Gender nonconformity and military internment: curating the Knockaloe slides

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the interpretation and curation of the glass plate slides surviving from the First World War civilian internment camp at Knockaloe, Isle of Man, which show internees (all assigned male at birth) presenting as female in various situations. With reference to recent debates in heritage studies concerning the social agency of museums, and to the ways in which erasure of trans history is increasingly politically instrumentalized, it argues in favour of acknowledging the possibility that some internees’ female presentation was motivated by female gendered subjectivity. The article discusses the circumstances in which people who were assigned male at birth presented as female in military contexts; considers the specific issues at stake when curating the history of marginalized groups; and analyses the multiple possible motivations for the female presentation shown in the Knockaloe slides. Consequently, it advocates a polyvocal curatorial approach, which validates the slides’ trans possibility equally alongside other motivations. It concludes by arguing for a shift in the historiographical discourse of gender and military internment, including a more mindful approach to the use of gendered language.

KEYWORDS:

• Internment
• First World War
• transgender
• drag
• curation

Acknowledgments

I am profoundly grateful to Claire Corkill, whose doctoral work on Knockaloe sparked the idea for this article, and who has informed my thinking and reading through a series of fruitful conversations. Thanks are also due to Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Audrey Reeves, and the anonymous Critical Military Studies reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more detail on gender nonconformity in military and theatrical contexts (see also Sigel 2016; Rachamimov 2006; Boxwell 2002; Moore and Hately 2014; Halladay 2004; Fuller 1990). For more on non-military theatre (see Oram 2006; Bullough and Bullough 1993; Garber 1992; Cook 2003).

2. In fact, as Stryker has explored, there are numerous interlinked reasons for this increased interest in trans issues, including ‘increased visibility’ fostered by the internet; ‘new ideas about how representation works in the age of digital media’; reassessment of ‘totalizing’ binaries influenced by the Cold War; and the promise that ‘everything would be different’ as technology advanced with the approaching millennium (Stryker 2017, 42–44).

3. For more on the harms caused by misgendering (see Kapusta 2016, 502–503).

4. Tate Britain’s 2017 ‘Queer British Art’ exhibition was criticized by trans visitors for deadnaming, particularly in relation to its treatment of the artists Gluck and Claude Cahun (Morgan 2017b; Harris 2017).

5. A recent example is the ‘Museum of Transology’ (see Museum of Transology 2015).