also: mulled thoughts
trans bodies and lives as a composition and revision of memory and time
- pronouning your memories (or not) strategically in conversation, in text
- reading present gender identities through and into archives of the past
- personal archives confronting semi-public/family archives
- family and friends as part of the revision—collaboration in identity, how the experiences of others effects the formation of the trans body and identity
- the trans archive in digital spaces and the networks they create, morph, and dissolve (shifting and/or deleting facebooks, tumblrs, twitters, etc)
- the assumption of the internet as a private-from-parents space by younger trans folks on the internet based on generational/classed access to internet literacy
- linear time and linear life narratives as implicity (explicitly?) hetero/gender normative—and colonial
- memory is revisable and never stable*—very clear in regards to transition and many other queer narratives
- how is all this shaped and changed by other layers of intersecting identities?
- what kind of way could you like at these inquiries? qualitative, theoretical, text/archive analysis? moving away from the psychoanalytic/poststructuralist mold of examining gender, sexuality, and identity
- what would it look like to frame this as composition? and vice versa? and rather than just rhetoric?
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*I saw a really good response to a question today that explored how memory is insidiously modified and revised to strengthen master narratives: The Help, for example, centers certain racist practices in the past—evokes them as a memory—without acknowledging the presence of similar racist practices in the present (such as the experience undocumented women who are domestic workers—could you make a [good] movie about that that would win an Academy Award?); this allows white people to feel better about or disavow racism.
