Yesterday I emailed out the first call-out for my thesis fieldwork. The call-out is for people who have had, or are obtending to obtain, gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, to conduct interviews with me about their experiences. It feels weird, good but also very weird. From here on, everything that takes place — the phrasing of the call-out, email exchanges, phone calls, all the processes of mutual checking out that might lead to interviews — is heavy with power relations. I have no idea about how people will respond. Today I received six emails, one of which politely and carefully questioned my asking for ‘transgender’ people to respond as well as ‘transsexual’ — since as she understands it, transgender people do not have surgery. Just as politely and carefully, I replied suggesting that our definitions of ‘transgender’ might be different, and that I had no intention of homogenising the experiences of either category. This made me aware (as if I wasn’t already) that this fieldwork negotiates a minefield of deeply-held definitions, understandings about gender. I’ve got to question everything, though, even the way I just phrased the field as a ‘minefield’. Also, being in relation with people is far more emotionally involving and requisite of attention, care, than critiquing a website, or a novel, or an autobiography. This will take deep engagement (or ‘thick relation’, rather than ‘thick description’.)

Gender Project v2.0, which I’ve been working on getting live for almost two years is up as a shell. Someone made a previous version using raw html, but we realised that user-friendly content management was more important, for the moment. So, Word Press as a Content Management System. I spent today learning the ins and outs of Word Press. Now, the dashboard is lovely but getting my head around some stuff was kinda hard. Like, for example, learning how to change file permissions in FTP clients. Whoa. Code alert. It’s not often I think of Blogsome with a nostalgic pang of familiarity.