Nan Goldin: The Other Side : photography and gender identity

Abstract

Summary In my dissertation I analyse selected photographs in the photo-book The Other Side (first published in 1992) by artist Nan Goldin (born 1953). They all portray biological males in different degrees of feminisation. My intention is to see whether the pictures illustrate the development of the discourse on gender identity from ca 1970 to the early 1990s. My intention is also to analyse what relation there may be between photography and the formation of new gender identities. The dissertation is based on theories from psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, from queer theory – Judith Butler, and from Michel Foucault. Today in the West we have a so-called two-gender system. It states that there are two – andonly two – genders, and that they generally exhibit opposite gender characteristics. The system is often thought of as universal and self-evident. Goldin’s 1970s black-and-white pictures may be seen as a critique of that system – revealing gender alternatives – and as an attempt to affirm those alternatives. Psychoanalysis and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s were based on the validity of the twogender system. Alternative gender identities were excluded. Lacan’s reworking of psychoanalysis opened up for new gender differentiation models, but it was not until the advent of Foucault’s analysis, deconstruction and queer theory (Judith Butler) in the 1980s and 1990s that the two-gender system lost much of its authority as the universal truth about gender identity. As a result, no gender system could lay claim to embodying the objective truth. For transgender people this was a blessing – ridding them of a discriminatory system, but it also put them in an identity vacuum. I believe that evidence of the consequent identity fragmentation is visible in Goldin’s 1990s colour pictures. Since no one knows the objective truth, everyone has the supreme authority to define one’s own subjective gender identity. In this respect, I elaborate on Lacan’s order of the Real to show that gender identity may be one of those personal, fundamental entities that evade discursive comprehension and definition. I differentiate between two kinds of documentary photography – fetishistic and narrative – and the parallel practice of constructing individuals as Other. Fetishistic photography works by projection of the artist’s (and by proxy the spectator’s) aggressive and sexual id urges and reveals little about its actual subjects, while narrative photography seeks to tell the comprehensive truth about individuals on their own terms. Fetishistic photography I fear will be detrimental to the formation of new identity positions, seeking out only the sensational and the shocking and bolstering our prejudices. Narrative photography, on the other hand, may by virtue of its comprehensiveness, truthfulness and its approach of focusing on common cultural, visual, narrative clues bridge the gap between the subjects and us. Thus it may enhance our understanding of the subjects and make us sympathize with them, bringing us all closer together.