#side affects

To the people following my page or anyone who just happened upon it, just know I’m at a very fragile point in my life.

So my headache right

It’s often the case with archival work that you find things you don’t expect, items that divert or entirely reroute your research itinerary. I think that folks who do archival work have a particular predilection for this feeling of being knocked off course, surprised by what the archive offers up. The challenge is to develop framings and concepts that do justice to the complexities of what surfaces, and this necessitates epistemic humility, a willingness to be wrong, and a loose hold on whatever historical or political narrative you might have at the beginning of such encounters. This form of epistemic humility rests on a willingness to be transformed by archival encounters, to grapple with worlds of discourse and sense that don’t necessarily cohere with hegemonic narratives, or that resist narrativization itself. I think about this relation to archival work as a kind of world-traveling, one that tarries with ghosts, traces, and hauntings of various sorts; one that disrupts temporalities, particularly teleological narratives of progress.

I wager that most trans folks can articulate a veritable litany of disorientations: the moments wherein we’re referred to by the wrong name, the wrong pronoun, the wrong honorific; the moments when our bodies are referred to with language that registers dissonantly, inaccurately; the moments wherein we are touched in ways that trigger rage, sadness, dysphoria, self-hatred, self-harm, where our bodies are being interacted with as if they were something other than how we understand and inhabit them. In each of these moments, which are so routine as to constitute a trans genre of misrecognition, we experience some form of disorientation. We are forced to ask ourselves whether or not a person or institution means to hail us, forced to wonder whether we are or are not being hailed. This, in turn, prompts us to consider, repetitively and frequently, how we are manifesting in a given room, how are we signifying, how our interpellation and positioning in the world might be clashing with our self-understanding. We are pushed to confront, over and over again, how the world in which we find ourselves is constructed in ways that refuse, exclude, elide, or overwrite our sense of existence.