How to Teach Manet's Olympia after Transgender Studies

Abstract

Addressed to art historians as both teachers and researchers, this essay reconsiders the well-trodden case of Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) to challenge the conventional assumptions about the nude as a sign for gender. Aligning itself with the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, the essay models one version of how art historians might teach a sceptical history of the nude in which we leave open the multiple and transformable genders that can be proposed by it. This essay argues that even a canonical episode about a non-trans artist such as Manet (and his scandalous display of Olympia in 1865) contains ample opportunities (in both the contemporary criticism and art-historical literature) to address transgender, non-binary, and intersex themes. To question the equation of seeing and knowing when confronted with a naked body is both an ethical and a methodological imperative for art history – a field that traffics in nudes as central to its defining narratives.