“She of the Pants and No Voice”

Abstract

Abstract This essay turns to two familiar figures in the transgender archive—Lou Sullivan and Jack Bee Garland—to think about the potentials of trans/crip conjunctions. The author offers a recuperative reading of Sullivan's biography of Garland, From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland, as not an impaired (but useful) work of historical recovery but an aesthetic object marked indelibly by Garland's cripped transmasculinity. More specifically, it attends to a period during which Garland used the “disability con” as a technology that scrambled the codes of gender, race, and class and, in so doing, allowed them to live—briefly in life, but indefinitely in the archive—a publicly nonbinary life. Garland's narrative, therefore, offers a compelling model of trans agency and authority that leans into, rather than flees from, the potentially disqualifying lumping together of disability/transgender.