Dr Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell
Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2024 - June 2025
Home institution: University of Cambridge
Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell is a researcher, writer and artist. They completed their PhD in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2024, with a thesis on British trans cultural production and trans theory in the 1990s. Their PhD combined historical and theoretical approaches to demarcate this as a period of radical practice and epistemic change, and to argue that the difficulty of thinking trans in the present originates with the political horizons of the 1990s. Informed by their creative work, Evelyn’s research attempts to develop strategies of trans theorising and practice that challenge the foreclosure of gender transition as material reality.
Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in British Art Studies, world picture journal, Art Monthly, and Cambridge Literary Review, amongst others. Evelyn is also the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, a work of experimental fiction published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing. Their work has been shown, performed, read at TACO!, Kaunas Artists’ House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project and Kingsgate Project Space.
Project title: Cracking The Queer Egg, Or, A Short History of Trans British Art in the 1990s
Despite recent institutional interest in ‘Queer British Art,’ there is no equivalent survey of art made by, or reflecting on, trans identities. This project addresses this lack, documenting trans artists and theorists working in 1990s Britain whilst interrogating the disciplinary difficulties in thinking trans as a historical and contemporary category. In particular, it argues that the difficulty of thinking trans originates in early queer theory, which relied upon (racialised) figurations of transsexuality to constitute queer as a political subjectivity and aesthetic practice, and that these figurations foreclosed upon gender transition as a material reality. This project also includes a materialist analysis of the digital to consider foreclosure as inherent to trans’s development under Web 1.0, where theories of virtuality produced (white) gendered identity as a privatised plastic entity separable from material conditions. Against foreclosure, this project draws on archival and creative methods to provide a history of trans cultural and theoretical production in the UK, with the aim of using these historical trans realities to ‘crack’ queer studies’ investment in denying the possibility of gendered change.