Points of Refusal: An Arts-Based Exploration of the Medicalization of Mad Trans Identity

This project discusses the impact of medicalization on transgender identity, examining how it enforces transphobic, white, abled, sane, cisgender, patriarchal norms, and effectively eugenics. By incorporating crip and trans theory, art, and embracing a mad aesthetic, I first highlight the concept of deliberate, productive failure through my inability to be read as transgender, showcasing my ability to pass as a white, cisgender, abled, sane man in photographs. I then apply the frameworks of mad aesthetics and disability art and justice to critique and transcend the photograph’s history as an object that pathologizes medicalized bodies through the gender binary, by using the concepts of crip technoscience and the glitch. This glitching of the technological software of the digital photograph leads to the creation of a final body of artworks that disrupt and visually disorient patriarchal readings and traditional perceptions of sex and gender, rendering the inability to language my transgender experience visible. By achieving this sense of visual disorientation and incongruence in my digitally created bodies, one that is not articulated through words, I expose the limited linguistic pathological transphobic roots of the medical model. Finally, I propose that through the artistic act of glitching the photograph and making bodies sexually illegible, we empower ourselves as mad trans people, and can do away with medical language when describing trans experiences. In other words, disability art and justice can advocate new ways of languaging trans corporeality through the space of the (digital) photograph. Through mad disability art and aesthetics, this project aims to challenge medicalized definitions of transgender identity and transcend their transphobic agendas.