Feeling Archive

http://elspethbrown.org/about

[elspethbrown]

CFP: Reframing Family Photography

What is family photography? Scholars have often understood the genre as simply snapshots of domestic scenes—images that reflect and produce normative notions of family. Yet, family photographs are more complex than we think: they can also include images taken by a wide spectrum of producers, including the press and the state; they frequently circulate between private and public spheres, linking personal memories with national and even global histories; and, just as importantly, they don’t just illustrate families, but also shape the very idea of family, as racialized and gendered social structures. Foundational thinkers including Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jo Spence, Marianne Hirsch, Martha Langford, Deborah Willis, and others, have offered influential terms for investigating family photographs, respectively, as: an affective punctum; middlebrow art; means of reinforcing domestic ideology; conduit for postmemory; integrally linked to orality; a form of resistance; and at the heart of identity formation.

This conference will re-examine the genre and develop new ways of investigating the cultural politics of family photography. This critical task is all the more timely not just because of photography’s transformation with the digital turn, but also because of recent historical shifts that have altered the composition and very meaning of kinship--including Cold War dislocations, the visibility of queer and trans* family belonging, transnational adoptions, and immigration under the auspices of family reunification.

We are seeking papers that critically reframe family photography in light of these historical shifts.  To what extent do domestic images confirm or contest official discourses of racial, sexual, and gender diversity? How do family photos produce ‘the family’ and function as one of the many technologies of the self? How do family photographs offer a counter-archive of normative modes of kinship? What problems do orphan images—photographs that lack context—pose for interpretation, and what methods might we develop to understand their significance? How might the reproduction and circulation of family photos, or their loss due to sudden or violent dislocation, help connect and constitute diasporic communities? How has the digital turn altered the look and meaning of family photographs? How might we situate family photography within the history of photography more generally? What are the implications for the recent interest in institutional collecting of family photos? How have contemporary artists contributed to new ways of understanding family photography? These are just some of the key questions that this international conference on REFRAMING FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY will explore.

Confirmed speakers include: Tina Campt (Barnard College) Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers University) Richard Hill (Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies, Emily Carr University of Art and Design) Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) Martha Langford (Concordia University) Laura Wexler (Yale University) Deborah Willis (NYU)

Deadlines: Please submit a 300 word abstract and a 1-page CV by September 1st, 2016. For more information, please contact: [email protected]

Schedule September 1st, 2016: 300-word abstract and a 1-page CV. October 30 2016: The selection committee will notify applicants of its decision. September 1st, 2017: Drafts of 10-page papers to be submitted to discussants. September 28th-30th, 2017: Conference.

[elspethbrown]

Trans Partners and Creative Non-Fiction

           I have been continuing my interviews with partners of trans men—folks who have been with their partners before and during some aspect of the transition. At this point I’ve interviewed 48 people in the US and Canada about a range of topics, including gender and sexual identity; visibility; coming out; affective labour; parenting; sex, and other topics. It’s been about 5 years since I put out an actual call. More frequently, people learn about the project and get in touch with me, wanting to talk to me about their story.

           During the weekend of April 15th, I presented some new writing on this project at a symposium organized by Lisa Cartwright and Elizabeth Wolfson at the University of California, San Diego. The event was organized around a collection of essays I had co-edited with my colleague Thy Phu (Western) entitled Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014). Other speakers included scholars Shawn Michelle Smith, David Serlin, Lisa Bloom, Kamala Viswenswaran, and Kelli Moore, as well as artists Ken Gonzalez-Day, Connie Samaras, and Anna Joy Springer. I presented a 3000 word creative non-fiction piece on the theme of visibility, featuring the stories of “Kevin,” a disabled trans man and “Muriel,” an artist; both have children who have been, for various reasons, subject to custody disputes. I was nervous about presenting the work, as it was the first time I’d ever presented non-academic writing for an academic audience. But it seemed to go well, and I received excellent feedback—particularly from Anna Joy Springer, a creative non-fiction writer who teaches in the MFA program at UCSD (see http://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/aspringer.html). Thanks, Anna Joy! And Lisa and Liz for organizing.

[elspethbrown]

Tears and Transition

[this material comes from one of dozens of interviews I’ve done with partners of trans men, who’ve been with their partner before and during some aspect of transition. For more info about the project, or if you are interested in being interviewed, feel free to email me at [email protected]]

ANNA: Anna is just twenty years old, a white student at a liberal arts college in the States. She grew up all over the country, as her dad had a tendency to be fired due to a difficult personality.  She met her partner at college, after he’d decided to transition, but before he’d started hormones or had surgery. She’d never encountered the idea of trans before attending the elite women’s college where she is enrolled, but she took her partner’s news in stride: “I wasn’t bothered by it. I mean I wasn’t bothered by it at all. I was like right, whatever, ‘you’re a person. You do what you want. You do want to be what you want to be, and that’s okay.’” A month after getting together, he started T. At this point, she paused. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s changed a lot?” she commented. “Physically…emotionally, definitely.”

           Later on in the inteview, she described her partner undergoing top surgery. He was cranky, due to not being able to eat or drink for 12 hours prior to surgery; she was panicked, driving the two hours to the hospital “like a crazy person,” afraid they’d miss the surgery. Up until that point, she’d been fine about it. But things changed dramatically as soon as the surgeon took out his Sharpie and drew the incision marks on his chest. She hadn’t really let her self take in the implications, which she described as him “chop[ing] off parts of himself.” But the bigger issue was the realization that, even though this is low-risk surgery, that he might not come out of it. In front of him, she managed to hold it together. “I love you,” she said, “you’ll be fine.” She kissed them on the lips and they wheeled him down the hallway. Meanwhile, she held her breath until she was alone, and then promptly burst into tears. “My only goal,” she told me, was “making sure that he didn’t know that I was freaking out so that he wouldn’t freak out, so that he would be okay.” It was, she said, “the longest four hours in my entire life.” Ironically, she slept through three of them, due to her exhaustion. Her friend documented her, passed out on a bench in the hospital cafeteria.

[elspethbrown]

The Partner’s Changing Sense of Gender, Body Image, and Clothes

I am continuing with my oral history interviews with partners of trans men, and here is a recent excerpt from one partner who is 45, and who is talking about how her own sense of gender has shifted in relationship to her partner’s transition.

“I think that as he's becoming more fully himself, I'm becoming more fully myself. And I think that's accelerated in the last year but it's been throughout our relationship. So, I have owned myself as a fem over time. Now I love to get my nails done and I have my favorite lipstick and I have to have it. And I wear much more perfume and really into like rings and earrings and having a nice purse and having my suit jackets be very fitted and flared and accentuate my hips and over time I wear more dresses than I used to wear. I still love jeans and a cute little smart suit jacket but I like really embracing my curves. Ezra is always saying “I don’t like skinny chicks so don’t feel like you have to starve yourself.” I'm thinking, “well thank God honey ‘cause I like to eat.” I'm not going to be skinny so that's good. So, I like really owning my body.

I grew up in that culture of feeling like curves are bad and I'm fat and I'm not beautiful unless I'm skinny. I have to be a certain shape and I have to be in shape a certain way, particular in American culture. Over time I've just owned that I am a woman with curves. I could starve myself into a size 6 or size 4 dress but size 8 is great, 8 is great. You know ‘cause it means I got some meat on the bone. So, over time really owning it; I had a period in my late 30's where I started to have some silver hair, and I started dying my hair again. Then you know what, I can't get the color that I really like and I'm tired of this and it's expensive. I'm watching men my age go silver and people are saying “oh that looks so distinguished and that's so foxy.” So I'm going to start a female silver fox trend and I'm chopping all of my hair off and as it grows in silver I'm not dying it.

So there's been all of these ways in which living with a life partner who his whole raison d'etre is being himself and giving other people permission to be themselves is incredibly empowering. ‘Cause I can just be fully myself.  I lived in a co-ed fraternity in college and I have a very tom boy… I just want to get home and get in my sweats, get in my yoga pants and go for a walk. I don’t want to have to dress up and I don’t want to have to be put together, I just want to hang. He never knows what to do with that ‘cause he's always dressed up, always at home when we walk the dogs he's always impeccable style. So, giving myself permission, some days I'm a tomboy fem, some days I'm a high fem. You know that's what feels natural to me.

I think women over time as we age, that's why it's harder for people in a professional setting to know how to deal with women who are not young anymore. ‘Cause you cross a divide at 40 where you're saying this is it baby and you can deal with it. I'm powerful and I'm female and get with the program, if you don’t like it. So, I think that that's been my experience, as he's been more fully himself.”

If you have been with your trans male partner before and during some aspect of his transition, and would like to be interviewed for this oral history project, please get in touch with me at [email protected]. I can only interview folks in the US and Canada, though, because of ethic protocols. You don’t need to still be with your partner to be interviewed. I use the term s‘partner’ and ‘transition’ very broadly, as we all define these terms differently. All interviews are confidential and I use pseudonyms; I work with narrators on the final transcript.

[elspethbrown]

Elspeth Brown on digital collaboration in LGBTQ oral history | OUPblog

This week on the Oral History Review blog, we’re continuing our recognition of LGBTQ Pride month with a special podcast featuring Elspeth Brown. In the podcast, Brown discusses the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, as well as her work as a member of the community and a historian. Check out the links below for more information, and send us your proposals if you’d like to share your work with the OHR blog.

A few weeks ago I did an interview with the Oral History Review’s blog regarding the LGBTQ digital collaboratory, the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives, and the Transpartners Project.  Click through to have a listen. The interview cover oral history as a method, what its like being a member of the community you study, and the role of historians in helping shape communities and their histories. It was a lot of fun! 

The interview was conducted by Andrew Schaffer, a PhD Student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison whose work covers LGBT Rights and History, Anti-LGBT Violence, AIDS/HIV Politics and History, Sexual Racism, and Stereotypes. 

[elspethbrown]

At DHSI 2015 in Victoria, BC

I’m in Day 2 of a week long intensive on doing Digital Humanities in undergraduate education via the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Getting all sorts of great ideas of bringing my research in digital humanities through the LGBTQ Digital Oral History Collaboratory, and the associated projects such as the Digital Trans Collections Pathway (via CLGA), into undergraduate teaching.

[elspethbrown]

A Gay Teenager in an Old Guy's Body

[this is from a set of interviews I've done with partners of trans* men about their experiences with transition] A few of the partners I interviewed were female-bodied when their partners transitioned from female to male, and they have now transitioned themselves. Kevin is a disabled trans man who began his transition at age 48; his trans male partner Robert came out as trans and gay at age 17, hooking up with gay men in NYC as a teenager. Yet Kevin at age 48 hasn’t had a chance to do any of that exploration, while Robert wants to stay home and play house. Kevin tries to get Robert to go out, saying “Let’s go party.  Come on, let’s go to that place that you used to go to.” But at the same time, Kevin feels like “I’m like totally this teenager in an old guy’s body and I can’t do anything about it.” As a female-bodied person, Kevin used weight gain as a means of protecting himself emotionally and physically, but now that he’s transitioning he has lost much of the weight. “I have degenerative disc disorder because of my weight. And I need all these skin surgeries and top surgery and God, when am I going to have time to do all these surgeries? Or have the money, for that matter? If I had a lot of money I could have a total plastic surgery, I could get the works. And then maybe I could feel like I could have some kind of second childhood, you know like one of these Hollywood people that is able to hike their skin up--like they have it tied up with a bow or something, I don’t know.” In the meantime, Kevin feels sexually trapped, reluctant to do the exploring that he identifies with coming out as a gay man. He and Robert both “have a poly outlook on life,” but haven’t explored much independently or with a third. As Kevin explained, “it’d be nice I supposed, if we found somebody we were compatible with, but it just seems way too complicated. I don’t want to add somebody else to our dysfunction.”

[elspethbrown]

LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

I'm happy to announce that the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory has received a five-year research fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada!

The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is the largest LGBTQ oral history project in North American history, connecting over 200 life stories with new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice. This team-based project is organized as a "collaboratory," by which we mean a virtual working space--a coopoerative laboratory--through which team members will come together to share work, ideas, and new knowledge concerning the creation of LGBTQ oral histories in the digital age.

Our project seeks to answer a number of research questions about LGBTQ lives, archives, and digital history. How can oral history, as a methodology, intersect with queer theory, trans studies, and critical race theory to ask new questions of LGBTQ lives? In what ways can we historicize some of the key categories of twentieth century LGBTQ history, including older terms such as "gay," "femme," and "butch" and newer ones such as "aggressive," "trans," and "queer"? What kinds of activism have been effective, historically, in improving the lives of LBGTQ people? And finally: how can scholars and LGBTQ community members best provide access to, and engagement with, historical artifacts central to LGBTQ lives? 

This is an exciting project - and one of my first forays into digital history - so I am looking forward to getting started! 

[elspethbrown]

Good News! Feeling Photography, a book I co-edited with Dr. Thy Phu at Western University, is now out from Duke University Press. It features a fabulous group of contributors, including Diana Taylor, David Eng, Dana Seitler, and many more. 

You can pick up your copy from Duke University Press, Amazon, or your local library! 

[elspethbrown]

Partners in Transition: a follow up

[I wrote this a while ago but for some reason it never got posted, so here it is!]

My recent posts about co-producing trans masculinity and caregiving seem to have triggered a lot of people, and so here’s a follow up. (Many thanks to the constructive tweaks people have offered, btw). Things get reblogged and excerpted out of context. I’m writing from the perspective of a cis-gendered partner of a trans man (over 14 years together) who has also been interviewing women (all cis thus far, but am open to interviewing transwomen too) who have intimate, live-in relationships with transmen and who were with their partners before, and during, the transition—even if they are not together now. I’m not interviewing partners of transwomen, and I am not limiting my interest to specific sexualities, since as we all know once people transition, the sexualities of both people often change. I am also not speaking to the experience of those who have hooked up with transmen after surgery and hormones, since in my experience it’s a whole different thing. In other words, my focus is very specific, and I apologize to anyone who does not see themselves reflected above.

I am also writing from the perspective of someone who has been fully supportive of my partner’s transition, but also wish to make space to acknowledge that for the transguy, let alone the partner, transition can be freaking’ hard! Transphobia sucks. “Gender dysphoria” is awful. Surgery is painful. Depression and anxiety can flourish. Money can be hard to come by. T takes a while to get used to. Not passing can be devastating. Including your kids in the transition is important yet difficult. Et cetera. All of this is a result of the transphobic environment in which we live. Transitioning can and should be celebrated. But despite its fabulousness, like any other life-changing transformation, transitioning can also be very difficult for both people—and not because of the gender ‘change,’ but because of all the transphobia that accompanies a transition. And when an FTM is hooked up with a partner, it is usually partner who helps to put the pieces back together, for obvious reasons. There’s some care-taking that happens, as would be normal for any other life-altering change in a partnership (pregnancy, loss of a job, illness etc). I’m not sure why drawing attention to the role that a partner plays in making the transition happen is so triggering for some people. But it appears to be so. For those people reading this who have transitioned (and here I am referencing surgeries and hormones, which I realize is not how everyone defines transition) with no difficulties at all, congratulations. I look forward to a time when this is the norm, not the exception.

[elspethbrown]

Other Tumblrs about Partners of Trans Men

Just got this list from an article that Jenna sent me (thx, Jenna) at xojane (if interested see: http://www.xojane.com/sex/my-trans-partner-had-his-breasts-removed#disqus_thread. I've added these resources to my page at http://www.elspethbrown.org/page/transpartners-project. Enjoy! allthevalidation.tumblr.com partnersof-ftm.tumblr.com aguidetoyourftmboyfriend.tumbl... transspouse.tumblr.com vickilovesdare.tumblr.com southeastsoffa.tumblr.com transpartnerconfessions.tumblr.com

[elspethbrown]

More Advice for Partners of Trans* Men

I'm cleaning up another interview on this oral history project of partners of trans* men who have supported the transitioning partner through some aspect of the transition. I end the interviews asking partners to provide some advice for others at the beginning stages of a medical transition. This advice comes from a queer black femme: "So I would say to a partner make sure —and it doesn’t really need to all be femmes--but make sure you have your support folks together. Just because somebody’s transitioning doesn’t mean they have the right to cross boundaries, so, you know, call shit out. Call shit out. Be prepared to be alone which is the hardest thing. That’s the thing I think that frightened me is being alone. And as it was, I was [already] alone in the relationship. Be prepared to say no, and say this isn’t something I can do; you need someone else to do that. And that doesn’t mean that you’re less of a support for that person or that you’re less in a relationship with that person. So get to say to the person who’s transitioning-- who’s also part of your team, right--it can’t all just be me. And get to say “I’m not having that conversation with you right now. Someone else needs to do that with you right now." And have fun, you know. Especially if they’re just starting and you’re together. Have as much sex as possible in really fun and fantastic places."

[elspethbrown]

Trans Poem by Patti Smith, 1967

I found this poem in Metamorphosis newsletter, for FTMs, in the Aug 1983 issue. Could it be 'the' Patti Smith? Sounds like her (note references to narrow-hipped boy--and mustangs) It's quite beautiful. Here is is:

FEMALE

female. feel male. Ever since I felt the need to choose I'd choose male. I felt boy rythums [sic] when I was kn knee pants. I sobbed when I had to use the public ladies' room. My undergarments made me blush. Every feminine gesture I affected from my mother humiliated me.

I ran around with a pack of wolves. I puked on every pinafore. Growing breasts was a nightmare In anger I cut off all my hair and knelt glassy0eyed before god. I begged him to place me in my own barbaric race. The male race. The race of my choice. In answer he injected me with all the characteristics of my gender. sultry. languid. wanton. dip into summer skirts, go down with a narrow-hipped boy behind a bowling alley. bleed. come. fill my womb.

the misfit massacres the mustang pony just to feel the soft rise of marilyn monroe against his chest. bloated. pregnant. I crawl thru the sand. like a lame dog. like a crab. pull my fat baby belly to the sea. pure edge. pull my hair out by the roots. roll and drag and claw like a bitch. like a bitch. like a bitch.

--Patti Smith, April 1967

[elspethbrown]

Transsexuals in Prison: 1987

Sort of ironic, as wonderful as it is, that it's only in 2013 that we have a sympathetic, mainstream media representation of transsexuality in prison, via Orange is the New Black. I am reading correspondence between Rupert Raj and an imprisoned trans woman, Allyn Scribner/Lynn Marie Scribner, in the late 1980s. Scribner was part of an organization (founded it, perhaps?) called "Transsexuals in Prison," and was pursuing numerous legal challenges against the Texas Department of Corrections, which refused her hormones. She also sent Raj a three-page confidential listing of other imprisoned trans people in the US, with full names, addresses, whether pre-op, post-op, etc. It's a bit of an archival gold mine for anyone doing research on this area, historically. Scribner was supposed to be released in 2014...maybe she's still imprisoned in Huntsville, TX. I hope now. [Raj materials are at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Toronto ON; I am processing the collection there as a volunteer.]

[elspethbrown]

Check out Amalia Charles' cool documentary about being trans* at Smith College We Graduate People: Trans* Experience at Smith College (2013). Way to go, Amalia!!

[elspethbrown]

Where's the Trans Material on Wikipedia? Time for a 'Write in!'

I'm at the CLGA again, processing the Rupert Raj collection, and out of curiosity I've taken to checking Wikipedia to see if some of these important figures in trans history are on there. The short answer is: no. Which means we need to add them. I've signed up for access, but have yet to do my first entry. For example, here are some people who don't even have an entry: Rupert Raj; Ari Kane (founder of Fantasia Fair); Mario Martino; Lee Brewster. There are some needs-to-be-edited entries for Stephen Whittle and Lou Sullivan. Important historical organizations don't have entries, such as FTM International and SHAFT, the UK group. If anyone reading this wants to start some entries on Wikipedia, that would be fantastic!

[elspethbrown]

Testosterone, Transition, and Changing Emotional Styles

I'm going through an interview I did with a young woman, age 18, whose partner has been transitioning for the past few years (they got together in high school). In general it's been very positive for both of them. But she reflects on how their emotional styles are more in contrast since her partner started T. It's something I've noticed in other interviews I've done. Here is what she has to say:

Interviewer:        We haven’t really talked very much about what happened with [your partner] going on testosterone. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like for him and what it was like for you.

Respondent:       Yeah. For him, it was really positive and like almost immediately he did the gel so the effects are like instead of one shot every week, it’s kind of like you get a new dose every single day. So it’s not like by the end of the week you're tired and… like it’s immediately in your bloodstream and stuff and… every day. And so he felt it immediately and I don’t know if it was also because it was like in his head. He knew he was on testosterone and he was waiting for it for a long time.

But he just felt better and had more energy and felt like he wanted to talk more, not only to me but like in general to other people, he wanted to go out more. Just felt more confident and felt not so hopeless, like “okay well now I know that I'm going to be more comfortable”, like “even if I can’t see changes now, it’s going to happen soon” and things like that. And he became more positive and just happier in general.

                          And for me it was good, like I experienced the same things as him. I was happy with him doing that. The main thing was that before we would always talk about the ways that we feel but since he went on testosterone and started to feel better and stuff, he wouldn’t really have that many things to say. So our conversations stopped; we would spend so much time together and just not talk about the ways that we felt. And then when I would ask him, he would say he feels good and then he would ask me and I would feel like weird saying anything else because I didn’t want to just like take up all of our time talking about me.

                          So yeah, that’s the main thing that we still struggle with, with testosterone is just him not wanting to talk about anything and feeling fine all the time. And if I'm upset it makes me feel like I don’t have a right to be upset because he's never upset.