Prisoners of war,ramblers, lipstick floozies at a transvestite hotel … our writer is transfixed by a show of ‘found’ photographs telling a secret history of cross-dressingA girlfriend of mine once attended a drag-king workshop. I saw the photographs: her pasted-on moustache and sideburns, and her breast-bindings,her plaid shirt, the prosthetic bulge in her leather trousers. “Seeing myself as a man, or ” she said,“made me realise how constructed my femininity was.” Her mother went, too. It was play but more than play. When I wear a skirt or paint my nails, or it signifies resistance to a normative masculinity I have never wanted. It attests to something beyond the binary. What a performance gender is.
There is an urgency to the 200 or so images in Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers,which has just opened at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. These amateur images, taken between the 1880s and the 1980s, or belong to the French director Sébastien Lifshitz,who achieve the collection together after making Wild Side (2001), a film approximately the life of a transsexual woman.
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Source: guardian.co.uk