Author: Elspeth Brown

Trans Elders’ Life Histories

November 24, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Oral History / Trans History

It started innocently enough at a plenary panel the last morning of the Moving Trans* History Forward symposium at the University of Victoria in the spring of 2014. Presenters recounted their experiences in activism, writing and engagement with and within the transgender community. Immediately following the panel, I approached my colleague and friend, Aaron Devor, symposium organizer and now Chair in Transgender Studies at UVic, expressing both enthusiasm and concern. On one hand, I was […]

Bridging the Gap with the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (ALOT)

November 4, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Digitization / Lesbian History / Oral History

By Mary Corbett, ALOT Archivist The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony collects, digitizes, and makes available online oral testimonies from people who presently or at one time identified as lesbian, and is supported by the Simon Fraser University Library. As part of our recent SSHRC Insight Grant, we are undertaking a study entitled “Bridging the Gap,” which aims to explore methods that an institutionally-hosted online archives (like ALOT) can employ in order to better involve […]

Publishing and Queer/Trans Public Praxis

October 23, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Publishing

As historians such as myself move from more traditional forms of scholarly work to a form of ongoing digital “making” that is the work of the Collaboratory, how do we make this work professionally legible? I have the great fortune to be tenured, so for me the stakes are not quite as high as they are for my more junior colleagues, where digital humanities and community-engaged research and scholarship remain, sadly, invisible and unvalued in […]

Mirha-Soleil Ross in the Archives: Transsexual Artist, Sex Worker, and Activist

October 3, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Collaboratory News / Trans History

The Collaboratory is beginning its work in organizing the archives of this amazing transsexual artist and activist, housed at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto. Eight years ago, while CLGA was moving into its current location at 34 Isabella Street, a large collection of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ personal papers, videos, notebooks and other material arrived at the archives. This week, Cait McKinney (Collaboratory postdoctoral fellow) and Aaron Cain (CLGA volunteer and iSchool grad student) […]

Reflections on the SRS De/Re-Listing Interview Project

August 6, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Collaboratory News

At the beginning of almost every SRS interview, Nick asked the question “Where were you in 1998 when SRS was delisted?” My answer is fairly boring. I was still in diapers and barely two years old. But the answers that I’ve been lucky enough to hear from interviewees including Martine Stonehouse, Greta Bower, Susan Gapka, Nick Mule, Cheri Dinovo, Anna Travers and Rupert Raj have been far from that. The SRS delisting interview project was […]

Ontario SRS De/Relisting Project Interviews: Rupert Raj & Anna Travers

July 22, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Collaboratory News

As you may have read in our previous posts, this summer we have been conducting a number of oral history interviews focusing on the 1998 delisting and 2008 re-listing of sex reassignment surgeries in Ontario. This July our team had the pleasure to finish up the series of interviews with Rupert Raj and Anna Travers, two integral activists in the fight to have SRS relisted in Ontario, and major figures in trans healthcare in Ontario since. […]