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HEATHER BENJAMIN /

Heather Benjamin - Girl On The Run (2021)

The ArQuives (Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives) created a digital exhibit on the zine “gendertrash” that was published in the early 90s. Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay collaborated to publish four issues of gendertrash which included a variety of articles, art, and resources. The ArQuives describes the zine as “explicitly political, discussing sex-work decriminalization, animal rights activism, the need for transsexual and transgender-specific health care and social services, racism, transphobia among the queer community, advocacy for trans prisoners, and much more.”[1] The digital exhibit provides the history behind the zine as well as an important conversation of the terminology used in the zine. The zine identified itself as “devoted to the issues & concerns of transsexuals.”[2] The ArQuives explains:

In gendertrash, as in Ross’s other works, there is a preference for the term transsexual over transgender. The parts of issues written by Ross and MacKay use transsexual almost exclusively, whereas sections were written by friends and acquaintances (such as those by kiwi, Bobby Gene, and Dancing to Eagle Spirit) often use both terms and the blurbs describing community organizations and resources primarily use transgender or transgendered. Various documents in the Ross fonds suggest that she may have felt some suspicion towards the politics of the term “transgender,” yet everything genderpress published or produced makes space for the inclusion of people who identify with either term.[3]

The zine provides an important look into trans life and politics in Canada and North America in the early nineties. The zine really shows us how many of the issues and politics around queer movements and trans movements are still around – just with new language. The full issues of gendertrash are available to view on the ArQuives website. I have posted some of my favourite parts under the tag “gendertrash” – click here to view!

SOURCES

[1] Sid Cunningham, Caleigh Inman, and MacKenzie Stewart, “Gendertrash: Transsexual Zine, 1993-1995,” The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions, https://digitalexhibitions.arquives.ca/exhibits/show/gendertrash/gtintro/.

[2] genderpress, Mirha-Soleil Ross, and Xanthra-Phillippa MacKay, “Gendertrash From Hell 1,” The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions, (1993): 2, https://digitalexhibitions.ArQuives.ca/files/original/0b998e7e26e97585016650eec5a37df7.pdf/.

“Zoé Samudzi: Can you describe the etymology of the word “looting” and how that informs its present racialized usage?

Vicky Osterweil: The word “loot” was taken from Hindi by [British] colonial officers. It first appears in English in an 1845 colonial officer’s handbook. From the very beginning it’s this really racializing word that contains the idea that black and brown people were obsessed with plunder—that they had a deviant relationship to property, as opposed to the proper ownership embodied by the colonizers. This connotation persists today, which is why people are so reactive and defensive against the word. It really is a classic dog whistle. When Trump says, “When the looting starts the shooting starts,” we know he’s not talking about the white protesters who might be helping and participating. He’s talking about murdering black people.

ZS: In your book, you explain the relationship between property rights and the evolution of white supremacy and racial structures. You write, “Many historians have shown that strong, explicit racist ideology does not appear in the historical record in America until the revolutionary period, when the rights of man (and it is indeed man) became the defining philosophy of US politics. If the rights to liberty and property are inalienable, then what to do about all these people who are very clearly not in possession of liberty, or the capacity of property ownership?” To solve this conundrum, the colonists enforced the structure and hierarchy of race in America by designating white people as owners and black people as things to be owned, therefore joining racial identity and citizenship to property relations. How can we think about looting in the context of what you are describing as the racial roots of property?  

VO: [The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist] Sylvia Wynter talks about this in her essay “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” about the way LA police were referring to a black criminal underclass using the phrase “No Humans Involved,” or “NHI.” She uses that as a jumping-off point for her project about the construction of the human: how the idea of humanity itself is built on the denial of [human] status to black people. This project of rights and legal bourgeois subjecthood is being built on a definition of humanity that necessarily has an outside: that outside is always African and Indigenous populations. The enslaved—who were not only excluded from property ownership, but were themselves defined as property—understood innately that the concept of property made no sense. They would call just having a meeting “stealing” the meeting, and they would call escaping “stealing away.” Once you have been made into property by a society, then you recognize that any freedom you’re going to have has to be stolen.

ZS: You write, “This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of black looters.” I really love the way you play with time, retroactively applying the word “looters” and connecting it to contemporary usage. It really allows us to connect the sheer magnitude of the state’s theft, trafficking, and enslavement of African people to its present fear of the black looter destroying and stealing in return.

An organization that does really interesting work preserving seed from threatened communities (and larger companies like baker creek often piggyback off of some of the work done by orgs like this and NS/S) is the Experimental Farm Network. They are very explicit about their (left-leaning) political views and you don’t have to worry about them being Problematic. They have lots of interesting and rare varieties and species you really cannot find anywhere else.

If you are looking for a wider selection of heirloom seed varieties, these two companies are very good resources as well, and carry many of the same things as Baker Creek. Afaik they are not expressly political beyond their general mission to preserve heirloom seeds (although southern exposure does a good job of preserving some very traditional african-American heirlooms from the Southeast US in particular).