Staging Trans Feelings: tactical atmospherics and cisgenderism in We Dig (2019)
By: Rachel Hann
Tags: Nonbinary, Transgender, Atmosphere, Performance, Theatre

Paper for TaPRA 2021 Scenography Working Group

9th Sept 2021

As a visual description (for visually impaired on zoom), I am visibly white and trans. Some may look at me and see a stereotype of ‘woman’. Journalist Julie Bindel in her recent best-selling trade book ‘Feminism for Women’ (2021) suggests that a world filled only with transsexuals would be a world of stereotypes. I have bleached blonde hair and no eyebrows to make space for my make-up affectionally termed ‘day drag’ (not featured). On my bookshelf behind me sit two Care Bears, one blue, one pink. This is my typical work environment during the pandemic. For me, these practices are tactical, queer, and overt in signally my political tranness. There is nothing to hide here. I am not a ‘trap’ — to borrow a term from toxic masculinity.

The politics of ‘trans’ as a label has changed significantly in the last 5 years. For me, ‘Trans’ is now a political category produced by and for others — who for the purposes of this talk I’ll refer to as ‘cis’. Trans is only useful for an individual like me in terms of positioning myself within cisgendered discourses. It is not a label that describes who I am, but rather how I relate to cis people. In relation to the last 80 years in the UK, whereas once trans was a medical term, maybe briefly it was a social attribute, it is now overtly political. It is to position your lived experience as against the pervading cultures that rain upon you each day asking you to be less visible and more cis.

To talk about ‘trans performance’ is to talk about performances that enact and investigate trans as a political act of affirmation, self-determination, and the felt affects of cis regulation. This paper is a working statement on the stakes at play in arguing the vitality of trans voices and perspectives for our collective social thriving.

Trans performance maker Emma Frankland’s work and in particular her collaboration for We Dig at the Ovalhouse in Oct 2019 is an apt case study for this discussion. As part of her company None of Us Is Yet a Robot (which as a name makes direct reference to a trans community shorthand ‘bio-girl’ to describe a cis-girl), We Dig was a part of the staged demolition of the Ovalhouse in London. None of Us Is Yet A Robot’s performance explicitly explores the search for protection (by digging a hole) and the labours of navigating cis oversight. While gender transition is a theme that informs the work, Frankland’s performances often offer a commentary on broader politics of oppression, labour, and ecology.

*Full credits were shown on a series of slides along with production images*

Cis reviewer Lyn Gardner described how:

In what must be one of the best entrances ever, most of the artists arrive on stage in a hail of rubble. They burst through a wall, reminding us that sometimes things have to be dismantled in order that others can take their rightful place centre stage. (Gardner 2019)

The performers undertake digging tasks to find objects that trigger casual discussions about their feelings and experiences. Mixed into these discussions are statements on the archaeologies of previous queer performances at the Ovalhouse along with ecological arguments of being with land (an explicit reference to Frankland’s time with two-spirited people in Brazil as part of a British Academy placement scheme).

Trans reviewer Frey Kwa Hawking notes that:

We Dig makes a debris-heavy home for itself in the uneasy territory of false-or-real, an area in which trans people often painfully or playfully reside (“Real sometimes feels so fake,” Wong notes). Can you be real enough? What’s real when it comes to gender? We’re seeing a sort of real demolition site, onstage, and the company’s actions are real, often drowning out their own words with the clang! of a spade against cement or rock against wheelbarrow […] (Hawking 2019)

Hawking concludes that:

I felt what I’d known for a long time before this but had been forced to unearth from the muck that day again, tired and shovel in hand: that purporting to be agenda-less and apolitical only keeps the vulnerable held down harder, and that art is political, as is, naturally, writing about art. Theatre venues, companies and individuals are increasingly making a move, one way or the other, but there’s no keeping clean, for some of us: we’re already in the dirt (Hawking 2019)

Frankland’s approach represents a group of practitioners — such as costume designer Daniel Lismore, set designer E. Mallin Parry, ‘transgender terrorist’ Miss Rosewood, playwright and performer Travis Alabanza, live artist Niya B, comedian Krishna Istha and writer Tabby Lamb — who are adopting trans experiences as methodologies for making. In many respects, there has been an unprecedented boom in named trans performance works in the last decade following ACE’s Creative Case for Diversity (2011) requirement for NPOs that have incentivised arts and theatre venues to develop initial schemes for developing ‘minority’ artists. Before this, there was a generally accepted myth that either trans performers and creatives did not exist or were not up to the task — best just to ask a cis-person to ‘trans up’ (there are too many examples of this to recount here).

As Frankland states, ‘to be a trans person is to be a person with an essential role in a balanced and harmonious society’ (2019: 7). In particular, I am interested in the staging methodologies of trans and nonbinary artists that enact or investigate the politics of being trans (as an umbrella political term) in an era of increased visibility and scrutiny. While I fully recognise the politics of trans casting for performances, these highly visible trans roles often disguise production processes that are highly cisnormative and controlled by and for cis folk.

None of Us Is Yet a Robot’s performance occurred in a historical political moment that continues to pervade UK politics. The impact of the UK and Scottish government consultations continue to dominate column inches, government policies, and the Twittersphere. For a brief context, the consultations proposed to modify the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to allow self-ID (along with evidence of 2 years living’ in role’) to gain a Gender Recognition Certificate (which in practice after the passing of equal marriage only relates to certain forms of information identity protection). It is now mainly a method for measuring the numbers of trans people in the UK. In practice, the vast majority of trans people have never felt the need to register — with around 5,000 of the estimated 600,000 UK trans population having a certificate (this puts the trans population at around 1% overall, including nonbinary people).

Philosopher and gender-critical academic Kathleen Stock starts her new bestselling trade book ‘Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism’ (2021), by, after first stressing she is not an expert in gender studies or sexology, offering three key points on why trans women should not be viewed legally as women. This relates to three key concerns:

First, that in terms of proposed changes to the 2010 Equality Act to modify the protected characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’ to ‘gender identity’, gender identity will supersede sexual orientation — if gender defines sexual categories such as lesbian or heterosexual.

Second, that safe spaces from patriarchy, rape culture, and the traumas enacted by cis-men that were historically won by second-wave feminist movements are put at risk by trans self-determination (as distinct from the medically regulated route).

Finally, that trans identity is a social fiction produced to facilitate the option of ‘changing sex’ through social and technological means.

Lennon and Mistler (2014) argue that positions such as Stock’s are examples of cisgenderism; or the political and legal preference of cis experiences over trans realities. Cisgenderism, in a similar manner to cisnormativity, is distinct from transphobia in its focus on the structural and societal preferences that are experienced by trans people on a daily basis. This is not to say that cisnormativity is not inclusive of a range of gendered expressions; tomboy, butch, sissy, bimbo, himbo, etc. These gender expressions do not destabilise cisnormativities as they are socially practiced, but legally invisible. Sex and gender remain legally constant in these models. Indeed, many gender-critical voices, such as Germaine Greer, argue that socially practiced gender expressions such as these resolve the ‘trans problem’ without shifting sex categories.

Legality and the visibility of ‘trans’ as a political category is the object at stake in these debates. A legality that foregrounds the categorical and binary thinking of Global North ontologies that, as Maria Lugones has mapped, were systematically imposed upon colonised peoples in lands such as turtle island, Hawai’i, India, and the Mari with a binary model of gender coupled with legally invisible socially practiced expressions.

[the] heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis. To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism — with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power — is to understand our present organization of life anew. (Lugones 2007, p. 187)

Of Stock’s three points, the spectre of trans people self-identifying is the clearest example of cisgenderism, with a preference for medical professionals (assumed to be cisgender) regulating and managing who counts as ‘trans’. This is a structural infantilising of trans people’s own self-determinism. Cisgenderism is the structural effects of systems that continually manage trans people as first and foremost mistaken, unwell, or fetishists.

In terms of staging trans feelings within a culture of cisgenderism, I was stuck by the TaPRA exec panel on Tuesday and the accounts of Christina Sharpe’s (2016) weathering of racism. I felt an immediate parallel to the potential weathering of cisgenderism. While I am clear these are distinct in their history and politics, the cultural geographer Kirstin Simmons argues that racism in colonial lands is experienced as a form of ‘settler atmospherics’.

‘settler atmospherics are the normative and necessary violences found in settlement — accruing, adapting, and constricting indigenous and black life in the U.S. settler state […] attunement to settler atmospherics can perpetuate further injury […] It can be pathologized as anxiety, paranoia, or conspiracy in an atmosphere of uncertainty and half-knowing’ (Simmons 2017)

Adopting a similar position to Simmons, I argue that cisgenderism is also performed through means of atmospherics. Of felt experiences of place, law, category and belonging that pervade and wash against and with you again and again and yet exceeds binary models of subject-object, thing-emotion, place-feeling.

As part of a larger project on the political scope of ‘cultural scenography’, I have been thinking about the mutual relationships between atmosphere and scenography. Or more directly, might ‘scenographics’ perform tactical atmospherics? Indeed, atmospherics is a term already adopted in some technical quarters of theatre-making to account for the collective effects of hazers, misters, and smoke machines. Atmospherics are here approached as the multiple agents of atmospheres — whether material, technological or political — that produce a feeling of place/event. Maybe scenographics are tactical atmospherics. By tactical, I mean the designed conditions that repeat, project, and sustain a distinct crafted feeling of world.

E. Mallin Parry’s set design for We Dig tactically produced an atmosphere of risk, collapse, discovery, and material uncertainly. In many ways, the atmospherics of the Ovalhouse offered a sense of the felt uncertainty and yet self-driven commitment that, for me at least, defines what trans feels like in the contemporary moment. To know that your actions, your existence, is world-making, literally, that sustains you and at the same time puts you at risk within that same remade world. To know that to weather cisgenderism is to tactically augment your surroundings, whether geographically or physically, to ensure you have shelter from the rain.

There is a possible conceptual alliance between atmospheres and trans experience as ‘atmospheres are indeterminate above all as regards their ontological status’ (Böhme 1993, p. 114) and the, to borrow Legacy Russell’s (2020) term, ‘glitching’ of trans experience. Russell’s Glitch feminism celebrates the indeterminacy of mixed-race, trans, and nonbinary life experiences that glitch in the wake of binary thinking. Glitching also troubles the historically produced political categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality adopted by a number of intersectionalists feminists and instead focuses on the generative potential of appearance, that critiques the theologically informed Romanticist ideology of a deep ontology — a stable internal self that appearance should seek to align with — Russell, along with decolonial theorists such as Lugones, argue that methods of talking about powers of categorisation upon minority peoples are essential.

But I stress that ‘trans’ — in its multiple terminological forms — has always been a means of regulating gender-nonconforming bodies to meet the preferences of cis people.

What is at stake is being asked to become invisible again. To weather cisgenderism through social practices and nothing more. To submit to cis terms and conditions. The stakes are most directly summarized by Frankland during We Dig when asked what she hopes for the future, she replied ‘to grow old’. The ultimate cis violence is to sustain an atmosphere that is literally unliveable for trans folk.

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Böhme, Gernot, (1993) ‘Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics’ Thesis Eleven 36.1: pp. 113–126

Frankland, E. (2019) None of Us is Yet a Robot: Five Performance on Gender identity and the Politics of Transition, London: Oberon Books

Gardner 2019 https://stagedoorapp.com/lyn-gardner/review-we-dig?ia=303

Hawking 2019 http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-dig-ovalhouse/

Lennon, Erica and Brian J. Mistler; (2014) ‘Cisgenderism’. TSQ 1; 1 (1–2): 63–64

Lugones, Maria. (2007) ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System, Hypatia 22.1: pp. 186–209

Simmons, Kirsten. (2017) Simmons, Kristen. 2017. “Settler Atmospherics.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, November 20. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics

Other reviews

https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/we-dig-review-at-ovalhouse-london--a-poignant-and-powerful-demolition-project

https://mytheatremates.com/we-dig-ovalhouse-stephanie/

https://mytheatremates.com/we-dig-ovalhouse-laura/

https://erajournal.co.uk/our-journal/we-dig/

https://www.emmafrankland.co.uk/work/performance-we-dig

https://actdrop.uk/reviews/review_listing?id=9123