Primary Investigator - Dr. Sage Brice
The study in Brief
This research project examines everyday practices of gender under the pandemic conditions of Covid-19 and how they reflect bigger social questions about the nature of identity and subjectivity. It uses creative and collaborative methods, working with a small group of trans and nonbinary people to develop a graphic narrative output. At its root, the project starts from this idea: thinking about gender identity as attached to individuals has made trans people and their lives a battleground for wider social conflicts about the meaning and definition of sex and gender. Thinking about gender and identity as collective problems rather than individual characteristics might offer a way out of this impasse. The research project will take everyday, seemingly mundane aspects of trans life as a way of exploring this idea.
The project is supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral fellowship. It is conceived and initiated by Dr Sage Brice, whose trans experiences inform her work as an artist, geographer, and activist. The research will be shared at professional conferences, public art venues, research events, and published in academic journals, art publications, and magazine publications.
Resistance to trans recognition produces a critical frontier of political inclusion today, arising in part from fiercely contested beliefs and theoretical positions regarding the 'nature' of sex and gender identity - positions which go to the heart of what constitutes a political subject. This project points instead towards a ‘trans-individual’ reading which understands identity as a collective and distributed problem rather than a fixed characteristic attached to individual subjects operating in isolation. It thereby offers a way past persistent conflicts which currently render trans bodies and lives a battleground for philosophical and political debates on the 'nature' of identity.
To develop this concept of ‘trans-individuality,’ the project examines the conditions of vulnerability through which Covid-19 elicits a new and different understanding of subjectivity, working closely with a diverse group of trans participants to examine what happens to everyday practices of gender expression under the novel spatial constraints of a global pandemic. Serial and periodic social lockdown isolates everyday practices of subject- formation within the contested geographical space of the home. At the same time, it precipitates a shift to new primary modes of social interaction, most notably with the sudden concentration of activity in online and virtual spaces. These novel (online and offline) conditions have proven deeply unsettling to the processes through which individuals customarily create and sustain a sense of self in relation to wider collectives, as evidenced by the confusion and disorientation widely expressed in social media forums during lockdown periods. Trans (transgender, transsexual, non-binary, and gender non-conforming) individuals have long been accustomed to operating under spatial constraints contingent upon their acceptance, recognition and inclusion as political subjects. Covid-19 brings these constraints into sharp focus, as trans individuals are forced to explore what happens to everyday practices of gender expression in the midst of a pandemic that foregrounds social isolation (or, in contexts of homelessness, sex work, and economic precarity: heightened exposure) alongside a heightened sense of the subject's permeable edges.
Conditions arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, combining as they do a generally unfamiliar degree of social isolation with new modes of exposure and mutual susceptibility, have profoundly destabilised customary practices and habits of subject- formation and expression. The pandemic imposes conditions of social isolation and/or hazardous exposure on individuals, but its 'viral' ecologies (physical, virtual, and metaphorical) draw attention to the ways we are in fact mutually susceptible and interdependent as part of a wider collective. These conditions and constraints raise searching questions about the nature of the relationship between collective and individual practices of subject-formation, a relationship for the analysis of which my work on trans-individuality provides a unique conceptual resource. Recognising the permeability of individual lives requires what Braidotti (2019:40) has called an "enlarged, distributed, and transversal concept of what a subject is and of how it deploys its relational capacities" - that is, a "posthuman" concept of subjectivity. The viral ecologies of the pandemic not only render individuals acutely vulnerable to and dependent upon one another, but call into question the very idea of individual humans as distinct and separate entities.
The uneven shift to predominantly online social interaction under Covid-19 sets the scene for this research, which takes its cue from the recent popular output of a number of trans writers, artists, and commentators who note the complex impacts of the pandemic on experiences related to gender expression. Trans and nonbinary participants from a range of geographical and social backgrounds are assembled using the snowball method, via anglophone social media networks for trans people. In addition to the active inclusion of participants in research design, a small community advisory group will help shape the direction of this research project to ensure that the collaboration is carried out with integrity and that the project aligns with the wider needs of diverse trans communities. This group will consist of 6-8 individuals with relevant lived and/or professional experience.
While the theoretical impetus of the project is well developed, the intention in the project is to open up the research design to participants from the outset in order to facilitate a more collaborative mode of knowledge co- production. Methods used will therefore depend on this research co-design process, but may include semi- structured interviews, focus groups, and solicited auto-ethnographic materials. These conversations and materials will examine in detail the personal and everyday practices through which participants negotiate their experiences and expressions of gender, focusing specifically on what, if anything, changes or has changed in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Solicited auto-ethnographic materials from trans and nonbinary participants will be re-assembled in the form of a single graphic narrative, in order to support the creative co-articulation of a trans-individual concept of subjectivity. The recruitment process is designed to include a range of gender identities and experiences. Rather than narrating a series of distinct, individual biographical subjects, however, the collaborative process will construct a trans-individual composite or collage of participants' differing experiences. This approach allows unexpected moments of both congruence and dissonance among participants to speak to the moments of euphoria and dysphoria that attend upon trans practices of subject-formation. Participants will be invited to engage with, and speak back to, the creative process throughout in order to ensure that the integrity of their contribution is not compromised by this practice of collage and juxtaposition, and in particular, that differences are not flattened or obscured in the process. The participatory and creative outputs of this method enable broader dissemination, and are integrated into a programme of traditional, high-impact social-scientific outputs.
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