Week 4. Politics of Trans Visibility
Text by Ellis Martin
Questions that arose during the t+t discussion of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility on September 14, 2022:
How do the sites of oppression identified in the introduction of Trap Door (body, land, labor, spirituality) apply to a specific physical site, the site of the Turk and Taylor cafeteria riot?
How does stability versus instability & building versus unbuilding (unmaking, defuturing) relate to the specific site?
How does attention given become tangible work in this group?
How does the community, the group take care of each other?
How does trans become a force that can be mobilized?
Is there an end to the using or defining of the term trans in the context of the text and beyond?
When does queer lose or when has queer lost the capacity to be radical?
How to escape or exist beyond what Che Gossett calls "the conceptual regime of knowing"?
What is the relationship between Eva Hayward’s transposition and trans embodiment and the neighborhood?
Trans as a conceptual and logical operator, moves across a line that creates a division between two things and a line that moves across that line. How do you use the idea of movement across and a vacillation across to materialize?
What is it about legibility and reassigning meanings that invokes worlding?
Is it important for cis people to understand a deeper level of transition in order to embody a certain form of politics?
If the task of developing a method of thinking through trans as embodiment and/or trans as political necessarily antecedent, and how does that shape a particular political stance?
How to connect the analytics of trans with the political?
How does, as suggested by Jack Halberstam, anarchism connect to trans? Is it in the movement of specific political actions? And to what existent is it useful to have two registers of trans (representation, political) to think through the world?
In what way is trans as a new form of sociality inevitably a kind of politics?
If the group is a microcosm, how does unbuilding connect to structures of relations? How can it be imagined through the structure of the t+t building?
Do the structures need to collapse (sites of representation, the physical t+t building) in order to bring forth new structures?
Can the building hold the space of representation for (instead of? alongside?) trans people?
How to think about the trans visibility paradox in reference to the t+t site? How to become visible without displacing?
Can we use the virtual as a space of reconfiguration?
What is trans embodiment in the metaverse?
How do we be a connected community without patrolling that also navigates the (monetized) virtual?
Is a sally port like a trap door?
Could the group digitally intervene in some way?
How could the group bring the digital realm into the physical as an intervention?
How do imagination, gathering, and rendering bring something real forth that then becomes the imagination for the next stage or another future project?
Imaging, rendering, communicating, teaching, a sociogenesis – a trans project of moving across registers of imagination and vision and physicality.
