBTQ history, including older terms such as "gay," "femme," and "butch" and newer ones such as "aggressive," "trans," and "queer"? What kinds of activism have been effective, historically, in improving the lives of LBGTQ people? And finally: how can scholars and LGBTQ community members best provide access to, and engagement with, historical artefacts central to LGBTQ lives?
The collaboratory has been covered in Oral History Association's Podcast, the CBC, and in the TSQ: The Transgender Quarterly.
“Trans/Feminist Oral History: Current Projects.” TSQ: The Transgender Studies Quarterly vol. 2 no. 4 (November 2015), pp. 666-672.
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"The Family Camera" is a collaborative, community-based project at the intersection of photography and oral history. Beginning in 2016, our network of cultural institutions, researchers, digital librarians and archivists will develop the... more
"The Family Camera" is a collaborative, community-based project at the intersection of photography and oral history. Beginning in 2016, our network of cultural institutions, researchers, digital librarians and archivists will develop the first multi-partner scholarly study of family photography as a critical building block for understanding self, family, community, and nation in Canada.
The project involves an ambitious three-part reseach program. First, the network will collect 70 oral histories and over 7000 accompanying family photographs. Partners in the network will collect materials from diasporic communities across Canada following World War II, capturing family photography at a moment of dramatic historical change. In the latter half of the twenteith century, diasporic communities were transformed through refugee policies, Cold War dislocations, family reunifications, LGBTQ marriage, and transnational adoptions. Family photos---and the many personal stories they anchor---are an important resource for understanding how such communities responded to these historical shifts.
Second, the Family Camera Network will build a digital platform that will make interviews and family photos available to scholars and the general public. Participants will also have the opportunity to preserve print artifacts at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
Third, in the later years of this program, we hope to lead a series of exhibitions and conferences in Toronto through the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives, the CONTACT Photography Festival, Ryerson University, and other cultural institutions. Through this collaboration, the Family Camera Network will strengthen Ontario as a vital hub for the study of photography, and set a new standard for the collection, preservation, presentation, and analysis of family photography.
The project involves an ambitious three-part reseach program. First, the network will collect 70 oral histories and over 7000 accompanying family photographs. Partners in the network will collect materials from diasporic communities across Canada following World War II, capturing family photography at a moment of dramatic historical change. In the latter half of the twenteith century, diasporic communities were transformed through refugee policies, Cold War dislocations, family reunifications, LGBTQ marriage, and transnational adoptions. Family photos---and the many personal stories they anchor---are an important resource for understanding how such communities responded to these historical shifts.
Second, the Family Camera Network will build a digital platform that will make interviews and family photos available to scholars and the general public. Participants will also have the opportunity to preserve print artifacts at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
Third, in the later years of this program, we hope to lead a series of exhibitions and conferences in Toronto through the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives, the CONTACT Photography Festival, Ryerson University, and other cultural institutions. Through this collaboration, the Family Camera Network will strengthen Ontario as a vital hub for the study of photography, and set a new standard for the collection, preservation, presentation, and analysis of family photography.
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Ibsen’s Ghosts; and contemporary documents on prostitution, incest, women’s education, and the ‘New Woman,’ all relevant to the play’s focus on an unusual mother–daughter relationship nevertheless representative of the conflict between... more
Ibsen’s Ghosts; and contemporary documents on prostitution, incest, women’s education, and the ‘New Woman,’ all relevant to the play’s focus on an unusual mother–daughter relationship nevertheless representative of the conflict between the Victorian and the modern. As the play represents a world and a world view that we should never forget for the lessons they can teach against backsliding, this edition expertly leads the way as a case study. But however valuable this play is in its history lesson, Conolly’s explanations also show how this play has timeless qualities and can live on today’s or any day’s stage. Until we eliminate sexes and sexual exploitation, and as long as children insist, against their parents’ wishes, on taking their own path, this drama will always ring true to experience. And as long as capitalism is the default setting on the world’s economy, there will always be universal complicity in the buying and selling that degrades and commodifies over half the human life of the planet, to the guilty profit of the rest. Shaw’s play didn’t come right out and call us all whores and pimps and financial backers of whores and pimps, but that was the implication, with the severest condemnation directed at those who imagine themselves innocent. Despite all the play’s resonance in our social and economic life, not the least of the play’s remarkable qualities, as Conolly points out, is its powerful rendering of an elemental battle between two strong-willed people, with their friends caught in between, as it shows them all either struggling to escape complicity in ‘Mrs Warren’s profession’ or to justify it. With all the characters given powerful arguments to rationalize individual choices, typical of a Shaw play, the play’s immense dramatic energy continues to startle and captivate but also to puzzle as its problematics pose questions that haven’t been answered yet, and thus the play will continue to need invaluable case studies of this sort to facilitate understanding. (RICHARD F. DIETRICH)
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Introductory chapter for this Special Journal Issue of Photography and Culture. Davidmann also co-edited this volume with Elspeth Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, and with Bruno Ceschel, writer, curator,... more
Introductory chapter for this Special Journal Issue of Photography and Culture. Davidmann also co-edited this volume with Elspeth Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, and with Bruno Ceschel, writer, curator, and publisher
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... North, North Building, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada <elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca> I would like to thank Joseph Corn for his comments on this essay, as well as those audience members who responded to this research at the... more
... North, North Building, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada <elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca> I would like to thank Joseph Corn for his comments on this essay, as well as those audience members who responded to this research at the Business History Confer-ence (Palo Alto, Calif ...
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This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering... more
This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering some reflections concerning how prior work in transgender ethnography and poststructuralist history are helping to shape contemporary approaches to trans oral history. Projects discussed include the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, the Transgender Archives (University of Victoria), the Digital Transgender Archive, the New York City Trans Oral History Project, the Trans Oral History Project, and the Transgender Oral History Project, Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries.
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Abstract This article analyzes the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, a pictorialist whose work revolutionized fashion photography at Vogue between 1913 and 1922. After a brief discussion of de Meyer's life and work in Europe before... more
Abstract This article analyzes the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, a pictorialist whose work revolutionized fashion photography at Vogue between 1913 and 1922. After a brief discussion of de Meyer's life and work in Europe before emigrating to New York City in 1914, the essay draws on recent scholarship on “public feelings” to investigate the queer context of de Meyer's photographic work for US Vogue in the years surrounding the First World War. The essay argues that de Meyer brought to Vogue a specific Edwardian structure of feeling defined by a revolt against the rationality of the second industrial revolution and informed by a transatlantic aesthetic movement that privileged emotional life and expression. De Meyer brought together the aesthetic movement with a queer transatlantic counterculture whose style, borrowing from José Muñoz, can be characterized by “affective excess.” De Meyer's collaborator in several of the Vogue essays was the mannequin and Ziegfeld model-showgirl Dolores, who complemented de Meyer's camp excessiveness with her signature laconic performance of white affect. In the context of US race politics and commercial culture in the First World War era, de Meyer's queer aesthetic was also a racial project that played a central role in the commercialization of aesthetic feeling.
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ABSTRACT This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that... more
ABSTRACT
This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both
increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether
trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies
surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering
the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of
political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form
of radical trans care. We explore the politics of visibility and transtemporal
solidarity in a range of trans-specific and queer oral history projects
unfolding in the US and Canada, including our own—the trans activism
oral history projects at the LGBQT Oral History Digital Collaboratory
(Toronto) and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Minnesota). In pursuing these questions,
we examine the political implications of our trans archival and
public humanities work through the lens of what Hil Malatino has
recently described as an ethos of “trans care.” We offer a set of reflections,
anxieties, and strategies that have guided us in pursuing transcentric
public humanities work that resists neoliberal narrative arcs and
pursues the creation of a usable past through an ethos of radical trans
care and mutual aid. We conclude our essay with a set of observations,
drawn from our own work as well as that of other queer and trans oral
history projects, that speak to four elements of most universitycommunity
partnerships concerning oral history: research design, the
interview, metadata and archiving, and public engagement. We argue
that trans oral history projects, created in collaboration with narrators,
community members, archivists, artists, and others, can create alternative
visual and narrative structures that are created, circulated, and
viewed within a network of mutual aid defined by an ethics of trans
care, rather than extraction.
This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both
increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether
trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies
surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering
the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of
political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form
of radical trans care. We explore the politics of visibility and transtemporal
solidarity in a range of trans-specific and queer oral history projects
unfolding in the US and Canada, including our own—the trans activism
oral history projects at the LGBQT Oral History Digital Collaboratory
(Toronto) and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Minnesota). In pursuing these questions,
we examine the political implications of our trans archival and
public humanities work through the lens of what Hil Malatino has
recently described as an ethos of “trans care.” We offer a set of reflections,
anxieties, and strategies that have guided us in pursuing transcentric
public humanities work that resists neoliberal narrative arcs and
pursues the creation of a usable past through an ethos of radical trans
care and mutual aid. We conclude our essay with a set of observations,
drawn from our own work as well as that of other queer and trans oral
history projects, that speak to four elements of most universitycommunity
partnerships concerning oral history: research design, the
interview, metadata and archiving, and public engagement. We argue
that trans oral history projects, created in collaboration with narrators,
community members, archivists, artists, and others, can create alternative
visual and narrative structures that are created, circulated, and
viewed within a network of mutual aid defined by an ethics of trans
care, rather than extraction.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This eloquent, erudite surprise of a book should be required reading for scholars of gender, sexuality, U.S. history, visual andmaterial culture studies, and art history. Maria Elena Buszek has both charted the first major scholarly... more
This eloquent, erudite surprise of a book should be required reading for scholars of gender, sexuality, U.S. history, visual andmaterial culture studies, and art history. Maria Elena Buszek has both charted the first major scholarly history of an important, yet understudied, genre of American commercial culture (the pin-up) while, at the same time, writing an alternative history of the genre from the perspective of the feminist pin-up. For all those Winterthur Portfolio readers born before 1966, or those who have watched toomany showings of Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly, allow me to emphasize: this is a history of the feminist pin-up, from Adah Isaacs Menken to Annie Sprinkle—and after. Buszek argues that the pin-up is a ‘‘sexualized woman whose image is . . . mass-reproduced because intended for wide display’’ (5). Unlike pornography, Buszek elaborates that the pin-up image ‘‘doesn’t represent sex so much as suggest it’’ (5). For Buszek, the feminist pin-up is not just any sexualized representation but one in which the pin-up herself is, or is represented as being, aware of or in control of her own sexual agency. To borrow from Robert Allen’s work on nineteenth-century burlesque, the pin-up, like Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, is ‘‘aware of her own awarishness.’’ The pin-up genre’s sexual knowingness, Buszek provocatively argues, has providedwomenwith ‘‘models for expressing and finding pleasure in their sexual subjectivity’’ (12). The pin-up, in other words, is not only a sex-positive representational genre but has also been recognized as such by women who have historically appropriated the genre as a means of transgressing the boundaries of normative gender and sexuality. The pin-up as feminist ‘‘equipment for living’’? This is a provocative argument, one that Buszek makes decisively in eight superbly researched chapters traversing the related histories of American theater, illustration, film culture, fanzines, and feminist art practice. A first chapter convincingly argues that the nineteenth-century cartes-de-visite photographs commissioned by bawdy burlesque celebrities such as Adah Isaacs Menken represent the beginnings of the feminist pin-up. These images, wonderfully discussed by Buszek, represented a site where stage performers could construct and control an image of frank sexual ‘‘knowingness’’ that remained outside the boundaries of proper Victorian gender roles. The next three chapters move the reader through richly historicized readings of the Gibson Girl and contemporaneous ‘‘NewWomen’’; the relationship between early film, the theater, and early twentieth-century feminism and suffrage (in a chapter that bears a close relationship to Susan Glenn’s recent work); and the beginnings of the filmpin-up in the early fanmagazine, Photoplay. The last four chapters move the reader from the World War II period to the present. In a chapter on Esquire and World War II pin-ups, Buszek emphasizes the work of Alberto Vargas, whose powerful and sexy Varga Girls ‘‘were sexualized yet proudly active womenusurping and clothed in the accoutrements of male power, learning drills and 1 Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Research Interests: Art History and Art
Historian Elspeth H. Brown and photographer Sara Davidmann explore the relationship between the family photograph album, trans☼ history, and queer archives. Describing their queer archival work, they address topics including ethics;... more
Historian Elspeth H. Brown and photographer Sara Davidmann explore the relationship between the family photograph album, trans☼ history, and queer archives. Describing their queer archival work, they address topics including ethics; intertwined histories of racism, colonialism, and normativity in photography; and the violent erasures of sexual and gender minorities within the conventional family photography album. “Family” photographs, so central to the affective production of trans☼ family, however defined, have not been the site of sustained discussion within queer history. Brown and Davidmann argue that family photography can also be a site of trans☼ family belonging and queer kinship, despite histories of violent erasure. They discuss these issues with reference to two image sets from Davidmann's work: one from her own family of origin (Ken. To be destroyed) and one from her (queer and trans☼) family of choice (the Stephen Whittle family album).
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LGBTQ2+ community archives, often founded in the 1970s and 1980s, are no longer necessarily outside the archival mainstream from the perspective of non-white, and non-cis LGBTQ2+ people. Histories of whiteness, settler-colonialism, and... more
LGBTQ2+ community archives, often founded in the 1970s and 1980s, are no longer necessarily outside the archival mainstream from the perspective of non-white, and non-cis LGBTQ2+ people. Histories of whiteness, settler-colonialism, and cisnormativity within the LGBTQ2+ community archive can create the “symbolic annihilation” of trans and Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) histories within the queer community archive, if left unaddressed. Our current moment requires an active reimagining of what activism means within legacy LGBTQ2+ community, activist archives. This article describes my efforts, as a volunteer and board member at the ArQuives and as the director of the LGBTQ2+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, to help bring an intersectional, trans-inclusive framework to an LGBTQ2+ community archive with origins in Canada’s gay liberation movement. The Collaboratory is a five-year digital history research collaboration, funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities...
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Research Interests:
Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for... more
Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Paris, London, and Hollywood in the years before World War II. I historicize what Lynes called the "amorous regard" of his fashion photography through an analysis of his male nudes and the sexual history for which they are a visual record. In this article, I show how both Lynes's fashion images and his male nudes emerged from a marketimbricated queer kinship network to produce a discourse of interwar glamour that accommodated both dominant readings of heteronormativity and resistant readings of queer, white, belonging.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology and Routledge
This article describes the relationship between family photography, oral history, and feeling. The authors explore questions about affect and family photography in relationship to black, queer relationality and to Asian, diasporic... more
This article describes the relationship between family photography, oral history, and feeling. The authors explore questions about affect and family photography in relationship to black, queer relationality and to Asian, diasporic subjectivities. They argue that the affective modality of family photography for marginalized subjects is that of ‘mixed feelings’, which they analyze through a focus on ‘aspiration’ as central to the visual and affective discourses of family photography, oral history, and diaspora. Working with recent work by Christina Sharpe and Tina Campt, the authors describe aspiration within family photography as indexing both the normative temporalities of capitalist futurity and, at the same time, a utopian technology of black futurity that enables the making of necessary futures outside of white supremacy and heteronormativity. The research is part of a larger photography and oral history project, The Family Camera Network, which the article describes.
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Abstract Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects... more
Abstract Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on refugee policies, Cold War dislocations that result from the push of violence and the pull of economic opportunity, queer and trans families, family reunification, and transnational adoption. We outline the state of the field when it comes to family photography, and explain how The Family Camera addresses issues that arise in contemporary debates in this area, namely addressing some of the limitations of visual studies (which do not sufficiently attend to the multisensory registers of this genre) and oral history (which treat images as means of eliciting memories).