In ten essays I’m marking on Aboriginal deaths in custody, not one student has questioned whether prisons should exist at all. In class we watched The Death of Malcolm Smith, which paints a dramatically horrific picture of conditions inside most Australian jails and reformatories. The essay I’m marking right now suggests that if adequate and fair treatment was provided for Aboriginal prisoners, then everything would be fine. It’s incredible. I can’t quite believe that they accept the necessity of incarceration so calmly.

On this note, Cruciferous links to two remarkable resources on the treatment of queer/trans people in prisons, and why queer/trans anti-incarceration work is so important. Go read them.

But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions — what a sociology that would be! — so a devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real. Would that it would, would that it could, come clean, this true real. I so badly want that wink of recognition, that complicity with the nature of nature. But the more I want it, the more I realise it’s not for me. Not for you either…. which leaves us in this silly and often desperate place wanting the impossible so badly that while we believe it’s our rightful destiny and so act as accomplices of the real, we also know in our hearts that the way we picture and talk is bound to a dense set of representational gimmicks which, to coin a phrase, have but an arbitrary relation to the slippery referent easing its way out of graspable sight.

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

Fangirl tagged me for this:

The rules are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your post “Meme: I can’t believe it’s not a passion quilt!”.* Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

In the archive of LTTR (which is perfect for a Saturday afternoon web browse and inspirational for all sorts of reasons, those homos know how to make art and shit) I found this piece by Boots, about an extremely awesome Pudding Tits Project, illegibility and language. Here’s an extract:

Right after I got surgery, I felt strange. I felt strange that I spent so much money on something so self-indulgent. And I felt really strange about my place in the world. I called a friend who, like me, is not taking testosterone, gets read as female fairly frequently, and who had chest reconstruction surgery. I tried to articulate the fact that all of a sudden, it felt as if I didn’t exist in the world, save for in the presence of a few people that understood my wonderfully freakish, spectacularly monstrous gender. He both reassured and disappointed me with his reply: “We’re illegible. But everyone is, it’s just that most people are never confronted with the situation of really realizing it.”

I know this experience of feeling as if I don’t exist. I’d articulate a little differently, though — in the sense that since I’ve begun to be read as unproblematically male, everyday life is a little ‘easier’, but I lose the power of making my own freakishness visible.

For example, I don’t think many of this year’s crop of gender studies students know that I’m trans. A couple of them expressed fairly transphobic sentiments earlier in the semester, along the lines of, “If someone wants to be called a woman, fine. I’d use female pronouns to their face. But to me they were born men and they’ll always be men.” I encouraged other students to deconstruct or challenge those sentiments, and was impressed when the other students in the class rose effortlessly to the challenge. But somehow I could not say, “So I guess that to you I would count as a woman?” Partially this is because being an educator (at least in gender studies) is about dismantling the reliability of students’ individual experiences of their worlds, and offering them a toolbox with which to read the abstract, the invisible. But it was also about protecting myself from surveillance, and not allowing the class to become a space in which my gender performances were scrutinised. I wanted to retain a space in which my identity was unimportant, and where I remained effective as a conduit for learning. Also, I couldn’t think of how to describe my gender, how to account for it, to them. Remaining illegible has its uses.

Perhaps my students would learn just as much if I were ‘open’ about being trans as not. But since I don’t know how to ‘come out’ to them, I’ve tried to teach them that none of us has a stable gender (or sexuality or ethnicity or identity), and that we are all being misrecognised, all the time. If I am passionate about anything, this is it.

Anyhow, since I’ve been back from North America, I’ve been experimenting with style. Long ago, I decided that tight jeans and tight-fitting sweaters would probably make it more difficult for me to pass as a guy. No, worse — because let’s not diminish the homophobia implicit in this arithmetic around tightness and bagginess — it seemed easier to pass as a straighter-looking white boy than a queer. The excuse I gave myself was that my bum was too big for tight jeans. I’ve always felt uneasy about it, but at Transsomatechnics my whole structure of passing anxiety crumbled into dust. No-one cared. Or, people did care, but in an encouraging and nourishing way. So why is it different in Melbourne? We are still operating in reactionary response to a medicalised system in which anyone who wants to modify their bodies surgically or hormonally must engage with the ‘true transsexual’ narrative. The stakes of not passing as a true transsexual at the clinic are high — people self-harm, destroy their relationships, kill themselves. Even in the spaces made to resist this poison, we are still so psychically alert to the prevailing pressures of passing as ‘trans enough’ everywhere else that we cannot entirely innoculate ourselves against it. Lately I have been wearing flamboyantly skinny jeans, pink-streaked 80s ties and cornflower blue sweaters. Eyeliner, too. The world needs more boys with eyeliner. For now, this will be my innoculation.

Tag!: Ika, Jonathan, Craig, Wildly Parenthetical and Mattilda.

PS Today I had breakfast with a friend. After our Minor Place bagels turned out not to fill our stomachs, we went wandering through Brunswick on a mission to find baklava. On the way, we discussed what, if it were not for how the last month has been chock full of brain-shatteringly exciting things for me, would certainly be the most exciting project ever. It makes me shiver with barely repressed glee. Good things are going to happen, I just know it.

Travel: the time when you reflect on what happens when you’re at home. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about what I want to do when this trip is over. About what’s important, politically. I had this feeling in Thailand in January — a sense of dissatisfaction, maybe some regret about not giving energy to the political practices that I feel are most important. But then I came home and everything resumed. A good example of this: last year I wanted to start an autonomously-run gender/trans drop-in centre, and so did other people. That vision was rejected by some of those who got involved, leading to a huge conflict (as yet unresolved) about the vision, but the project itself has kept running, even in the absence of a clear manifesto. What I originally envisaged was a shopfront with genderfucked banners everywhere, a zine library, skill shares on all sorts of crazy shit, art making, computers for people to use, a one-day-a-week counsellor and a space for ‘activism’ to incubate, initiated for and by the lumpen queers and trannies. A place where bodies can be temporarily free from gender regulation, but which acknowledges that gender regulation is all about other forms of regulation, too. A lot of the other people involved in this gender centre project envisage something really different, something far less politically confrontational. Most recently, it looks like the project will be moving into an office space rented out by one of Melbourne’s mainstream gay and lesbian charities. This is not a bad thing, but it may not be what I want to make.

Perhaps part of the issue is that within identity-based organising, it’s hard to have conversations about class, or race, or strategies for coalitional resistance, or gentrification, or how and why the state sucks and should be avoided if possible, or how we need to rethink the concepts we use to talk about healthcare itself. (This is so even within ‘trans*’ networks, despite making an effort not to police participation along identity-based lines.) But maybe I need to be working on a project that deals with those larger issues, as well. Maybe I need to work with more people who can challenge me, rather than me trying to challenge others.

This is all a bit vague, but I just know that I’m not sitting right with my current level of political engagement. It’s not a panic along the lines of ‘omg we’re not doing enough, we have to act or die!’ either. What I’m feeling doesn’t issue from that black, icy despair everyone expressed around 2002 when the War of Terror really got started, that sense of absolute hopelessness. The world is getting more fucked up by the day, it’s true. But there are already so many people working in the cracks of the glittering cold machine-edifice. I just want to make more cracks. Sex-positive, genderfucked, sequiny, ebullient, hard-edge marxian cracks.

Anyhow, here are some things I’ve been doing in North America so far: talking trash in fag metal bars with new friends; taking a tour of Mattilda’s beautiful 7th floor view and comparing our experiences of global gentrification and rent craziness; cooking up ideas for kink skillshares back home; getting my tarot read by a posse on a ridiculously expensive kitchen floor in the Mission; meeting people I’ve known online for years who tempt me into eating amazing icecream, and having great conversations; not writing conference paper much, but feeling like I have my shit together enough to wing it.

Finally, have an awesome May Day. When I arrived in Seattle this morning I noticed big signs on the airport bus — apparently on May 1st a large march will be disrupting downtown traffic. Yeah like that. Or maybe like this: hundreds of topless taxi drivers converging on the city, demanding an end to [often racially-motivated] violence:

It’s actually impossible for me to watch this. I keep pausing it, switching tabs, going back to the clip only to be astounded by another of Oprah’s really fucking odd statements. Apparently until not too long ago, gay teenagers understood themselves as being ‘in the wrong body’, genderwise. There’s other stuff, which you can see for yourselves. Mostly, I can’t watch the clip because I identify with Thomas Beatie, his nervousness, his desire to please and be seen as sympathetic — even the attempt at which is sure to be coded as ‘feminine’, because a ‘real man’ never explains, never apologises. I relate to the attempt to tell a complex story publicly that in the soundbite logic of the medium, winds up seeming implausible. And I relate, more than a tiny bit, to his desire to bear a child.

Of course, while the mainstream media has a poke, ftm email lists and communities are going just as crazy, if not more so. First, you have the transmen who respond with pure disgust, rage and a flat dictate: “Men don’t have babies; therefore Thomas Beatie is a woman.” The more interesting arguments touch on the politics of visibility and invisibility. A lot of transmen seem to think Beatie should have just borne his baby quietly without making a stink. Some of these arguments are conservative: the logic that as long as a pregnant transman ‘does it’ in private, it’s acceptable; when it’s public, it becomes unacceptable, because it tarnishes the image of transmen as authentically male. The other argument against visibility is far more precise: given the swing of public aympathy against Beatie, law-makers will use this example as a way to argue for regulating access to change of gender markers even more than they already are, possibly requiring infertility as a condition of any rights. I am a fan of clandestinity, at times; I don’t think visibility or recognition is necessarily always the right answer. But I’m wondering how in this case, various transpeople’s desire for a clandestinity which facilitates more freedom seems to be collapsing into the logic that all ‘authentic’ transpeople desire to remain stealth, and that stealth (passing as ‘real’ men and women) should, in fact, be a condition of recognition. When does a radical clandestine politics mutate into a conservatism that simply preserves the status quo?

“I have the feeling of always wandering around, kind of alone, irresponsibly, while you’re sweating over capitalism. How could I possibly help you?”– Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers

This weekend there’s a convergence in Melbourne to discuss the formation of an oceanic anarchist (+communist? +autonomist?) federation. Oceanic as in the region of Oceania, but there are likely to be some oceanic feelings involved as well, a la Freud. A bit of desire for transcendence, a bit of a lean towards hanging onto the skirts of Mother Anarcho with a capital A.

I do tend to wander alone, irresponsibly, while other people do the sweating bit (well, who’s to say wandering irresponsibly isn’t its own form of sweating over capitalism?) but I’m kind of in a mind to attend the convergence. And maybe put in a word for the impossibility of a ‘common politics’, and against the federation being made in the name of anarchism. And get shot down, obviously, but hey…

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.

So there was this one moment at the Transdestinations “Trans Law” panel on Sunday when I seriously considered the tactical sense of walking offstage in a dramatic funk. I didn’t, because it would have looked like I was spitting the dummy. (I talked about this afterwards, I can’t remember who I was talking to, but I said this and they responded, “Yeah, Az, you would have been spitting the dummy AGAIN!” Oh.) But it would have short-circuited the falsely nice sense that all the panellists agreed on the definition of what was politically important. Plus it might have shut Jamie Gardiner up for more than a half-second. Three things about Jamie Gardiner: a) he was the only non-trans person on the panel; b) he wears knee socks; and c) he’s from the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission and is now trying to sell the merits of the new Victorian Human Rights Charter. It’s sort of vague how transpeople can benefit from the charter, but as Jamie says, “change is incremental and we don’t want to try too hard, but just write lots of letters to your local member.” Since he spent 50% of the session talking, this dominated discussion totally. He seemed blithely ignorant of how bad this made him look.

The amazing thing is that people did, in fact, intervene on the great non-discussion of the Human Rights Charter. Crystal Johnson intervened. Crystal is a sistagirl from the Tiwi Islands. I guess one of the only great things about being nearly the only Indigenous person at a trans conference is that the facilitators’ white liberal guilt will make them give you the microphone (nearly) every time you want it. She said something brilliant, which was, “Where are our human rights? We don’t have any. We’re getting raped and beaten up and having stones thrown at our houses. What does this thing mean to us?”

At this point, Tracie O’Keefe, a hardnosed Sydney trans therapist, spoke — directly to Crystal. She said, pretty much, “It’s up to you to stop them. Wipe the blood from your face and keep getting up in the morning.” There was no sense of solidarity, it was basically, “You have to do it yourself.” It’s one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard someone say at a conference.

It’s not really possible to communicate how fucking angry that panel made me, and how frustrating the entire conference was. Politically, it could have been much more powerful and useful. I don’t think these are teething problems; I think they have to do with what political concerns motivate conferences, and how the people organising them imagine and design the space allocated to talking about politics. Just getting a bunch of trans ‘public spokespeople’ in a room together does not result in anything worthwhile, necessarily. Good conference design is all about figuring out which conversations need to happen, and why, and how they might intervene in a broader framework where the most important conversations are hardly ever heard. Facilitators have to be on the same page about what’s important, so they can direct proceedings.

I feel bad making these criticisms, because most of the organisers are my friends, but it feels even more important to say, given this. Next year might be better. I hope so.

On the other hand, the arts and performance quotient of the weekend was terrific. Lots of great shows, especially Byrne and Erge doing a slapstick wrestlers’ bout depicting transmasculinity as scarcity, and Crystal’s performance/autobiographical rant. And while I’m linking to pics, you can also spy a picture of me doing my dirty Dr Seuss poem here.

At Recording Surface (back posting again!), Eric uses a Yo La Tengo lyric to prise apart the propertarian nature of intimate knowledge:

The get in the title of Yo La Tengo’s “Sometimes I Don’t Get You” should be taken in its double sense, as understand and as possess. The two are really inseparable. Complete understanding is an attempt to possess, just as possession requires a high degree of understanding. Under the rule of capital, the axiom of interpersonal relationships demands that the flows between intimates represent the totality of possible flows. Nothing should escape and nothing should stay a mystery. If some bit of history or a feeling remains a secret, if it is not shared or revealed, that is an infidelity. It is in fact the definition of unfaithfulness. Secrets are always dirty little secrets. In the Yo La Tengo song, the feeling of not understanding the other is also the sense of losing possession of the other and the discovery of something new only induces crisis:

Sometimes I don’t know you, it’s like we never met
The way it seems to me is that you’re having regrets
Am I clinging to something that’s past?
That was never intended to last?

Lately, fiction-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin. I’ve been working back through the canon, from Voices and The Telling to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. While the former feels as if it should resonate, in its experimentation with writing a differently gendered world through an interlocutor whose universe is distinctly binary gendered, The Dispossessed continues to fold me back into a consideration of its philosophical undertaking. It’s still the best fictional example I can remember of an attempt to think outside capital. But Le Guin attempts something more ambitious, as well: to critique the subjectivity of capital itself from a place entirely other. (more…)

It’s been difficult to know how to respond to the Liberals’ latest clumsy use of migration as a dog whistle. The cycle of anger followed by dull cynicism gets a bit old after you’ve rehearsed it so many times. The other day some people went to the Sofitel to respond to Kevin Andrew personally, in their own beautifully excessive surrealist fashion, giving Andrews exactly what he ‘wants’. Vegemite sandwiches all round, zinc cream, and finally, the ecstatic cry of the ‘new convert’: “I’m assimilated! I’m integrated!”

Also from Engage Media, the Authentic Austrayan Citizanshit Test:

The Australian citizenship test is:
A) played on boxing day
B) a cynical attempt by the Australian government to show they can
filter out international terrorists and not workers with low level
English
C) free with every pot and parma
D) a good idea

Australia*s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton famously said:
A) “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to
the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman”
B) *Why must they insist on calling me Toby Tosspot!*
C) *I just don*t know about letting Queensland join*
D) *You know what I think Australia needs? Big things. Heaps and
heaps of big things * I mean I*m talking giant prawns and sheep and
bananas and rocking horses* ah ha gentlemen*

The past two hundred years of Australia*s history are:
A) a specialised narrative that if told right gets you on the ABC
board
B) an unfinished war
C) super chillaxed, like one big bar-b-que
D) not something we really need to think about

Immigration minister Kevin Andrews comments about cutting African
refugee numbers was:
A) A sensitive well measured response to the death of a young man
B) Based on the UN refugee agency advice
C) An unusual example of the Liberals using race politics in the lead
up to the election
D) Strange because we don*t let Africans into Oztralia* do we?

Apartheid was first introduced in:
A) Australia with the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the
Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld)
B) South Africa in 1913 with the Land Act
C) 2005 Cronulla
D) 2007 Northern Territory

The 72 Tamil and 7 Burmese Refugees currently incarcerated on Nauru
show that:
A) We have come a long way since Edmund Barton
B) We are a compassionate and flexible county,
C) It helps to be a white Zimbabwean farmer if you*re seeking asylum
in Australia
D) Anybody want some zinc cream?

Last boat, stand in a river;
Muddy river, how I love her
Hawk flying is fooling his folly
Gas hurricanes spray over Heaven
Weeping willow is bawling the light
On fire.
Humans running for cover,
Wishing for life, gripping the light
House lift up, trees lift up
Cars intersect in the middle of the sky.
No time before, no pull, no gravity on the ground
Give it up–it’s over
The world’s weight is over
The limit
Our bodies are exploding
As the sky spills through our mouths.
All the blue blood is flowing
The cities, its contents have been ripped out.
The world is gone.
Did you know it would last this long?
You made it to the dark, now you’re gone.
You are gone.
Great waves
Frozen in a secret space
A great big place,
Dark-spilling universe.

Last boat, stand in the river.

(Chan Marshall and the Dirty Three, “Great Waves”, from Cinder)

Sorenson has been talking about this song on her blog already, and now I’ve got it on a mix cd courtesy of nixwilliams — but it’s worth posting the lyrics here. To consider apocalypses, big and small.

We watched Babakiueria today in the class I’m tutoring in at La Trobe in Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies. I’m really enjoying teaching again. But how could I not, when we get to watch films like this? The first four weeks are on indigenous history and politics, interwoven with theories around racialisation, representation, ideology. There’s been a lot of talk in tutorials about the actions of the quote unquote Taskforce in the Northern Territory, alcohol bans, compulsory health checks, land grabs, uranium mining etc. I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that most of the students already feel suspicious of the government’s motives; or, better, already have a really solid understanding of what the new laws mean in terms of land control and how it fits into the temporality of electioneering, as well as mining interests.

Otherwise, the whole thing makes me feel depressed. This is what it must have felt like to be anti-racist in South Africa under F. W. de Clerk. Depression, fantasies of escape, questions about how to help resist the extraordinary effects this will have on material everyday life for indigeous people in the NT. I guess there’s one thing about this, though: it becomes very difficult to talk about dispossession as a historical, past event that we have ‘progressed’ beyond when it’s happening again, right under your very nose. I hope this radicalises some folks.

This weekend just gone was Camp Betty, a queer DIY/autonomist festival of workshops, performances, parties and lots of other stuff. It was a bit like Queeruption if it was in Melbourne, but connected to reviving the 70’s local tradition of holding a queer picnic on the Queen’s Birthday weekend (don’t ask why in Australia the Queen’s Birthday is this weekend in June, it just is, even if it’s not actually her birthday.) There’s so much to write about. I wrote this on Monday night when it was still fresh in my head, and even now, on Thursday, I still feel excited about how good it was. And this, coming from me, who has been off the scene of all sorts of squatted/autonomously organised events over the last four years, and pretty critical of some, too — maybe I’m mellowing out in my old age.
(more…)

From the Port Phillip Leader:

A PORT Phillip-based welfare group has slapped a ban on transsexuals using two of its St Kilda rooming houses.

Hanover Welfare Services has taken civil action to stop male-to-female transsexuals frequenting its women-only hostels.

It has also won the right to employ only women at the crisis housing centres in Dandenong Rd and Burnett St, where more than 250 women are accommodated each year.

The group recently won an exemption from anti-discrimination laws at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, entitling it to refuse care to male-to-female transsexuals seeking shelter.

The action came after a male-to-female transsexual housed at one of the women-only centres horrified other tenants by walking through the facility naked and displaying male genitalia.

Hanover chief executive Tony Keenan said the ban applied to women-only accommodation and would not extend to other services, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation and sexual assault counselling.

“We have transsexual clients for a number of our services and we’ve long had a proud history of that,'’ he said. “But at this stage, we have some women who have suffered violently at the hands of men, so we need an exemption on a small scale.'’

Right. Because according to this logic, transwomen are really men. Transwomen are not women — not unless, according to the VCAT decision, they provide medical certification that they don’t have any ‘manparts’. I’m sure all the homeless transwoman are going to be planning their careers in crisis accommodation with such things at the top of their to-do lists. It’s a shame that women at the rooming-house were traumatised. But if someone behaves inappropriately, you deal with their individual behaviour. You don’t go getting a VCAT exemption from equal opportunity law unless you secretly believe transpeople shouldn’t be in women’s only crisis accommodation in the first place.

What makes it ten times worse is that Tony Keenan, the CEO of Hanover and the architect of this little transphobic battle, is also the Chair of the state government’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on GLBT health. This should surprise no-one: the committee has done sweet FA to directly improve the lives of transpeople, even though several very trans-friendly health workers sit on it. Yet another example of the lie that is the ‘queer community’.

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)