Frank Sinatra sang, ‘What is a man? What has he got?” The conventions and meanings of masculinity have been under increasing scrutiny in recent years, in the wake of feminism and the struggle for gay and lesbian equality. The male/female binary is at the core of how we view ourselves, and yet it seems increasingly unstable.
Robert Hamblin is a transman. He used to be a woman (and a lesbian) and is now a man — has always, as far as he is concerned, been a man. Only now, with the help of hormones, is he fulfilling that destiny. Biology used to be destiny, until that notion was comprehensively challenged, and it is open to question whether Hamblin’s story further undermines that belief or somehow reinforces it.
What is noteworthy about Hamblin is that he is an artist who, in parallel with his journey of transition between the official genders, has created a series of artworks that explore that process. He has two short films showing on the Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, The Boet and A Father. These are two of five short films Hamblin has made, and grow out of a career in photography, the medium in which he began to find images for his inner, evolving dynamic on the road to becoming a transman.
The lush, gorgeous photographs in series from several years ago construct composite images of imaginary spaces Hamblin calls ‘the binary farm” and ‘the blue room” or ‘inner room”, a space in which naked Adam and Eve figures are juxtaposed with stern, suited authorities whose eyes are masked by golden blindfolds.
Growing up in an Afrikaans environment, Hamblin says, ‘I was always drawn to cameras. I had romantic fantasies about being a photographer in a war zone — very masculine fantasies, an idealised macho thing.” The then Adele Hamblin began taking and selling photographs at school, and later started working at various newspapers as a ‘dark room girl” and then, as an adult, as a news photographer.
The late Barry Hough was working at Beeld when Hamblin joined that paper, and he took Adele to the theatre and encouraged Adele to mount an exhibition of portraits of actors, which was a success. At 21, Hamblin went freelance, working for magazines and later making art photographs.
It was round then, he says, that he ‘started having issues with my identity. I had no issues with being a lesbian, but it never stuck. I always knew what I wasn’t, but not what I was.” Living in the United States for a time, Hamblin discovered the website of transman Loren Cameron, ‘the most beautiful being, so open and free. I discovered a lot of successful transmen — doctors, professors, artists. The light just went on — I decided, that’s me.”
Or, as he puts it more poetically, ‘I was living in a flat with a lot of mirrors and there was this guy in the mirror who wouldn’t let me go.”
The first film, he says, started as more of a slide show than a film proper. His then girlfriend helped him put together a series of still photographs combined with the text of a ‘distilled poem” Hamblin had written. This early film, Hair, shows Hamblin removing a generous head of hair and emerging shaven and laughing — a butch lesbian if ever you saw one. But My Boet complicates the negotiation with the inner butch dyke, while A Father deals with Hamblin’s father (‘a real moffie”) and another short film, Grandfather, using family photographs of Hamblin’s grandfather alongside his own, asks questions about masculinity and its often coercive relations with femininity.
For Hamblin, the self-examination of the films are something of the past already, and the older series of photographs even more so. ‘I don’t know if I want to make any more films,” he says. ‘I’m in a completely different space now. I made them before I started my hormone treatment — your head changes a lot. Since then I’ve lost a lot of interest in myself and it’s like heaven. The last time I felt so connected to my world was before puberty.”
Yet the works are way stations on a journey, and they continue to raise interesting questions about gender and sexuality. ‘It was all in my head. I was trying to work it out,” he says of the Binary Farm photographs. During the time Hamblin had to live as a man without the help of hormones, he says, ‘it was bloody torture. I felt like I constantly had to prove myself. But it was useful for me as an artist because you are constantly examining your life anyway and people’s responses to you.”
For transwomen, transitioning can be very hard, not least because they are joining a group all too frequently treated like second-class citizens. For a transman, on the other hand, says Hamblin, ‘once you’re on the hormones, six weeks and nobody mistakes you for a girl any more.”
Hamblin is involved with the NGO Gender DynamiX, which gathers and supports transgendered and transsexual people and helps them in their battles with a staid medical-psychiatric establishment as well as government departments such as home affairs — which is not always eager to abide by the law and adapt identity documents. Hamblin points out that ‘transsexual” is a medical term, and refers to procedures that actually transform the gendered body, while ‘transgendered” can cover a multitude of sexual and gender identities. Part of the trans movement’s work is to articulate the complexities that arise in this realm.
As for Hamblin himself, ‘My life is just going from strength to strength and I’m becoming more and more hooked in and happy. I wish that for everyone who tries to find themselves.”
So what, then, as Sinatra asked, is a man? For a transman, it would at first appear that being a man is the destination of a long, hard journey, but, for Hamblin, ‘It’s not a goal. It’s a departure point. In the spectrum of gender there are two departure points, woman and man, and after that we do with it what we want.”
Robert Hamblin joins a panel including Jennie Livingstone to discuss transgender issues at 6pm on March 10 at Nu Metro Hyde Park, and at 6pm on March 17 at V&A Waterfront, following a screening of Hamblin’s films and Jennie Livingstone’s Paris is Burning, at the same venue. Hamblin’s photographs can be viewed at roberthamblin.com. See also genderdynamix.org.za