Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form of radical trans care. We explore the politics of visibility and transtemporal solidarity in a range of trans-specific and queer oral history projects unfolding in the US and Canada, including our own—the trans activism oral history projects at the LGBQT Oral History Digital Collaboratory (Toronto) and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Minnesota). In pursuing these questions, we examine the political implications of our trans archival and public humanities work through the lens of what Hil Malatino has recently described as an ethos of “trans care.” We offer a set of reflections, anxieties, and strategies that have guided us in pursuing transcentric public humanities work that resists neoliberal narrative arcs and pursues the creation of a usable past through an ethos of radical trans care and mutual aid. We conclude our essay with a set of observations, drawn from our own work as well as that of other queer and trans oral history projects, that speak to four elements of most university-community partnerships concerning oral history: research design, the interview, metadata and archiving, and public engagement. We argue that trans oral history projects, created in collaboration with narrators, community members, archivists, artists, and others, can create alternative visual and narrative structures that are created, circulated, and viewed within a network of mutual aid defined by an ethics of trans care, rather than extraction.