The Persistence of Scars
In imagining and producing a self portrait I then titled "
agony," I wanted to convey an emotional “agony” and vulnerability that had developed from a sense of frustration and entrapment in relationships. I had to be nude in this photo to convey this vulnerability, so my mastectomy scars were part of the image. However, I wasn’t thinking about the presence of my scars in the frame while shooting and editing the photo. I was more concerned about producing the appropriate expression, the appropriately pained contortion of my torso, the appropriate exposure. I wasn’t producing a self portrait as a transperson; I was producing it as a person who felt trapped in an unhealthy relationship.
I have no desire, at this point in my life, to erase my female history, to be understood as “a real man,” or to have a coherent, unscarred male body. The scars from my mastectomy are wider than I had hoped they would be; the scar on the right side is stretched out and healing much more slowly than the left scar; the left scar, even though it’s healing better than the right, is still dark pink and mostly very visible (it’s only been eight months since I had surgery). Perhaps because I understand myself as “trans” more than as “male,” the permanent presence of these scars doesn’t bother me. Anyway, the presence of these scars in my self portrait didn’t bother me.
That’s what I thought as I was posting this photo to my flickr account. By posting it in my “photostream,” friends and family with flickr accounts, along with any of flickr’s thousands of other users, could potentially see my photo. I submitted my image to seven themed groups including “emotions,” “self portrait,” and finally, “FTM.” The keywords I entered for this photo were similar and also included “self portrait” and “FTM” along with “scars.”
The first person to comment on this photo started with some positive feedback about the expressiveness and “tonal range” of the photo before asking, “What are the scars from?” I explained in my response, “The scars are from a bilateral mastectomy for female-to-male transition.” At the same time, I responded to the FTM who had commented, letting him know where I was at in my transition. I offered this information so that he, in his excitement at the newness of his transition, could gauge what sort of results he might expect in the coming months. A few comments later, someone said, “Simply fascinating, and visceral. The image is intriguing on its own, enough so that I wondered what was happening in it - and now that the story unfolds in comments, I'm kind of gobsmacked.” At this point, I was concerned that people didn’t really understand what I had hoped to convey in the photo. I was concerned that the scars had taken over the photo—my scars or transition had been remarked on in every comment—or worse, that people thought the “agony” I was expressing was somehow linked to my scars, surgery, or transition. Transition for me hasn’t been at all tragic or agonizing, and I really didn’t want to add to the understanding of transpeople as pitiable, however benign that response may be compared to more violent reactions. I responded to the last commenter, archiving my concerns about the scars overtaking the image and causing confusion.
Based on the focus on my scars in the comments, on the relative absence of comments on the emotion I had hoped to foreground, it seems to me that my photo is being misread. Though I didn’t want to erase my scars—my trans identity—from the photo, I wanted to express something of myself that was not intimately wrapped up in my being trans. It seems as though I unsuccessfully communicated that in composing this image.
In producing this self portrait, I was trying to represent something more universal and simple than my “otherness,” an emotion I had hoped people could identify with directly. It seems like my scars—which had to be part of the photo, which I want to be part of the photo—have prevented people from identifying with the simpler message I was trying to communicate. I keep wondering if I could’ve composed the portrait differently to maintain the visibility of my transness while also making it clear to people that my scars were only a minor detail in the photo. Just as I continue to struggle with this in verbal communication—having my female history and trans identity recognized without then becoming “NickTheTransguy”—I’m not sure what the answer is.
