“Angie was Our Sister:” Witnessing the Trans-Formation of Disgust in the Citizenry of Photography

Abstract

In 2009, Andre Andrade was convicted for the murder of Angie Zapata, an 18-year-old Latina transgender woman living in rural Colorado. This essay traces the way Angie's friends, family, and community countered the assertion of transphobia in the courtroom and larger public discussion by circulating self-portraits of Angie on t-shirts at community vigils. Displaying Angie's portrait not only resists the mobilization of transphobic disgust, but also enacts a way of seeing trans people as citizens within the civil contract of photography. The mourners' resistance enacts a politics of witnessing that contests the bureaucratization of gender and the aesthetic norms of legal culture. These rhetorical performances illustrate the emotional politics of visuality, and how citizenship is a category of of embodied sociality, public emotionality, and performative enactment.

Keywords:

• Witnessing
• Citizenship
• Visual Rhetoric
• Political Emotion
• Transgender

Notes

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

1. Betsy Markey, Quoted by Ernest Luning, “Markey to House: Shepard, Zapata ‘two victims of hate crimes in my district’” The Colorado Independent, April 29, 2009, http://coloradoindependent.com/27885/markey-to-house-shepard-zapata-two-victims-of-hate-crimes-in-my-district .

2. Donna Rose, Quoted by Andrew Villegas, “Friends, Family Gather to Say Goodbye to Slain Woman,” The Greeley Tribune, August 10, 2008, http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20080810/NEWS/865256674. A subscription was not required when this story was originally written. Rose's quote is available in the Topix Forum, “Friends, family gather to say goodbye to slain woman,” http://www.topix.com/forum/news/gay/T5TFOJM15554EC2SR.

3. I attribute the phrase “seeing and being seen” as a citizen to Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), 33.

4. “Transgender” is a categorical term that seeks to encompass a broad range of practices, affects, performances, and embodiments that call attention to the assumption of gender(s) disidentified from ones assigned at birth. Marcia Ochoa, “Latina/o Transpopulations,” in Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies, ed. Marysol Asencio (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 230. In this essay I use “transgender” as an umbrella category for a general “imagined community” of gendered embodiments and performances. Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. I also invoke the particularity of terms such as trans woman, or trans and their intersections with other dimensions of identity experience such as race, class, and geographic location. My usage of the category honors the kind of identifications embraced by Angie and her family. In the media, she was sometimes described as a “man who lived as a woman.” This was corrected many times by both family members and trans activist and ally comments in electronic newspaper articles. Although I use both Zapata and Angie in this essay, my use of “Angie” intends to recognize her on her own terms. I use gendered pronouns that also reflect how Angie identified. At times, I invoke “queer/trans” as a way to mark the political orientation of the essay, as an “approach that questions, disrupts, and transforms dominant ideas about what is normal” in relation to bias crimes discourse. S. Lamble, “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle The Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and The Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011), 237. For a range of diverse perspectives on the category of transgender, see Deidre McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1999. Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

5. This story was habitually repeated in local and regional presses. Monte Whaley, “Date Arrested in Greely Transgender Murder,” Denver Post, December 18, 2008, http://www.denverpost.com/ci_10044234.

6. Monte Whaley, “Transgender Victim Referred to as “It,” Denver Post, July 31, 2008, http://www.denverpost.com/ci_10049216.

7. I am greatly indebted to J. Jack Halberstam's insightful analysis of Brandon Teena's memorialization, which especially considers how relations to place animate the ways publics make sense of and respond to violence against queer and transgender bodies. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 22–46.

8. Colorado Anti-Violence Program, “Community and Zapata Family Applaud Decision to File Hate Crime Charges,” http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs036/1101527247940/archive/1102192743176.html.

9. For an extensive illustration of the systemic factors that inhibit heightened public attention or response to bias crimes against gays and lesbians, see Lester C. Olson, “A Cartography of Silence: Bias Crimes and Public Speechlessness,” The Journal of Intergroup Relations 31 (2004/2005): 76–101.

10. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, “Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and HIV-Affected Communities,” 20, October 30, 2011, http://www.avp.org/documents/NCAVPHateViolenceReport2011Finaledjlfinaledits.pdf.

11. Dean Spade and Craig Willse, “Confronting the Limits of Gay Hate Crimes Activism: A Radical Critique,” Chicano-Latino Law Review 38 (1999–2000): 38–52. Carolina Cordero Dyer, “Hate-Crime Penalties Will Not Work,” Times Union, http://alb.merlinone.net/mweb/wmsql.wm.request?oneimage&imageid=6055525.

12. Queers for Economic Justice and Black and Pink announced a partnership shortly after CeCe McDonald's plea agreement. Although each collective coordinates actions on the ground, they significantly rely on the activity of digital publics. See “Queers for Economic Justice,” http://q4ej.org/. “Black and Pink: Supporting Our LGBTQ Family in Prison,” http://www.blackandpink.org/.

13. Joy Powell, “Plea Deal Ends Protests Over Murder Charge,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), May 3, 2012, http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/149864755.html.

14. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2011), 29.

15. Spade, Normal Life, 29.

16. For a range of perspectives about multiple forms of scholar advocacy, see the special “Forum on Engaged Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010): 404–68.

17. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.

18. Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, ed. Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Bureaucratic transition such as changing one's driver's license, birth certificate, or other identity documents generally require documentation from psychologists, physicians, or surgeons (although this differs on a state by state basis), and often times the completion of forms of medical transition. These norms have generated criticism amongst transgender activist communities because they conflate transgender with medical transition, and inhibit poor gender-queer or transgender people from attaining legal documentation.

19. David Schoetz, “Transgender Teen's Death a Hate Crime? Cops Probe Death of 18-Year-Old Found Fatally Beaten in Colo. Apartment Last Week,” ABC News, July 25, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=5444468&page=2.

20. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22 (2007): 48.

21. John Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 23.

22. Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 271. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 145–47.

23. Nathan Stormer, “Embodying Normal Miracles,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 177.

24. For distinctions between visual rhetoric as product or process, see Cara A. Finnegan, “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 195–212.

25. I limit my discussion to “political emotion,” rather than the politics of affect because of the archival choice to draw from secondary sources rather than participant observation. Affect captures encounters between bodies in noncognitive and sensory modes. Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 20. Emotion translates those affects within a cultural register, often policing the propriety of particular emotional displays within public or private scenes. Gould, 20–21.

26. Richard M. Juang, “Transgendering the Politics of Recognition,” in Transgender Rights, (2006), 253.

27. Ariella Azoulay, “The Ethic of The Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography,” Afterimage 33 (2005): 38.

28. Harold and DeLuca, 263–86. Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Andrea Noble, “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J. U. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (London: Routledge, 2009), 63–80.

29. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006).

30. Denise A. Menchaca, “Memory's Vigil: Witnessing Departures in Paul Bonin-Rodriguez's Memory's Caretaker,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24 (2004): 206.

31. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books), 1972. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1993. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18.

32. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 25.

33. On the realist aesthetic and the rational actor, see Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 216–18.

34. See Harold and DeLuca, 271. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 145–47. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2001.

35. This builds on Charles Morris and John Sloop's analysis of queer public kissing as a kind of visual display that potentially traffics different affects. Charles E. Morris and John M. Sloop, “What Lips These Lips Have Kissed”: Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing,” Communication and Critical/Communication Studies 3 (2006): 1–26.

36. Rachel Hall, Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 6–7.

37. Oliver, 7.

38. Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 194.

39. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric's Future,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 320–21.

40. Harold and DeLuca, 271.

41. Harold and DeLuca, 272–75.

42. Taylor, 265.

43. Phaedra C. Pezzullo has powerfully illustrated how participant observation enables critics to “witness and record discourses that are left out of written records,” including emergent and ephemeral experiences, sounds, and smells. See Pezzullo, “Resisting,” 350.

44. Lester C. Olson, “Audre Lorde's Embodied Invention,” in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2009), 93.

45. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 30–34.

46. Anne Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.

47. Although outside of the scope of this essay, my methodological move is animated by work that explores the rhetorical effectivities/affectivities that emerge in the interaction between researcher bodies and archival material. For a rhetorical perspective that details how this move is critical for transgender archives, see K. J. Rawson, “Accessing Transgender//Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics,” Archivaria 68 (2009): 123–40.

48. Frederick Lawrence, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3. Although Lawrence does not engage a discussion of disgust in relation to bias crime laws, he does articulate how defining what counts as a bias crime is contingent upon a particular motive or intent.

49. Dan M. Kahan, “The Progressive Appropriation of Disgust,” in The Passions of the Law, ed. Susan A. Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 71.

50. Deborah Gould, “On Affect and Protest,” in Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010), 27. Although vernacular disgust would help to better understand how the emotion operates affectively in everyday life, such a perspective is outside of the bounds of this essay.

51. Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 21. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 139.

52. Deborah Gould draws from the work of Brian Massumi to explain how language is a failed though productive attempt to “capture” the intensity of affective states. Naming emotions involves the struggle to articulate non-cognitive into a shared vocabulary intelligible to language. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Gould, 27.

53. Steve Whitson and John Poulakos. “Nieztsche and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 11–45. Ronald Walter Greene, “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical Perspective on Argumentation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1998): 19–29. Ariella Azoulay, “Getting Rid of the Distinction Between the Aesthetic and the Political,” Theory, Culture, and Society 27 (2010): 239–62.

54. Martha C. Nussbaum, “'Secret Sewers of Vice’: Disgust, Bodies, and the Law,” in The Passions of Law, ed. Susan A. Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 52.

55. Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law,(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 20.

56. Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki, “The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 484–85.

57. Kahan, 63. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 235.

58. Kahan, 71.

59. Monte Whaley, “Zapata: Gender Issues to Define Trial,” Denver Post, April 12, 2009, http://www.denverpost.com/ci_12124940?IADID=Search-www.denverpost.com-www.denverpost.com.

60. Whaley, “Gender Issues.”

61. Bettcher, 47. Other iterations might be queer or gay panic, which mobilize similar feelings of heteronormative disgust. The gay panic or trans panic defense blames the victim of assault and/or murder for actions that call the perpetrators consolidated perceived hetero location into question.

62. Bettcher, 48.

63. Bettcher, 48.

64. Bettcher describes the use of “deception” defenses used by those who murdered Araujo. For details related to Teena, see Sloop, 57.

65. Jeffrey Wolf, “Defense: Andrade did kill transgender teenager,” 9News, April 15, 2009, http://www.9news.com/money/story.aspx?storyid=113868.

66. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 130.

67. Isaac West, “Debbie Mayne's Trans/scripts: Performative Repertoires in Law and Everyday Life,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 247.

68. McKerrow, 315.

69. For a discussion of state bureaucracy and its relation to identity documents such as birth certificates, driver's licenses, and passports, see Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body, 171–93.

70. I take this cue from Andrea Noble.

71. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 85–86.

72. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 5. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Visual Tropes and Late-Modern Emotion in US Public Culture,” Poroi 5 (2008): 48. http://ir.uiowa.edu/poroi/vol5/iss2/2. Zelizer, 2–6. Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope, ed. Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), 2008.

73. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 9. Cara Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 36. For more on snap shots see Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 62. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Harvard University Press, 1997). Sarah Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Sarah Kennel, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (Princeton University Press, 2007).

74. Jill Walker, “Mirrors and Shadows: The Digital Aestheticisation of Oneself,” in The Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture, 184–90, https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/1956/1136/1/mirrorsandshadows-final.pdf. Ori Schwartz, “On Friendship, Boobs, and the Logic of the Catalogue: Online Self-Portraits as a Means for the Exchange of Capital,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 16 (2010): 164. Although Schwartz is critical of the usage of digital self-portraits on specific online platforms, this essay traces the meaning of their civic appropriations.

75. T. Benjamin Singer, “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-Normative Body Images,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 610.

76. Singer, 602.

77. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 130. Emphasis mine.

78. Singer, 602.

79. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 131.

80. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 33.

81. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 44.

82. Dean Spade, “Documenting Gender,” Hastings Law Journal (2007–2008): 731–842.

83. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 94.

84. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 289.

85. Monte Whaley, “Friends Stand Up for Angie's Life,” The Denver Post, August 7, 2008, http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_10120018.

86. Whaley, “Friends Stand Up for Angie's Life.”

87. Ernest Luning, “Prosecutor: Accused Zapata Killer Didn't ‘Snap’ at Transgender ‘deception,’ Colorado Independent, April 17, 2009, http://coloradoindependent.com/26875/prosecutor-accused-zapata-killer-didnt-%E2%80%98snap%E2%80%99-at-transgender-%E2%80%98deception%E2%80%99.

88. Luning, “Prosecutor.”

89. Butler, 16.

90. Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Act of 2009, S.909, 111^th Cong. (2009).

91. Criminal Law and Procedure, Session laws of Colorado 2005, http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/olls/sl2005a/sl_321.htm. See “Colorado Transgender Legal History,” Transgender Legal History, http://www.translegalhistory.info/legalhistory/CO/index.html.

92. “H.R. 1913 Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009,” Open Coungress, http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h1913/show. “Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) What You Need to Know,” Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/combating_hate/What-you-need-to-know-about-HCPA.pdf.

93. Lori A. Saffin, “Identities Under Siege: Violence Against Transpersons of Color,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011), 156–7.

94. Noble, 72.

95. Isaac West, “Performing Resistance in/from the Kitchen: The Practice of Maternal Pacifist Politics and La WISP's Cookbooks,” Women's Studies in Communication 30 (2007): 358–83. Diana Taylor, “Performing Motherhood: The Madres De La Plaza De Mayo,” in The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right, ed. Annelise Orleck, Alexis Jetter, and Diana Taylor (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 182–96. For a specifically rural account of familial kinship, see Mary Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

96. Butler, 22. Cited in Noble, 74.

97. “Emotional pedagogies” is developed by Gould, Moving Politics, 28.

98. In addition to a Facebook campaign, “Light a Candle for Angie Zapata,” mourners were able to produce memories or submit photographs at the digital memorial site, “Angie Zapata Tribute,” http://www.respectance.com/angie_zapata/memorial/index/page/11/. The twitter user @justiceforangie maintained a presence during the trial.

99. “Voices from the Angie Zapata Family Vigil (April 14, 2009),” YouTube Video, 7:19, posted by “autumn59,”April 15, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjQuf0m4Qag&feature=related.

100. Ariella Azoulay, “The Ethic of the Spectator,” 44.—this is not referenced earlier, if this is correct it needs properly noted—see earlier suggestion re. adding a note.

101. “Voices from the Zapata Vigil.”

102. “Voices from the Zapata Vigil.”

103. “Voices from the Zapata Vigil.” It is difficult to distinguish between what might be the word “Greeley” and “grieving” in this person's narrative.

104. Butler, 26.

105. Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges,” 10. For more on the discourse of anti-trans violence and policing, see Valentine, Imagining, 205.

106. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 14.

107. Taylor, Dissappearing Acts, 25.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

E. Cram

E. Cram is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the 2011 National Communication Association Convention in New Orleans and was awarded Top Paper in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Communication Studies Division. I sincerely thank John Louis Lucaites, Raymie McKerrow, the anonymous reviewers, Isaac West, and Bryan Thomas Walsh for their provocative engagement, critiques, and support in developing this project. This essay is better because of our exchanges