We chose to keep the full version of the article in its original form, with the collective commenting in French on the conversation held in English. Two shorter versions, one fully in French and one fully in English, are also available.

November 2021, the lesbian and trans* bar Mothers & Daughters launched a call for projects so that the 2022 edition of the bar would include an exhibition and events centred on trans*, non-binary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming archives from Belgium. Two of us ended up leading this project, LoupKass and Nour Outojane; His/her/their Stories was born.

After our first attempts at digging through the past, we decided to archive the present, in our own way. It took the form of a living and temporary archiving space with several setups: walls covered in wallpaper for people to write on, a photocopier to print texts or scan our bodies, cameras to capture ourselves, an audiobooth¹ where we could narrate our stories, a listening bed to listen to them, a small library,² couches to meet, organise, and exchange ideas. It lasted a month, July 2022, and was archived as a zine.

To continue the project, we applied for the FNRS-FRArt artistic research grant, with the following main research question:

“How can archiving, as a collective, artistic, and activist practice, enable trans* people in Belgium to reclaim their stories, through Belgian historical archives, their personal archives, and the intangible set of ideas, representations, narratives, and emotions available to them?”

Our aim was to explore Belgian archival centres (we eventually focused on Brussels) and to reclaim the archives we encountered. We wanted to intervene in them: to insert our subjectivities, layer interpretations, imagine other readings, cut, tear, cover, rewrite, paste, share, assemble, and create new archives. And then repeat the practice.

In November 2023, Les Midis de la Poésie and Maison Poème hosted us for two months on their top floor; fittingly, where they kept their archives. We organised seven workshops that marked the beginning of our research. Two of them were led by Els Flour (Avg-Carhif), who opened the centre’s archives to us, and Tommy de Ganck (Brussels Regional Archives), who introduced us to the functioning of public archival infrastructures. At the end of this series, we produced our first collective zine, bringing together historical and personal archives.

Over the following months, our practice was shaped by conversations with archivists, activists, researchers, artists, students, and participants. Among them were Bart Hellinckx (Fonds Suzan Daniel), Mathilde Messina (who researched on political lesbianism in Brussels in the 70s), David Le Simple (whom we met for the preparation of the conversation Partager nos mémoires. Un état des lieux de l’archive LGBTQIA+, at the Brussels Ass Book Fair at Kanal in 2024), Eliza Steinbock and their course *Trans* Archives, Arts, Affects, Jack Halberstam during a Firefly Conversation at Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

We met community archives such as the Big Tata network (that we met in Marseille) and the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (for a great workshop they held in Brussels, archived through a collective zine), and we exchanged with students at La Cambre (Lissa Choukrane, Archives face au genre) and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Castillo’s Art of the Book class).

Throughout the year, we continued our archival research and used workshops as a laboratory for testing and refining our approach to artistic research and collective zine-making. We facilitated sessions at the Ecole de recherche graphique (Erg) with Archivesmakefriends, at Centre Bruegel during the Journées du Matrimoine, at Beursschouwburg for a workshop focused on queer and racialised archives, and with Aminata Labor and Pauline L. Boulba on the occasion of the screening of their film JJ.

In October 2024, we presented our work at the conference My Evidence: Creating LGBTQI+ Art and Archives, organised by Perverse Collections (Percol) in Amsterdam. During that conference, we met Susan Stryker, whose writings had accompanied our work since the beginning. Her thinking encouraged us to shift from searching for transgender identities in the archives to exploring trans ways of moving. This reframing became a key conceptual anchor in our research.

Towards the end of the project, the research group grew from two to six members with the arrival of Constant Léon, Flo*Souad Benaddi, Luma·Pola and Sopi. With six of us, new paths opened. We now conclude this research by documenting ways of engaging with archives without being historians and preparing an archive boom.

All the people we met, the practices we exchanged, and the moments we shared helped us grow in this research. We warmly thank everyone for the time spent with us.

A year after the Percol conference, we invited Susan Stryker for an end-of-research conversation, to revisit the developments, doubts, and questions that emerged since our first meeting. Thank you again, Susan, for your generosity.

This article is made up of several layers, different moments of exchange: a discussion between Nour and Susan and other voices that join theirs , those of Constant, Sopi, Flo*souad and LoupKass.

LK : c’est comme si nous avions été toustes là, pour échanger avec Susan. Comme une conversation collective imaginée, fictive. Je trouve ça beau que ça puisse exister, et qu’il y ait la place pour le créer. Donc merci à Susan et Peach, à Constant, Sopi, Flo*Souad, à Céline de l’asbl a/r, aux graphistes et développeureuses Clara et OSP, de participer à rendre cette conversation possible. merci à Nour pour ton audace, ta détermination et ta ténacité durant tout ce processus.

Susan Stryker greeted us from a window flooded with sunlight, while everything around us was already dark. She was nine hours ahead of us, or perhaps 30 years of archival work, depending how you look at it. We are deeply grateful to have had this conversation with her for our end-of-research publication.

Nour: You may remember the early stages of our project, from the conference, but I’ll re-situate it briefly. It began with an invitation from Mothers & Daughters, a lesbian and trans bar in Brussels, to create an exhibition on trans* archives. At first, we turned to archiving centres. And it’s not that there was a total lack of material, but a lack of material that felt resonant to our lived experiences. So we shifted focus and began archiving the present: documenting our own communities and practices. Once that space closed, we were left with the feeling that this work kept starting from scratch. That’s when we began wondering: could we re-appropriate Belgian historical archives, despite their violence? So we went back to the archiving centres, but without any formal training in archival research or history, we felt quite lost. When we asked people working in LGBT archiving centres here in Brussels whether they held any materials related to gender non-conformity, the response was often that they did not hold anything, which is quite a big claim, because, I mean…

S : C’est vrai que c’est frustrant au début où je pensais que j’allais chercher des archives mais que je n’avais pas les outils pour faire des recherches approfondies et t’essaye de te prouver un truc genre comme une réponse inconsciente aux proches et aux autres : bah ouais en fait on a toujours existé, la preuve ! Mais en avançant dans la recherche tu te rends compte que ça n’a aucune importance que ça n’a pas de sens de vouloir prouver quoi que ce soit même à soi-même et qu’au final l’important c’est de déterrer et inventer des histoires pour nous parce qu’on en a que trop peu et qu’on a tous·tes besoin de se nourrir dans des histoires d’adelphes qui ont vécu peut être des choses similaires à nous.

Le projet His/her/their Stories j’en avais entendu parler bien avant de rencontrer Nour et Loup et j’étais trop content de voir qu’un projet comme celui-là existait. Beaucoup de personnes queer m’en avaient parlé et j’avais trop hâte de les rencontrer et de leur parler du projet. Ça m’a reconnecté avec toutes ces recherches que j’avais faites sur des archives avant d’arriver à Bruxelles et ça m’a fait un bien fou. La force que j’ai vue dans ce projet, c’est celle de raconter nos histoires pour nous et par nous.

Susan: Doesn’t everybody not conform to gender at some level, I would say [sic]. This brings up a lot of memories for me, because when I first started doing trans archival work in the early 1990s, I showed up at what was then called the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society in San Francisco and said, hey, I’m just finishing a PhD at Berkeley, I really don’t think I’m going to be able to find a job, because I was transitioning at that point. I said, I just want to show up and do community-based work here.

And I very much had the experience of it being what I would now call a cisgender-centric space. Oh, they might love to talk about, quote unquote, female impersonation on the stage in nightclubs, or drag queens, or passing women, or butches, or whatever. But it was all within a cis, gay, and lesbian framework. They wouldn’t think about that as trans, even though one of the founders of the organisation was a gay-identified trans man, Lou Sullivan. But it’s like, they were thinking that Lou was part of the group because he was gay, not because he was trans.

And this is 30 or 35 years ago now, maybe. But I just very much remember having to move against the grain, swim upstream. Trans was not something that the people who founded the archives thought about much when they organised it. And so there was a lot of trans information there, gender nonconforming information, both like, quote unquote, binary trans people, and plenty of material to recover by reading old gay community newspapers and publications, things that got mentioned.

Even documentation of some of what I think of as the border wars, identity skirmishes between trans people and trans lesbians and cis lesbians and women’s community, there was a lot there to be found. But it wasn’t what they thought they were collecting. It’s like you had to find the traces of things that were almost there by accident or that were there, but people didn’t see them. They just didn’t focus on it. It wasn’t what their interest was. So I’m very familiar with that problem.

F*S : J’ai l’impression que c’est à cet endroit là où les vécus queer sont cruciaux. En fait les personnes aux genres non-conformes sont partout, des lesbiennes butches/stud aux pédales folles. Cependant poser notre regard sur ces présences là peut-être « tricky ». À quel moment, la pédale folle dans l’article datant de 1934, est une pédale folle au moment T de l’archivage et à quel moment cette pédale folle ne devient pas une personne trans* 2,10 ou 20 ans après, en dehors des archives ? Peut-être que si l’on regarde aussi la présence de personnes queer dans les archives plus sous un regard de « potentialité de trans*itude » que d’identité de genre avérée… Et bien nous sommes beaucoup plus !!!!

LK : une personne qui a déposé ses archives personnelles à l’AVG-Carhif (centre d’archives et de recherches spécialisé dans l’histoire des femmes et du genre), avait collecté elle-même des coupures de presse qui racontaient des histoires de personnes "dissimulant leur sexe ». Et notre deuxième contact avec les archives ça a été de parcourir justement ça, une personne qui a vu et collecté ce queles autres n’ont pas vu. Cette personne avait fait le travail de regarder les archives (ici les journaux) avec une attention spécifique à un sujet, à des représentations. C’est possiblement ce qui la touchait, ou ce qui l’intéressait.

Nour: When we were in these archival centres not really knowing where to search, we started following instincts, for example, looking into records on sex work from the 19th century, because these are spaces we and our communities often inhabit today. But we started asking ourselves: why there? Aren’t we unintentionally reproducing the idea that we only appear in certain highly controlled or criminalised spaces? Were we missing something by staying within institutional logics of visibility? And working in this way we were really struggling to find traces of gender nonconformity even though we know it’s always been everywhere. That was before starting to search with keywords in databases. Also before moving from looking for trans people to looking through trans modes of life. The discomfort we felt was probably a good indicator that we weren’t working in a way that felt aligned with us. And this makes me think about how moving it was when, almost by chance, we encountered the first archive that gave us a feeling of recognition, that sense of resonance and closeness despite temporal distance. An archiving centre, the CARHIF, had selected a few documents for a workshop we organised, not specifically on gender non-conformity but as examples of their holdings. One text written by les Lesbiennes Radicales, the “radical lesbians”, mentioned Maurice Filot a.k.a la Reine Gégé and we both thought about one of our friends called Gégé who the archive could have been speaking about.

F*S : Il me semble que le projet Hht Stories par sa méthodologie permet d’exemplifier aussi l’histoire des transidentités et à quel point en Europe de l’ouest elle est indissociable de l’État. Ce n’est pas tant peut-être de trouver des existences de transêtres qu’une manière appliquée et vécue de voir « où l’on pourrait nous trouver », et de voir que forcément nous devons aller chercher du côté de la criminalisation car c’est comme ça que nos identités sont apparues pour les personnes cis.

S : En fait je me suis dit la même chose en cherchant et à un moment j’ai compris que plus j’avais de mots-clefs stéréotypés plus j’avançais dans ma recherche parce que les personnes qui ont trié ces archives pendant des années les regardaient avec des yeux extérieurs et avec ces clichés-là !

Nour: How is it for you? I’m wondering, do you have specific methods? With Compton’s Cafeteria Riot,³ I’m wondering if you had strategies that helped you locate it, or?

Susan: I found a mention, a very slender, slight passing mention of this riot that had taken place in San Francisco’s sex work ghetto, in a poor downtown sex work ghetto in 1966, which is pretty early in US social history for that to have happened. It was before Stonewall. And so, it’s like I found this one mention of trans women. It said a drag queen threw a cup of coffee on a cop’s face and all hell broke loose at this all night restaurant cafeteria. And fighting spilled out into the streets. And, it seemed like it was a pretty significant disturbance. But it just wasn’t remembered, so doing the work of trying to find the traces in the archive let me put that history back together. And then also ask the question of: Why was this not remembered? Why did this thing happen that was like Stonewall, but it didn’t have the consequences that Stonewall had? Why was it not related to in the same way as Stonewall when it happened? So that was a very interesting project to do. And I still feel like I continue to do work on that topic, but that question of like, not only what’s the work of recovering a forgotten event, but what’s the work of asking why something was not remembered? Those are two different questions. I’ll just say I have great empathy and sympathy for your project, trying to look for traces of things and places that were not designed to catch and capture that.

C : Je repense à Saidiya Hartman qui s’interroge sur comment elle a sorti certains exemples sur lesquels elle a travaillé, notamment dans À perte de mère, pourquoi ces vies-là et pas d’autres ? Pourquoi celle-ci reste dans l’ombre de la mémoire ? Et la réponse tient dans son affect face aux archives et une part de hasard, on ne sait pas pourquoi ce trait de caractère ou cette caractéristique physique apparaissant sur une photo ou dans une ligne de formulaire, fait écho et nous donne envie d’y réagir

Susan: Something that strikes me is how Western nation-states, especially after World War II , began to conceptualise identity in ways that are distinct from what came before. One of the things that fascinates me about doing so-called trans history or the history of gender nonconformity is how context-specific it is. Every nation has its own administrative practices, rules for categorising people, histories of medicalisation, and social movements. At least until recently, a lot of this kind of historical work came out of the United States. It just felt more possible to do it here than in other places. That’s very much different in the current moment. But there’s always been a risk of exporting something very U.S. specific and imagining it as a global model when it might not be appropriate or useful in other contexts.

C : Pour moi Susan parle ici de modernité et de néolibéralisme (capitalisme) et, par conséquent, de la façon dont l’histoire homosexuelle et trans est aussi une histoire hétérosexuelle, puisque dans la modernité les deux se construisent l’une en opposition à l’autre.

S : Oui, pour moi ça fait référence à l’individualisme néolibéral qui a intensifié la division des identités pour pouvoir mieux les contrôler.

F*S : Et c’est tellement aussi révélateur de comment un état se construit, et des choses que l’on pense très bureaucratiques et/ou techniques sont en fait un exemple des politiques qui sont (ou vont être) mises en place.

Susan: I just always want to insist on the importance of doing research that tries to understand the logics that operate in that particular place and time and not make everything a one size fits all. One of the things I appreciated about the work of yours that I saw is that it is about Belgium. It’s really useful to have those kinds of local studies that open the door to comparative work, you can learn so much by seeing, “ah, that’s what it’s like there,” and it raises questions about how things play out elsewhere. So I just, I think it’s very, very valuable what you’re doing. But, that kind of raises the question of, before records are being kept in a certain way, how do you relate to the archive to find traces of things that you’re looking for?

LK : Et c’est justement pour trouver des traces qu’on a sollicité cette demande de bourse. Mais comment trouver ces traces ? de quelle manière ? C’est ça qui a été compliqué.

Comment peut-on trouver des traces de genre non conforme dans ces kilomètres de documents archivés, avec un vocabulaire pas adapté, via des archives triées et classées (catégorisées) de sorte à ce que la non conformité ne se retrouve pas. Comment trouver la trace de quelque chose qui n’a pas été archivé sous ce prisme. Comment trouver quelque chose qui n’est pas étiqueté ou mal étiqueté ?

En y pensant c’est assez puissant de ne pas être étiquetable. D’une certaine manière ça nous rend intouchables. Et tu l’as mentionné (et d’autres nous l’ont partagé aussi) : le hasard, c’est le hasard qui nous aide à trouver des traces.

F*S : c’est grave bien dit cette image de documents rangés, via des kilomètres, qui est au final à l’opposé de quelque chose d’accessible. et en même temps les archives c’est aussi un peu le chaos parfois, des documents manquent, sont mal rangés dans le mauvais folder, et là cela commence peut-être déjà à ressembler plus à nos existences.

Susan: I mean, even using historical databases of newspapers, there are now huge bodies of historical newspapers that have been digitised and are searchable online, and so, there’s, like, 300 years worth of English-language newspapers in what’s now the United States. Where do you go? In that vast body of material, you can’t just use the search term transgender identity, so, what are your search terms for finding things? If you use something like « woman who was actually a man », or « man who was actually a woman », well, you’re gonna find some things by searching for those phrases, but you’re only gonna find cases where somebody got outed and turned up in the press, so, you’re only getting a small little fraction of the practices. There’s no good way to search for information about something that wasn’t recorded in the way that we think of it now, and I don’t know if there’s like a secret weapon, a magic bullet, there’s not like a here’s the one hack that will make it all work. It’s very hard to find some of that stuff.

F*S : Je pense que c’est pour cela que j’ai voulu commencer à me pencher sur la question de la méthodologie des archives et de leur accessibilité. Car j’ai l’impression que ce qui est en jeu aussi c’est la question du consentement dans la présence de xx personnes dans une archive. Comment se rappelle-t-on d’une personne avec un élément, qui au final n’est qu’un fragment. Comment archiver pour honorer plutôt que pour documenter ?

LK : et c’est exactement ça qu’on voulait éviter, éviter de reproduire les violences, éviter de remettre en lumière le regard porté par la cis-normativité sur nos corps. Donc de trouver des récits, des traces, des témoignages de personnes concernées directement. Il y a des mémoires d’une personne intersexe du XIX^e en France qui ont été publiés (Herculine Abel Barbin, Mes souvenirs, Mémoires de la première figure intersexe française (1838–1868), Petite bibliothèque Payot, 2024). C’est une personne qui a été beaucoup étudiée (notamment par Butler et Foucault). Mais moi je l’ai rencontrée à travers ses mots et le témoignage de son existence. Je corne les pages d’un livre pour pouvoir revenir sur les passages qui me touchent, qui évoquent quelque chose en moi. Pour les Souvenirs de Barbin, j’ai corné presque toutes les pages.

Susan: I think you just have to immerse yourself into a particular archive and see what you find there, and get creative about how we understand what gender variance can mean. Something that I wrote recently… I’m interested in jazz music and in the history of jazz, and was watching a film about a US jazz artist named Ornette Coleman, who’s given credit for launching what’s called free jazz. Interesting artist, not trans, but in this interview in the film, he starts talking about how he had a question in his mind. He started playing music about the same time he started dating girls, and he always had kind of a confusion in his mind, “do they like me? Or, am I being kind of star fucked?” and he said: “So what it made me want to do was after I had been married and had a kid, I started thinking about how I could separate myself from having any kind of sexual feeling. And somebody told me that was called castration. So I went to a doctor and asked if he could castrate me”. And the doctor said: “Well, have you thought about circumcision instead?” And Coleman said: “what’s that? Is that like castration?” And the doctor said: “Well, not exactly, but it’s kind of symbolic of it, like, maybe, maybe try, you know, circumcision”, and he says: “So I got circumcised, but that particular operation didn’t give me what I was looking for. But it taught me something, it taught me that there’s a difference between being a man and being a male, and that being a man is a way of affecting and being affected by other people. And that, I wanted to join the category of being a man, but I didn’t want to be a man because I was male”. He’s making this distinction between a kind of biologically determined identity and an affective style of being in the world. And by altering his genitals he learned something critical that played into his creative life about creating a space between maleness and masculinity. And so is that trans? I mean, he didn’t transition from one gender to another, but he learned something from deliberately engaging with genital modification as part of a creative practice of self-elaboration. And he got some insight from that that informs how he lived his life and how he made his art. So do I want to think about Ornette Coleman as part of a history of gender variance? And, think about that in relationship to questions of racialisation or creativity, I find it fascinating.

F*S: this is so trans* lol

Susan: So you find things in the archive that you were not expecting, and that’s my favourite part of doing the work. I think for whatever reason, something has been collected or documented, yes, there’s always a violence in that at some level because it leaves some things out or the documentation or the collection always has a hidden agenda or a motive in it that the archive is not neutral by any stretch of the imagination. But it captures things, sometimes things that are not expected and it makes it available. And so I think there’s definitely a relationship between going into an archive as a person who’s looking for certain things or who is attuned to making certain connections between things, or recognising something when you see it. Like the person who made that film about Ornette Coleman was not thinking, “I’m making this film because Ornette Coleman has got some really interesting things to say about like non-binariness and creativity in music.” He’s just a famous jazz musician and he’s got this wacky story to tell. I would say that just because there’s a bias in the archive doesn’t mean that you can’t find things that are really interesting and important to find. You kind of have to have a different eye to look for it. And that, collecting is the first step even if it’s not the last step. It’s like saving things, making them available is really important I think particularly for documenting things that are not usually considered worth documenting. I liked what you were doing, that you’re documenting, collecting, searching for, but you’re also doing programming outreach, community-based work. You were making events in spaces and I really liked that because it raises for me the question of, well, who does the knowledge belong to? Who needs access to that information? Who would benefit from having it?

F*S : Je trouve que c’est surtout très important et/ou intéressant dans le cas des savoirs académiques qui sont dans des champs d’études comme les queer studies, post-colonial studies, crip studies. Pour ma part j’ai arrêté de lire un certain nombre d’essais émanant de ces champs d’études, non pas parce que cela m’intéresse pas, mais parce que je suis persuadé que je peux trouver des théories aussi fascinantes en buvant un verre durant un événement queer ou autre. En fait nos vies sont la base de travaux de recherche (et au début beaucoup par des universitaires non concernés) qui en fait ne font que puiser dans nos savoirs communautaires pour en faire une « pensée ». D’où la question, combien coûte/vaut le savoir et à qui appartient-il ?

S : De ouf, ça me fait penser à la psychologie sociale qui est beaucoup plus étudiée ces dernières années car beaucoup des théories psychiatriques du DSM (outil de classification des troubles mentaux) se sont avérées être très très fausses et surtout pas efficaces. Elle a donc pris à des communautés marginalisées (queer et racisé·e·s) qui ont toujours pratiqué « l’entraide par des pairs » c’est-à-dire des gens concernés par un même problème/contexte qui se réunissent pour partager leur vie et s’aider sans forcément passer par un médecin/autorité « compétent·e ». Je trouve que c’est une chouette réappropriation du savoir qui ne passe pas par une tierce personne qui certes en a fait son métier mais n’a pas l’expérience et donc reproduit des violences de un et de deux l’aspect libéral du marché dans lequel les médecins proposent leurs services rend le soin pourri et n’est pas efficace du tout.

Tout ça pour dire que je trouve ça intéressant de voir à quel point le capitalisme se sert de nos outils de lutte qui sont par nature opposés à son fonctionnement mais qui lui permettent de devenir plus efficace et plus pérenne. Ça renvoie à ce vol des pratiques ou des histoires, comme dans les archives. Et ça confirme qu’on est hyper prudent aussi quand on parle de ces questions-là parce que pour moi en tout cas il y a toujours cette peur que ce soit réutilisé contre nous, volé, approprié en perdant tout son sens initial.

Nour: I would like to say that knowledge, history, and access should belong to the people whose lives and experiences are at stake, archives as community-based spaces of collective knowledge-making that sustain life. In this sense, archives became an excuse to gather, to create community, and to reappropriate the means of making knowledge. But especially when we think of the archives that precede the words trans, transsexual or transgender, they remain largely confined to institutions. The documents that surface from them such as medical reports, police files, were produced through regimes of control, so that even what is made visible is shaped by that violence.

Since the archiving space in July 2022, we’ve held collective zine-making workshops in which we create collages from historical archives, mostly found in archiving centres, alongside personal archives, brought to the workshop or made on the spot. At the end of each workshop, we assembled all the pages into a zine, mixing what we borrow from the past, what we share from our present lives and what we want to leave to the future.

I’ll show you one zine page we made during the workshops, as an example. It’s the usual story of someone’s sex supposedly not fitting their gender being “revealed” at death. Instead of going the expected way, it becomes interested in the interior life of the person. In that way, we aimed to creating spaces for affective justice, transforming archival material into something that can resonate differently.

Apart from these workshops, in the last phase of the research, we invited four people to think with us about how to document the project itself. We’ve been documenting alternative tools and methods: how to engage with archives when we’re not historians, how to give back to the archives so that we don’t only take from them, how to document our daily lives and create our own archives. We’re planning on sharing them on community platforms.

Susan: Yeah. I like that very much. It makes me think about a novel that I love called Confessions of the Fox by a trans author, Jordy Rosenberg. At first it seems to be a historical novel, set in the 18th century, that’s being annotated by a literature professor in the present who’s talking about what is happening in this 18th century manuscript. But as the novel goes on, you realise that it’s actually being written in the future. And so that it’s not just a speculative novel about the past, but it’s also kind of a science-fiction novel. There’s a footnote in the book where the author is saying, “yeah, I’ve found myself in this future time or alternate timeline”. And in the novel, the researchers who are studying the past call themselves “stretchologists”, a word the author made up, from the word stretch. He says, “because they think about the past or they think about the fabric of history as if filled with holes. It’s like a piece of fabric that has a lot of holes in it.” And that they think about the relationship to the past as stretching that fabric of history to make the holes in it bigger, because it’s those holes, the gaps, that are the spaces of possibility for imagining something different. I think about that when I see this piece of archivally inspired work that you’re making. I think it’s very very powerful particularly for people who’ve been denied a past to speculate about the future. I really love the afrofuturist science fiction genre. If you’ve been denied a past because it’s just been erased, because you’ve been violently separated from it, you can have a speculative orientation towards the future where you’re dealing with the consequences of having been separated from your history, but also it’s like why do you have to stop there? Why can you not have a speculative relationship to your past? The most popular example of all of this would be the Black Panther Marvel universe stories. I think it’s really important to do that kind of imaginative work about extrapolating from the lived reality of a present moment, thinking about it not just what kind of better future do we imagine, but how can we ground our current experience in a speculative version of the past that actually gives us affectively something that we need. That’s just such a powerful move for anybody who’s in a more minoritised position to be able to do and to resist those ideas about, well, you’re just making that up about the past. Why can’t we make up things that feel true about the past just like we make up things that reflect our hopes and visions of the future? You can make a distinction between what’s been documented, I’m not going to argue with that, but I’m not going to say that just because it’s not documented doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. We know that there’s a violence of erasure. We know that there’s gaps, we know that there’s spaces and that we can project ourselves into those spaces and have a kind of affective relationship to them, as well as thinking about the plausibility of a life that was lived then. I like the affective labour that’s involved in doing that kind of work. It feels sustaining somehow.

S : C’est super beau, j’aime trop ! Ces déficits à combler ils me font penser à nos propres vécus. Moi j’ai commencé à transitionner à 26 ans et j’ai eu l’impression de sortir d’un trou et de commencer ma vraie vie à cet instant. C’est comme si en voulant combler les vides du passé, je voulais aussi réparer ce qui m’a été pris, cette vie que j’aurais pu commencer bien avant. Ça fait aussi pour moi écho à mes origines ivoiriennes et à la vie de mon père qu’il me racontait quand j’étais petit, aux histoires orales des violences qu’il a subies, l’histoire des Akiés qui n’est racontée nulle part, les vides que la colonisation a laissés dans l’histoire, pour asseoir son pouvoir impérialiste.* *

S : Et au final c’est un mouv’ similaire à l’écriture de l’ « Histoire avec un grand H » sauf qu’on a pas les outils institutionnels pour les légitimer parce que l’Histoire que l’on nous a apprise n’est pas la nôtre du moins en grande partie et elle a été modifiée, tordue pour romancer leur idéologie. La différence aussi c’est qu’elle se veut neutre et universelle, sans émotions, rationnelle. C’est là aussi qu’on voit le délire fasciste à vouloir enfermer les corps, à nier les émotions comme si c’était mauvais, c’est une manière de nous rendre dociles, contrôlables parce qu’on ne peut pas remettre en question ce qui est « neutre » voire même qui n’existe pas. Acter que de fait quand quiconque parle c’est biaisé ça permet de ne pas tomber dans ce piège-là.

Susan: Historically archives are state-based practices. They’re for demography and war and taxation and all of those reasons and back to Sumerian, cuneiform tablets, most of what gets recorded is a kind of administrative and bureaucratic record keeping. And so the idea of having an archive of content that people might find important now because they live a life that’s off-centre somehow, that’s marginalised, that’s oppressed, that’s not valued, particularly not valued by the state in any kind of positive way. I think it’s just so important to pull those resources together that give people a sense of connection to the past because I think there’s an interesting connection between the past and the future. I always say that, history is a story that we tell in the present, and that part of what studying history teaches you is that there is a radical difference in the past, like I think of the US lesbian writer, one of the people who founded the Lesbian Herstory Archive, Joan Nestle. She talks about how, the past is a foreign country and that when you encounter the foreignness or the radical difference of the past, it teaches you that just as the past is different than the present, so too will our present be different than the future. It restores the sense of how the present came about, it can denaturalise the present. And when you think about the present as not being something that’s inevitable, I think that plants the seed that the future can be different from the present and that just as people in the past made our present, so too can we in the present make a future.

C : Ici, c’est vraiment intéressant le travail d’Achille Mbembe sur l’archive comme source du pouvoir de l’État comme capacité à gérer la mémoire et simultanément comme talisman, qui permet de détruire le pouvoir de l’État.

Susan: And, to me, it just restores a sense of agency to thinking about how we operate in the present. And it makes me think about, who are our stories for? Who are we collecting for? Who are we telling our stories to? Why are we telling those stories? What’s it for? When you think about it that way, I think it opens up the archiving question in a really interesting direction.

LK : ce qui me fait penser au film Framing Agnes finalement en fouillant dans le passé, en retrouvant des traces des archives, il y a toujours une part de notre présent qui se retrouve projeté dans ces archives. C’est notre regard qui interprète ces histoires, c’est nous dans le présent qui venons poser des mots sur ces archives Comme le dit une des personnes dans le film « on trouve ce que l’on veut voir », ou quelque chose comme ça, et que l’histoire se fait aussi comme ça.

Nour: I think so too. When we reinterpret or transform historical narratives, we’re also shifting the present and by extension the future. We might even be changing the past itself, not in how it was, but in how it continues to live through us, how we perceive it, the possibilities we project unto it. History is always interpretative, even though hegemonic history often pretends to speak absolute truth. Our approach acknowledges that our readings are shaped by who we are, what we feel, and the time we inhabit. I believe that by acknowledging it we can make it a strength.

LK : Il y a beaucoup d’interprétations dans l’Histoire et à moins d’avoir plusieurs sources qui relatent des mêmes faits, qui racontent la même histoire, on entre très vite dans de l’interprétation. Par exemple, même si on a un témoignage direct vidéo et audio d’une personne qui raconte son histoire, son témoignage peut être sans cesse interprété. La Bible c’est le meilleur exemple. Je pense qu’on peut se permettre d’interpréter et d’imaginer à partir du moment où on le dit, où le contexte est posé.

Nous aussi dans notre recherche on interprète des sources tout en sachant la fragilité de nos lectures, car on sait que nos compréhensions sont imbibées de nos regards et donc de notre présent, et on passe notre temps à questionner ce que l’on essaye de raconter. Encore une fois comme il est dit dans le film Framing Agnes consciemment ou non on cherche à raconter nos histoires présentes à travers celles du passé.

Et comme dit Pacôme Thiellement dans ses podcasts « L’empire n’a jamais pris fin », il est exégète, pas historien et il nous donne son interprétation, une alternative à l’histoire de France, et si on n’aime pas son histoire de France, « écrivez la vôtre » qu’il dit.

Susan: Right, because the past, we only find a slice of it. We only find part of it, when we find documentation, when we hear ancestors tell their stories, when we stumble upon things like Ornette Coleman, the jazz musician, talking about desire and castration. You find these things and it helps you find a different past, there’s so much in history, in education. It’s like state discourse or bourgeois discourse, that there’s so much that is about wanting to use the past as a foundation for the present, like the idea that the present continues indefinitely into the past, like there’s something that’s very conservative about the past, right ? And when you realise it’s like, ‘oh there were anarchists in the 19th century”, or you look at what the people who get called Luddites were doing, it’s like they were workers who were smashing the machines that were taking their jobs. There’s a history of radicalism, there’s a history of resistance and refusal in the past, and it’s really important to remember those moments. To me, that feels quite profound. Like I think about, we were mentioning the Compton’s Cafeteria riot earlier, there’s a way to look at it, like sex work and street queens were fighting with the cops and they won, they pushed back, right ? And did the world change ? Maybe in some ways, certainly not in others. But does that mean that it was futile, resistance is futile? No, they did something that left a mark on the historical record that was recoverable by people in the future. So, we know now that there’s always been resistance. People have always had an analysis of their situation. They’ve always taken actions. Those queens did something in their moment that left a mark. So too can we do that now, to leave something for people who come after us, it’s part of building a recoverable counter-dominant history.

Nour: That’s exactly the sense of agency and power you were talking about earlier. Especially in times like ours, marked by the rise of fascism, how do you see this kind of speculative archival work relating to our present and to our material realities?

Susan: So you ask a question about what’s the use of doing this kind of historical work at a moment of rising fascism, not just in the United States, but globally. And for me, the very simple answer is that fascist ideologies and imaginaries very specifically target gender non-conforming people. There’s a direct correlation, a relationship between fascism and the targeting and suppression of gender variance . I mean, we saw that very clearly with the rise of 20th century fascisms in the 1920s and 30s, like the whole idea of degenerate art or of the ways that anti-Semitism and targeting of gender variance got conflated, there’s strong correlations between that. So I think doing the work in the present that helps think through, like why in this moment of rising fascisms are certain kinds of people being targeted, immigrant communities, the idea of—as they call it in the US—the great replacement theory, that, white Christian people are imagining that those dark people from somewhere else are trying to take over our country. Those xenophobic anti-immigrant fears of “replacement” are about something imagined as an external threat. An internal threat is all those people who don’t fit into the categories and ideologies that the dominant culture believes in, the queer and trans bodies. And so, I think if we want to have a deep analysis of the present, then thinking about the relationships between transness and anti-immigrant sentiment, and thinking about how both of those things tell us something about the organisation of the modern state and to think about reactionary popular movements that target both transness and foreignness, it’s really, it’s really important for survival in the present to be able to think about those things together. And I think historical work on that topic, looking at trans people in Weimar, Germany for example, can tell us something really interesting about the present. There’s that famous essay by Walter Benjamin in which he says the history of minority people teaches us that the state of emergency is not the exception, it’s the rule, and that the more that you understand that, then the better prepared you are to use that knowledge in the fight against fascism, to see that our present crisis is intrinsic to the way Western society is organised. Benjamin directly links that to understanding the relationship between the past and the present. So, just for example, a story that I found doing some research on my own, that other people are now writing about far more extensively than I ever will: in the United States, in the 1860s and 70s, there was a Black formerly enslaved transfeminine person in Memphis, Tennessee, named Frances Thompson. Before she was like publicly out as trans, she had given some testimony to the US Congress about a race massacre that had taken place in Memphis in 1866. It was the first post-Civil War, race massacre in the US, where white people were killing en masse formerly enslaved Black people as a way of reinstitutionalising white supremacy, and that those whites, the northern whites who were in favour of the abolition of slavery held hearings, they got the Congress to hold hearings about the causes and consequences of the 1866 race massacre in Memphis. Francis Thompson testified about being raped during the disturbances. That gets entered into the congressional record, and the story was picked up by politicians nationwide, it was used polemically as one of the arguments in favour of the northern states still militarily occupying the southern states after the Civil War. That policy was called Radical Reconstruction in the US. Well, 10 years later, during the presidential election of 1876, which was essentially a referendum on whether post–Civil War Radical Reconstruction should continue, and whether the federal government should support a biracial democracy, Thompson was outed as trans. And the argument that was being made in the newspapers was: here’s this person who claimed to be raped but she really was a man and you couldn’t be raped if you were a man. So it was said that using this person’s testimony to advocate for the continuing Northern occupation of the South to enforce the idea of racial equality was predicated on a lie. Basically, look at all these northern politicians who are kind of in bed with like a black trans person who also seems to have been involved in commercial sexual activities. It turns out that the person who outed Francis Thompson as trans, Elizabeth Meriwether, her husband was one of the people who founded the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, which was founded in Memphis. She was regarded as a prominent suffragist who defended women’s rights in a racist way, arguing that it was unfair for Black men to vote while white women couldn’t. So 150 years ago, you have people weaponising the existence of Black transfeminine sex workers and using that as a campaign tactic to argue in favour of white supremacy. It’s directly related to racial terrorism on the part of white supremacists, and there is a version of feminism that totally supports this. It’s the same ways that gender critical people now are anti-trans and find themselves being strange bedfellows with very reactionary anti-gender ideologies. What we’re seeing right now is not new, you can see the exact same dynamics at work 150 years ago, and so there’s something that is at the very least clarifying about saying the situation that we’re in now is not completely unprecedented. This is something about the way that race and gender and sexuality play into the logic of the modern western state and the relationship of territory, population, and security, the way that capital reproduces itself through racial differences, that’s still exactly the same. We’re not in some bizarro world right now, where these things are happening and we don’t even know how to think about. You look at what was happening in the past and it can help you think about it and understand it now.

F*S : Je recommande d’écouter ce Twitch de Mediapart sur les livestreams et la violence (notamment de la plateforme Kick) la journaliste Marie Tourcan parle exactement de cela et du piège (bon c’est une émission un peu déprimante car cela montre vraiment qu’internet c’est trash mais c’est aussi très important il me semble) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i4lK9e4rdE

Susan: I was in Madrid in June and went to this very cool event: it was kind of a music festival, mostly queer and trans performers in the city park. People are just sitting around drinking and talking and listening to music. And someone had brought as an exhibit large scale photocopies of radical queer zines from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A lot of it was about the AIDS crisis, some of it was more from people who’d come out of the student movements or anti-imperialist movements or who were involved in avant-garde art practices or musical groups. They just hung these photocopies up on a clothesline, like it was old pieces of clothing with clothespins hanging from a wire. And it was just nice to see that, to say like, “Oh, there are these moments of resistance, we do come from a people who have perhaps always been marginalised in some ways. » There’s a subterranean existence. We find each other. We make our art. We live our lives. We do our politics. We insist that our lives are worth living. And we’ve always done that. And in Spain, some of that subterranean radicalism was explicitly about surviving under a fascist government. When you find moments of resistance, it’s important to share them . That’s one of the reasons I like to keep telling the Compton’s Cafeteria riot story.

LK : Finalement, créer des projets, des collectifs, faire de la recherche, des ateliers, des soirées, des expos, vivre nos histoires et les faire vivre, ou simplement vivre, tout ça ce sont des manières de faire archives, de partager notre héritage. comme si nous avions dans notre ADN trans* une histoire transmise, que le simple fait d’exister est déjà synonyme de lutte et c’est en vivant qu’on partage cet héritage, c’est en vivant que nos luttes s’activent, que les archives se lient.

Nos transitions sont imbibées des récits de nos transcêtres. C’est grâce à leurs histoires quelque part que nous pouvons transitionner aujourd’hui. C’est le témoignage d’autres personnes trans* qui m’a aidé à conscientiser ma propre transness.