Capturing Identity

In this sin­gle-episode pod­cast, we speak to Alexa Udell about her project “Trans-Pho­tog­ra­phy: Gen­der Eupho­ria and Expres­sion Through Por­trai­ture.” Her project, fund­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut Office of Under­grad­u­ate Research, seeks to cap­ture trans­gen­der por­traits through a gen­der-affir­ma­tive lens. We also talked to one of her sub­jects, Remy Dupuis, who used Udel­l’s project to aid in their own cre­ative endeavor. 

Learn more:

UConn Student’s Trans Pho­tog­ra­phy Project Has One Sim­ple Goal – To Affirm

Gen­der Affir­ma­tion: A Frame­work for Con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing Risk Behav­ior among Trans­gen­der Women of Color

Pro­mos:

Check out Alex­a’s pho­tos of Remy Dupuis: 

Music:

Charged Up by Ketsa 

Clip:

Best Scenes of Call Me By Your Name

Tran­scrip­tion:

[MUSIC]

Ali­cia Gomez

Hi, my name is Ali­cia Gomez, and I’m a stu­dent jour­nal­ist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut. Today, I’m going to be telling you about a stu­dent who seeks to ampli­fy the trans expe­ri­ence through her pho­tog­ra­phy. Wel­come to Cap­tur­ing Identity.

Ali­cia 

Alexa Udell is a Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut senior who seeks to give trans­gen­der peo­ple the oppor­tu­ni­ty to see them­selves through a gen­der-affirm­ing lens through photographs. 

Alexa Udell

The project for the idea grant can be either aca­d­e­m­ic research or they can be like a cre­ative project. So for me, that’s tak­ing the form of a series of pho­tog­ra­phy por­traits of trans­gen­der peo­ple and the pur­pose of that is to try and incor­po­rate a col­lab­o­ra­tive por­trai­ture inter­view method that allows for peo­ple to real­ly be active agents in their por­traits and to be able to depict them­selves and work to make sure that they rep­re­sent­ed it in a way that’s affirm­ing to them and that feels real­ly true to what their iden­ti­ty is.

Ali­cia

 Alex­a’s project can con­sti­tute a non-med­ical cre­ative, acces­si­ble form of gen­der-affirm­ing care, but what is gen­der affir­ma­tion? The Nation­al Cen­ter of Biotech­nol­o­gy Infor­ma­tion says gen­der affir­ma­tion is an inter­per­son­al inter­ac­tive process where­by a per­son receives social recog­ni­tion and sup­port for their gen­der iden­ti­ty and expres­sion. This can be as sim­ple as being called the cor­rect pro­nouns or pho­tographed in the lens in which you see your­self. Alexa uses an inter­view process to allow sub­jects to take con­trol of their own gen­der expression. 

Alexa

So in addi­tion to giv­ing the sub­ject of the por­trait more of a sense of con­trol, the impor­tance of the inter­view is to kind of get to know more about them because one of the oth­er aims of my project was to show off the diver­si­ty of iden­ti­ties with­in the queer community.

Alexa

So just because some­one uses a cer­tain set of pro­nouns does­n’t mean that they iden­ti­fy with a par­tic­u­lar label, or just because some­one dress­es a cer­tain way or express­es a cer­tain way. Like all of those three things are three inde­pen­dent fac­tors. So for exam­ple, a very obvi­ous exam­ple is that peo­ple who use they, them pro­nouns could iden­ti­fy with a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent gen­der iden­ti­ty labels. So through the inter­view process, I’m able to get a lit­tle bit more infor­ma­tion about that. But then anoth­er part that I’m able to get more infor­ma­tion about that’s espe­cial­ly per­ti­nent to pho­tog­ra­phy is how they wish to express them­selves and how they feel very affirmed. So dur­ing the inter­view, for exam­ple, I’ll ask ques­tions about like, what is your name, your pro­nouns, how would you self-describe your gen­der? But then also like, what feels affirm­ing to you, like you like more mas­cu­line or more fem­i­nine or more androg­y­nous pos­es, as well as kind of what are sta­ples of their per­son­al­i­ty? Because for a lot of peo­ple, the way that they express their gen­der, like their gen­der expres­sion, which can go a lot kind of into like aes­thet­ic or like, you know, dress­ing a cer­tain way is real­ly rel­e­vant to their gen­der iden­ti­ty because the expres­sion, their gen­der expres­sion is aid­ed through the aes­thet­ics that they have. 

Alexa

This project is per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant to Alexa because of her own iden­ti­ty. Some­thing her sub­ject says makes them com­fort­able as well. So for me, what inspired me to do this project was as some­one who’s trans myself, I came out in the sum­mer before my junior year of col­lege. And for me, one part of that jour­ney, and I’ve always been very expres­sive as an indi­vid­ual, I’ve always real­ly liked to acces­sorize and to dress up and stuff like that. And a big part of tran­si­tion­ing for me was learn­ing how to do that in a way that was affirm­ing to my gen­der expres­sion and made me feel good. So I fig­ured that when I real­ized that I could apply for the idea grant for fund­ing for a cre­ative project, my first thought was that I would be able to use that oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring that feel­ing of eupho­ria to oth­er peo­ple in my com­mu­ni­ty as well. 

Ali­cia 

One of these sub­jects was Remy Dupuy. Remy’s a pho­tog­ra­ph­er them­self and was able to col­lab­o­rate with Alexa to put their own cre­ative spin on the project.

Remy Dupuis

I brought a book which I love read­ing. I brought my gui­tar art. I brought a peach which kind of felt like a fit the sum­mer thing and the pho­to shoot was based off of the book/movie Call Me By Your Name. And it was cen­tered a lot around my queer iden­ti­ty, so I wore more gen­der-affirm­ing clothes and stuff like that.

[CLIP FROM ‘Call Me By Your Name”]

I like the way you say things. I don’t know why you’re always putting your­self down though. 

So you won’t, I guess?

Are you real­ly that afraid of what I think? 

Ali­cia

Remy was able to use the pic­tures in their own cre­ative process, a project that was inspired by the movie, Call Me By Your Name. It fea­tured their favorite quotes, and they dis­played it at two gal­leries in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut Rain­bow Cen­ter and at a pop-up art gallery in Mansfield. 

Remy

My main way of express­ing myself isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly so much through soci­ety as it is my art. I have my own YouTube chan­nel. And I’m a very cre­ative per­son. I have my own port­fo­lio and a lot of that is real­ly where my queer iden­ti­ty is kind of dis­played. And so being able to take Alex­a’s pho­tos and put my own cre­ative spin on it for my own expres­sion was prob­a­bly the most gen­der-affirm­ing part of the process. 

Ali­cia

It was­n’t only Alex­a’s iden­ti­ty that made Remy com­fort­able, but it was also the process in which Alexa took photos. 

Remy

I brought my gui­tar and we just kind of went with what­ev­er loca­tions matched. It was sup­posed to be set in sum­mer to like what­ev­er matched like the sum­mer feel­ing of New Eng­land. And we kind of just walked around, and it would be, oh, does this spot look good? Yeah, this spot looks good. And we would stop and find like which pho­to idea we thought would fit best for that area and like choose a dif­fer­ent cou­ple pos­es and like go through a dif­fer­ent cou­ple options so that there was a vari­ety of things to work with. And so we, some of the, it was most­ly improv’d.

when some­thing felt right, we stopped and took photos. 

Ali­cia 

This process has been reward­ing to Alexa because she’s been able to help peo­ple cre­ate their own stories. 

Alexa

I think one thing that I will remem­ber is like, it’s just, I mean, every­thing is its own lit­tle jour­ney. Like as part of it, you real­ly get to know, like your sub­ject, like as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, I feel like there’s all, obvi­ous­ly, there’s like ran­dom pho­to shoots, like if I do head­shots for some­body, I won’t get to know them as much as I will on a project like this. So because it’s such an involved thing where I’m inter­view­ing them, talk­ing to them about like what makes them feel, you know, affirmed, like what their iden­ti­ty is, like the back­ground of that, it’s real­ly mean­ing­ful when we’re able to actu­al­ly like exe­cute the pho­to shoot. 

Ali­cia 

Thank you so much for lis­ten­ing to Cap­tur­ing Iden­ti­ty. I real­ly hope you enjoyed this pod­cast. You can learn more about Alexa Udell and her project on the web­page for this episode, and you can find the tran­scrip­tion for this episode there as well.

[MUSIC]