Noelle Derksen

Apophasis and Trans Abstraction

For this project, I propose to write a scholarly essay that examines the entanglements of apophatic studies and trans studies, and explores how these intersections are mobilized within contemporary artistic practices. In dominant cultural imaginaries, transness is often apprehended through visual, morphological, and aesthetic frameworks that privilege legibility, fixity, and recognition. Against this regime of visibility, apophatic traditions—concerned with the articulation of that which exceeds language, representation, and conceptual capture—offer a critical vocabulary for thinking trans ontologies beyond the constraints of the seen and the sayable.

Bringing apophatic thought into dialogue with trans studies, this essay argues that both fields share a constitutive engagement with absence, opacity, and the limits of epistemological access. Rather than treating transness as an object to be rendered visible or fully known, I wonder: what forms of representation emerge when transness is approached through negation, abstraction, and refusal? What does it mean to represent, express, or interrogate trans experience in the absence of the gender-diverse corporeal body, particularly within a cultural context that demands its constant exposure and verification?

To address these questions, I turn to methodologies of queer abstraction as sites of both aesthetic experimentation and political intervention. Focusing on the work of multidisciplinary artist P. Staff, whose practice spans video, installation, and photography, I trace the disruptive and liberatory potential of their trans abstraction. Staff’s work resists the capture of trans subjectivity within normative visual regimes, instead using absence, fragmentation, and indeterminacy as generative strategies. Through these tactics, trans abstraction destabilizes hegemonic architectures of surveillance, naming, and visual essentialism, while opening space for alternative modes of embodiment and relationality that cannot be easily codified.

In particular, I analyze Staff’s photogram series Knife, Scalpel, Blade (2022), which presents spectral impressions of cutting instruments. These images evoke both the material histories of surgical intervention and the symbolic violences associated with the regulation of trans bodies, while refusing to resolve into a coherent narrative of transformation or harm. By foregrounding trace, outline, and negative space, the series stages a confrontation with the limits of visual form and the desire for representational certainty.

Through this case study, I map how trans abstraction operates as an apophatic aesthetic practice—one that does not simply negate representation, but reconfigures its conditions of possibility. In doing so, the essay contributes to ongoing conversations in trans studies, queer theory, and visual culture by proposing abstraction not as a withdrawal from politics, but as a critical mode of engaging the violences of visibility and the demands of legibility.