Ernst van der Wal (PhD)*
Senior Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, Stellenbosch University.
(Dis)Engaging the Gaze – Moving Images and the Lives of Trans Sex Workers
The very grittiness that often pervade the lives of trans sex workers, and that also predominate generalised public understandings of the concept of working in the sex industry, has been an issue of great concern within local society.[6] Being subject to both scorn and sympathy, sex workers occupy a space of vulnerability where their recognition as human beings and their ability to make a living is highly insecure, and this is compounded when dealing with trans subjects.
Speaking to this intersection between art and activism, the departure of Hamblin’s work is to highlight the complexity of trans sex workers’ lives. The main concern that arose during his consultation with the participants was their desire to move beyond a typecast victim role and to show their own lives as more nuanced, and perhaps also more human, than popular stereotypes often allow for. The photographs that were the result of these consultations potentially become a vehicle, Hamblin believes, for “expressing the joy, vulnerability and violence that form part of their everyday and working lives” (Personal Interview, Cape Town, 12 February 2013).
The process of negotiation between the participants and Hamblin came to be focused on their desire to express their own femininity. The participants drew attention to the fact that they wanted this project to be about their experience of a female self, while they also felt strongly about the fact that these images should be reflective of their identity as sex workers. In addition, the participants also decided to deliberately and strategically use their nudity as a reference to the sexual act. As Hamblin explains, the participants wanted to show their whole body to demonstrate that their consciousness of being trans is not about denying their male bodies, but that it is about their expression and interpretation of femininity.
The result of this visual interpretation of trans femininity takes a particular form in Hamblin’s work. By using specific techniques – such as movement and blurring, as well as scale and format – Hamblin’s work aims to facilitate an intimate relationship between the trans participants’ experience of their own femininity and the viewer’s reading and interpretation thereof. This relationship is seen in Lily 2 (see Figure 1) – an image that forms part of a series of small works in which the depicted subject barely measures more than a few centimetres. Framed by open, white space, Lily (one of the participants in Hamblin’s project) is shown from above, with the gaze of the camera assuming a position that is at once reminiscent of a god’s eye view[7] and the microscopic lens. Looking down at this small figure, the viewer is placed in a position that is at once intimate and removed, as one is not exactly sure whether one is looking at a figure from a distance, or confronted by something so small that it almost evades our gaze. At the same time, our gaze is also unsettled as the image is not sharp enough to afford us the detail needed to make any final judgement. While some parts of the subject’s body are caught in a blur, others are strategically hidden from view. In all, this minute image instils a sense of femininity while not trying to show precisely where such gendered traces are found on the human body. In this sense, allowing the body to move before the camera (to play itself out, so to speak) facilitates the experience and reading of trans femininity.
When looking at this image, as well as other similar images that also forms part of this series, the very idea of ‘a body of work’ takes on multiple meanings, for not only do such photographs constitute a corpus of work (a collection that speaks, in its totality, of a sense of community), but they also deal with bodies that are, in effect, caught in the process of working. By focusing on the corporeal movement of trans sex workers, the idea of the body working has resonance in these images. Yet, for a spectator fixated upon finding some form of evidence, of discovering a clear photographic profile, such images might be frustrating. They are never crisp enough, neither are the subjects revealed in enough detail for the spectator to ever assume that these images trade in statements of ‘fact’ and ‘precision’. This is not the camera as a positivist instrument or a documentary vehicle, intent on laying a body bare for close inspection. Instead of focusing and freezing the lens, the camera rather seems to provide a suggestion of presence and movement. In this regard, these images almost take the shape of blurred film stills, or drawings even, as they intimate a gestural understanding of the body. These images seem to propose rather than reveal, and instead of providing verification of ‘the life’ or ‘the body’ of ‘the trans sex worker’, they rather insinuate that such lives are more complex than a camera can necessarily give credit for.
While these images trouble an understanding of photography as a vehicle for accurately capturing trans bodies, Hamblin’s questioning of the visual consumption and monitoring of such bodies is extended in a more recent project where photographs serve as a basis for filmic modes of representation. As a site for experimentation, Hamblin created a film in which he is appears alongside Leigh, a trans sex worker and activist who forms part of the Sistaaz Hood collective. Entitled interseXion, this body of work references Hamblin’s complex relationship with Leigh, and the various gender, racial, cultural and religious discourses that impact and leave their trace on trans bodies. As such, this film is supposed to represent the intersection between Hamblin as an artist (and as a white, male, trans subject) and Leigh, a self-identified ‘coloured’ mtf trans sex worker. As Hamblin explains, “Leigh grew up as the first-born boy in a Muslim family, so to transition meant that she had to give up enormous privileges in order to live out her identity as a trans person. At the age of fourteen she ran away from home and started doing sex work to support herself.” (Personal Interview, 26 September 2016, Stellenbosch). By referring to the act of dancing, Hamblin suggests that, in moving with, away from and towards each other, a ritual is enacted that is both uninhibited and constrained. For example, this dance echoes the gendered, patriarchal and even religious forces that are always at play when thinking about human relations, especially in those instances where sex and sexuality is at work. The symbolic nature of this moving relationship is thus of the utmost importance, be it as reference to the sexual act, a form of negotiation, or broader commentary on human relations.
When looking at the technical make-up of these images and their final representation, it can be argued that this work lies somewhere between the photographic and the filmic media. The viewer is made aware of the fact that they are witnessing images moving, and subjects already moving within these sequentially orchestrated images.[8] As a result, the viewer is left with a trace that might be called a volatile image – a term I choose to use for its suggestion of precariousness, change and instability as the determining factors which shape the viewer’s experience of the image.[9] In a sense, this volatile image speaks of an act of double blurring, for not only is the subjects blurred in the images (with Hamblin strategically choosing a low shutter speed when taking these photographs in order to give reference to the act of moving/dancing), but the individual shots also blur into one another when seen sequentially. Movement is thus that which is captured within each image, but also in the relationship between the images – it is the basic component that allows for interplay between a photographic and filmic understanding of this body of work.
Movement also becomes a means of escape, a political strategy and potential space for slipping away and imagining a sense of fluidity. Modes of visuality stand central to this endeavor for release, as the very place to escape a normative imagining of the gendered, laboring body seems to lie there where it becomes least traceable. Hamblin’s work speaks of a desire to understand such bodies and the complex gender negotiations they underscore. But then the twist, for if this body of work is a means to ‘capture’ transness in action (as it is lived and worked), it is a severely unsettled one. Instead of static images that can provide us with the clear outline of a topology – photographs with a crisp, petrified outline of ‘the trans subject’ and ‘the sex worker’ – these images are hazy, blurred and somewhat incomprehensible. The subjects they are meant to ‘contain’ somehow escape our sight – they move instead of lying still, and they ultimately evade us. In all, these volatile images show us how difficult it is to know, or to transfix, even when looking closely at the subject in front of us.
Conclusion
In Hamblin’s work, this aspiration to preserve complicates an easy understanding of a ‘fixed’ image, insofar as his work tries to blur, and depart from, the very idea of fixedness. While his photographic and filmic gaze on trans sex workers suggest, and plays with, the form of the human body, its scopic caress is never meant to settle or finalise. In fact, it aims to create a space for escape and withdrawal, a place where the body does not need to stay put.
Such depictions by Hamblin resonate with other forms of visual activism that address the body of the trans sex workers, specifically within the South African context where such bodies are increasingly referenced to draw attention to the rights of sex workers and/or trans subjects. In this regard, the domains of art and activism intersect and the visual becomes a tool demonstrating the fact of existence, the act and routine of living as a trans sex worker. To some degree, Hamblin’s work act as documents that demonstrate the fact of existence while, at the same time, not allowing the camera to become a purely documentary vehicle. Here, the interplay between film and photography has been highlighted as a technical and conceptual means that facilitate a form of representation that is suggestive rather than penetrative. Within a visual culture where trans sex workers are often prone to stigmatisation and sensationalism, Singer’s (2006: 609) call for forms of trans representation that allows for subjects to “talk back” and “look back” is echoed in Hamblin’s own work. And it is specifically in the domain of the moving image where such an act of looking and talking back takes place – of seeing oneself reflected as a moving, living entity.
Biographical Note*
Ernst van der Wal (PhD) is a senior lecturer in Visual Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Working under the rubric of cultural studies, art theory and queer activism, he investigates the embodiment and visualisation of non-normative identities within post-apartheid South Africa – a subject he has published on widely.
Robert Hamblin 