Archiving Our Bodies:
trans embodied becoming and t4t archival reading
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v37i2.141262Nøgleord:
Archive, Embodiment, becoming, t4t, transition, temporality, proofResumé
This article analyses artworks by three non-binary or trans masculine artists: Kris Grey, No title (2019), Emmett Ramstad, The good ones (2006), and Marie Ahlberg Andersen, My Dick Clit has many forms (2022). I look at the corporeal traces the artworks display: wound scabs, blood drops, and crotch imprints, and find that they present a proof of trans becoming which, I would like to suggest, counters hegemonic narratives of transition and disturbs the notion of proof in relation to trans life; to highlight instead, the slowness, temporal multiplicity, and volatile uncapturability of trans embodiment. Through the article, I analyze Grey’s, Ramstad’s, and Andersen’s transition documentation as forms of counter-archiving, as well as how they function as t4t archival offerings – an invitation for other trans people to engage with their transition documentation and the potential of shaping their trans becoming through them. Through my personal narratives as refl exive, personal introductions to the analysis, the artworks, as a t4t archive, shed light on the moments and experiences that in small steps gets us, as trans people, closer to the way we want to be seen and feel about ourselves.
Referencer
Andersen, M. A. (2023, December). Email exchange with Marie Ahlberg Andersen [Personal communication].
Awkward-Rich, C. & Malatino, H. (2022a). Meanwhile, t4t. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 9(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475467
Awkward-Rich, C. & Malatino, H. (Eds.). (2022b). The t4t Issue. Duke University Press Books.
Cifor, M. (2015). Presence, Absence, and Victoria’s Hair. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2, 645–649. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3151565
Cifor, M. (2017). Stains and Remains: Liveliness, Materiality, and the Archival Lives of Queer Bodies. Australian Feminist Studies, 32(91–92), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357014
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press Books.
Deleuze, G. (2005). Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (4. print). Zone Books.
Derrida, J. (1998). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Digital Transgender Archive (2024). https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/
Drager, E. H. (2022). LOOKING AFTER MRS. G - Approaches and Methods for Reading Transsexual Clinical Case Files. In Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (pp. 165–184). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478022589-008
Edenheim, S. (2014). Lost and Never Found: The Queer Archive of Feelings and Its Historical Propriety. Differences, 24, 36–62. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2391950
Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An Overview. Historical Social Research /Historische Sozialforschung, 36(4 (138)), 273–290.
Friborg, N. M. (2023). ‘It’s our bodies, we are the experts!’: Countering pathologisation, gate-keeping and Danish exceptionalism through collective trans knowledges, coalition-building and insistence. In Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe. Routledge.
Getsy, D. J. (2015). Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. Yale University Press.
Gill-Peterson, J. (2018). Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press.
Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York University Press.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press.
Halberstam, J. (2018). Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (First edition). University of California Press.
Halberstam, J. (2022, April 29). Trans Representation after the Figure. Frieze, 227. https://www.frieze.
com/article/trans-representation-after-figure
Hayward, E. S. (2017). Don’t Exist. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 191–194. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3814985
Horak, L. (2014). Trans on YouTube. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(4), 572–585. https://doi.
org/10.1215/23289252-2815255
Lundy-Harris, A. (2022). “Necessary Bonding.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 9(1), 84–100. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475537
Møller Madsen, S. (2024). The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed: T4t togetherness in Jules Fischer’s performance Vanitas. Peripeti, 21(39), 130–151. https://doi.org/10.7146/peri.v21i39.152304
Malatino, H. (2020). Trans care. University of Minnesota Press.
Malatino, H. (2022). Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press.
Mbembe, A. (2002). The Power of the Archive and its Limits. In C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover,mG. Reid, & R. Saleh (Eds.), Refi guring the archive. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
MOTHA (2024). MOTHA. https://www.motha.net
Muñoz, J. E. (1996). Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8(2), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407709608571228
Namaste, V. (2000). Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. University of Chicago Press.
Pearce, R. (2020). A Methodology for the Marginalised: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy. Sociology, 54(4), 806–824. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520904918
Raun, T. (2015). Archiving the Wonders of Testosterone via YouTube. TSQ. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2(4), 701–709. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3151646
Rawson, K. J. (2015). Introduction: “An Inevitably Political Craft.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2(4), 544–552. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3151475
Steinbock, E. (2019). Collecting Creative Transcestors: Trans* Portraiture Hirstory, from Snapshots to
Sculpture. In H. Robinson & M. E. Buszek (Eds.), A Companion to Feminist Art (1st ed., pp. 225–242).
Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118929179.ch13
Steinbock, E. (2022a). Affective Justice. In T. W. Reeser, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (1st ed., pp. 247–257). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003045007-27
Steinbock, E. (2022b). T4t: Archival Legacies of Trans for Trans Adoration. In D. Neugebauer (Ed.), Re_Visioning Bodies. Spector Books OHG.
Stone, A. L. & Cantrell, J. (2015). Introduction. In Out of the closet, into the archives: Researching sexual histories (pp. 1–22). SUNY Press.
Taylor, D. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press.
U of T Digital Humanities Network (Director) (2020, December 16). Trans Collections Guide Launch, December 3, 2020 [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFC8FrgZLpA
Downloads
Publiceret
Citation/Eksport
Nummer
Sektion
Licens
Copyright (c) 2025 Storm Madsen
Dette værk er under følgende licens Creative Commons Navngivelse –Ikke-kommerciel (by-nc).
Udgivelser i Kvinder, Køn og Forskning er beskyttet under Creative Commons License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
