'This superhuman androgynous being' writes London-based DJ Josh Caffé in Tate Etc about a figure photographed by queer Sri Lankan artist, collector, curator and critic Lionel Wendt (1900-44).¹ A version of the untitled black-and-white image, created after 1934, was exhibited at Colombo’s National Art Gallery in c.1936 and London’s Camera Club in 1938.² The shimmering gelatin silver print depicts a solarised body in profile: from just above their lips to just below their groin, wearing only a loin cloth—which would have once been considered everyday public dress in the Indian Ocean island’s tropical climate.³ 'Even though it’s a strong, masculine image, in line with contemporary notions of the idealised male form', muses Caffé, 'there is a softness to it too'. 'The underwear the model is wearing could be mistaken for women’s attire, and there is a very feminine aspect to the positioning of his hips'—Caffé concludes—'it’s an androgynous image'. Although this commentary may betray a profound lack of knowledge about the histories of gender and sexuality in Sri Lanka, I want to take up Caffé’s proposition to ask a question: what is at stake in a trans reading of Wendt’s photograph?

'Wendt never publicly referred to his bisexuality' writes art historian Niharika Dinkar, firmly placing the artist’s sexuality within a gender binary, despite recognising the prospect of 'a fluidity between genders' in the Indian Ocean island.⁴ 'In the case of Lionel Wendt', Dinkar continues, 'the gaze is much more direct in producing the subaltern male body as passive and effeminate, and indeed this gaze had a precedence in the case of colonial travelers'.⁵ But rather than Wendt imposing effeminacy on Sri Lankans—cultural studies scholar Sita Balani argues that European colonialism produced modern concepts of gender and sexuality to intervene in land relations, while nineteenth-century race science claimed that greater sexual dimorphism among white people was a supposed sign of imperial superiority.⁶ In an 1867 book of his drawings, diplomat and artist Eugène de Ransonnet proclaimed that it was ‘very difficult for strangers to distinguish boys from girls, during their first stay at Ceylon, so striking is the similarity of their features and costumes’.⁷ Writing a couple of years later, surgeon William Gregory van Dort believed colonial capitalism would 'stamp … an expression of manliness’ on plantation labourers, although to little avail: by 1886 planter Richard Wade Jenkins recorded alarm at the sight of 'naked coolys, men who seemed to be all women'.⁸

As historian Nira Wickramasinghe acknowledges, what was perceived to be cross-gender presentation in Sri Lanka was 'troubling to European men, accustomed to a clear demarcation of gender roles and appearance'.⁹ Such stress was not limited to the nineteenth century: in the 1920s, journalist Roland Dorgelès wondered, 'Men or Women? … Smooth skinned, with huge eyes and long eyelashes, their hair hanging free or wound in a bun, these males are so perfectly beautiful that one’s gaze can be fooled'.¹⁰ A 1926 novel by Francis de Croisset remarked on the 'naughty little habit men have here to comb their hair and dress like women do'.¹¹ By that point, Sri Lanka had been under British rule for more than a century, following the 1796 invasion and complete control from 1815. In the 1840s, the British reorganised the entire island around a plantation economy: outlawing soliciting and 'indecency', codifying marriage and inheritance, institutionalising ethnic groups, replacing common land with mass-crop estates and importing Tamil workers from South India.¹²

Sea captain and merchant banker James Steuart explained in 1862, 'England has not sufficient land to produce food for its manufacturing people; while Ceylon has not sufficient labouring population to cultivate the soil for English capitalists'.¹³ The British sought to transform Sri Lanka’s social and environmental landscapes, treating Sri Lankans as a colonial workforce in order to extract resources from the Indian Ocean island. As gender and sexuality studies scholar Shermal Wijewardene has pointed out: the 1883 Penal Code outlawed homosexuality for the first time as 'against the order of nature', as well as anyone 'pretending to be some other person'.¹⁴ This legislation remained on the statute books after independence, and even expanded in 1995 to criminalise lesbian relationships by inserting gender-neutral language, before the Supreme Court backed the constitutionality of a Private Members’ bill seeking decriminalisation in 2023 (such efforts have since stalled).¹⁵ Writing in 1883, queer eugenicist and artist Ernst Haeckel observed partially-nude men in public, with 'a curiously feminine appearance … increased by their slender and fragile proportions'.¹⁶ Homosexuality as a nineteenth-century Global North identity category spread through imperial rule, despite or because of colonial prohibition: Buddhist and Hindu understandings of desire were not organised through the same structures of sin as found in Christianity.¹⁷

Despite centuries of what now might be called gender variance and non-normative sexualities, recent homophobic rhetoric has framed queer people as somehow foreign to the island—a commentary often projected onto Wendt, whose affluent and mixed-race background afforded a socially privileged position, enabling an experimental art practice that engaged with both traditional Sri Lankan culture and European modernism at a time of rising anti-colonial movements ahead of independence in 1948.¹⁸ As is materially symbolised by the artist’s use of silver extracted through global capitalist-colonial networks, Wendt’s vision was both shaped by and sought to picture imaginative worlds beyond existing power structures (including those of gender, sexuality, race, class).¹⁹ Wendt did not document nachchis, a group sometimes described today as trans (although trans as a descriptor is contested), but did photograph multiple genders in everyday clothing or posed nude through an aesthetic that ranged from documentary to surrealist.²⁰ Is a trans reading of Wendt’s work even possible?

Any perception of the androgyny of the figure in Wendt's photograph Untitled is not necessarily interchangeable with a trans reading, and to collapse the two entirely is not my intention.²¹ Rather I want to consider what may be opened up by Caffé’s interpretation, which could either be situated in a long tradition of projections onto Sri Lankan people by those not steeped in the island’s history, or as an inadvertent gesture that imagines ways of inhabiting the world beyond taxonomical identity categories developed in the Global North. It is important to both heed anthropologist Themal Ellawala’s warning against imposing Western norms onto Sri Lanka, as well as acknowledge that the extensive impact colonialism had left little untouched, making gender and sexuality sites of enduring entanglement.²² Could the solarised shimmer of Untitled be thought of as a kind of flickering aesthetic, carrying traces of a chemical process that both demarcate and disperse a body? Art historian Natasha Eaton has written about how 'Wendt’s aesthetic {is} connected to the qualities of pearlescence and the shimmer', situating the artist’s practice within the Gulf of Manaar’s pearl fishing economies.²³ 'Pearls and pearlescence really pushed photography', Eaton reflects, as the 'shimmer bears within itself a slight iridescence that incites movement in and of the image'.

The shimmer and pearlescence of Wendt’s photography also draws connections with Eliza Steinbock’s analysis of a trans aesthetic in lens-based media that is often 'slipping in and out of shadows, moves into and out of the light, becoming a shimmer of a body, difficult to grasp perceptually … shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities'.²⁴ Such a framing seems to fit Untitled, its solarised surface fizzing on the cusp of perceptibility. Untitled might flicker towards forms of visual bewilderment, a bewilderment which may structure the subtext of Caffé’s own response.²⁵ Wendt’s artistic experiments draw from and feed an imaginary of gender and sexuality in Sri Lanka that circumvents and exceeds imperial taxonomic logics. Read through a trans method, Untitled's surreal shimmers also refract, reframe and reimagine gender itself. Historian Beans Velocci has proposed a 'dismantling cisness as a natural, majority category, with trans history deployed as method rather than subject'.²⁶ The 'task of the historian is to notice that cisness is not a natural state', Velocci argues, 'instead, the idea that most people fit into binary sex and gender categories took tremendous amount of work to construct and takes a tremendous amount of work to maintain'.²⁷ 

In the context of Sri Lanka, European colonisers not only imposed binary ideas of sex and gender—as is evident from the above descriptions—it also took considerable effort to try and maintain that binary given the persistence of ways of inhabiting the world that were not bound by it. Caffé is certainly wrong that the faceless figure in Untitled could be wearing women’s underwear. But Wendt’s aesthetic, with the shimmer of the silver gelatin and the dispersed body’s edges frayed by solarisation, points to a visuality beyond the colonial photographic conventions that framed Sri Lankans at the time. Wendt’s non-confession of a specific sexuality might resonate with thinking by theorist Marquis Bey, who has argued that often we are 'coerced to confess its gendered self, or confined to the normative registers of the body-made-legible'.²⁸ Bey explains, 'the assertion of a legible gender at times acts as a coerced capitulation that forecloses a radical alternative possibility of subjectivity in the refusal of gender, of gender abolition, in favor of requisites that one must “fess up”'.²⁹ What Bey calls facelessness perhaps finds visual form in Untitled’s own cropped composition.

As Bey insists, the world demands one lives 'one’s gender truthfully, a truthfulness whose probity rests on an adherence to a normative understanding of binary gender'.³⁰ Such a demand is undoubtedly bound up with violent social structures: the 1883 Penal Code’s prohibition of 'pretending to be some other person’ has been used to persecute trans people in Sri Lanka.³¹ For Bey, 'if genders are disciplinary vehicles, and if discipline is a non-consensual, coercive web of both entrapment and production', gender abolition is necessary.³² If we were to take this proposition seriously, it would mean not reading Wendt as a bisexual man or Untitled as a portrait of male effeminacy—but rather an artist and an aesthetic that stages the very shattering of binary identity categories, flickering with bewilderment.

While much scholarship works to extract and expose a supposedly stable and innate inner truth from its subjects in a performance of mastery over them, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant has instead proposed a right to opacity.³³ Similarly, Steinbock seeks to challenge 'the assumption that all real identities are visibly marked': instead thinking about 'being unmarked and opaque {for} your modus operandi, as decolonial scholars equally champion. The ideology of the visible undergirds the natural attitude about gender, with its narrow belief in genitalia determinism from birth’.³⁴ There are implications here for the study of visual cultures, which tends to make inferences about artists and their sitters based on assumption. Although Caffé’s reading in Tate Etc involves both projection and ignorance, a trans method would take seriously the proposition being made. For Steinbock, a radical anti-static subjectivity suggests identities not fully graspable, being 'in the shimmering of these boundaries opens up another way of knowing that does not rely on visual certainty'.³⁵ Refusing easy legibility, Untitled and Wendt tend towards a bewildering flicker at the very edge of definition: faceless non-confessions imagining expansive worlds of gender abolition.