transartorialism

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?

_____

*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.

i read most of original plumbing and their blog like i do cosmo (i flip through it when i remember about it or see it on someone’s coffee table and generally shake my head), but recently there have been two posts that have given me pause, especially being at home.

oliver bendorf wrote about love and hurt, and chris mosier wrote about getting “girled” by his mom and it was weird for me to read, because i constantly give my family passes.  i never ask that they use the right name and pronouns with me, though i am out about it all at this point.  and they never do.

i’ve been asking myself the same questions here the whole time i’ve been here.  why do i give my family a pass when i don’t give other people nearly as many passes?  part of it is that my family is always going to be my family, while it’s easier for me to drop acquaintances.  part of it is that i don’t ever want to drop my family, and for whatever reason—being rural, being raised in a faith that santicifies birth families, being a taurus to my mom’s cancer—i can’t even think about what “dropping them” would look like.

chris continues:

If my mother was not supportive, we wouldn’t be talking. I’m grown and living an adult life in NYC. I believe family should be supportive and should love unconditionally. If there were big issues, I know that I would act accordingly and not call, not answer calls, and not make visits to see her or allow her to visit me. But she’s my mom and I don’t want that to happen. Therefore, I can rationalize not accepting and verbally reflecting back to me my identity as a “small issue” and not a deal breaker. Part of this rationalization includes me questioning my own reaction and wondering if I am making too big of deal of this, or of anything. This sort of thought process leads to a cycle of being hurt, not saying anything, blaming myself, suppressing my own feelings about it, and then being hurt again.

i don’t necessarily think this is the wrong way to approach things, but i don’t know how you cut off your family. maybe it’s that my mom and dad still wants me to be in touch with them, relatively speaking, and hate the distance between us. but as i let further barriers down, as i become more and more out with them, worse and worse things happen. tonight my mom and i went to a big used bookstore and as i was digging through the james section, she came up to me and asked if we were ready to go. suddenly she turned and one of her old coworkers came up and talked to her. my mom turned from me as if she didn’t know me, blocked me from the view of her former coworker, and didn’t introduce me.

i don’t know if she did it consciously but it broke my fucking heart.

i’ve been thinking about the young man who killed himself in my hometown recently, and what i would want the most to happen is for my family to do something about it, to come out about me being queer and/or trans, to look me in the eye and face the world with me rather than hiding me in plain sight.  it’s ridiculous, i think, because i feel like it’s this big open secret; i’m that kid who went off to the city and then off to wisconsin and is just never coming back, too gay to fit in and too ambitious to sit still.  i want my mom to tell me that we should do something together, write a letter to the editor or speak at a board meeting together or even just write the director an email together about what it’s like to be queer in the cheatham county school system.  i want her to ask me how to support queer kids more thoroughly in her own school, to ask me what it was really like and finally listen to me.

but i know it’s never going to happen and worse, if i did anything on my own, both of them would spurn me even harder than they have before.

i don’t know; the worst part is i’ve tried before, i’ve tried to hold them at arm’s length, and they just blamed me for the distance.  they didn’t take it personally or thought they could be to blame.  they read it as the product of escape velocity, part of my pretention that i could leave home, that i could be good enough to leave this town behind.

weird weird weird

all i can think about is, “what is my family about me now?  what do they think is going on?  what do they think about how i look?”

it’s like i never came out as trans but did and now they’re ignoring it but they miss me so they’re continuing to ignore it even though i look like a boy kind of generally speaking except i’ve been misread more times in the past week than i care to count

and then came the part where my mother watched the doctor who marathon with me all day and got really into it

for the joint 19th century transatlantic/world lit class we had a student conference to end the semester this saturday, where we all cobbled together pieces of our drafts of our final seminar paper (or in my case, started the seminar paper and awkwardly read the first seven pages) and dressed up (except i didn’t get the memo and wore jeans and a sweatshirt) and sleepily encouraged one another with questions and comments during panels after each round of papers.  like most conferences there was no coffee despite the ridiculously early start time and the sheer length of the day-long conference session, where minutes stretch to hours.

i hadn’t met about half the students in the other class, so it was good to get an introduction to them.  during one of the question and answer sessions, one woman was asking really spicy questions, and i woke up and listened to her.  her vowels had that tell-tale lilt that always makes me cock my ear up here; it was just barely there, but i could tell.

at the break i asked her if she was from the south and she admitted, embarrassed, that she was from alabama; i told her i was from rural tennessee and both of us shifted into our lilts perhaps consciously.  we were talking about being from the south and from rural families when another woman from kentucky came up to us.  then my new fellow southerner she-pronouned me, and my heart broke in a thousand pieces but then came back together again instantly and i didn’t know what to do.

it happened again later that night at a party—at the moment where the perpetual 2:30 am my mind is at these days met with the real 2:30 am plus a few drinks—someone who i was talking to about where they grew up (california) she-d me.  i called them out on it and she got really awkward and not apologetic but sort of like, “i know i know i’m sorry i didn’t mean to i feel really bad” but i just didn’t care and neither did she.  we both just felt bad and then we talked about something else.

i started grad school wanting no one to know i was trans even though i knew that was probably not going to happen, or at least to be able to tell people on my terms.  but i feel like that is what these little pronoun slipups mean; that people think of me as trans and then it comes out when they misgender me, despite the fact that i’ve never looked less like a woman in my life. somehow everyone has come to know about it through other people, even though both of these people don’t really know me or talk to me frequently.  it is so alienating and disheartening, especially coming from folks who are transplants themselves to this wisconsin cold, to this winter with no end.

i forgot about my testosterone anniversary.  i forgot my shot that week, too.

at the doctor’s, i had to take off my binder for her to palpate my stomach.  she pressed on my left ovary; i squealed.  she didn’t say anything.  she asked me if i was taking oral testosterone and i wanted to cry. i hate explaining my body to doctors—didn’t they go to graduate school for eight years to know how the body works?  didn’t they drag themselves to bed every night, only to worry for hours about upcoming papers, exams, pressing personal problems they didn’t have time to address?  don’t they know the power they have to make or break a life?  i sighed.  she watched me put my binder back on and wondered if she watched everyone put their underwear back on.  the worst part was that she was so nice, just unsure, so i couldn’t even be angry.

my mother emailed me and told me that she was worried about me attending my best friend’s wedding.  too many people from work, too many fellow friend’s parents.  i’m in the ceremony.  i hash out with my friend what i’ll wear—maybe a pant suit, maybe go all out drag and wear a dress.  i tell her to use my birth name because this day is not about me.  but i feel like i’m putting my underwear on in a room full of doctors who don’t know that oral testosterone disintegrates your liver. 

i respond to my mother’s email, reassuring her, wanting to tell her that it’s not worth all the trouble, that everyone knows.

this is just as hard for me as it is for you, i tell her.

besttumblr:

at least there’s free breakfast, which I can chew silently when someone refers to me as “she”

i would punch them for you if i was there.  well, not physically, but with my brain.

almost all the awesome people i’ve met in madison are randomly famous.

Something I really don’t understand at all is the way that we are conditioned to not use correct pronouns for trans people in this very deep, very visceral way. I don’t really understand why it happens.

What I’m talking about is something I’ve noticed over and over again this summer. I am getting to this point where people don’t know I’m trans instantly, especially if they’re not looking for it. I’ve started or really deepened several friendships with people who never knew me before I transitioned, so they didn’t know I was trans at first, and didn’t know my birth name or what I even really looked like before. In every single one of those relationships, at some point, my new friend (who only knew I was trans because I told them) would mess up and use the wrong pronoun with me. Just casually. Or because they were tired, or stressed out, or not thinking very carefully. In a way that I can’t even fault them really, so I just wave away their apologies and pretend it’s not a big deal.

To lay it out: there is this subtle language thing where many folks don’t have problems using the right pronouns with trans folk IF they don’t know they’re trans and the pronoun they use matches what that person wants; however, if they later find out someone is trans, almost instantly pronoun problems start cropping up.  It’s the trans thing much less than the understanding a person’s preferred gender identity thing, if you will.

And I’ve done it before, even, which makes it worse. I know I’ve inflicted those little injuries.  I don’t want to do it; no one does, especially if they love the person.  It’s just so pervasive.  One of you rhet/comp Tumblr people need to get on this.