Hepatoscopy

In Linus Borgo’s Renaissance-influenced paintings, trans, disabled experiences—especially his own—offer a unique scalpel with which to examine the world. Often, they depict his interactions with the medical system; other times, they use myths and fairytales to indicate his identifications across species. “Hepatoscopy” does both. Borgo has discussed his fascination with the fact that doctors have seen inside his body, a feeling that echoes broader anxieties among many transsexuals about their reduction to “objects” of medical knowledge. The pig—itself an “object” of medical science, as emphasized by its perfectly cut-out flap and anatomically precise entrails—serves as a point of identification for these fears. It is also more directly a historical reference: the first hormones for medical use derived from slaughtered pigs. The title “Hepatoscopy,” which refers to the use of animal livers for divination, thus paradoxically suggests the sacrality of the dissected pig (as the historical condition for trans futures), and acknowledges its medical exploitation (through which these futures came to being). That is, the pig is an ambivalent symbol for medical transsexuality on two levels: it pictures the fear of relinquishing one’s body to an unsympathetic clinical system; and it recognizes the historical violence against animals that paved the way to modern hormones. Borgo’s painting “Meat and Meaning,” also in the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s collection, appears to extend this scene by displaying the dissection’s bloody tools and an almost identical flap of skin.