Podcast alert! With the recent surge in research on Trans oral history, different kinds of projects are beginning to emerge as well. As covered in an earlier blogpost, Transcripts seeks to share the different trans narratives in the city of Minnesota. Quite similar to Transcripts, this week we have Country Queers, which, on a fundamental level, shares the same goal: putting an emphasis on queer history to make up for the lack of research in […]
Excerpt from the Trans Activism Oral History Project – Presented in Collaboration with the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (project lead, Dr. Elspeth Brown), the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, and The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. Marsha Botzer (she/her) interviewed by Dr. Evan Taylor (they/them)Original recording using Zoom platform on February 19, 2020 Full interview found here: https://vimeo.com/478929224
The LGBTQ Collaboratory invites you all to sit in on a roundtable discussion regarding the trans holdings of the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ Archive, and the histories and futures of trans archival practices. I hope to see you all there! Dont forget to register here: https://tinyurl.com/y33evo58
Narrative as Trans Worldmaking”: this concept has been foundational to the multiple projects that were presented on the Friday October 23rd Trans Oral History Panel for the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association. What this concept aims to convey is that creating a world for trans people begins with trans people telling their own stories. Traditionally, trans people, much like other queer folks, have been expected to self-navigate in the cisheteronormative world that […]
What would a World without transphobia look like? Is life getting better for trans people as a result of visibility? How do the qualms of other social categories intersect with trans identity? What would it take for Black trans people to live out liberation, to live joyfully? These are the types of questions that Myrl Beam, Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota and Virginia Commonwealth University, and Andrea Jenkins, the Vice President of the […]
What’s it like to be LGBTQ2+ in Canadian suburbs and edge cities? We’ve next to no primary sources about queer and trans life in Canada’s ‘burbs and edge cities, so my students and I decided to create some. This spring, students in my 3rd year history course at the University of Toronto, Mississauga conducted 25 oral histories with LGBTQ2+ activists, students, alums, and residents of the Peel region in the Greater Toronto Area. Our goal […]
Post-doctoral Fellowship in Trans Oral History The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (University of Toronto, ON), in collaboration with The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC) will award one six-month Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship is to be taken up, and concluded, between 1 June 2019 and 30 March 2020 (exact starting and ending dates to be negotiated within this time frame). The Fellow will be expected to coordinate and conduct oral histories […]
Twenty years after the delisting of gender confirmation surgeries in Ontario, the recent return of the Conservatives to power forces us to remember the ten year struggle for relisting that resulted from this decision. On October 1st, 1998, the newly-installed Conservative provincial government removed coverage for gender confirmation surgeries under the Ontario health care plan (OHIP). The delisting of these procedures, formerly referred to as sex reassignment surgery (SRS), was part of a broader plan […]
I realize that even though the website has a fantastic collection of websites concerning LGBTQ oral history, put together by Cait McKinney, I have not actually had the time to go through them all, and reflect on what they offer. I’m in the process of putting together a new course on Queer and Trans Oral History, and this seems like a perfect moment to explore some of these sites and reflect on some of their […]
A potential benefit of digitizing zines is increasing their accessibility. While a physical copy of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ gendertrash from hell might be hard to come by for many people in 2017, putting a high quality scan of the zine online makes it accessible to anyone with an internet connection, right? Not really. Depending on the context, “access” can take on very different meanings. I think we should think critically about what it means to make […]