[Digital Poetics 4.7] A Fragment on Kurt Cobain’s Transgender Ideas from ‘In Utero’ by Francis Whorrall-Campbell
Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage
EPISODE ONE
HOME – INTERIOR
Kurt Cobain stood by the bedroom window of his Seattle mansion. He looked out over the park and Lake Washington. It was very beautiful. Kurt sighed. Beautiful things always made him sad somehow. Maybe because he felt apart from them. Kurt turned away from the balcony and went back inside the room instead.
The new Sony hi-fi was playing from a low sideboard on the opposite side of the room. Kurt liked to listen to songs over and over again to see how they were made. For the last hour it had been This Boy by the Beatles on repeat. Lennon and McCartney’s warm harmonies soothed Kurt, polishing his mind. Smooth brain; no thoughts.
He usually only felt this way when he was high. Could you get addicted to music? If anyone could, Kurt was sure he could. He was already feeling the familiar dullness that preceded the restless need for a new rush. The song’s depth was becoming thin, like velvet rubbed down after too much wear.
Kurt wanted to feel velvet around his body. He imagined a gown, with huge flowing sleeves and a mermaid skirt. He wanted to feel the way the fabric skimmed his narrow hips, how the weight draped from his shoulders and swished around his ankles. Instead, Kurt lay down on the bed. Smooth brain. No thoughts; just vibes.
VIBES
On January 23rd 2022, twitter user @MagsVisaggs wrote the following tweet:
‘Kurt Cobain was a trans girl.
she is ours now.
we will not be returning her.’
The origin of the ‘Kurt Cobain was trans’ rumour is unclear. There is a post on the r/Nirvana reddit thread from six years earlier by a member called ‘PositiveStonedCreep’ which attempts to find references to gender dysphoria in the 1993 album In Utero. While most people on twitter attach photos or videos of Kurt Cobain wearing women’s clothing during interviews and performances, ‘Kurt Cobain’s Transgender Ideas from In Utero’ performs a close reading of song lyrics and vocal arrangements to make its case.
Speaking in 2002 of the ‘archival turn’ in the humanities, visual resources documentarian Cheryl Simon identified ‘the emergence of an evidentiary aesthetic in the information age’. This line was subsequently quoted by Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah in their ‘General Editors’ Introduction’ to the November 2015 special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (‘Archives and Archiving’). Though they do not explicitly say it, visual proof appears as one of the central gatekeepers of the transgender archive.
But how do we actually know that someone is trans? Without medical transition, we don’t look or sound different from anyone else. Perhaps we can say that we read it in the ‘grammar’ of the person. Which is maybe a more academic way of saying, it’s just vibes.
In the blog post ‘Is a Vibe the Same Thing as a Style?’, philosopher and music scholar Robin James argues that vibes are ‘alignments’ or ‘orientations’ that amplify and quieten the perceptual contents of different objects. This definition can be contrasted to ideas of ‘style’ which emerged in the early twentieth century. The art historian Heinrich Wölflinn wrote of style as an expression of the inherent character of an age or a person, a quality which can be isolated and deciphered through careful formal analysis. A vibe, however, has no such essentialist quality. It is not even a quality, but a method of perception dressed up as description. James approaches the current manifestation of ‘vibe’ as an overspill of Web 2.0 into the ‘real world’: ‘vibes are vernacular versions of the methods algorithms use to perceive the world. Vibes are how we perceive ourselves the way algorithms perceive us.’
Data analysis replaces formal analysis. Multiple inputs are swept and amalgamated, as the machine works through a process of aggregation. This cloud of information is subjectively selected, with the identifier of the vibe becoming the main determinant of its content. A vibe is a feeling an object has to us. If vibes are the result of a real-world algorithm, then instead of a mathematical equation, our subjectivity becomes the filter.
As with most trending internet-speak, the word vibe originates in Black music and youth culture. As Twitter user and sound studies doctoral student @AmbreLynae put it in a tweet from August 2021: ‘When Black people use the word “vibe” we usually talkin bout kickin back with our friends in a cool place. When [whites] use the word “vibe” they finna gentrify a community.’
The widespread usage of ‘vibes’ registers much more than how our subjectivity is being trained on market research. In analysing the gentrification of this phrase, Lynae identifies how culture is transformed into identity through a process of economic development. A community is viewed as capital to be improved; its content displaced while the symbolic form that made it potentially valuable is kept intact. The hollowed-out form (the word ‘vibe’, the boroughs of Brooklyn or Hackney, football scarves etc) becomes an abstraction, recognisable for nothing more than its reputation – like a brand identity or a celebrity, eventually it conjures up nothing except for itself.
During the early 2020s, a genre of videos emerged on tiktok with the format: ‘things that give me trans vibes. ’
‘Transmasc’, ‘transfemme’ or the rainbow flag are often substituted for the generic descriptor depending on the objects chosen. Some videos express that the selection conveys simply ‘Gender Vibes™’. Collapsing ‘gender’ with ‘trans’ is a rhetorical stumble usually seen on the internet performed by friends of J. K. Rowling et al., who insist – despite centuries of grammatical precedent – that they have no pronouns. The use of the trademark symbol, however, denotes that these ‘gender vibes’ are something unique. They are not just gender vibes but Gender Vibes™: a particular and possibly superior variant of the generic category, or at least one with greater cultural investment and brand recognition.
The contemporary use of the word ‘vibes’ both tracks and elides the process by which subjectivities are commoditised and transformed into markets with their own specific and highly prescribed tastes. These tastes might be esoteric, seemingly disconnected, but it is the number of them and their strange precision in conjuring a description of a person – as an individual, as a consumer, as a citizen – that is their power.
Trans scholar Kadji Amin has warned of the rise of micro-identities within queer and trans communities since the 2000s as a kind of internalisation of this algorithmic search for precision. In the essays ‘We Are All Nonbinary’ and ‘Taxonomically Queer’, Amin pushes back on the notion that the proliferation of gendered language and categories represents a move toward liberation. Instead, nonbinary and other new, non-standard gender identities are the logical outcome of the history of Western identity politics, a legacy of sexology and racial science. Microidentities are touted for their supposed utopian promise of a world where nobody’s gender or sexuality will be assumed and, potentially, misregistered; instead, all will be explained within precise and endless language.
‘Trans vibes’ appears a more diffuse description than these microidentities, however, they arise from the same history. Algorithms are an operation used in statistics, a branch of mathematics which emerged from eugenics and race science. However, paying attention to how identity is algorithmically defined shows us that gendered feelings which have proliferated in the new millennium are not primarily scientific or biological but economic: they register markets and sites of extraction. This is true for the broader pre-internet labels also. Race science and sexology were also techniques to produce bodies as raw material for the extraction of value, whether through the justification of the Atlantic slave trade, or the unwaged and gendered labour of social reproduction, and while they were invested with a kind of ontological truth, that truth was a fiction.
Reading microidentities in relation to ‘vies discourse’, its not clear whether those who describe themselves as an asexual demiboy twink, or transfeminine nonbinary dyke, do so with a philosophical earnestness which mirrors the delusions of the original demographers. Speaking about the rise of Spotify, James notes how 'vibes’ have replaced musical genre as a means of categorising music. Leaning on the shared etymology of genre and gender, maybe squishy feelings have replaced hard facts in that arena also. While the rise of a contentless, commodified form of gender is cause for some pearl-clutching, acknowledging feelings doesn’t mean leaving the body behind. Feelings are not just experiences to be labelled, but catalysts for action, shaping how we present, behave, if we take hormones or get surgery – or not. Some feelings can stand in the way of wanting these things, but that’s the thing about feelings, they can always change with time.
UPLOAD ONE
THE PILOT
Edie adjusted her ring light, moved her mouse to the top right of the YouTube window and clicked ‘Go Live.’
She blinked, opened her mouth, and smiled. ‘Hey rats, miss me? Sorry I’ve been gone for a little while, but I have exciting news to share.’
Edie licked her lips, a sign of nervousness, or was she building suspense?
‘I’m gonna start with a voice check as always… Hi my name is Edie, and this is my voice four months on t.
I think it’s dropped a bit since the last stream, but I haven’t watched it back to check. I’ve definitely noticed more facial hair and some more bottom growth as well – hope you can see my ‘tache coming in on camera.’
She leaned toward the lens and turned her face side to side, swiping a forefinger over the thickening fuzz.
‘And …’ Edie sat back in her spinning desk chair, holding her body and the syllable still, 100% for dramatic effect this time. ‘I’ve just got a date for my top surgery consultation!’
Alone in her bedroom, Edie pantomimed excitement for the five others on the stream.
‘I don’t have a date for the surgery itself yet, I’ve got to prove myself to this doctor first, but I’m so stoked you guys.’
Again, she gave a little squeal for the internet.
‘If any of you have tips, things I should ask the surgeon or, like, how to advocate for myself, let me know!’
The chat window remained empty.
‘You’re probably wondering if I’m going to change my pronouns now I’m actually going for the chop, but I’ve decided to keep using she/her, but, like, in a gay way. He/they is so 2030 anyway.
Ok, so updates out of the way, let’s get into the video. I’ve got another historical celeb to trans for yous.’
Edie’s eyes shifted from the lens of her Sony vlogging camera down to her keyboard. With a few clicks of the mouse, she pulled up a new window beside her face on the stream. Inside was a photograph of a person with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair and stubble in a chintzy floral dress, clearly worn over a white t-shirt and jorts.
‘Have you heard of Kurt Cobain? He was in this band Nirvana that was famous before my parents were born, but the 90s are back in a really big way so I’m sure some of yous know who he is. And probably everyone has heard his music. He’s also super famous for un-aliveing himself at 27 – spoiler alert! – but we’ll get to that later.’
Edie enjoyed explaining things to people. Her last boyfriend (unkindly) said he would have thought she was autistic if she wasn’t so hot. Why were so many trans people autistic? Maybe Kurt was too. Edie was just getting started.
EPISODE TWO
KURT’S BRAIN - INTERIOR
Kurt’s obsession with fashion went back a long way. It was part of a more general appreciation of beautiful and material things, which he’d had since he was a child.
Kurt suspected that this early aesthetic education was responsible for the direction of his own tastes. Things were beautiful to him in inverse proportion to their accessibility: a logic which struck him as childish for its fetishisation of impotence. But the 90s were about not growing up. The pages of the music and celebrity magazines that didn’t have Kurt’s face on them were filled with images of manufactured adolescence: teeny bopper twinks dressed in virginal white, A-listers doused with slime in studios resembling kindergartens, and an ageing parade of actors fresh out of high school drag.
He might seem like a kid to an industry obsessed with youth and its prophecies, but he was a grown up with a kid of his own. Even in earlier relationships he’d wanted the house with the picket fence. Tobi Vail used to say it was because of his parents’ divorce; they’d get into screaming arguments about his attachment to what she called the ‘bourgeois and patriarchal trap of success’. Kurt was hurt, but he did agree that he wanted these things as signs that he had made it. Not to the American dream that Vail despised him for, but to some indefinable sense of a future, and this was the only one he could imagine.
Such feelings were deeply unfashionable, and got in the way of the punk recklessness that had first attracted Vail, and which she held at arms’ length, an accessory to complete her image. Not that he minded them not interrogating these desires together. Kurt couldn’t put it more eloquently than this, but it felt both good and bad to dangle from her arm. To be used the way a man might use a beautiful woman. No one had read any Judith Butler yet, so Kurt could only say: Tobi’s riot grrl feminism made him feel like a woman, but it also made him know he wasn’t one. He was part of a group of people who obstructed people like Tobi, who’s desires stood in the way of her liberation. These wants stood for his involvement in patriarchy; women only wanted these things because men wanted them for them.
But Kurt didn’t care, he dreamed of being turned into an image, into an adornment for the grrls, the gyrls, the gworls of the future. He dreamt that his name would become a secret call passed between women in chokers at parties in lofts and warehouses in metropolitan areas of the United States. He dreamt of a teenage starlet gaining fame in a tv show where she wore his dirty bob for an audience too young to remember his music. He dreamt of the expansion of the internet and forums on which users would share photos of him and argue about what he wore and what he said.
He didn’t tell anyone these dreams. Unlike the house and family, these were just for him.
NORMATIVITY
Contemporary trans studies is animated by a fierce debate over ‘normativity’. An older generation of theorists emphasised the radical ‘anti-normativity’ of transition. In her 1987 essay ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto’, Sandy Stone argues that trans people retool and reconfigure the gendered narratives they have been given. She suggests that we ‘constitut[e] transsexuals […] as a genre – a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.’ However, more recent scholars like Grace Lavery and Andrea Long Chu have criticised the afterlife of Stone’s ‘posttransexual’, on the premise that a generic idea of queer refusal – aided by a substitution of the body for language – has evacuated the specific ways in which transition materially adheres bodies to cis standards (and shames trans people who desire ‘normative’ expressions).
Long Chu and Lavery characterise Stone’s posttransexual utopia as a ‘romanticism’ which must be countered by a heavy dose of trans ‘realism’. Where the romantic queer theorist views transition as a (politically and aesthetically) radical mobilisation of uncertain possibilities, most trans people are actually realists, dealing with the hard facticity of their own bodies and circumstances: a messy and often disappointing materiality that undercuts any obsession with heroic resistance.
Trans people can and do take on a romantic function in the (cis) gay imagination. In ‘Trans Romance: Queer Intimacy and the Problem of Inexistence in the Modern Novel’, Zhao Ng outlines the appropriation of a disposable trans feminine subjectivity in Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. At the same time, however, Genet’s writing necessarily enfolds the conditions of trans impossibility in early-twentieth century France into narrative, invoking solidarity between queer and trans voices, where the former can amplify the possibility of the latter rather than shutting it down.
Some trans people are afraid of admitting that cis writers might have not wanted to replace us with their own imaginings, but wanted instead to make us possible. Making transness possible can sometimes be a very trans feeling. Some cis writers turn out not to be cis, and in some times and places we can’t ever really tell for sure who is what. It is more difficult now to both hold space for everyone’s potential transness while at the same time acknowledging that not everyone is actually trans. But maybe we should ask why do we care so much who is and who isn’t? Surely the most important thing is to make sure everyone can realise that potential – if they want to.
UPLOAD TWO
TWINK DEATH
Rows of square photos sailed up the screen and away. Edie was on Grindr again. Tired of scrolling, she flipped to her inbox.
Hey. Hot? Can I come
over? Free? You have a room
Can you feminise me and make me
look like a slutty girl
Trans? That’s cool, how long
u been a woman for
FTM? whats that
Fuck (me in) The Mouth I’m hoping ;)
Edie decided to respond to the last one.
It means I was born a woman
but now I’m a guy
Ok sick
My flatmate actually showed
me ur tiktoks
Lucky I like small guys ;)
The man had a broad, creamy chest split by a line of hair, fading to each side like a sunset in the water or a Rorschach test. Edie considered his age, and if it was the same as the number superimposed over his pronounced obliques. Men sucked, and Edie wanted to be one. It was enough to give a person whiplash.
Gotta get in there fast. Soon there
won’t be any of u left …
As with so many other conversations lately, talk turned inevitably to the newest gay plague decimating the warehouse parties and brunch scene. Edie could almost hear the cogs of history crunch through the awkward foreplay. They didn’t have apps back in the 80s and 90s. Chat rooms? Whatever.
You mean twink death?
Yeah
But ur safe right?
Edie wasn’t so sure. Every day that she pumped the chemical-smelling gel onto her inner thighs or shoulders, the levels of testosterone in her body leapt closer to the fatal limit. It had started with the cis gays, though Edie knew many t-boys who had gone this way also, even if the medical establishment wasn’t really reporting it. She’d watched as these budding specimens joyfully marched their newly minted manhood to self-obliteration.
One by one, they disappeared from the community Whatsapp group, leaving requests for spare t, advice about surgery and photos of beard growth behind. The ghosts of their bulking bodies haunted Edie. She knew she walked a fine line between masculinity and death and was terrified that one day she’d overdo it. Some cis guys were secretly taking oestrogen, which the dolls loved ‘til it threatened their supplies, but that was a moot strategy where Edie was concerned. It was just the price of being sexy, I guess.
What you worried
about catching it
Think youre past the
point mate
haha yeah probably
so you want to come over then?
But Edie had already closed the app. She’d open it again later to say sorry, my mum came home, thanks but no thanks. Right now, she was content to float like a phantom through this guy’s fantasy world, protected from her fraught embodiment, fluid, amorphous, and alive.
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Francis Whorrall-Campbell is a writer and artist from the UK. They are currently completing a practice-based PhD, working title ‘Inhabiting a Poetics of Confusion: Creativity and Doubt in Transition’.
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
