My name is Aren Z. Aizura. I'm finishing a PhD in the Cultural Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, Australia about the valorisation of travel metaphors in transsexual and transgender cultural productions, and their connection to material transgender mobilities. My work focuses on the intersections between queer and gender variant geographical mobility, social mobility and transnational neocolonialisms. Lately I have also developed a research interest in medical tourisms, particularly cosmetic surgical tourism. I also write fiction and occasionally non-fiction essays: check out the Writing page for a list of recent publications. I intend to submit my PhD thesis soon, and will be looking for future employment somewhere outside Australia. Please get in touch if you would like to offer me work!

Hobbies
Having read my Adorno, I despise leisure-time as a capitalist plot to make us believe time outside paid work is free, when the traditional 'eight hours play' is mostly spent replenishing and reproducing our capacity for labour, plus enabling us to fantasise that the time we spend outside work has an independent social meaning. (Not that anyone ever did, or really has, eight hours' play: this too, a bourgeois fantasy!) But this doesn't mean I don't have fun! I love love love to dance. I used to make zines, and maybe will again some day. I also really gardening, making delicious food, and obsessing about tv shows including Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Recently I've also been developing a taste for cross-country skiing.

Identity documents
Once upon a time people looked at me and thought I was a woman for sure. Now, people look at me and think I should shave the scruff from my chin. I consider gender a pretty weird and non-binary affair. That goes for everyone, not just me. I don't truck much with labels, so 'ftm', 'transman', 'trannyguy' etc don't really apply -- unless I'm in a psychiatrist's office, requesting approval for body modification, in which case I describe myself as a man. 'Trannyboy' I will accept at a pinch, but that's just cause I am unhealthily obsessed with youthfulness. Administratively, I'm a walking contradiction.

What is this place?
A friend of mine called Monty Cantsin once referred to a sharehouse he lived in as a SPAZ -- a Semi-Permanent Autonomous Zone. SPAZ. SPAZZZZ. Say it loud, say it proud.

Why 'Going somewhere?' This weblog is all about travel. Transit, displacement, movement, in all senses of the words and in any fashion. Moving through identities, cycles, internal roadmaps. I like to think about why people move and how -- also how and why, at particular points and in particular places, people decide not to move, or are rendered immobile. Associated with that interest in movement is an enduring interest in the workings of territory: ownership and property in one direction and identity disputes, 'border wars', in a thousand other directions. I like to remember that the map is not the terrain.

Some of the things I would like to keep here:

  • Thoughts I’m grappling with as part of a huge project on the relationships between geographical travel and gender identity.
  • Writing to figure out what 'politics' means -- which could be anything! -- although much of the time, I suspect, I’ll be preoccupied with resonances and frictions between the ‘political’ and the ‘personal’.
  • Words that pass through with a sense of their own weight, the implications and complications of bearing them into the world, words that can wait to fall on the beat whenever it comes, words that broker a deal between spontaneity and deliberation.

    • And about the map: it's not a map, or rather, not a geographical map. It's a microscopic slide photograph of human cell tissue: a nice visual thought-explosion, I think, for the diffractions between maps of 'internalised', bodily, psychic traversals and maps of 'the world'.



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