Royal Defiance

• Published in: J19 Vol. 11; no. 2; pp. 219 - 223
• Main Author: Chinn, Sarah E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: African Americans; Archives & records; Colonialism; Color; Drag (Performance); Gender; LGBTQ people; Narratives; News media; Photography; Racism; Transgender persons; Women; United States > US; Georgia
• ISSN: 2166-742X; 2166-7438; 2166-7438
• DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a921878

[...]the image—part of the Wellcome Collection, a museum funded and maintained by the pharmaceutical giant of the same name—is of two vaudevillians, Charles Gregory and Jack Brown, who were credited with bringing the cakewalk to France (indeed, the photograph is, as the caption suggests, one of a series of French postcards produced to publicize their act).6 Brown was famous for his performances in drag, and the pair's interpretation of the cakewalk was so well known in Paris that the Lumière brothers, inventors of the first movie projection technology, filmed them dancing (in the same costumes they are wearing in these photographs) in 1902.7 I'm interested in the desire to identify this picture, and the others from the series, as being of Swann. Almost all the articles that discuss him, from Joseph's original Nation piece to stories in Pink News (a British queer news and lifestyle website), the Georgia Voice ("The Premier Media Source for LGBTQ Georgia"), the Oregonian, Black Enterprise, and Yahoo News, either implicitly or explicitly identify the person in drag in these photographs as Swann.8 At a moment in which the histories of African Americans and the lived experiences of transgender people (and particularly those who occupy both subjectivities) are under concerted attack, it is not surprising that Swann's story and the photographs of Gregory and Brown are so often conflated: queer and trans people want visible evidence of Swann's remarkable life. [...]we would do well to take into account Jacob Lau's observation that dominant gender arrangements themselves are a product of white supremacy, and that we should look to trans of color critique for a reworking of the social hierarchies within which gender operates: "By positioning trans of color and in particular trans femmes of color figures at the center of analyses of power, trans of color critique asks not only how bodies are assumed and aligned with normative ideologies of sex and gender but which bodies and how that assumption and alignment adhere to intersectional structural oppressions and long-operating histories of whiteness, classism, racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism. [...]much of the information about Swann's milieu comes from newspaper reports of police raids and court records, not from Swann or their peers in this vibrant and active social scene. "11 These are the "stories we tell in dark times," linkages that do not quite align with the truth but that speak to a need for narrative, even when the absence of an actual picture of Swann demands the "embrace of likely failure and the readiness to accept the ongoing, unfinished and provisional character of this effort, particularly when the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue.