"Trans/Feminist Oral History Current Projects: The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory." TSQ: The Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4 (November 2015), pp. 666-672. (original) (raw)
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Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History
The Oral History Review, 2022
ABSTRACT This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form of radical trans care. We explore the politics of visibility and transtemporal solidarity in a range of trans-specific and queer oral history projects unfolding in the US and Canada, including our own—the trans activism oral history projects at the LGBQT Oral History Digital Collaboratory (Toronto) and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Minnesota). In pursuing these questions, we examine the political implications of our trans archival and public humanities work through the lens of what Hil Malatino has recently described as an ethos of “trans care.” We offer a set of reflections, anxieties, and strategies that have guided us in pursuing transcentric public humanities work that resists neoliberal narrative arcs and pursues the creation of a usable past through an ethos of radical trans care and mutual aid. We conclude our essay with a set of observations, drawn from our own work as well as that of other queer and trans oral history projects, that speak to four elements of most universitycommunity partnerships concerning oral history: research design, the interview, metadata and archiving, and public engagement. We argue that trans oral history projects, created in collaboration with narrators, community members, archivists, artists, and others, can create alternative visual and narrative structures that are created, circulated, and viewed within a network of mutual aid defined by an ethics of trans care, rather than extraction.
Radical History Review, 2015
Sara Davidmann is a photographer working in London, and Elspeth H. Brown is a US cultural historian who lives in Toronto. Both of us are engaged in the creation of queer archives concerning recent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) history, with an emphasis on trans* and queer archives. Brown is currently describing trans* activist Rupert Raj’s collection for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA) as a volunteer, while also conducting an oral history project concerning the histories and experiences of partners (cis and trans*) of trans* men in the United States and Canada. Davidmann has been photographing her queer and trans* community in London for fifteen years, while also interviewing her image collaborators about their lives. Together, we developed a few questions that allowed us to address the intersections between our various projects. The conversation that follows concerns our ruminations concerning archives, photography, ethics, queer methods and bodies, and trans* lives.
Accessing Transgender // Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics
Archivaria 68 (Fall 2009): 123-140., 2009
While efficient and satisfactory access may be a common goal for most archives, it is rarely achieved in full. In this article, the author considers specific access barriers for both transgender patrons and transgender materials within archives. In particular, the author argues that environment and language shape the ways in which patrons encounter archives and the materials contained therein. Rather than seeking satisfactory access, the author suggests that deferred or denied satisfac- tion might also produce productive encounters for archival researchers.
Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ2+ Community Archive
Archivaria, 2020
LGBTQ2+ community archives founded in the 1970s and 1980s are not necessarily outside the archival mainstream from the perspective of non-white, and non-cis LGBTQ2+ people. On the contrary, histories of whiteness, settler colonialism, and cisnormativity within the LGBTQ2+ community archive can create the “symbolic annihilation” of trans and BIPOC people within the queer community archive, if left unaddressed. Our current moment requires an active reimagining of what activism means within a legacy LGBTQ2+ community, activist archive. This article describes my efforts, as a volunteer and board member at The ArQuives, as well as the Director of the LGBTQ2+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, to help bring an intersectional, trans-inclusive framework to an LGBTQ2+ community archive with origins in Canada’s gay liberation movement. The Collaboratory is a five-year digital history research collaboration, funded by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans oral histories. We have four archival partners: The ArQuives (formerly, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives); the Digital Transgender Archive; the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria; and the Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony. In this article, I focus on the Collaboratory’s efforts to bring trans visibility to The ArQuives’ collections.
Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and their Methodologies
Research in the Archival Multiverse, 2015
In this chapter, I critically consider the ways that heteronormativity, homonormativity, and the politics of respectability come together to both haunt and produce the digital narratives that constitute the Arizona Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Storytelling Project, in order to discover how memories are sometimes disciplined to re-produce normative narratives about queer pasts. I look and listen for the queering potentials in shared stories and in the digital and participatory technologies that record them. While conversations about “queering the archive” are not new and are, in fact, taking place transnationally, these conversations are extended here to explore the ways in which conformity to archival norms can be treacherous. I ask whether an archive can be a space of radical intervention or if it must always and only be a repository for stories that reproduce normative iterations of histories that inform powerful and normativizing national imaginaries. For those of us committed to intervening in traditional archival constructs and related practices of collecting and documenting, we can see that such practices run the risk of reproducing sexual normativities and social divisions.We should, therefore, understand the queer/ed archive as always in motion—forming and re-forming itself as we constitute and re-member its collections. Ultimately, this chapter argues for the need to develop a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to help ensure that complex, non-normative, and even contradictory histories have their places in society’s record.