Judith Butler’s cover girl
An ambiguous child on the cover of “Gender Trouble” helped launch the ‘gender revolution’
A book of feminist theory in 1990 argued that ‘gender’ was only a performance. The text was a lot of academic jargon, but a cover photo seemed to make it all make sense.
That’s how readers have read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble for three decades: as a hazy set of teachings about gender and “performativity”—explained by a 19th century portrait of two kids.
Readers wondered: Is that a girl or a boy?
The photo seemed to demonstrate that gender wasn’t just a modern problem.
Here seemed to be proof that ‘male’ and ‘female’ were always unstable categories, and in the end, perhaps, just a style, or a ‘performance’.
In a 2010 paper, the scholar Fiona Jenkins writes of repeatedly flipping back to the photo. The child on the left, she writes, seemed to “correlate with what I took the text to say.”
Jenkins writes of trying to ‘read’ the photo:
“The front cover of the edition I read shows in grainy black-and-white a girl and a boy, aged about seven or eight, but the boy is in girls’ clothing — a dress and ruffled pinafore matching those of the slighter taller girl next to him. At least, I took him to be a boy. It looked to me like a boy’s face.”
The original edition of the book had some biographical information about the children.
The back cover informed:
“The jacket photo, ‘Agnes and Inez Albright,’ first appeared on the cover of SINISTER WISDOM, №21. (courtesy of Catherine Nicholson)”
As the book became a phenomenon, this information would disappear from later editions. It is not found on currently-available copies. But a disclosure about physical sex was made: the child on the left was a girl.
As the photo caption disappeared, so to did the knowledge of the child on the left being female. In that, I suppose, the meaning of Gender Trouble changed between editions. Gender became even more mysterious.
Fiona Jenkins saw that the child was a girl, and yet kept thinking about this person’s sex.
The question nagged: Was this boy-appearing child really a girl? She writes in conceptual crisis:
“Are these, then, really two girls — one of whom looks like a boy — or does the boy not only wear girls’ clothes but bear a girl’s name? And why did it bother me that I neither knew the answer nor found it easy to square my experience of the image with what Butler seems to argue in this work?”
She wondered why she even thought of the child’s sex.
Why impose a sexual binary? She writes:
“Was it my own implacable conservatism that was revealed in the recurrent either/or that seemed to me posed by the picture? Was I seized by homophobic norms? Why the depth of my evident attachment to the frame of gender reference that forced the either/or: either a boy with a girl’s clothes and name or a girl with a boy’s face?”
But I have a different reading. The book used a vintage photo to suggest an idea that the people who produced the book knew was untrue. This ‘boy in a dress’ had been a moment’s illusion, not historical evidence of confusion in gender role in children.
I go in search of more information about the Albright sisters.
The photo credit pointed to the Fall 1982 issue of Sinister Wisdom, which was a lesbian feminist journal published out of Berkeley, California. The photo had been used on the cover.
I find the issue. A photo credit there had a bit more information:
“two sisters: Agnes and Inez; Alamance County, North Carolina, circa 1895; family collection of Catherine Nicholson”
Was this a family photo of the journal’s lesbian founder, Catherine Nicholson?
Nicholson died in 2012. She was from North Carolina, like the Albright sisters, though as I look over their genealogical references, I don’t notice any connections with the Albright family.
I find that local newspapers in North Carolina had documented the lives of sisters Agnes Mae Albright, born on August 21, 1888, and Inez Gladys Albright, born on January 8, 1891.
As the sister on the left seems younger, I’m thinking the ‘boy’-appearing child was Inez. That the credits were reversed suggests that Catherine Nicholson didn’t know them.
And yet Nicholson must’ve known that both girls became conservative Christian women not at all marked by gender dysphoria.
Inez married in 1917 and had three kids.
Her sister Agnes became quite a tart-tongued Republican, often writing letters to the editor, but Inez seems to have lived quietly. Long a resident of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, her husband died in 1942. She re-married in 1949, to become Inez A. Haymore.
That event was covered by the newspaper, which featured a photo of her at age 58. The officiant was noted to be her pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Rocky Mount. The long description of her accessories seems like a testimony to her tastes being on the more decorous side of feminine.
“For her marriage the bride wore a navy blue gabardine dressmaker suit, with which she wore a dusty rose blouse and a navy blue off-the-face hat, trimmed with blue net dotted with rose sequins and a small matching feather.”
When dying on October 26, 1976, Inez Haymore had 11 grandchildren. They might still be unaware of their grandmother having become the poster girl of gender ambiguity. 🔶
