The other day I wrote a Sticky note with a list of people whose reading eye I want to keep in mind while I’m finishing my thesis. Only a couple of these people will read the thesis, this is certain. But the list includes a bunch of people with fierce intellects and diverse interests. Writing ‘for’ them, addressing them, helps me attend to what they might wish I performed rigorously, the questions and critical eye they might contribute.

This person, for instance, will want me to go for the jugular: what theoretical density can I sustain, how can I push a line of argument further, how can I shock myself out of wishy-washy cult stud gestures? This other person will be attending to what he talks about as “having enough death” — acknowledging the material violences of inequality, the bodies that are regarded as disposable and whose deaths don’t ‘matter’. One person will care that the words are clear and readable and beautiful, because otherwise they won’t bother reading at all. Someone will attend to philosophical complexity and how I define my theoretical frameworks. Someone else will be interested in the rigour of my critique of political economy and what I’m doing with Marx. Someone else again will want my Thai history and politics to be accurate. Someone else will attend most to my treatment of transnationality and gender/sexuality, and the postcolonial. And so on. It’s a long list.

The beautiful thing is, most of these people are friends. The political and theoretical networks I inhabit are full of people who I respect totally. I feel so grateful to have these people around. Even if they don’t actually read anything I write, in the future, imagining how they might read this work forces me to write as if it were a conversation, larger than myself. (And some of you are reading this, anyhow, which means you’re already part of the conversation.)

I am having a really great time with writing at the moment. When it flows, I know exactly how to stitch everything together. This is why people spend three or four years on the same project. One simply knows, finally, how things fit — and one knows exactly what one doesn’t know, also, and why. But I’m only at this point because of conversations that have already taken place, and because of the generosity of those who have engaged with me, here, and in other spaces.

Did I just write a draft of an acknowledgments page? I think so.

Back in Melbourne and the winter is setting in. It’s time to wrap a blanket over my knees and sit at the computer and write. Currently I’m expanding the paper I presented at Transsomatechnics into a chapter. Expanding conference papers this way really demonstrates how slack a scholar I am. And how ridiculous it is to have to make concrete definitions of terms, to begin with. For example, defining subjectivation. Despite having planned the chapter already, ’scheduling in’ the requisite glosses in the correct places, in the paper itself I wrote just whatever I thought subjectivation means. It’s difficult enough parsing the distinction between ’subjectivation’ and ’subjectification’, without realising that a) the Bifo essay I rely on to define Foucault’s development of subjectivation is referenceless, in that beautiful slack Continental fashion; b) Judith Butler talks about subjectivation in The Psychic Life of Power, but, in a move that must have caused who knows what domestic dispute, assigns an argument about identity politics, differentiation and rights to Foucault when her own partner Wendy Brown made it, neglecting to footnote Brown at all. Well done. Here is what I have so far on subjectivation. If anyone can offer insight, please do:

Subjectivation is the Foucauldian term I use to describe a technique of power which forms subjects who are able to think of themselves as autonomous individuals, but simultaneously produces subjection. This technique of power

“applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.” (”The Subject and Power”, 212)

Rather than, as with governmentality, dealing with the management of the population on a mass scale, this technique of power is intimately imbricated within the practices of everyday life. To call this form of power subjectivation is also to follow the anti-humanist claim that the ‘human’ does not pre-exist the practices that form subjects (of the law, of the state, of capital, of medicine and so on.) Franco Berardi writes,

“The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy. There is no subject, but subjectivation, and the history of subjectifying processes is reconstructed through the analysis of epistemic, imaginary, libidinal and social dispositifs modeling the primary matter of the lived.”

What Berardi refers to as subjectivation here are the multiple and performative points of contact whereby bodies become identifiable and categorisable. This could be thought of as a similar hermeneutic to the Althusserian concept of interpellation, whereby the state and/or capitalism bring subjects into being through hailing. But distinct from Althusser, Foucault maintains that subjectivation is not entirely oppressive, but that it also encompasses our own production of ourselves in relation to institutions. Thus, subjectivation might also be enabling of resistance to capital, or the state, in the same breath as we understand it to be a technique of either.

In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault implies that the newest modes of subjectivation as processes of individualization and differentiation. These contemporary modes of subjectivation are borne out of the political conditions of contemporary liberal democracies, in which formal rights and recognition are assumed to accrue only in relation to a specific (and wounded) category of identity. These multiple identity categories interface with biopolitical social apparatuses (or what Foucault calls dispositifs) in ways that are constantly mutating, along with the regulative regimes which recognise and manage them as categories of personhood. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, woman, migrant, refugee, indigenous or Aboriginal: these are some of the categories that could be cited in this context. ‘Transsexual’ or ‘transgender’ (with their different genealogies referencing relationships to medicine and politics) are two others.

Eduardo Cadava is visiting Melbourne and doing workshops at Melbourne University next week. Apparently everyone is welcome to attend, even non-postgraduate students and those who haven’t submitted an application:

Eduardo Cadava Graduate Seminars 2008

Seminar 1 – Monday, March 10, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: JT Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Nadar

Seminar 2 – Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: CFI Seminar Room (Arts Hub, Level 2, 234 St Kilda Rd)
The Poetry of Photography

Seminar 3 – Friday, March 14 2008, 5-7 pm
Location: T Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Photography and Reproduction: Walter Benjamin

2008 Eduardo Cadava Public Lecture

Thursday, March 13, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts
PALM READING:
FAZAL SHEIKH’S HANDBOOK OF DEATH

Riki alerted me to to this excellent article by Dan Irving, “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive,” in the Queer Futures edition of the Radical History Review. He quotes a line I’m proud of writing. But better, he takes a beautifully hard line about trans studies’ almost complete ignorance of gender variance as a form of consumption/production that is entirely very enmeshed within capitalist relations:

Scholars within trans studies rarely contextualize trans identities, subjectivities, and activism within historical and contemporary capitalist relations. Much scholarship seeks to save trans identities from invisibility, as well as to counter the ongoing reproduction of the heteronormative binary of sex/gender through detailed analyses of the vast array of existing trans identities. There is a tendency within this commentary to reify trans identities as solely matters of sex/gender and to challenge state and institutional dominance over trans people by emphasizing the necessity of self-determination of sex/gender. Such advocacy of self-determination is often coupled with arguments for human rights protections. Progressive scholars must question the theoretical and political implications of putting forward individualistic strategies of sex/gender self-determination, especially within the contemporary neoliberal context, where the minimalist state and a free-market economy demand individual self-sufficiency. While some texts address the impacts of capitalist socioeconomic relations on trans people’s lives, a critical analysis of the exploitative labor relations that comprise the logic of capital remains lacking.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is this Dan Irving, we must converse.

Some resources:

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (ed), Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (San Francisco: Seal Press, 2006).
Dean Spade, “Compliance is Gendered: Struggling for Gender Self-Determination in a Hostile Economy,” in Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter (eds), Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Michelle O’Brien, “Tracing this Body: Transsexuality, pharmaceuticals & capitalism.” (2003)
Jo Hirschman, “TransAction: Organizing against capitalism and state violence in San Francisco”, Socialist Review (2001)

Coburg is hot and dry, the house is an oven. Our neighbours on one side have ripped up their lawn, front and back, as well as the carefully-planted lavender bushes and saplings the previous occupants put in to make it look like there was a garden. In place of grass, the guy is laying down astroturf. Apparently astroturf will save heaps of water; it’s really ‘hardy’, but unfortunately not biodegradable. This is the neighbour who encouraged our landlord to fell the one surviving eucalypt in our front yard, as it was dropping flowers on his car. Today they’re using some astroturf laying machine. On the other side, the neighbours have NOVA FM on the stereo turned up crazy loud.

Back in thesis mode, I’m once again tied up in crazy [massively self-absorbed] theoretical knots. For the fourth time this year, I’ve lost a sense of how my chapters work, as a logical progression through particular theoretical sites. Sometimes I know exactly how it all works, but it’s a really blink and you miss it enterprise: like one of those 3D pictures. There really is no logic, actually, just a cosmetic one that looks okay in thesis plans but comes apart when I try to write it out in those required linking sentences that end up about a paragraph long. “While in Chapter Two, I argued [insert long, grammatically suspect clause], in Chapter Three I shift registers to [insert another, longer, more grammatically suspect clause].” Hysterical.

Structure, discipline, thought order… All the things I mark my first-years down for in their teensy 1500 word essays, I fail monstrously at.

I think too much. I have too many ideas, and they all shoot off into the outer atmosphere right away. It’s like when I tell people what my thesis is about, and if they’re nice they generally say, “Wow, that’s so interesting, yeah, wow,” and tell me how they’ve heard that Singapore is the gender reassignment capital of the world or whatever, random contributions to the archive of trans travel practices. This archive is busting at the seams, it’s so huge, and I have decided for some insane reason that I should be the person to file it all under headings. I’m mostly interested in the crazy stories, the tiny details, the archive; not so interested in contextualising it all, making sense of it, fitting everything in boxes. But this is what a thesis does. Or so I’ve heard. It’s like P. said, after hearing one of my ‘o-hai-here’s-a-crazy-idea-i’m-still-working-on-the-theory’ papers earlier in the year: “So exciting! Or it will be, when you tie it all down.” And the bitch is, I know this monster won’t be readable or coherent unless I do that grounding work.

It’s hard to tie down. Maybe I should just throw the whole thing out and start again.

On Friday afternoon I’m giving a little talk about trans masculinity, sex and refusing lack at a symposium called King Power: Designing Masculinities at RMIT. It’s on at 4pm, in the Storey Hall Seminar Rooms. King Power is on in conjunction with a range of bizarre events celebrating Elvis. It should be kind of fun.

I found out today that I have two chapters and my thesis intro due on 6 September. Somehow I managed to lose the paperwork telling me this back in March. Quick calculations: if I write 500 words per day, 5 days a week (and those solid finished draft words, not write-and-throw-out words) I can submit the package only two weeks late, on September 21.

Today has mostly been spent doing last minute stuff for this:

(Un)Making Queer Worlds: Transformations in Asia-Pacific Queer Cultures
Roundtable Workshop for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers

June 22-23, 2007
Graduate Centre
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia

If you’re in Melbourne and you’re interested in Asia-Pacific stuff, or queer stuff, come along. It’s free! I would particularly recommend coming to see Peter Jackson’s keynote, entitled “Capitalism, Queer Autonomy, and the Historical Production of Sex Cultural Difference.” Here’s a part of the abstract for his talk:

Simplistic, but nonetheless influential, “McWorld” accounts of cultural globalisation draw on political-economy models of imperialism that portray capitalism as a force that homogenises world cultures along Western lines. This line of thought has influenced many accounts of the global proliferation sex cultural difference, which is often portrayed as the “spread”, “borrowing”, or “imposition” of originally Western, usually American, models upon the rest of the world. In these accounts the West/America is positioned as active/dominating, while the rest of the world is positioned as passive/subordinated. Somewhat oddly, despite their political differences both conservative pro-globalisation analysts as well as anti-capitalist critics of imperialism often share this basic model, differing only in whether they value the assumed Western/American dominance of world cultures as a good or a bad thing. However, the results of Asian queer studies research seem to question both the traditional conservative and critical positions on the role of capitalism in contemporary cultural production, and to reveal both as being deeply infected with West-centric assumptions.

You can also catch papers during the day on Friday and Saturday by amazing people like Katsu and Bobby, for whom I can’t find a good link but who talks awesomely about cars, speed and gay clubbing in Manila. I am giving a paper too, on Saturday afternoon, but it’s (embarrassingly) a referenced and expanded version of the paper I did in February at Queer Asian Sites, and not the sparkly new material I’d hoped to have written by now.

I’ve been reading Warren Montag’s book on Althusser this week and wrote this huge post the other day about Althusser, blogging, getting back into blogging, all sorts of crunchy stuff, but it’s not ready yet.

At Somatechnics back in April, I was lucky enough to meet the fabulous Susan Stryker and hear her present about her latest research project, on Christine Jorgenson’s career-cum-hobby as a film maker. The project relates Jorgenson’s visions of herself behind the camera, making films, with her production of a public self as the ultimate, perfect, man-made woman. Along the way, Stryker makes some great links to the racialisation of that vision of Ultimate [Trans] Womanhood, and talks about the production of ‘transgender whiteness’. Really exciting stuff. I also met Eliza, who’s writing on trans pornography at the Uni of Amsterdam and has been making queer/trans porn with various collaborators all over the world forever. Along with Zoo, we went swimming at Coogee Beach, just as a thunderstorm was breaking overhead, in the craziest downpour. Eliza gave this quite stunning paper relating Walter Benjamin to transness, with the result that maybe we can talk about ‘gender affinity’ as a concept rather than ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender role’ or gender… binary? Affinity as in affinity groups, but also affinity as in a space permitting the micrological difference of everyone to each other. Pretty damn fun. Actually, the number of trans theorists at Somatechnics was really heartening — it’s the first time I’ve ever felt surrounded by people who were at least on a pretty similar wavelength, politically and theoretically, and I’m hoping to be enjoying conversations with them for a long time to come.

Eliza also alerted me to the awesome, AWESOME cinematic talent of Oakie Treadwell, director of Phineas Slipped and a feature called Maggots and Men. Maggots and Men is a trans/masculine re-telling of the Kronstadt sailor rebellion. Gender anarchy, alright. Phineas Slipped, a short, is about an English class in a boy’s school. As the teacher asks questions about a homoerotic novel, the boys/bois flit off into porno fantasies about Phineas and what happened when they met him.

Finally, an article by Emi Koyama from Intersex Initiative about the change from talking about ‘intersex’ to ‘disorders of sex differentiation’, covering the intersections between intersex activism, disability rights work and disability theory. I’m not sure I agree with her on some points — ie, it seems a mistake to return to a model of activism that works mainly for people who feel they embody a ‘normal’ gender, rather than taking gender apart altogether. Then again, different battles, different strategies.

PS I accidentally closed the tab I was writing this post in just now, and thought I’d lost it. Then I realised Firefox has a ‘recently closed tabs’ option in the History menu. It’s like a magic ‘restore’ spell. One more reason to convert to Firefox, folks. I also have a ‘light’ bout of pneumonia and have been mostly bedridden since Friday. Bedridden and rediscovering the internet. Wish my lungs luck with their struggle against the nasty bug.

Ika’s awesome new blog is up, reminding me that it’s high time I posted . Sydney was already two weeks ago. I wrote assiduous notes on most of the papers I attended, meaning to write a full report. But of course when I did arrive home after a slightly odd roadtrip from Sydney to Melbourne, I was too tired to write. Now I’m all distracted by other things — such as last week’s battles to save the Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, a squatted social centre and house. The following ‘mobilisation video’ movie is propaganda in the most beautiful sense of the word:

(found via @rchive)

I’m so glad someone came up with a more useful deployment of that grand tearjerky soundtrack from A Perfect Storm.

Anyhow, Sydney. First, some photos: from the Queer Asian Sites conference and shots of South Durras, near Bateman’s Bay, which was as far along the beach as we got in our shiny silver rental car before it became clear that none of us really wanted to spend three days driving along a windy coastal road, and headed for the Hume via Canberra.

It’s funny how one can invest so much hope in the idea of ‘queer conferences’. One almost expects that things might turn out to be really queer. Instead, one finds that ‘queer’ to most academics still means ‘gay’, or to really stretch matters, ‘gay and lesbian.’ I found Queer Spaces more underwhelming than Queer Asian Sites, apart from Ika’s paper about how slash fanfiction offers a way to read textuality itself as spatial (and possibly utopic), with reference to a lovely montage of scenes from Blakes 7. The paper, and talk of utopic spaces generally, reminded me of a recent post by Steven Shaviro on Delany’s Mad Man riffing the distinction between utopic and heterotopic spaces (or ‘pornotopic’ and pornutopic’ spaces.) Is there a way to think queer sex and queer space without utopias, as already circulating in the everyday?

Possibly the worst moment at Queer Spaces happened in a session on Transy House, a trans communal house in Brooklyn mostly inhabited by transwomen, many of whom were previously homeless. The presenter had spent some time in Transy House doing fieldwork for a sociology PhD. She admitted at the start that she’d gone there expecting the transpeople in the house to all be engaged in dissolving gender binaries — which they manifestly failed to do! Her method, therefore, involved extrapolating the transpeoples’ ‘identities’ by reading the look of the house. Ie, the house was messy and there were numerous maintenance problems = transpeople are self-hating and underconfident; some of the transwomen had decorated their rooms with ultra-feminine accoutrements = they were recuperating gender norms; there was a house mother, a house dad and ’sisters’ = repeating heteronormative nuclear family dynamics, and on, and on, ad infinitum.

It didn’t seem to occur to the presenter that she would probably gag if someone told her that because she had (for example) a satin doona cover, she was recuperating binary gender norms. But things got even more weird when Elspeth Probyn, from whom you might expect more smarts, responded in question time to the photos of the house by saying, “Yeah, the house looks like it’s full of a bunch of blokes!” Right. So on one hand, the transwomen who live there are ‘too domestic’ with their frilly sheets, and on the other hand, their messines indicates that they’re really just blokes. Far too much enjoyment of passing judgment on transpeople for my comfort, there. But hey, that’s queer space for you!

(Part II to follow)

It’s been a strange week, full of stress about job offers that either didn’t fulfil the required money/time co-ordinates or failed to materialise entirely. May I register my utter disillusionment with the academic employment market just once more, with feeling?

I’m about to head to Sydney on Saturday for the Queer Space and Queer Asian Sites conferences. I’ve been trying to write part of Chapter One this week, and the paper I’m presenting at QAS (on which I’m also working) is from Chapter Six. You’d think this would mean a clever kind of book-ended, broad perspective on the whole project, but instead I feel torn in two different thinky directions at once, able to give neither my full attention. But the conferences look promising, and loads of people are coming — from as far as Bristol, even! I’m particularly keen to meet Bond, a Thai postgrad who I missed the pleasure of meeting in Bangkok back in June because her wallet was stolen on the day we were supposed to hang out.

Meanwhile, I’ll be absent from the blog. Not that I wasn’t absent already, but you know what I mean.

The other day I had coffee with a friend, and a friend of his who recently finished Honours in Cinema Studies at our [growing] esteemed institution. Cinema Studies has been rocked by controversy lately, and it’s all the fault of Jean Seberg. Apparently, some of this year’s first year Cinema Studies students were shocked at finding a picture of two men in a romantic embrace on the cover of the Cinema Studies 101 photocopied reader. They continued to be offended until it was pointed out that the ‘two men’ were actually Jean-Laul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, from A Bout de Souffle, and that what they’d been reading as homosexuality was, in fact, heterosexual love between a man and a 60’s androgynous gamine.

To be sure, Jean does look pretty boyish. Boyish enough, I think, for some queer Godard fan of yore to deliberately read her in key moments as male, turning Breathless into a story about a boy failing spectacularly to find a Daddy. You would have to explain the pregnancy somehow, but it could be done.

Anyhow, what-philistines-isn’t-that-that-hilarious! Not so much, it turns out. Some of the students were so offended that they complained to the Vice-Chancellor. So the VC had words with the Cinema Studies department, and as a result, Jean and Jean Paul were removed from the reader cover, along with the week on pornography in cinema. It looks like A Bout de Souffle itself only just managed to escape being pulled off the syllabus completely. (more…)

Eric reminds me that Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, is out. I’m looking forward to reading it — Politics Out of History wasn’t my cup of tea, and States of Injury has been cited far too many times in things I’ve written to bear much more. If I owned a copy of the latter, it would be faded, battered and dogeared. Instead I just have numerous photocopies of the same chapters from moments when I couldn’t find them in my enormous photocopy piles.*

Speaking of the US feminist/queer left (or maybe queer leftists Taking A Break from feminism) I finally started reading Janet Halley’s book Split Decisions after BitchLab’s enthusiastic recommendations. (Princeton University Press: what all the cool kids are wearing this season.) One of the things it does very well is to rearticulate some of Wendy Brown’s thought about rights, democracy and coalitions in a manner akin to how Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook made trans theory immediately conversational, personal and ‘tasty’ reading ten years ago.

But with an added kick. Reading Split Decisions is a bit like doing a one-night refresher class in queer and feminist theory over tequila shots, one shot per theorist. It can make you feel a little drunk. There’s an amazing recapitulation of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, which makes me yearn for thinkers like Bersani. Obstinately Freudian and only interested in ‘gay men’ he might be, but at least he never wanted to assimilate. Not even deep down. He just wanted to be taken apart.

I feel particularly gleeful about Halley’s reading of Jay Prosser’s conflicted relationship to Butler — “an oedipally murderous prodigal son who wants his father to approve the prodigal’s depredations at the homestead.” Ouch, Jay. She just said your book was all about daddy issues. (With a daddy like Butler, no wonder you got issues, boyfriend.) Actually, this has got to be the most incisive and perceptive reading of Second Skins I’ve encountered. Halley neither bows to Prosser’s demand that we read his interpretation of the transsexual body as the only one available, or tries to water down the more useful claim that trans politics cannot collapse its deeply conflicting claims into one united community.

I’m not sure if it was reading Spilt Decisions that fired me up, or because I stopped working on the most boring chapter in the history of theses and got cracking with a paper on Paper Dolls, but I’ve been working very hard this last week. I’ve also been experimenting with filing notes, full-text articles and writing drafts in Keynote, this tree-structured note manager. It’s fully searchable, which is a huge improvement on the strange collection of word documents I’ve collected in my phd folder that all seem to called ‘plan.doc’ or ‘thoughts.doc’. I’m now wishing I could combine EndNote, Keynote and a note manager that read pdf’s and multimedia files, so all my references, articles, random notes and chapter drafts could be accessible in the same interface. If anyone knows of such multi-tasking software, I’d be very interested in finding out more.

*Memo for November: buy a freakin’ filing cabinet.

Academic Blogs: a new wiki designed to create an invisible college of academic blogs. It started as an idea for an aggregation of ‘theory blogs’, I think, but the project has developed. Ange is already writing a post about this for Long Sunday, but I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. Here’s a slab of text from the FAQ:

What are the necessary qualifications for a blog to be listed?

They’re pretty simple - the blog has to be written by an academic. That is to say, the author should be either a member of a third level institution’s faculty (i.e. community college, college, university, technical institute or whatever), or pursuing a doctoral degree, or employed by a third level institution to do academically relevant work (such as working as a university librarian). If you come across a blog that seems to meet these requirements, feel free to add it. When you do, you ought to note the evidence for why the blog qualifies on the changes page. Some blogs - e.g. those written by anonymous academics - may involve tricky judgment calls. Say why you think this is a genuine academic blog, but please add it - many academics have good reason to blog anonymously. If it turns out not to be a legitimate academic blog, it will likely be deleted later. Very rarely, blogs written by non-academics may qualify. If you think a blog by a non-academic qualifies on its merits, you should suggest it to one of the Senior Editors, with supporting evidence. The Senior Editor will then decide whether to nominate it. Otherwise it is liable to be deleted summarily. If you are a non-academic and you nominate your own blog for consideration, don’t be offended if it isn’t accepted - only very exceptional blogs will be included. The intent of this site isn’t to provide comprehensive lists of blogs and resources dealing with history, politics, archaeology etc - there are already very good sites in existence that do this. It’s to provide a resource for academic bloggers, and readers of academic blogs.

Grant Morrison’s thoughts on Invisible Colleges differed somewhat from this plan, but no matter. It’s ever so comforting to watch idiots carve up the de-institutionalised, random, multiple spaces of the bloggosphere into manageable, institutionalised blocks. Say ‘yeah!’ if you’re an academic. If you’re not, piss off. We don’t like your type here. The only exceptions are very special idiot savants who can do things like recite the entirety of Plato’s Republic in Latin and even then, we have to delouse them first.

(Note that Academic Blogs is a wiki, editable by almost anyone, so if one was inclined to register one’s objections, one might do so quite easily on the site itself.)

I’m wading through the statistics gleaned from the survey on trans travel I ran earlier in the year. Aside from doing a crash course in how to get what I need from Excel, I’m finding some interesting stats in there amongst the more immediately arresting answers to open-ended questions, like “Why is it necessary for you to travel in relation to gender identity?” It feels odd, sort of Enlightenment social science-y, to have this package of ‘data’ that can be caused to ‘reveal’ information. Except that with 300 participants, this is a tiny sample, and even then, I wouldn’t want to regard it as proper social ’science’. Plus, a surprisingly large number of people either got bored and didn’t finish the survey, or just didn’t feel like telling me the gender they’d been assigned at birth. Which is kinda great, actually. I would be disappointed if it was possible to neatly categorise everyone’s answers according to a binary system that I don’t actually believe in.

Anyhow, on to my ‘findings’… Tonight, pace issues with binary gender, I compared gender assigned at birth with limitations on travel, and in particular, financial limitations. Financial hardship is one of the biggest themes of the survey, in fact: about three quaters of the participants said their financial status would have an affect on their ability to be mobile. I was wondering whether there would be a skew towards male-id’d folks or female-id’d folks in this question, and there was: more of those who said they’d been assigned male at birth (70%) felt their economic status affected their ability to be mobile than those assigned female at birth (50%). Crazy, huh.

At some point in the next three months I plan on releasing some findings, statistical and qualitative. This will be independent of the thesis (which doesn’t use stats much — I’m more focusing on profiles of participants and their experiences.) Anyhow, I have a mailing list, so if anyone’s interested in reading the results, leave a comment here or email me.