Reading Against the Frame: Photomontage and Trans Aesthetics in the Russian Avant-Garde

abstract: As the visibility of transgender identity has increased in recent years, popular discourse has tended to cast trans existence as radical, experimental, and new. This essay counters that trend with a provocation: what it might mean to locate models for trans phenomenology in works of the past, particularly those that espouse a revolutionary approach to both media and politics? The article posits the hybrid verbal-visual art forms of modernism in general, and early Soviet photo-montage works like Mayakovsky and Rodchenko’s Pro Eto in particular, as aesthetic constructions that render otherwise “impossible” forms of trans embodiment concrete and conceivable.