The Uses of Misrecognition

In Camera Lucida, Barthes’ recollections of family photographs are marked by misattributions and misremembrances—errors that reveal the psychic investments photographs accrue. This paper places Barthes’ moments of misrecognition in conversation with my own “erroneous” reading of a childhood photograph to consider the queer and trans potential of such errors. By framing misrecognition as a trans methodology, I advance a reading of the image that resists the truth-claims and categorical certainties often privileged in theories of photography and gender transition. My point of departure comes from a recent encounter with a childhood photograph: a naked toddler on the edge of a bed, legs folded. At first glance, I took the child to be a boy. Between his legs was the soft flaccid form of a child’s penis. Unable to identify the boy, I took the photograph to my mother. Looking first at the child’s face, she said with certainty, “that’s you!”—then quickly retracted her claim. Only after some scrutiny did we realize the boy’s “penis” was my own foot, tucked beneath my body. Whereas dominant narratives of transition often frame childhood photographs as painful reminders of an unaligned body, this moment of misrecognition offered a glimpse of my younger self otherwise unavailable. By foregrounding such errors, I propose a trans approach to the photograph that preserves uncertainty, destabilizes conventional notions of evidence, and refuses teleological readings. In this register, misrecognition becomes a critical strategy for engaging trans pasts—not as recoverable or representable “truths,” but as complex, contingent traces of the self.