“She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes and Acting More Masculine”: Queering Historical Knowledge, Gendered Identity Making, and Trans Potentialities in Visual Information

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(5), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

“She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes and Acting More
Masculine”: Queering Historical Knowledge, Gendered
Identity Making, and Trans Potentialities in Visual
Information

Travis L. Wagner University of South Carolina, USA

Abstract

This paper examines two examples of archival visual information with potentially transgender
and non-binary representation to interrogate the descriptive challenges latent within such
materials. By using gender theory and queer historiography, this paper deploys a critical case
study to consider the particularities of naming gender when contextual evidence provides little
to no authoritative guidance. By talking through the way gender makes itself visible within visual
information, the paper guides readers through the way transgender or non-binary identity might
exist within both pieces of visual information. The paper then provides suggestions on how to
provide respectful and inclusive descriptive records that attend to the complexities of a still-
evolving queer history. By offering both a statement on the impossibility of naming identity
within intersecting forms of queer embodiment alongside reference points for methods of
discussing potential gendered identities, the paper offers practical approaches to describing
transgender and non-binary identities for information professionals.

Keywords: archival description; cataloging; critical information studies; queer theory;
transgender identity

Publication Type: research article

Introduction

hile transgender and gender non-binary persons have long existed, their visibility within
public discourse remains relatively new. Given how this population challenges once
rigid, socially constructed notions of gender requires both theoretical and practical

answers about how to best describe, affirm, and represent their narratives within the appropriate
historical and cultural contexts. Almost all practices of description rely upon verbal affirmations
of identity, wherein the naming of gender requires locating discursive markers to confirm a
person's given identity. Such affirmations can come from the individual in question, but it is often
equally plausible that those descriptions emerge through others' perceptions. Simply, if a person
does not say their gender then it is up to the person describing a piece of information to interpret

it.

However, for information such as moving images or photographs whose existence is primarily
non-textual, the practice of interpreting and labelling gender identity proves more complicated.
Further, visual non-textual information representing humans from early years may or may not

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

match up with how we identify and make assumptions about humans today. Suppose the visual
information is older, such as the mid-19th century daguerreotype. Does the gender expression
represent a trans masculine identity or an aesthetics of such as stone butch lesbianism? This
paper considers how representations of potentially transgender or gender non-binary identities

within visual information exist as a form of inherent queerness.

This paper employs a case study of two disparate archival images of queer embodiment at the
intersection of transgender and non-binary gender identity to attend to these challenges. By
analyzing how each image takes up the representation of transgender and non-binary identities,

how each makes this representation visible, and how each interrogates the naming of public and
private transgender embodiment, the paper offers tenuous but forward-looking suggestions on
descriptive practice. Alongside this analysis, the paper considers how the materials make visible
gender in both subversive and normative ways by considering how each item exists in decidedly
different spaces, and advocates for how information professionals can participate in the building,

defining, and understanding of transgender visual information history.

Literature Review

This literature review situates critical ideas within this case study by first understanding
contemporary debates around gender identity, particularly highlighting what modern queer
theory understands as the performative elements of gender. This discussion then considers the
role of queerness as both an identity and a politics of practice, examining how queer identity
exists to disrupt and challenge normative ideologies, here with a particular focus placed on
normative gender ideologies. The discussion then emphasizes relationship between cultural
heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums, etc.) and queer embodiment before shifting
to how these same institutions approach gender within descriptive practices.

Gender as Performance

Judith Butler (1990) decentralizes gender as a rigid identity tied to sex-assigned-at-birth by
moving its function from the factual to the performative. She notes that "the presumption of a
non-binary gender system implicitly retains a belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex
whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.” (p. 6). Butler notes that historically
the ideas of masculinity presumed an inherent linkage to maleness, whereas to be a woman
presumed one's existence singularly within the realm of the feminine. Butler’s ideas raised two
concerns: our notion of gender has nothing to do with our sex-assigned-at-birth and second, that
gender, even if it is a deeply ritualized experience, remains better understood as deeply
individualized phenomena. To this end, there exist myriad gender identities both within and
beyond a binary. Further, regulatory mechanisms within society award individuals for performing
a gender identity that aligns with their sex-assigned-at-birth.

Attending to Butler's work, others expand on the complexities around seeing and doing gender
within a cisnormative (presuming that all persons possess a gender identity that matches their

sex assigned at birth) society. Transgender activist and theorist, Kate Bornstein (1994) described
gender as akin to one's fashion, noting that her "identity becomes [her] body which becomes
[her] fashion." (p. 1). Such a framing of gender echoes how one performs gender, but it
specifically prioritizes individual agency within one’s gender. As Bornstein further clarifies, this
means not only that she, as a transgender woman, engages in a unique relationship with
femininity but that any person who expresses and does femininity does so individually.

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

Jack Halberstam (1998) expands on Bornstein by identifying dominant ideologies that provide a
normative presumption around what gender can and should be. Halberstam deconstructs “heroic
masculinity” to illuminate how a limited and restrictive notion of what masculinity looks like and
who has access to this masculinity prioritizes and centers patriarchal values centered on
cisgender, heterosexual white men. Halberstam asserts that such normalizing power works not
only to render alternative masculinities (transgender or otherwise) invisible but assumes them a
joke. Deftly, Halberstam takes up this presumption and argues that if such versions of masculinity
are themselves a parody than so too is cisgender masculinity, Halberstam queers the very notion
of gender as a performance. This notion of queer as a verb opens possibilities concerning how

one might understand the imperatives to describe gender beyond a binary.

The Act of Queering

Queering as a verb challenges perceptions of normalcy and interrogates the presumptions latent
within (Dilley, 1999). The act of queering and doing queerness operates to unsettle the notion of
a binarized and essentialized way of thinking. Taking up debates around normativity and any
notion of natural sexuality, queering works to locate how both an identity and its antonymic
relationship (i.e., ab/normal or un/natural) might benefit from critical examination. Such
examinations show how binaries often operate discursively through shared social ideologies with
little grounding in truth (Jagose, 1996).

Queering challenges not merely what is different but also what is similar. One such widespread
uptake of queer theory centers around the debate of one's queer identity as being a product of
either nature or nurture. Scholars note that while there are likely some genetic explanations
around one's potential queer identity (including sexual orientations and gender identity), it is
equally likely that one's social environments inform queer identity. Queering then becomes at
once an action (to make something queer), an identification (to find queerness in contexts), and
a thing to celebrate (to evoke moments of queerness throughout history). In each instantiation,
queerness intends to disrupt systems and logics in ways that often seem chaotic and fractured

but prove quite agentic and deliberate.

Queerness in Institutions

Perhaps most integral to queer theory and its informing of cultural heritage institutions' work is
the unsettling of a rigid notion of fact and fiction. Such a destabilization responds to the
historical erasure of queer history. Examples of this erasure: the avoidance of calling gay men
gay by instead evoking terms like a bachelor (Madden, 2019) or through the inability to deploy
terms consistent with historical moments when trans identity might be present in a historical
figure’s life (Wagner, 2019). In both examples, the idea of fact or even truth remains limited by
the language of a moment. In response to such limits, queerness asks questions of to whom a
person is normal and how such normalcy becomes contingent on the space and time of the person
in question and who is viewing them.

Since much of the engagement with queering happens at the level of individual encounters, the
binary of user and subject becomes complicated. To see a figure in history as queer requires one
to be critical of histories of normativity in the first place, an action often informed by one's
queerness. This need for queer-identification is likely because bodies within modern Western
thought must become oriented towards other bodies phenomenologically using identification
practices to make meaning of oneself as situated against the other (Ahmed, 2006). One's desire

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

to see their queerness manifest within contemporary spaces often results in their seeking out
potential versions of this from the past to normalize their identity in the present. While
anachronistic, this action works to produce a version of queer history that is self-affirming. Queer
historical maneuvers also mean that the queer subject is always in the present. Heather Love
(2007) identifies this project as an affective endeavor. For Love and those seeking a queer
history, it is both a project of individual meaning-making and imagining the possibility of
queerness as existing throughout time despite attempts by institutions to delegitimize, ignore,
and even destroy such histories. As such, the role of personal history-making against institutional
malevolence marks a particular feature of the visual information record of transgender and non-

binary persons.

Such an individually driven approach to history building helps explain the impetus by many queer
communities to build their own archival spaces. The othering of queerness against
heteronormativity and cisnormativity meant that their histories were at best ignored and at worst
deliberately destroyed. Further, questions like consent within traditional archival practice
become central to LGBTQIA+ communities as outness in private spaces does not always equate
to outness within public spaces wherein one’s job security, health and well-being, and emotional
support are all subject to threats from persistent anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments. Queer oriented
cultural heritage spaces and queer archives prioritize the safety of community as a response.
Gina Watts (2018) brilliantly chronicles these systemic exclusions and the radical practices
undertaken by queer archives to do justice to queer history, noting that they run parallel to
existing archival practices, while also offering new inroads for such spaces to better attend to
their queer collections and users. In turn, the photographs and moving images discussed later
become further complex as they represent stories whose narratives may exist within traditional
institutions, as well as those very same spaces wherein alternative, community-protective history
making occurs. One exists in a historical archive where concern for authentic representation of
the potentially queer identities was never prioritized, and its impact reflects the current
challenges such spaces are facing with amending such exclusions. Another shows the approach
given to gender diversity within a queer-oriented archive, illuminating how similar questions are
framed at community-protection and affirmation. Yet, both represent a larger concern for how
to attend to queer historiography at the intersection of an action done by the society often
reified at institutional levels such as a cataloger's desk.

The Cataloger/Archivist as Gendering Agent

In 1982 Susan Martin discussed the role of authority standards within librarianship and
information organization as a “set of procedures which determines consistent names and
terminology in the face of...changing names; changing subject terminology; and changing
relationships between and among scholarly disciplines, corporate bodies and governmental
agencies” (p. 2). An initial reading invites optimism regarding information organization as
profoundly malleable or as a set of standards willing to shift for the sake of inclusivity. However,
what Martin makes less clear is that the word central to authority standards is not one of change
but consistency. Like predecessors of information organization like Melvil Dewey (1899) and S.R.
Ranganathan (1937), Martin’s version of authority control relies on universality, an authority
tasked with naming all bodies. As Melissa Adler (2017) deftly states, "the library inhibits
intersectionality and intertextuality by reducing bodies of literature to disciplined, discrete
subjects distributed across the library.” (p. xii). Of course, the library is an institution within
which individuals work, suggesting that the cataloger is complicit within the description of

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The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

information. Yet the position of the cataloger is one rarely explored, especially within critical
contexts.

In a similar vein, archives have been theorized as sites of authority for history, though oft
challenged by critical theorists such as Michel Foucault (1969) and Jacques Derrida (1996). Within
the realm of information professionals their deemed them sites of neutral truth telling. In
particular, the archive became an evidentiary institution operating as a site of historical truth,
even as that truth would eventually be a contested one (Cook, 1997). In particular, practitioner
scholars like Verne Harris (2002) argued that institutional archives, especially those operating on

behalf of governments, work to both directly and passively destroy histories which render them
in negative lights, particularly with regards to systemic oppressions. While Harris refers
specifically to apartheid within South Africa, his concerns extended beyond racism and invited
theorizing around similar exclusions at the site of gender and sexuality as well. As note, the
emergence of alternative archives for queer history was in response to this failed neutrality and
such spaces operate as a direct challenge to this falsely held concept of neutral record keeping.
In fact, K.J. Rawson (2015) makes this point in his introduction to the Transgender Studies
Quarterly special issue on archives. Noting that the emergence of transgender as a term is not
indicative of an absence of such persons within history, but a new moment in which visibility and
demand for historical recognition has produced the bodies of transgender persons within
community and traditional archives as sites of “political change” (p. 548). Specifically, the
reality that gender non-binary within archives whose gender identities challenges cisnormativity
and its production of the site of gender as a normative identity. The duality of transgender
historiography and transgender subjectivity did not politicize archives, but merely made
abundantly clear what was already politicized by refusing space to render such identities visible
to begin with. Further, as Aaron Devor (2014) notes, it was trans identity which specifically
destabilized archival praxis for queer history making, asserting that this identity and the
complexities around its visibility and description, impacted both activists and historians alike.
Further, attendant to this journal’s international scope and the aforementioned work of Verne
Harris, the political work of making transgender identity visible often happens at the
intersections of colonialism and racism, as evidenced by the emergence of transgender archives
within Sub-Saharan Africa rooted in the region’s own political queer activism (Theron & Kgositau,
2015). In turn, these types of politicized realities inform not only cataloging, but how gender is

described and perceived of within the records of such bodies.

Cataloger’s judgment stands in as a framing device for the positionality of the cataloger in
describing a piece of information. While theorized as a method to understanding the onus placed
upon catalogers to make available and accessible as possible a piece of information. The idea as
currently utilized situates the practitioner as a descriptive agent of information from a vantage
point of neutrality. Most scholarship asks the cataloger to think critically of their role in making
information available to users, while never noting how the identities of those users and
catalogers inform descriptive presumptions (Diao, 2018). Latent here is that a cataloger, on
behalf of their respective institution, can imagine all potential user needs or can see all potential
representations within a given piece of information. From an ethical standpoint such
presumptions fail to attend, first to the systemic exclusions observed by Adler and others, while
also assuming that cataloger’s identities are simultaneously cohesive enough and diverse enough
to prepare, with proper education, a record for access. Fox and Reece (2012) extend this issue
by arguing that the notion of a cataloging ethics exists without any central theoretical framework
from which to orient ethical practice meaning that concepts such as minimal bias and neutrality
exist without considering in what ways an information professional might be biased, driven by

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

identarian blindsight or otherwise. In response, Fox (2016) asserts that one such method of
integrating positionality into cataloging would be through the framework of intersectionality,
understanding that one’s lived identities (race, class, gender, sexuality) work to afford access or
produce barriers to social spaces and services. Understanding this concept, Fox argues, will allow
for catalogers to examine how their own identities exist situationally to cataloging as practice
and the ethical choices made in their work, thus resulting in better work judging the content
they describe not for neutral access, but from how it works to undo regimes of oppression. In
response, the following discussion explores how cataloging produces notions of queerness and

ascribes queerness to bodies in ways that reproduce normativity.

Adler, as well as critical treatises by Sanford Berman (1971) and Hope Olson (2002), notes the
challenges of naming queer bodies. Contemporary complexities regarding transgender and non-
binary bodies came to light when the information organization standard Resource Description
and Access (RDA) sought to provide users with an easy way to describe gender. To provide users
with a means to describe gender in all types of information resources, RDA prioritized traditional
print materials. Those describing resources were initially only given the categorical options of
male and female. Following the advocacy of Biiley et al. (2014) RDA now allows for any gender
option. However, RDA still stipulates that such prescriptions of gender come from declarations
made by the person within the piece of information. While alleviating some immediate issues
concerning the misgendering of individuals within materials from a metatheoretical level, it still
assumes a coherent shared queer body of knowledge. Such insistence upon consistency, for this
type of organizational framework, relies on some point of initial reference, resulting in yet other
examples of problematic queer description. This has led to the design and implementation of
alternative authority standards such as the Homosaurus, which aims to, like queer archives,
prioritize the community representation of LGBTQIA+ identity, as opposed to assuming that a
current standard can appropriately exist as inclusive of such identities. As will be discussed, the
Homosaurus works to imagine multiple ways of being queer and affording descriptions space to
exhaustively name these iterations of identity rather than merely picking the most relevant term
at the cost of essentializing one’s identity. This demand for consistency becomes a challenge
when dealing with predominantly non-textual and visual information (Wagner, 2019). Visual
information requires contextual specifics, noting not only what one sees but the informational
contexts of the item and, crucially, who is sharing and using the piece of visual information.

When practitioners have tackled the question of gender diverse representation with cataloging,
it is through advocating a refusal to rely on Library of Congress entirely (Roberto, 2011) or to use
the failures of the inability to name gender identity in diverse ways as a point of dialogic inquiry
between patrons and practitioners (Drabisnki, 2013). Indeed, the consensus across literature for
practitioner approaches is to utilize emergent technologies and site-specific practices attendant
to the case-specific needs of a collection and its investment in gender diversity (Johnson, 2010).
In turn, very little exists around a cohesive “what to do” when it comes to gender non-binary
identities within cataloging and even less so when it refers to visual information, suggesting a
chronic necessity for such exploration. In response, this paper's remainder approaches these
complexities of the competing ideas of consistency and contextuality by offering a nuanced case
study of potentially transgender and gender non-binary identity in visual information. However,
before engaging with this case study, the methodological choices behind the visual resources and
their intended focus require clarification.

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

Methods

This paper deploys a case study methodology by highlighting two curated images (one a film of
newsreel outtakes the other a photograph from a drag performance) that focus on transgender
embodiment. The case study takes an approach through what Robert E. Stake (1995, p. 44)
defines as “critical uniqueness.” This case study highlights challenges, issues, and contexts
relevant to naming and affirming gender diversity when encountered in visual information
cataloging. The critical part here, like the earlier discussed archiving and cataloging practices
produced by queer communities also centers queerness as a preeminent concern within the case
studies, approaching examples “with queer concerns and experiences at the forefront of the
logic” (DeCamp, 2020, p. 10). In particular, the images picked for the case study highlight a
century of visual information related to transgender and gender non-binary identity, focusing on
the historical impetus for how information professionals might understand the gender identities
in question. Further, the items discussed work to highlight the respective conduits through which
individuals share and engage with queer visual information, including items encountered in
differing contexts. These differing contexts produce a binary of institutional and communal
archives while understanding this binary to itself be antithetical to queer methods, however,
attending to what Tom Boellstorff (2016) defines as “surfing binarisms” these examples
contextualize similar challenges across both types of cultural heritage institution, while providing
insight into overlapping and divergent practices (p. 222). Each item considers the degrees of
visibility provided to a given gender identity, including moments evoking transgender identity in
hyper-scientific contexts to moments where non-binary identity exists figuratively, but not
through literally visualizing these bodies. Following the analysis of each piece of visual
information, the paper considers possible descriptive approaches followed then by a loose, albeit

contextually specific method of transgender visual information description.

Limitations

While the images discussed represent and engage with divergent issues around the representation

of transgender and non-binary bodies within visual information, their use as case study examples
does not come without limitations. The case study prioritizes my interests as a scholar of queer
embodiment within archives. As such, the examples do not address all issues concerning queer
identities within visual information. Further, the examples given their visibility within queer
media history reify issues around homonormativity (Duggan, 2003). All the shown subjects appear
to be white and likely of higher socioeconomic classes. This acknowledgment means that while
this is about transgender and non-binary embodiment and how to approach description from a
visual information perspective, it is decidedly not about how to tackle the equally complex topic
of naming race within similar examples. The geographic scope of the samples generally resides
within the United States. Further, each example also considers material whose origins revolve
around the American South and the suggestions following each case study might need nuance
and alteration to better attend to global and even regional challenges. Finally, the items
discussed prioritize content over practice and serve not as a perfect representation of how to
deal with transgender embodiment across all cultural institutions or within specific cataloging
rules or standards, but merely survey issues that cut across these particularities. The idea here

is not to offer up criticism or failure but instead to open outwards towards potential solutions.

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
ISSN 2574-3430, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

Case Study 1: Jazz wedding—outtakes

The first piece of footage titled Jazz wedding--outtakes (1928) is a Fox Movietone Newsreel
outtake held at the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collection and
represents footage whose use exists as ephemera to newsreel footage of the early 20th century.
The footage depicts a group of individuals who are dressed in clothing indicative of both brides
and grooms processing down an outdoor courtyard with arms interlocking. Leading the group is
a person in a suit holding a book while raising their hand. The footage then cuts to multiple

scenes of brides and grooms kissing (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Fox Mews Story C3252: Jazz Wedding-outtakes, Fox Movietone News Collection. Reproduced by
permission of the Moving Image Research Collection, The University of South Carolina.

The moving image’s description places both “bride” and “groomsmen” in quotation likely due to
the footage’s ties to the then women’s college Brenau University. The presumption that all

persons were performing possibly explains the inclusion of subject headings such as "male
impersonator" and the decidedly more dated "transvestism.” 1It is also critical to note here that
this example is profoundly contextual and represents the particular knowledge of a set of
archivists and/or catalogers at a particular location. It is equally plausible that were there
knowledgeable information professionals at this site, they would have contextualized the uses of
the terms in the subject headings or been keenly aware of the way that this potentially one-time

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The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
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DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

event at a women's college were not actual engagements in male impersonation as a form of
identity-making (see Fig. 2).

Content Description Girls of Brenau College hold a jazz wedding to depict the spirit
of modern times. Women dress up as both sides of the bridal
party, the ceremony is performed and the bride and groom
kiss, dancing all the while. Scene of the "bride" dancing with
"groomsmen."

Geographic Location Gainesville (Ga.)

Subject Transvestism.
Male impersonators.
Women college students.
Dance--United States
Weddings.
Theater.
Costume.

Figure 2. The content description, geographic location, and subject terms for Jazz wedding--outtakes
provided by the Moving Image Research Collection. (Converted to text for accessibility).

While we cannot presume these to be actual images of transgender men or non-binary persons
exploring their identity, we equally cannot assume them to be lesbians. This challenge becomes
magnified by the footage's long-term intentions, many of which may not have been known by the
students at the time of the recording. This issue is both descriptive and ethical. The question of
whether the acts should be digitally visible to begin with, their content reflecting “negotiated
intimacy” between students who may never have imagined such acts becoming public and, as
such, ask questions about how they might want such things contextualized, let alone defined into
a historical record. (Cowan & Rault, 2018, p. 124). The footage is silent and does not suggest the
existence of a transgender identity; however, given that the use of women juxtaposed with the
deployment of multiple gendered clothing styles does offer up the potential for gender to be
queered and for the "groomsmen" to be trans men. This possibility would be historically
unprecedented given the 1928 recording date of the footage, a precedent even more unusual
given the footage’s Georgia location. The challenges of describing this content then emerge from
a lack of appropriate terms for the historical version of gender expression occurring in the
footage. It is not to say that viewers are not looking at the presence of trans men or even gender-
fluid individuals, but that these were not the terms afforded to the persons in the footage.
However, this does not deny information professionals the ability to identify and label the
content as something akin to contemporary notions of transgender and gender non-binary
identities. Such reclamation is the move made by the creators of the hit Amazon Studies show
Transparent, who used the footage in the opening credits of their show focused on a trans
woman's daily life. To navigate how one might understand alternative descriptive practices for
this piece of footage, one must first attend to a few points about how it engages with transgender
identity and its existence within a historical record. The primary challenge resides because no
form of contemporary terminology accurately reflects what identities the participants present
and identify within Jazz wedding--outtakes.

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She Started Wearing Men’s Clothes

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
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DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

Again, while there existed both trans men and butch lesbians within this historical moment, the
lack of an affirmative statement on the part of the individuals shown in the footage prevents any
method on the part of information professionals to assert transgender embodiment
authoritatively. Wagner (2018) observes the limitations of schemas like RDA when attempting to
assert language used to describe moments of gender non-binary identity face scrutiny due to an
overreliance on textual affirmation. In the case of this footage, camera operators (who were
almost exclusively cisgender, straight white men) failed to label and identify these individuals
as anything more than women playing dress-up. So, for the most queerly astute and forward-
thinking individuals cataloging the record, the rules of organizational practice do not allow for

asserting a transgender identity upon the subject.

Further, the content itself evokes an ongoing challenge around two dueling ideologies of queer
history-making (between trans men and/or butch lesbians). Each side entrenches itself in the
project of laying claim to what seemingly few historical queer figures exist. Rarely, if ever, do
the two communities within the subset of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella concede to sharing figures,
likely due to a larger struggle to seek out and gain recognition within a queer history that
overemphasizes the narratives of gay, cisgender, white men (Duggan, 2003). Subsets of queer
identity seek out any representations that will help make legitimate identity, even if it means
denying another identity in the process. The question almost always becomes an either/or
identity instead of offering up the potential of a this/and identity description. Undoing this need
for uniformity might liberate the transgender image within visual information.

The challenge of naming a queer identity within Jazz wedding--outtakes only exacerbates given
that the footage in question exists as outtakes of newsreel footage, much of which exists on the
periphery of media history content that never made it to theatrical release (Chambers et al.,
2018). The lack of theatrical context makes it impossible to codify Jazz wedding moments--
outtakes into any particular genre. So too, does the non-public nature of it make the footage's
intentions challenging to understand. Further, the outtakes represent repeated actions intended
to be re-edited and cut together into linear narrative cohesion. A viewer of Jazz wedding--
outtakes sees the group processing through a courtyard multiple times, just as they see the
images of participants kissing through multiple takes, including the one used in Transparent.
Further, if the viewer were to take the provided description as truth, then it is women, some in
drag, performing a wedding ceremony. Such an additional layer invites new ways of thinking

about the sexuality of the footage, never mind its overt confrontation with gender.

Despite the issues mentioned above between histories of transgender masculinity and stone
butch lesbianism, footage like Jazz wedding--outtakes allows for a space for both histories and
further quite evocatively affirms their presence in early twentieth-century queer history. This
subversive representation provides a useful connecting point for an equally subversive, yet far
more direct representation of transgender embodiment. The question then becomes how might
a cataloger or archivist tentatively consider describing this item within their workflow? The

following is an attempt to provide a checklist of potential approaches.

Embrace Ambiguity

Given the contentions around Jazz wedding—outtakes as a historical representation of queerness
at the intersection of transgender and lesbian identity, a cataloger might benefit from simply
allowing both identities to exist in conversation. Since the Library of Congress offers no way to
name queerness as an identity within a group, alternative approaches remain necessary. Evoking

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these identities as potential standouts affords a cataloger the ability to do their due diligence as
an information professional while also not avoiding naming identities because there exist no
perfect means to do so. In this case, the embrace of dual identities as a potential becomes almost
obligatory. Terms worth deploying include the already existing "Male impersonators," as well as
potentially "Transgender people," and even "Lesbians." Though "Transgender men" exists as an
option, this inability to affirm that the individuals shown did indeed identify as trans men or
transmasculine remains a challenge. The much more open heading of "Transgender people"
affords a degree of openness to this uncertainty.

Additionally, emerging subject headings around things like "Gender nonconformity" might also
open potential avenues to talk about the footage's complications without naming gender
specifically. Such a heading would allow viewers to note that both masculinity and femininity
are being performed in the context of the wedding. It is worth remembering here, however, that
choices such as these could be misinterpreted as ontological claims, so an information
professional should do their best to provide notes and clarifications to the contexts behind such
subject headings and their ethical reasons for providing these terms (Fox & Reece, 2012). The
work of the cataloger or archivists here becomes about their own positionality in the work and
what they understand the context to be, but at no point should this understanding be interpreted
at definitive truth. This emphasis on providing specifics within a descriptive framework also
provides insight into an additional approach that adheres to context-driven rather than factual
description.

Describe Gendered Ways of Being and Not the Gender

An equally legitimate approach to this content would be to avoid the gender-specific tags such
as "Transgender men" or "Male impersonators" and keep something like "Gender nonconformity"
and then use the space of the content description to describe the particularities of how the clip
challenges gender. Instead of describing things like "women dress up as both sides of the bridal
party", a description could read as a site of expression. The cataloger might write something
like, "group of people at women's college don bridal gowns and tuxedos to recreate a wedding."
Note the almost subtle shift of language that confirms what is, ultimately, an unknowable gender
identity (save for actual affirmation from the person in the footage). Here details are left to

researcher conjecturing or laying claim to queer identities.

Opening the description here also helps legitimize the performance of gender happening by the
individuals being read as cisgender women in dresses. Though it does not outright offer a naming
of it, such an approach expands the footage's potential to be also understood as either
genderqueer or genderfluid.

Make Cautious Use of Preexisting Descriptions

Jazz wedding—outtakes comes with multiple levels of description, including both the descriptions
provided by the camera operators at the time of the footage's release, as well as the various

interpretations of this data between catalogers over the past few decades. In each case, the
person updating the description ought to have wrestled with making sense of what language best
describes the persons within the footage shown. Just as shifts in language around race within
cataloging have shifted in the past century, too should our notions of the correct or appropriate
term are for a piece of footage whose gender exploration is as rich as this. It is also equally likely
that the persons describing these figures refuse to see gender identities divergent from cisgender

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The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
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DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v5i4.36492

identity. As Wagner (2020) argues this is likely the case with pioneering queer speedboat racer
Joe Carstairs whose refusal to adhere to feminine gender conventions and identification has
nonetheless faced constant misgendering not only by archival descriptions but historiographers
as well. In turn, when it comes to something like the Jazz wedding—outtakes footage, a cataloger
researching such footage should provide equal weight to what a current gender studies scholar
or queer activist has to say about the content documentation contemporary to the footage's
existence. The guidance afforded by standards such as RDA and the Library of Congress prioritize
textual affirmation but provide no space for imagining how these affirmations might be products
of cisnormative ignorance or, worse, deliberate queer erasure. So even as it may not be an
identity spoken about by name, the expression here provides more than enough of a justification
to assert its potential. Examples like Jazz wedding—Outtakes offer information professionals an
item whose emergence within their workflow ties to a pre-existing archival collection with its
own rules and ideas; however, there exists an even more significant challenge when engaging

with materials whose emergence occurs by happenstance.

Case Study 2: Unidentified Person Performs Onstage at the 1997 Christmas in July
Carnival

The title of this piece of visual information, in many ways, describes as best as possible what
one sees, without additional interpretation. However, a deeper description of Unidentified
Person Performs Onstage at the 1997 Christmas in July Carnival (hereafter Unidentified Person
Performs) might expand the discussion a bit. For example, it might observe that we are seeing a
person in a neon-patterned leotard, black shorts, tights, high heels, and sunglasses singing on an
outdoor stage. The photograph's faded nature might even lead us to believe that it is from the
late eighties or early nineties (Figure 3). Critically, what we do not know about the person is
their gender identity and, further, what ways they might be expressing gender within or against
the conventions of their sex-assigned-at-birth. However, simply saying a person performing
onstage offers very little insight into what might be worthwhile or utilizable to a patron or

researcher.

Unidentified Person Performs is one of the many "unidentified" photographs included within the
Digital Transgender Archive, a collection of materials focused on helping undo the "significant
barriers to the accessibility of trans history" by linking up various and disparate global collections
into an isolated digital repository and shifting the representation of transgender history away
from being defined by "language" (Overview, 2018). In particular, the Digital Transgender Archive
attempts its best to clarify that while there was rarely ever a direct naming of transgender
identity within archival collections before the 1990s, there certainly exist materials whose
themes, representations, and content reflect transgender potentiality. The Digital Transgender
Archive is doing the work of advocating for materials such as the aforementioned Jazz wedding—
outtakes being included within the still-forming transgender history. There exist works whose
representations include self-defined and avowed transgender individuals. There also exist
materials such as Unidentified Person Performs, which emerge concerning identifiable
transgender and nonbinary historical figures. This photograph provides an example of the
potential challenges around encountering a piece of visual information with much less context
than the newsreel discussed earlier. Indeed, the image only has for reference points its temporal
relationship to 1997, its event related to the Christmas in July event, its spatial relationship to
Houston, Texas, and its collection links to the photographic works of JD, all of which one can
cull from the metadata made available within the Digital Transgender Archive's page for the item
(see Fig. 4).

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Figure 3. The unidentified person of the Unidentified Person Performs photograph housed within the Digital
Transgender Archive.

Item Information

Identifier kw52j834d

Collection JD Doyle Photographs (1950-2000)

Institution JD Doyle Archives

Date Created 1997

Date Covered 1997

Genre Photographs

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Subject(s) Christmas in July Carnival

Places Texas > Harris County > Houston

Topic(s) Carnivals
Crossdressing
Photography

Resource Type Still Image

Analog Format Color

Language English

Rights Contact host institution for more
information
For more information on copyright,
please
read our policies

Figure 4. The available linked metadata for Unidentified Person Performs. (Converted to text for
accessibility).

Clicking any of the links related to the collection or the institution redirects a user to other items
within the collection, but very little about the actual contexts from which the collection exists,
finding that there are materials for drag shows, crossdressing, and theater more broadly. As such,
this is the most one can deduce about this image given its ties to an event wherein drag likely
occurred, or some variety of theater engages in gender subversion. Similar to Jazz wedding—
outtakes, a viewer can, at best, only conjecture as to what types of gender experimentations
were occurring in this particular time and space. However, this minimal context does not mean
that one cannot begin to engage with the gender potentials latent within the photograph. Like
the previously discussed materials attempting to contextualize what it means to engage in gender
non-binary expression warrants consideration.

A litany of scholars, both through theory (Halberstam, 2005) and qualitative study (Gray, 2009),
have taken it upon themselves to challenge a misperception of queer embodiment within rural
spaces and, more specifically, the Midwest and American South. Deploying what he calls
"metronormativity," Halberstam argues that while we often fail to see transgender identity within
rural spaces, there nonetheless existed and continue to exist unique deployments of this identity
both all part of the United States. While Houston, Texas is by no means a rural town, its location
as a city within Texas offers up space wherein one presumes a lack of open and visible queer
culture. The Unidentified person performs photograph exists as a challenge to this
misperception, even if it is impossible to name this particular moment as one of transgender
embodiment. The event, for which this untitled performer is present, is one titled the Christmas
in July event, and digitally thumbing through other photographs in the collection allow one to
discover that one of the performers here did have a name, and though not the person in the
photograph her identification as Crystal Rae Lee Love, allows a researcher to explore and think
about her presence within Houston queer culture. One discovers Love not only to be a prominent
drag persona within Houston from throughout the 1990s and the 2000s but the recipient of 2002's

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"Best Drag Queen," from the Houston Press. In the interview and description of Love, she openly
identifies as being a "tranny" and as somebody who practices "transvestism," two terms whose
utilization, while dated, offer insight into the way drag for many performers exceeds the
simplicity of performance and aligns with gender identities beyond cisgender (Best Drag Queen,
2002). It affords a way to link up the performers to engagements which at the very least attempt
to engage in gender as an identity. The simultaneous deployment of terms whose evolution now
more implicitly reflects transgender identity and the site's actualities as being one that included
transgender people allows for this to be a way to talk about the image. Such a discussion cannot
aim to name the transgender identity at play, given the uncertainty around the unidentified
person in question. Perhaps indicative of the thought and care placed on respect within the
Digital Transgender Archive, this photograph's metadata generally represents an appropriate
approach to the content, but for purposes of imagination, treating this photograph as something
one might find in a shoebox or between photographs of Crystal Rae Lee Love allows one to reflect

on the particularities of describing gender.

Like Jazz wedding—outtakes footage, there is no evocation of sex-assigned at birth here and
even less to go on concerning pre-existing metadata. There is no marker akin to "women dress
as both sides of the bridal party." One cannot use terms like "female impersonator" or "male
impersonator" here since those rely on a transition between one identity to another. As such, it
is telling that the only sort of term within the existing record here utilizes "crossdressing" as a
catch-all for expressions blurring between gender identities. A person might utilize “drag shows”
as a broader idea or lean into "gender nonconformity" to understand that ultimately, the image
confronts cisgender logics of binary identity. In this way, it becomes more about utilizing
available descriptors within the image to talk through what is shown and seen as gendered
without naming gender itself. Noting that the unidentified performer, for example, has a curly
bob haircut/wig and cat-eye sunglasses offer up expressions more traditionally associated with
femininity, but avoids naming the identity as feminine.

Similarly, noting the presence of high heels, a black shirt, and pantyhose invite a multitude of
interpretations of femininity that allow simultaneous potentials of drag performance as well as
feminine gender expression. None of these state that what viewers are looking at is that of a
transgender woman. It does, however, allow a potential researcher to build connections between
Crystal Rae Lee Love's hypervisibility and this unidentified performer. Such an approach provides
a robust, descriptive record that provides users some semblance of what the performer looks like
while also remaining ambiguous enough to avoid the one thing that remains wholly uncertain
within the footage; the person's gender. In turn, providing some critical points of reference for
why such a description matters and justifying these descriptive practices is necessary.

Utilize proximate information

While one can imagine Unidentified Person Performing as a standalone item, one whose
emergence comes by way of donation, it is also one whose materiality exists in proximity to other
definable materials. As observed, it is part of a particular event within Houston's drag culture,
and these details afford it some descriptive legitimacy. While it could equally be a photograph
whose inclusion in a box of materials is one of mere happenstance, such presumptions do little
to aid accessibility and findability. A work such as this benefits from having terms tied to it, ones
that, while they may ultimately prove incorrect, place it in front of the eyes of area experts.
Hypothetically, one could imagine this passing through the gaze of a researcher of Texas queer
history who has found materials elsewhere on the subject. They may encounter the photograph

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The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(4), 2021
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and note that it is not from the event or part of this particular drag scene. However, in that
realization, it is equally plausible that they will offer up some information on the who and what
of the photograph. The value of proximate information here allows for a cataloger to make
educated guesses with the materials while also offering up a way for those with information,
whether from lived experience or knowledge acquisition, to engage with and add to the
materials. Once again, such educated guesses call attention to the lack of an objective or neutral
stance in one’s work and require the cataloger to be wholly transparent about the ethical
framework informing their choices. As an example, the cataloger might note that historically
normative institutions have failed to adequately describe such bodies and communities. Users in
this case become central points of knowledge as informed by archival queer theory, which here
becomes the ethical framing of the cataloger's work (Watts, 2018). Further, from an economic
standpoint relying on user knowledge takes the onus of knowing the right thing to say or do off
the information professional. Ostensibly, it serves as a necessary reminder that the function of
describing information, even one as contextually complex as Unidentified Person Performing, is
to make users aware of it and to engage with it.

Leveraging alternative text description

One of the significant impetuses of accessibility within digital archival repositories focuses on
utilizing alternative text to afford accessibility to users engaged with web-readers. A major
challenge of alternative text description occurs around the aesthetics of an image, wherein a
person might describe the colors as being nice without detailing this (Ghosal et al., 2019). In this
way, artificial intelligence has operated to train computers to fill in the descriptions by noting
what potential colors exist within an image, allowing a user to understand these lost details
better, should they need help doing so. Given that gender is markedly more complex and
certainly not easily learnable for AI (at least in methods not relying on conflating sex-assigned-
at-birth), the role of describing gender becomes the burden of a cataloger or related information
professional. By leveraging cultural heritage institutions' obligation to be thoughtful about
making clear and coherent descriptions available in multiple ways, the exceptionally detailed

discussions around gendered expressions within Unidentified Person Performing become not
simply viable but obligatory. Further, gender is an oft-avoided component of computer-driven
alt-text description, suggesting it remains a particularly human-driven descriptive practice. The
use of terms like "a person wearing cat-eye glasses, feminine makeup and a black skirt" serves as
a two-fold way of providing a discussion for gendered components and a detailed description of

the footage itself.

Utilize inclusion-driven organizational methods

One outstanding option for addressing the complexities of gender identity within visual
information remains the use and deployment of alternative schemas attuned to gender as a social
construct. For example, the Homosauraus, an internationally deployed, linked data system built
on the iterative understanding of queer-centered descriptive frameworks offers up thoughtful
and inclusive language to better recognize the historical contentions around queer identities.
The Homosaurus also connects identities whose meanings remain deeply contextual to other
salient and intersecting identities within the LGBTQIA+ community. Originally designed as a
horizontal organizational structure by the International Homo/Lesbian Information Center and
Archive, the Homosaurus expanded definitions around terms like bisexuality and trans resulting
in a realization that a thesaurus of queer-oriented terms would better serve as a supplement to
existing organizational standards instead of a standalone framework (About, 2019). The terms

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within the Homosaurus, which in no way intends be an exhaustive alternative, allow for nuance
around deliberate identity description related to gender without expressly naming gender. For
example, noteworthy terms of inclusion might include the already existing choice of
“crossdressing” to fill in for the potential of there being some subversion of gender at play. Other
notable terms that the Homosauraus utilizes that align with this issue include "clothing", "drag
community", "gender blending", "gender binary", "gender expression", "gender identity",
"gender non-conforming people", "genderqueer people", "hair", "LGBTQ", "LGBTQ events",
"LGBTQ people", "LGBTQ+", "LGBTQIA", "queer (verb)", "queer community", "queer identity",

"queer people", "queer theatre", and "subcultures."

The expanse of options intends to be specific choices and a potential list of concurring terms
that a record might include. If this seems like a considerable number of terms, it is partially
intentional. Unidentified Person Performing's informational potential is such that it could be
about any and none of these terms, so the choice to include them embraces this duality. It also
follows what Bri Watson (2021) identifies as a queer organizational imperative to identify and
embrace the hyper specific and understand that it will help to aid the individual desires within
an increasingly expanding landscape of visual media. Since the existence of alternative
frameworks such as the Homosaurus understands terms to have deep historical and contextual
components, this offers information professionals and the users alike ways to open
understandings of gender within Unidentified Person Performing. Such understandings note
gender here as a profoundly intimate yet, as an archival record, public encounter. Perhaps more
than the others suggested, this approach notes that it is not about the certainty with describing
gender in visual information and remains resolutely about imagining potentials. With this in mind,
the paper now turns toward a sense of collective praxis when describing the transgender body
within visual information; however, it remains essential to acknowledge the case studies'

limitations as delivered before doing so.

Implications for Practitioners

The prior case studies suggest considerable challenges for information professionals when it
comes to meaningfully engaging with materials representing transgender and non-binary persons.
While this paper cannot begin to serve as an authoritative stance on the layered issues brought
forth, it can provide some suggestions regarding how best to approach one’s work. First, like any
descriptive or cataloging practice, an information professional ought to do their best to
contextualize their choices. While they may not know if a person within a piece of visual
information is transgender or non-binary, they can do their best to situate the footage within
relevant historical contexts and expand description in response. This, of course, means producing
an extension of one’s labor and often providing information that might not match across similar
records. For example, one record might represent a person who is resolutely a butch lesbian,
while another is a transgender man, yet to a passing cataloger the individuals within the footage
might appear similar. The queerness latent in such identities, both within their historical record
and within contemporary contexts, make an approach to such identities as universal or essential
impossible, and this impossibility is deliberate. In turn, instead of suggesting that two records
are identical, an informational professional can crosswalk their decisions within available
contexts and materials. If possible, information professionals can also clarify their decisions to
go with an identity related to gender as opposed to sexuality, or vice versa. In doing so, this will
help not only other information professionals, but the users of such materials to examine their
own presumptions about the two identity categories and how each fold into one another. As

such, it suggests an additional practice for information professionals to consider.

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Since so much of the definitional work around transgender and non-binary individuals remains in
flux, working with community members is another way information professionals might address
descriptive challenges in such footage. This work can be as simple as networking and sharing
complex materials with queer history networks via social media and listservs, wherein raising
questions about collection items with a potential to be transgender or gender non-binary affords
access to experts in transgender history and a potential overlap of transgender and gender non-
binary persons. In turn, these networks will be made aware of materials they likely will have
interest in working with and exploring. In the process of doing so, records and appropriate
definitions for identities within those records becomes a collaborative project between the
institution in question and the researchers’ users working with those records. While the layered
description mentioned earlier undeniably adds work to the information professional, it is far
easier to see this engagement as being one that falls well within the purview of outreach,
especially within the contexts of archives and museums.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this shift in work cannot happen in isolation to larger
systemic exclusions within a cultural heritage institution as it relates to representing transgender
and gender non-binary persons within visual information. Simply, if every record is provided with
the most up-to-date and nuanced terminology for the moment, yet staff routinely misgender
patrons or reinscribe cisnormativity elsewhere (i.e.., bibliographic information such as abstracts)
and this work becomes quite meaningless. Addressing misgendering or avoiding appropriate
methods of gender description within a catalog record is but one layer of the way inequity has
manifest itself within cultural heritage institutions, and correcting this problem cannot be seen
as a panacea for the reality that the population being discussed remains othered and invisible
within such spaces beyond the materials themselves (Wagner & Crowley, 2020). Critically, such
a practice relies on cultural humility, one that understands the information professional’s role
to be subject to its own criticism. In particular, work that is done in earnest to be inclusive might
reproduce power inequities and one’s willingness to learn from those failures and grow, rather
than refuse to accept fault becomes a means for producing an anti-oppressive institutional space.
It echoes Tai’s (2020) notation that such an approach embraces the iterative and cyclical nature
of Jessia language around inclusivity and sees the information record as a means to grow and
change as necessary. The critical point here worth remembering becomes the value this has for
transgender and gender non-binary inclusivity, but the endeavor has impact relevant for other
systems of oppression and their role in describing identity (i.e., racial identity). As such,
imagining ways of describing persons in an inclusive and respectful way becomes not merely a
practice, but a project of hopefulness about the future of transgender inclusion within the
profession more broadly.

Towards A Visual Information Logic of Trans Potentiality

Though the examples of visual information deployed within this case study provide hyper specific
contexts as to which one might encounter transgender embodiment within information
organization, their particularities help define, even if loosely, the look of a visual information
organization landscape of transgender potentiality. Borrowing from Jose Esteban Muñoz (2009),
this logic of transgender visual information organization deploys politics of hopefulness, wherein
the belief that queer representation and inclusion in all spaces necessitates a constant
“anticipatory” belief in abundance and expansiveness (p. 3). Using the metaphor of the horizon,
Muñoz advocates that there can always be more and better versions of what it means to be
positively included within society. In no way is this idea assimilationist in nature as Muñoz intends
quite literally for this inclusion to be system-changing instead of system affirming. The

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suggestions made in this case study intentionally challenge the rules for just that reason. The
hope is that through exhausting the limits of current ordering that new methods of organization
will emerge. As such, information professionals can help anticipate this change by allowing
organizational records to be a site of expansion and inclusion instead of locations where
transgender embodiment does not fit. The logics of transgender and non-binary embodiment
purposefully and resolutely refuse to fit into cisnormative structures. Inclusive options that exist
now offer isolation (i.e., single-stall bathrooms) or case-specific rules to describe records.
However, with increased visibility, acceptance of transgender individuals will shift, and the
conversation from temporary salves to systemic alterations will follow in turn. Information
organization can anticipate this shift by appropriately affording space to explore what it means
to embody transgender identity by defying structure or binarized ways of thinking within the
record. Each approach to describing a transgender body within visual information research,
whether that transgender body is un/named or in/visible, must accept that a body cannot be
seen as a thing to be corrected and defined within preexisting ideologies. Instead, information
professionals must see these as sites of potentiality, change, and imagination. A record for a
piece of information is only as good as its engagement with users, and those users are only able
to do so if they are seen and seeing themselves within those records.

Endnote

1 It is important to note that while writing this, the author contacted the archive and noted the
potential language issues and received an email stating that they would look into the use of
this term on not only this record but others still deploying the term as well.

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Travis L. Wagner (travislwagner@gmail.com) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School Information
Science at the University of South Carolina. Wagner is also an instructor in USC's Women’s and
Gender studies department. Their primary research interests include critical information studies,
queer archives, and social advocacy in libraries. Their recent publications include articles in
Reference Services Review and Open Information Science. They are also the co-creator of the
Queer Cola Oral History and Digital Archive.

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/index
https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3151502
https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3151502
https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-10-2019-0072
https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-10-2019-0072
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1830590
https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.27.15
mailto:travislwagner@gmail.com

Introduction
Literature Review
Gender as Performance
The Act of Queering
Queerness in Institutions
The Cataloger/Archivist as Gendering Agent

Methods
Limitations
Case Study 1: Jazz wedding—outtakes
Embrace Ambiguity
Describe Gendered Ways of Being and Not the Gender
Make Cautious Use of Preexisting Descriptions

Case Study 2: Unidentified Person Performs Onstage at the 1997 Christmas in July Carnival
Utilize proximate information
Leveraging alternative text description
Utilize inclusion-driven organizational methods

Implications for Practitioners

Towards A Visual Information Logic of Trans Potentiality
Endnote
References