Jennie Moore’s Handbag: Trans Opulence and the Everyday

Sinclair, Jeanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9823-7235 and Aaron, Nic (2024) Jennie Moore’s Handbag: Trans Opulence and the Everyday. In: ASSOCIATION FOR ART HISTORY 2025 ANNUAL CONFERENCE, 9-11 April 2025, York.

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Abstract / Summary

A woman’s handbag is arguably the most intimate of everyday objects, and its contents have the potential to reveal much about its owner. What do these quotidian items reveal about a person? This paper explores the story of Jennie Moore, a working-class trans woman who lived in the North East of England in the early twentieth century. For Jennie Moore, much of what we know about her life comes from her entanglements with the law, and the invasive and intrusive newspaper articles that report her appearances in court. In these reports, which not only list the contents of Jennie’s handbag, but detail the contents of her wardrobe and the furnishings in her home, we find the fragments of who Jennie was. In Jennie’s handbag, we find the objects of trans livability in the everyday luxuries of shoplifted cosmetics. In the description of Jennie’s home, we see trans opulence in the depiction of her curtains and piano. We read against these everyday sources - specifically newspaper articles and criminal records - that are transphobic and transmisogynistic in character, to look at the ways in which these descriptions of everyday objects embody Jennie, and attempt to identify and disentangle her agency from within the materials available. We consider Jennie's trans livability, considering the objects and artefacts of her everyday life through which she expressed her transness and framed her subjectivity, and in doing so, address questions and challenges around how we can talk about Jennie’s life and gender non-conformity.

I collaborated with a third year Illustration student, Jesse Clarkson (jesseclarkson.com). Instead of showing the images that we have of Jennie, a mugshot and a photo from the Daily Mirror from 1913 of Jennie walking into court and reproducing the violence of their transphobic and transmisogynistic gaze Jesse has redrawn these photographs. Jesse’s drawings turn a newspaper report designed to shame and sensationalise Jennie into a fashion plate, and a police mugshot into a portrait to celebrate Jennie’s life. Using illustration as a subversive tool, Jesse has illustrated Jennie’s life through the inventory of her possessions that are listed by her prosecutors as proof of her immorality and criminality, but here, they are evidence of Jennie’s trans opulence as everyday resistance to state violence.

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