Wrongly Bodied: Documenting Transition from Female to Male, Clarissa Sligh, Clarissa Sligh, May 2009, paperback (ISBN 978-1-60743-932-5)
160 pages, 7 ¾ x 5 inches, 75 black and white photographs
List price $29.95, Books may be ordered from the author at csligh.art@gmail.com.
About the Book
In emblematic photos and texts, Clarissa Sligh chronicles a transsexual experience that also transforms the artist’s own sense of self. With a rare gift for empathy Wrongly Bodied narrates a female to male transition that acquires even greater poignancy when contextualized alongside reflections on cross-dressing and racial passing as necessary strategies for survival. Juxtaposed with an epic narrative of African-American self-fashioning, the textured portraits of Jake, his partners, and support group bring sharply into view the uses of embodiment in the quest for freedom and fulfillment.
- Israel Burshatin, Levin Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Haverford College, Haverford, PA.With Wrongly Bodied, Clarissa Sligh thoughtfully examines this culture’s greatest persistent taboos-gender, race, and identity. Highly personal, unflinchingly honest, and thoroughly evocative, the journey Sligh embarks upon with her most unlikely subject is a photographic treatise on the complexity of our shared humanity, and in the artist’s deft hands the reader will find her or himself compelled along for this extraordinary ride. Throughout, Sligh creatively melds historic heroism with contemporary chutzpah, likening external enslavement with internal entrapment, all of it woven together by the fearless, singular vision of the artist as observer, participant, historian, skeptic, and sympathizer. In an era of teenaged transgendered persons detailing their transitions on YouTube with nary a batted eye, Wrongly Bodied is a long overdue critical and artistic investigation of self-determination, free will, identity politics, and defining the role of the artist.
- Carla Williams is currently the editor of exposure, the Journal of the Society of Photographic Education and is co-author of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History with Deborah Willis, published by Temple University Press (2002). Williams resides in San Francisco, CA.
About The Author
One’s life sometimes collides with moments in history, causing it to be altered dramatically by external change. Certainly this was so for Clarissa Thompson Sligh. When she was 15 years old she became the lead plaintiff in the 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia (Clarissa Thompson et. al. vs. Arlington County School Board). From that moment forward, her work as a student and as a professional – first in math/science working for NASA, later in business, and finally, in the arts – has taken into account change, transformation, and complication: themes that related to her experiences fostering social justice.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Sligh wove together the personal and the political in text-based installations, alternative photographic processes and artists’ books to open up conversations on contestable themes. Her books include Reading Dick and Jane With Me and What’s Happening With Momma? A recipient of awards including New York Foundation for the Arts (2005), Anonymous Was a Woman (2001), the Annual Infinity Award of the International Center of Photography (1995), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1988), Sligh’s images are in the collection of The International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additional information about Clarissa Sligh may be found at www.clarissasligh.com.
Publisher
Clarissa Sligh with the support of the Leeway Foundation (www.leeway.org).
