Who am I?

Name: Aren Aizura, most often called Az for short

Starsign: Virgo

Age: 30 but often more like half that.

Hobbies: Having read my Adorno, I despise leisure-time as a capitalist plot to make us believe time outside paid work is free, when really 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!) At any rate, I'm writing a PhD. I suppose you could call this a hobby. I also spend too much time online: on the right CV, net-surfing could also be a hobby. (That CV may not result in work, just in case anyone thinks of trying it on.)

Work: not enough pay, too much time. Mostly in a call centre, although I am attempting to develop a lucrative sideline as a paid 'Trans Community Consultant'. No offers thus far.

Political Persuasions: Not present in any existing political party. Some of my best friends think they're communists, does that count?

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 scruffy fluff on 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. At the dole office, my title is 'Mr' but my gender is female. At VicRoads, my title is 'Ms' but my gender is male. It gets old after a while.

What is this place?
A friend of mine by the name of 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, in case you hadn't already gotten the picture, 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’.
  • Music, too often an invisible presence out here in the silent outposts of webville.
  • 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 reckon, for the diffractions between maps of 'internalised', bodily, psychic traversals and maps of 'the world'.



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