How to Read Dr Betty Paërl's Whip

Intersectional Visions of Trans/Gender, Sex Worker and Decolonial Activism in the Archive

Bibliographic Data

ID3946142
AuthorsWigbertson Julian Isenia (0000-0002-0461-8284, corresponding author), Eliza Steinbock (0000-0001-5531-7142)
Year2022
Volume132
Issue1
Pages24-45
Publication date2022-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01417789221137045
OpenAlexW4311731855
LanguageEN
References cited19

In this article, the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives. The white mathematics professor was located in IHLIA LGBT+ Heritage, the largest queer heritage collection in Europe, as a notable SM sexpert and spokesperson on transgender politics, and also found during archival research into the anti-(neo)colonial struggles of Suriname against the Dutch. Upon closer inspection of the materials, the authors find the recurrent image/item of the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr Paërl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being 'in the shadow of the whip'. The article aims to combine an analysis of these versions of the whip in different visual and discursive registers to detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms. To do so, the authors develop the intersectional model of the kaleidoscope employed by Dutch Black, migrant and refugee (BMR) feminist theorists to grasp the shifting patterns of power that Paërl battled and embodied as an activist of the anticolonial struggle, for sex workers' rights, for kinky sex and for transgender people. This is all the more important in the historical study of transgender visual materials that most often arrive in archives via medical and police photography or pornographic materials. The historical researcher, the article argues, should be wary of (re)producing a static vision that would reduce transgender figures to sex and gender politics, or eclipse a vision of trans politics that dilates beyond sexuality

Intersectionality · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Shadow (psychology · Sociology · Transgender · Vision · Whip (tree · African history and culture studies · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · South African History and Culture