author: Natálie Drtinová

Monday, 8 August 2022

As I’m writing these lines, preparations for the Prague Pride festival are coming to a head. Many people – I would say perhaps most of the majority society – see Pride as a one-day event, a loud, colorful, sparkly parade, that is attended by tens of thousands of LGBT+ people and their allies. It is often forgotten that Pride is a long-week festival, taking place mainly in the so-called Pride Village that sprawls over the whole of Střelecký Island. This place offers a loud, colorful and sparkly music program throughout the whole week. But Pride Village serves mainly as a place for meeting – it is almost impossible to walk on the grass on the island, as it is all occupied by groups of both younger and older queers drinking and hanging out with their new and old friends. The younger ones are equipped with the obligatory rainbow tote bag and are wrapped in large synthetic flags – either rainbow flags or more specific flags that stand for particular minority sexual and gender identities. What is important is to be present and to be seen. 

Thursday, 11 August 2022

I’m stopping by the village for a bit. Within the two hours I’m there two different professional cameras are pointed at me (not to mention my photos being taken by people taking selfies and livestreams) – I cannot see the photographers behind the lens, their faces are hidden, unlike mine. I am standing in an illuminated stand full of second-hand clothes, exposed not only to the visitors of the rainbow village but potentially to everyone who visits the Prague Pride social media. Dozens or even hundreds of photos are posted there every day, capturing the events of each day and including portraits of performers, visitors and people from the NGO’s present. All of this fits in with the politics of visibility that has been one of the focal points of LGBT+ activism over the last few decades. As Emil Edenborg writes in the recently published The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics (2020), the theme of visibility appears as early as in Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s founding text of queer theory, Epistemology of the Closet (1990). She wrote that the mythical closet “is the

defining structure for gay oppression in this century”. Visibility, coming out, and the ability to express one’s sexual and gender identity as they wish and to be accepted by those around them have been themes at the heart of LGBT+ activism and much queer theory. Edenborg recalls: “Questions of visibility are central in discussion of global queer politics, whether we speak of, on the one hand, LGBT pride marches and activist’s struggles to make their voices heard and influence public conversations or, on the other hand, efforts to delimit queer visibility by prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality, as was done in Thatcher’s Britain and Putin’s Russia or as Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, Wan Azizah, argued in 2018 that gay people should ‘practice whatever it is they do in private’”. The author also recalls the frequent denial of any existence of homosexuality in some countries by representatives of the governments there, as in the case of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov or former President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Visibility and constant demonstration of our existence to achieve social and legislative goals is necessary and in place. After all, the personal is political, and that’s what we’re sort of trying to show everyone during Pride.

The issue of visibility and especially its pitfalls are addressed, for example, in the Netflix documentary Disclosure (2020). It features well-known American trans* actors and actresses such as Laverne Cox, Trace Lysette, Candis Cayne or Elliot Fletcher. They recount the history of the representation of trans* people (especially trans* women) throughout film history. They point out the presence of gender transgression in the form of stereotypes used for entertainment (similar to racial stereotypes in the form of blackface or yellowface) in the early days of the moving image: for example, Laverne Cox mentions the American humorous film Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken from 1901, when cross-dressing was illegal and was thus used to entertain the audience. Both blackface and gender transgressions also appear in the now infamous 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and A Florida Enchantment released one year earlier. The most famous horror film of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) ushered in a new era of “trans” representation – the era of men dressed as women who murder women. This stereotype would continue in films like Dressed to Kill (1980) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and for a whole generation it became the closest thing to the only reference as far as trans* representation is considered. As Cox points out, referring to a study by the American non-profit organization GLAAD, 80% of the American population does not know anyone who is trans*. The representation of trans* people in mainstream media, films and TV shows, therefore, plays an important role in the perception of these people by the mainstream society. Currently, we are witnessing an unprecedented amount of real transgender representation in mainstream TV shows and films. However, this does not lead to better living conditions for trans* people, especially for trans* women of color who face a disproportionate amount of violence that often leads to their death. Activist Tiq Milan sums it up by saying: “The more we are seen, the more we are violated”.

As I mentioned, transgender women face the most violence, but they are also represented much more than transgender men or non-binary people. According to Nick Adams, Director of Transgender Media and Representation at the GLAAD organization cited above, “Certainly being invisible is a privilege compared to the type of transphobia that has been written into trans women characters”. The protagonists* of the documentary agree that transgender men are not as easily recognizable as transgender women, and at the same time their portrayal is not so sensational. Referring to the disproportionate portrayal of trans* women, Jen Richards remarks: “And of course, that’s partly because women overall, therefore including trans women, are a more commodifiable asset”.

Another skeptic when it comes to trans visibility is non-binary activist, performer and writer Alok Vaid Menon. Their article Greater transgender visibility hasn’t helped nonbinary people – like me published by the Guardian around the same time as Laverne Cox’s aforementioned article was being celebrated by all mainstream media alongside advances in transgender visibility. Time magazine, which had Laverne Cox as its cover star in 2014, called this period “a trans turning point”. And while Alok acknowledges some of the advances in trans issues, he points out how this media representation further promotes the gender binaries embedded in our society. “For me, the ‘trans tipping point’ tends to be yet another form of exclusion because it recognizes only those trans people who make claims to ‘real’ womanhood or manhood. Trans people who present a fixed male or female identity are regarded as representative of all of us. And I wonder if their acceptance by society is less a reflection of progress than a question of palatability. Indeed, while celebrities like [Caitlyn] Jenner challenge the idea that gender is innate, ultimately they don’t challenge society’s mandate that we all must exist as either male or female.” So another paradox is revealed here which is that even the correct representation is not enough, as it creates the illusion of a single correct queer experience and queer reality. As Michel Foucault said in Discipline and Punish: “Visibility is a trap”. In his understanding, visibility is both a tool of surveillance and discipline of the individual and a guiding principle of our contemporary society.  

In 2018, a photo of Alok, taken without their consent and circulated on the internet for amusement over Alok’s gender non-conformity. Alok, who experiences this frequently for their deviation from the expected gender performance, published a lengthy post on their Instagram detailing their reality. “It’s so surreal & scary to see this – it reminds me that I am constantly being watched, rendered into a spectacle for other people’s enjoyment and entertainment. People don’t ask me for consent because they read my gender non-conformity as already consenting to public consumption. (…) I want you to think about what happens to people like me in between the snapshots you see – how we are hunted, ridiculed, and put on exhibition for cis enjoyment. How I manage to still look so good despite being harassed and stalked and shoved and spat on knowing that few people will defend me because I am not cis or white.” Does visibility still seem like a valid political goal?

Saturday, 13 August 2022

I’m scrolling through the album on the official Prague Pride profile, compiling all the photos from this week so far. I recognize my friends, my colleagues, my crushes, and the familiar faces of Czech LGBT+ activism.  I remember four years ago when a friend took a picture of me while we were setting up a Pride party. The photo, which I posted on my Instagram with a short comment and rainbow-colored hearts, became my de-facto coming out. And since coming out is not a one-time thing, but a never-ending process, more Instagram posts followed. Relationship anniversaries – coinciding with the date of Prague Pride – have always been a particularly good excuse to remind myself that I’m still here and queer. Like the teenagers wrapped in flags of all colors, I felt the need to declare that I was queer. The paradigm of the imaginary closet remains and rules our perceptions about sexual and gender identity. We are either out or inside of it, but we cannot completely escape it.   

In his book Opacity and the Closet (2012), Nicholas de Villiers compares coming out to confession – sexuality and identity become one through the pronouncement, the acknowledgment of something that is perceived in retrospect as a secret. The truth must be spoken, and only life in truth is a life of freedom. De Villiers notes that Foucault “has detailed the manifold ways in which sexuality has become ‘the truth’ of a person, a truth that must be made to speak, ceaselessly, in ever-new permutations of the confessional”. In another text, he situates the necessity of coming out, confession, and the associated demand for gay visibility into a neoliberal framework where queer people are “controlled less by homophobic exclusion than by a politics of inclusion and legalization, therefore regulation, commercialization, and, ironically, ‘privatization’”. In Opacity and the Closet, then, he explores a possible queer strategy of opacity, which he identifies in three subjects: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Andy Warhol. These three, according to his analysis, were able to escape the binary logic of the closet and the dominant imperative to declare their sexual identity. They spoke between the lines, avoiding simple answers and looking instead for the reality hidden behind all these meanings. 

However, the paradigm of clear identities, truths, knowledge, and declarations does not allow such mystifications, for it is not profitable. As Rosemary Hennesy points out, “Not only is much recent gay visibility aimed at producing new and potentially lucrative markets but as in most marketing strategies, money, not liberation, is the bottom line. (…) Visibility in commodity culture is in this sense a limited victory for gays who are welcome to be visible as consumer subjects but not as social subjects.” This is also why much of contemporary LGBT+ visibility is carried out by corporations and big brands, why accessories in the colors of the rainbow can be purchased in almost every store located on the Wenceslas Square, where a Pride march of sixty thousand LGBT+ people started on Saturday. A pride march of sixty thousand potential consumers.

Zach Blas, an American artist, filmmaker, and writer, has long been concerned with this issue in the context of global surveillance technologies and biometric data collection, as seen in the works such as Face Cages (2014-2016) and Facial Weaponization Suite (2012-2014). In Face Cages, in which he abstracted facial scans by biometric software into 3D printed grid face masks, he suggests that these surface calculations are reductive and harmful. “Biometric machines often fail to recognize non-normative, minoritarian persons, which makes such people vulnerable to discrimination, violence, and criminalization: Asian women’s hands fail to be legible to fingerprint devices; eyes with cataracts hinder iris scans; dark skin continues to be undetectable; and non-normative formations of age, gender, and race frequently fail successful detection“. The project references protest movements such as the Anonymous, the Zapatistas, and the Black Bloc tactics. In her introduction to an interview she did with Blas for Hyperallergic magazine, Alicia Eler writes: “It is impossible to go back to a world without biometrics and facial recognition tools, but it is not too late for a political act against the idea of allowing our faces to be scanned for the purpose of the surveillance or informatic capture.“ In the same interview, Blas notes that while “an older queer politics was concerned with creating a coherent presence, a visibility, that was crucial for survival and existence, today, in light of global surveillance/dataveillance and other surreptitious forms of recognition-control, there is a burgeoning political investment in opacity, imperceptibility, and escape.” 

Significantly, Blas sees masking not only as protection from surveillance technologies but also highlights the collective presence that these masks and other means of obfuscation help to create. In doing so, he works with the same assumptions as the owners of many music clubs where no images can be taken, such as Berlin’s Berghain, as well as Prague’s Ankali. Indeed, they too believe that the impossibility of capturing images is not only a protection for some but helps to build a collective present moment.

Natálie Drtinová