• “The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a hall, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context” -Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

• “I hold one thickly braided cord as story"  -Cherrie Moraga, Native Country of the Heart

• “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

The “X” in the title of this project — Queer x Trans Memoir: In Sight of an Embodied History — stands for multiplication, multiplicity, exponential change and movement: infinite multiples in every direction. It stands for the movement of queer identity: a sign that indicates an action in itself. These memoirs are alive; they live, they breathe, and they change through every read. These changes are representative of how identity can be shaped and reshaped, written and rewritten, through memory—revealing the flexibility of identity in the process. In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland writes, "Carson is changing as I write about her, and so am I" (119).

Welcome to the exhibit.

-Rhyan