Welcome to the Exhibit
“If biography is peering through the windows of someone’s house and describing what you see…memoir is peeking into the windows of your own life. A voyeurism of the self. An interior looting” -Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Rethinking Queer History Through The Memoir
This archival-type inquiry project constructs a queer historical archive built on an analysis of queer and trans* memoirs in order to better understand queer and trans* identities.
This project is predicated on the assertion that queer and trans* memoirs enact characteristics of queer and trans lives.
Gemma Killen describes the endeavor of queer historians as “attempting to ‘recover’ missing queer voices and produce stories about queer history that resist the medical and legal discourses within which they have traditionally been shrouded (2017, 60)” (McCann and Monaghan 234). The memoir does not rely on medical diagnoses or legalities to characterize LGBTQIA+ identities; instead, LGBTQIA+ individuals are able to tell their own stories outside of the discourses that frequently misrepresent them.
Queer identities vary based on self-identification and self-understanding, and differ from person to person. The form of the memoir allows writers to communicate the ways in which they conceptualize their own identity, which need not rely on generalizations, oversimplistic labels, or previous stereotypes. This is precisely why the memoir should be examined as history, as it is direct insight into the inner thoughts and feelings of queer individuals at various points in time.
Personal, firsthand accounts of queerness like those left in the memoir, must be viewed as historical, archival evidence. Sara Edenheim presents the possibility of a "queer archive of feelings." Characteristics of the queer archive of feelings include consisting of ephemera, being fragmented, being of magical or fictional value, fulfilling a psychic/emotional need, of everyday events, and centering on memories and feelings (McCann and Monaghan 234). The memoir fits right into the queer archive of feelings, as it fulfills an emotional/psychic need — the need to express oneself as one truly is — which is a basic human right that queer and trans individuals have been deprived of for so long.
The same goes for transness; the form of the memoir also enacts transness itself. Jay Prosser writes, "the conventions of transsexuality are thoroughly entangled with those of autobiography, this body thoroughly enabled by the narrative. Like two mirrors autobiography and transsexuality are themselves caught up in an interreflective dynamic, resembling, reassembling, and articulating each other" (191). Prosser describes not only the ability of personal narrative to represent transness, but also how the creation of a narrative affects the narrative itself.
Through an analysis of queer and trans memoirs, insight is gleaned into the ways that queer and trans lives have been lived at various points in time. Memory-as-evidence comes into play. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz explains that "queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence" (65). This project works to illuminate the evidence that already exists, but has not yet been a central point of focus.
Embedded is a timeline of the publication dates of the memoirs, situating the release of each of them into a historical moment.
Processing Digital Rhetorics and an Individually-Contructed Digital Archive
1) The creation of a digital archive is shaped by its creator (s). In this case, as the queer and trans individual creating this project, I found myself confronted with the ethical dilemma of how to portray these histories of many people with identities that don't always align with my own. I came to the conclusion of the importance of transparency. Any claim at total objectivity is absolutely inaccurate. Objectivity is not my goal. This project is not intended to represent all queer and trans people. It is a starting point, one that will never fully be complete. This project is limited by its scope; there are still many voices and identities that unfortunately are not represented within the scope of this project, just a few of which include indigeneity, asexuality and disabled perspectives. These are areas for future exploration, as well as a geographic expansion of the memoirs considered (this project only analyzes memoirs from the United States).
The truth of this project's exigence lies within my own desire to better understand my identity, as well as the complex identities that I saw all around me. I wanted to understand the contradictions between queer and trans studies, and to make sense of lived experience at the boundary of where theory has failed.
Jay Prosser once wrote, "while theory is grappling with various forms of gendered and sexual transitions, transsexual narratives, stories of bodies in sex transition, have not yet been substantially read" (18). Similarly, I still believe that there is a vast amount of theory in circulation, but much less personal evidence and embodied stories actually being read. This project provides insight into the gaps in theory that only personal experience can fill.
The very process of composing this knowledge — taking information and rearranging and reinterpreting it — helped me make sense of my life experiences and identity. In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, memoirist Jenn Shapland writes, "Carson is changing as I write about her, and so am I" (119). Not only are these memoirs a subject of inquiry, but my own understanding of them is a point of analysis as well. Based on my experience conducting this project, I can fully testify to having had "the experience of coming upon new ideas as a result of writing" (Naming What We Know 19). The creation of this project has been a generative process for me as a writer as well as a reader.
2) The memoir exists within a framework of relationality, and it allows the multi-dimensionality of queer and trans lives to take full form. This relationality breathes through the memoir, as stories are told through contact with the people who have shaped them. Jay Prosser explains, "Transgender may indeed be considered a term of relationality; it describes not simply an identity but a relation between people, within a community, or within intimate bonds" (49).
The digital structure of this project mirrors that kind of relationality. This platform, Scalar, allows users to comment and annotate, allowing them each to uniquely engage with the content. Scalar also allows pages to contain visualizations that depict relationships between other pages, which I have utilized below.
Theoretical Framework
I utilize Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's framework of assemblages to understand queer and trans identities through the genre of memoir. Assemblage theory "actively links these parts together by establishing relations between them" (2), and therefore is a useful theory to understand sexual and gender identities that are largely relational. I understand the following definition of assemblage:"An assemblage is a collection of heterogenous elements. These elements could be diverse things brought together in particular relations, such as the detritus of everyday life unearthed in an archaeological dig: bowls, cups, bones, tile, figurines and so on. This collection of things and their relations expresses something, a particular character: Etruscanness, for example. But the elements that make up an assemblage also include the qualities present (large, poisonous, find, blinding, etc.) and the affects and effectivity of the assemblage: that is, not just what it is, but what is can do. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, we do not know what an assemblage is until we find out what it can do" (Stivale).
In this case, there are multiple assemblages in play. One obvious one is the assemblage of these memoirs. What characterizes the genre of queer memoir? What are its conventions? What thematic commonalities are there? Another assemblage is that of queer and trans identities. What characteristics are common among the people writing the memoirs? What similar stories exist, and what similar motifs or images do people use to communicate their experience?
Non/linearity
The numbered interface of Scalar is by default designed to be quite linear, as seen in the menu bar on the far left. However, I have structured this webtext in such a manner that readers are given the opportunity to disrupt this linearity, if one chooses to, through alternate pathways.Just as the memoirs enact queerness, the digital structuring of this space also enacts queerness. This largely has to do with temporalities; there is no set beginning-to-end reading of this exhibit. Different readers can read differently. There is no intended beginning or end.
The prospect of nonlinearity is important to this project. In In a Queer Time and Place, Jack Halberstam writes that, "queer uses of time and space develop...according to other logics of location, movement, and identification" (1). Queerness results in a multiplicity of possible alternative movements; as a result, there are numerous ways to interact with this platform, rather than only a single suggested path.
Halberstam explains, "part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space" (1-2). For example, when it comes to trans lives, many trans people do not transition until later in life. Similarly, many gay or lesbian people might not come out until their 50s or 60s. This is disruptive of the heteronormative temporality that regulates how people during that age are expected to be married and have grandchildren. To acknowledge this reality, the project does not grow in a linear, straight form. Instead, it is more kaleidoscopic, where all elements of the project are equally important, and can flow from multiple directions. Readers have a great deal of agency on the paths they chose to take.
Navigating The Webtext
1) A summary-analysis of the twelve memoirs that informed this project. This section is intended to provide a brief overview of each memoir for interested readers. The books that I have chosen are books that I felt captured something interesting about queer or transness, whether that be through personal identity, content, or structure. They were intentionally chosen to carry voices from numerous different cultures, sexual, gender, and racial identities to more accurately elevate the diversity of queer experience.
I analyze not only the writing of the memoirs, but also the structure and form. Ramzi Fawaz and Shanté Paradigm Smalls emphasize the possibility of seeing “the actual composition of a given text as an indicator of varied material histories of sexuality….form…can be understood as a kind of evidence of how queerness is being lived and inhabited by different kinds of LGBTQ people at distinct historical moments” (Fawaz and Smalls 179). Therefore, the structure of the memoirs themselves provide historical insight into the contextual nature of queerness.
2) A visual map highlighting the locations that the memoir writers have visited or lived. The map represents an embodiment of history, giving the writing both a material and spacial rendering. The map is informed by assemblage theory as well. In his book Assemblage Theory, Manuel de Landa writes,
"Whether we are talking about the frontiers of a country, a city, a neighborhood, or an ecosystem: or about the defining boundaries of our own bodies — our skin, our organs' outer surfaces, the membranes of our cells — inhabiting these bounded extensive spaces is part of what defines our social and biological identities" (110).
Places shape people. Interacting with a particular environment is undoubtedly identity-forming. The materiality of these lives and stories, and the places that have shaped these people, deserve to be given concrete shape; the map element is a means of doing so.
3) Common themes found across the memoirs. Part of my mission in this project is to better understand the nature of queer identities by finding commonalities among the genre of queer memoir: what binds the genre together? I view themes as the qualities common across the assemblage. Learning about similar qualities among the assemblage's parts provides insight into the nature of the assemblage itself (queer and trans memoirs/identities).
The themes are presented only as direct quotes from the memoirs. This allows readers to connect the themes themselves, encouraging readers to actively engage with the webtext.
4) There is no particular order recommended for navigating the webtext. Exploration is encouraged.
Author's Note
And to the reader, thank you for being here.
Welcome to the exhibit.
BEGIN YOUR JOURNEY BELOW.
Click an orange dot in the central web to begin exploring.
*This project was piloted in August 2022, made possible by a generous research grant from Chapman University. I want to thank Dr. Jan Osborn for their incredible support throughout the creation this project, as well as Jessica Bocinski.
Cover photo credits: Queer.Archive.Work, Inc.
