Avant-garde art and transgender identification begin from a common crisis of representation: a sense that, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “[t]here is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself material form.” In diverse instances of modernist cultural production and trans gender alike, such a recognition spurs attempts to reconfigure the contours of the sensible in ways that affirm the salience and shareability of this “something.” Yet avant-garde practitioners’ experiments attest to a structuring ambivalence about whether and how the “unpresentable” might be made visible on the surface, whether of a body or a body of work. In the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917, this ambivalence assumes heightened political stakes, and art objects appear correspondingly riven with dialectical tensions; much as they celebrate the destructive potential of their own novelty, they cannot quite relinquish the dream of the artwork as seamless totality. How answerable must the made body be, they ask, to a public? To history? Thus, I suggest that we might understand the art of the early Soviet avant-garde—both in its motivating questions and in the answers its new forms encode—as surprisingly trans. From a phenomenological standpoint, such a reading is not far-fetched. Compared with the spectrality of the as-yet-unrealized trans body, or—in the case of achieved gender transition, its no-longer-visible past—even the most conceptual art works feel far from abstract. To be trans (in the broadest sense of that term) is to perceive, with immediacy, the always-already-mediated nature of one’s flesh. It is to live with a constant awareness of the body’s historicity, as it seeks to disentangle itself from both the lived praxis and the conceptual nexus of being/having been “the other” gender. But to be trans is also to be possessed of a different, mental image: a vision of a truly-gendered (or genderless) self whose hold on one is no less powerful for lacking the body’s—or words’, or pictures’—material support. Trans gender, then, is a paradox: an identity founded on a metamorphosis. It is, as Judith Butler and others have described, an accretion of actions, a habitus or performance, and yet not reducible to how a body looks or moves. “Trans” plays at the boundaries where determinism borders on agency; it seeks what the Soviet avant-garde sought: not merely a shift in the visible world, but to be material differently.

I have heard proclamations of feminism’s death many times over the years. Nevertheless, it came as a genuine surprise when I encountered it this past July, in an essay on “Sidecar,” the New Left Review blog, by NLR editor Caitlín Doherty. “A decade ago,” Doherty writes of feminism, “a generation of women—now in our late twenties and early thirties—claimed it as a primary political identity, but no longer.” Since then, Doherty argues, feminism has become not a politics so much as a style thanks...

In a scene midway through Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, the little tomboy Bechdel sits with her father in a small-town Pennsylvania luncheonette when, together, they look (or rather he swivels to glower and she stares moon-eyed) at a bulldyke standing at the counter. “Is that what you want to look like?” her father hisses derisively across the laminate table, compelling his child to answer, falsely, “no” (fig. 1). This glimpse of a butch truck driver “sustained” the queer child...

From the start, I wanted Claude Cahun to be like me, or I saw myself in them, and used the pronoun that would make this misrecognition seem the most true. It would be possible to write a different sort of essay than the one I’m writing now, without any recourse to autobiography. This other, more academic essay would make a strong case for Cahun as a key figure in transgender history. But my argument for why Cahun’s pronouns matter is situated in the drama of more personal misrecognitions, mine and those of others, played out between the queer historical past and the present tense of its archival recovery.

Contemporary genealogies of transgender are now returning to the scene of the modern, for the modernist era witnessed tremendous change in concepts of sexual and gender identity. In turn, contemporary modernist scholarship is returning to fin de siècle sexology. Michael Levenson in Modernism (2011) makes the case for the sexologist’s case study as an experimental modernist narrative form. [2] In 2016 Benjamin Kahan published Heinrich Kaan’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality and edited a cluster for Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform on “sexual modernity.” [3] And currently we, with Nikolaus Wasmoen, are co-editing the first comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of “Lili Elbe,” who, as Einar Wegener, was one of the first people to undergo gender confirmation surgery in 1930. [4] Thinking about the display of this text in both print and digital versions raises an interesting set of connections between transgender theory and a theory of the literary work as an historical artifact.