Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Website Finished (for now)
After months of development, I am nearing a stopping point in designing the website. I am still not exactly pleased with a few elements, and I definitely have some major web projects ahead of me for next semester (like a fancy animated timeline, and an exhibit walk through). But for the moment I am pretty satisfied with the ground work I have laid and am eager to get working on content! Check out the site.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
San Fransisco Historical Society
The San Fransisco's GLBT Historical Society has an exhibit going up about the transformation (aka gentrification) of Polk Street in the 1980's. I have contacted the exhibit curator about using his material in my exhibit. He seems friendly and sympathetic, so it looks like it will work out.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Web Design
So I haven't done work adding to the actual project in a long time. Hopefully I will rectify that somewhat before the semester ends. However, I have been working on designing a new website which will have interactive elements. I'm talking to artist about helping me bring to fruition my vision for the homepage, I was going to post the basic layout but the image's color were all off. I hope this is not indicative of a larger issue. I will post images within the next week.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Bet Update
I went to Northampton today. I got some footage of the town with a few inches of snow on the ground. I realized how much good footage I could have gotten this summer if I had only had a camera on long term lease. even though the footage wasn't nearly as good as it would have been during the summer, I felt pretty good about what I got. Soon, I will edit together a preview clip with it.
While I was in town, I went to visit Bet Power, the curator of the Sexual Minorities Archives. He is doing somewhat better even though he has a serious lung/throat/larynx condition. He has tons of doctors visits coming up. I went to Florence to check the mail for the East Coast FTM group and the archives. Then we chatted for a bit. He can speak if he whispers. He seemed really appreciative of the help. I'm hoping he gets better soon.
While I was in town, I went to visit Bet Power, the curator of the Sexual Minorities Archives. He is doing somewhat better even though he has a serious lung/throat/larynx condition. He has tons of doctors visits coming up. I went to Florence to check the mail for the East Coast FTM group and the archives. Then we chatted for a bit. He can speak if he whispers. He seemed really appreciative of the help. I'm hoping he gets better soon.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Bet Powers is Ill
I have kept in contact with Bet Power who has helped me immensely in continuing the Transgender Oral History Project. I scheduled a fourth trip to the archives in November in order to film the physical space and scout out artifacts for the exhibit I am planning. He responded that he was sick, and could not host me. He has canceled ECFTM meetings, all Sexual minorities Archive visits, and his job search for the past two months.
On December the tenth, I found out that he has been hospitalized due to serious lung infection and complications of the larynx. He has been diagnosed with pneumonia and is undergoing several tests as he waits for a diagnosis. A close friend of his through the ECFTM has set-up a website (http://www.carepages.com/carepages/BetsFamily) in order to give mass updates on Bet’s condition and facilitate Bet receiving letters of support from the geographically dispersed ECFTM network. Members of the local trans community are using the forum to form carpools to visit Bet and bring him care packages.
****YOU CAN HELP***
If you have a laptop you are not using, he needs one in order o be able to acess the website. If you could donate it (temporarily) let me know. cperez@marlboro.edu
On December the tenth, I found out that he has been hospitalized due to serious lung infection and complications of the larynx. He has been diagnosed with pneumonia and is undergoing several tests as he waits for a diagnosis. A close friend of his through the ECFTM has set-up a website (http://www.carepages.com/carepages/BetsFamily) in order to give mass updates on Bet’s condition and facilitate Bet receiving letters of support from the geographically dispersed ECFTM network. Members of the local trans community are using the forum to form carpools to visit Bet and bring him care packages.
****YOU CAN HELP***
If you have a laptop you are not using, he needs one in order o be able to acess the website. If you could donate it (temporarily) let me know. cperez@marlboro.edu
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Oral History Exhibit Proposal (1st Draft)
Background
I started The Transgender Oral History Project as a means to uncover the rich, though often invisible history of transgender political activism. Stories including trans people often become a tiny portion of a subgroup that is largely dominated by normative elements who marginalize them in order to create an image that is more palatable to the mainstream. Furthermore, the narratives Americans are exposed to are so limiting—they are the stories of an individual who struggles with their own body or else the story of victimization by illogical violence. I want to tell different stories… ones that highlight how trans people have been pushed out of self-proclaimed safe spaces and have been abused by the psychiatric and medical establishments under the guise of treating them. I want to talk about the violence that happens when our entire society operates on logics that systematically force trans people to exist on the margins of society—refused healthcare, left out of government programming, and refused gainful employment. But I it would be missing the point to tell a history of oppression without the correlating history of resistance. I want to tell the stories of riots against police brutality, volunteering services in trans-specific health centers, reclaiming public spaces for people who have nowhere else to go, and civil rights marches for legal protections—a legacy of empowerment through community organizing.
Overview: The Basic Idea
I would like to create a multimedia historical exhibit that leads the audience in exploring the
issues that have fostered the evolution of the trans community over the past fifty years. I hope to engage viewers in the passage of time by creating a spatial representation of a timeline that they move through as they move through space. The timeline will portray the events and conditions trans people were operating within, but also the collective responses that enabled trans people to deal with these circumstances. I hope to make viewer think about how this community necessitated by a hostile environment that is not of its making but more importantly, to see the means by which this community has constituted itself.
I plan to accomplish this through using a combination of text, photography, ephemera, audio, and film. The central three AV elements will be video clips of vignettes from the Transgender Oral History Project situated within the context of the time period as created through the timeline. I am concerned with showing how the historical moment frames what is possible for people’s lives by showcasing stories that exemplify how this intersection is experienced.
Audience: Marlboro and Beyond
I see two distinct audiences for my piece—one of normative people with liberal political sympathies and one made up of people who understand themselves as gender-variant.
Of primary concern to me are people who understand themselves as gender-variant. I believe collective action and movement building begins with seeing ourselves as having common experiences and drawing from a shared sense of history as well as having shared ambitions for the future. This project is, at least in part, my own search for community, but I want it to extend further than that. I hope that I can engage other people who identify as transgender as seeing themselves as part of something larger. I want to reach people for whom exploring how the trans community has been shaped and where it is going, is a profoundly personal matter.
My goal is that I can communicate the continuing need for community while encouraging collective action.
My secondary audience is the Marlboro community. I anticipate this exhibit being different in two major ways. First of all, I intend to have more contextualizing information, more explanation and analysis. The purpose of the Marlboro version will be to introduce this community to the transgender community’s struggle and to make connections between the trans community and other communities we study or may even be a part of. In the process of exploring how transgender activism has intersected with, been co-opted by, and collided with the womyn’s and Gay and Lesbian rights movements, I want the community to think about inclusion within their own social circles and subcultures. Secondly, I will be hoping to address to concern stated above about how limited the portrayals of trans people are in mass media by presenting competing narratives. I want viewers to see a more multidimensional version of how trans people understand themselves within the context of broader society.
Logistics: Venues and Timing
Because it will be more of an overview, I feel like I already have access to the material I need in order to create this exhibit on campus. For this reason I would like to explore creating the exhibit next semester. I also understand the drawbacks since it would be more competitive to get gallery space and it would mean my outside examiner could not experience it. I am not even sure that the gallery is the best space for the project because of acoustics (I am concerned about how loud it will be if there are multiple, differing AV components), monitoring (I will be using electronic equipment that is expensive and am unsure of how to ensure it does not get stolen), and space (movement is central to my idea and I am unsure of how to create the kind of movement I want to in that open of a space).
Because my target audience is necessarily a scattered population, I do not know what kind of venues would be most appropriate for this exhibit. There is a yearly conference put on at UVM that I have attended for three years now: the Translating Identities Conference. It seeks to build community and provide a forum for the exchange information among trans communities throughout the northeast. I see my project as being very in line with this goal, so I think it would be a good fit.
I started The Transgender Oral History Project as a means to uncover the rich, though often invisible history of transgender political activism. Stories including trans people often become a tiny portion of a subgroup that is largely dominated by normative elements who marginalize them in order to create an image that is more palatable to the mainstream. Furthermore, the narratives Americans are exposed to are so limiting—they are the stories of an individual who struggles with their own body or else the story of victimization by illogical violence. I want to tell different stories… ones that highlight how trans people have been pushed out of self-proclaimed safe spaces and have been abused by the psychiatric and medical establishments under the guise of treating them. I want to talk about the violence that happens when our entire society operates on logics that systematically force trans people to exist on the margins of society—refused healthcare, left out of government programming, and refused gainful employment. But I it would be missing the point to tell a history of oppression without the correlating history of resistance. I want to tell the stories of riots against police brutality, volunteering services in trans-specific health centers, reclaiming public spaces for people who have nowhere else to go, and civil rights marches for legal protections—a legacy of empowerment through community organizing.
Overview: The Basic Idea
I would like to create a multimedia historical exhibit that leads the audience in exploring the
issues that have fostered the evolution of the trans community over the past fifty years. I hope to engage viewers in the passage of time by creating a spatial representation of a timeline that they move through as they move through space. The timeline will portray the events and conditions trans people were operating within, but also the collective responses that enabled trans people to deal with these circumstances. I hope to make viewer think about how this community necessitated by a hostile environment that is not of its making but more importantly, to see the means by which this community has constituted itself.
I plan to accomplish this through using a combination of text, photography, ephemera, audio, and film. The central three AV elements will be video clips of vignettes from the Transgender Oral History Project situated within the context of the time period as created through the timeline. I am concerned with showing how the historical moment frames what is possible for people’s lives by showcasing stories that exemplify how this intersection is experienced.
Audience: Marlboro and Beyond
I see two distinct audiences for my piece—one of normative people with liberal political sympathies and one made up of people who understand themselves as gender-variant.
Of primary concern to me are people who understand themselves as gender-variant. I believe collective action and movement building begins with seeing ourselves as having common experiences and drawing from a shared sense of history as well as having shared ambitions for the future. This project is, at least in part, my own search for community, but I want it to extend further than that. I hope that I can engage other people who identify as transgender as seeing themselves as part of something larger. I want to reach people for whom exploring how the trans community has been shaped and where it is going, is a profoundly personal matter.
My goal is that I can communicate the continuing need for community while encouraging collective action.
My secondary audience is the Marlboro community. I anticipate this exhibit being different in two major ways. First of all, I intend to have more contextualizing information, more explanation and analysis. The purpose of the Marlboro version will be to introduce this community to the transgender community’s struggle and to make connections between the trans community and other communities we study or may even be a part of. In the process of exploring how transgender activism has intersected with, been co-opted by, and collided with the womyn’s and Gay and Lesbian rights movements, I want the community to think about inclusion within their own social circles and subcultures. Secondly, I will be hoping to address to concern stated above about how limited the portrayals of trans people are in mass media by presenting competing narratives. I want viewers to see a more multidimensional version of how trans people understand themselves within the context of broader society.
Logistics: Venues and Timing
Because it will be more of an overview, I feel like I already have access to the material I need in order to create this exhibit on campus. For this reason I would like to explore creating the exhibit next semester. I also understand the drawbacks since it would be more competitive to get gallery space and it would mean my outside examiner could not experience it. I am not even sure that the gallery is the best space for the project because of acoustics (I am concerned about how loud it will be if there are multiple, differing AV components), monitoring (I will be using electronic equipment that is expensive and am unsure of how to ensure it does not get stolen), and space (movement is central to my idea and I am unsure of how to create the kind of movement I want to in that open of a space).
Because my target audience is necessarily a scattered population, I do not know what kind of venues would be most appropriate for this exhibit. There is a yearly conference put on at UVM that I have attended for three years now: the Translating Identities Conference. It seeks to build community and provide a forum for the exchange information among trans communities throughout the northeast. I see my project as being very in line with this goal, so I think it would be a good fit.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Installation possibilities
What was most immediately interesting to me about the project was the actual footwork--doing interviews, starting conversations, visiting archives. Now that I have collected some material, I am spending more time think about what I am actually ging to do with it. I started out my project assuming I was going to make a documentary. However, lately I've been thinking about alternative ways to present my material. I want to involve people in history; help them feel connected to it; engage them in the process of building connections through it.
I've come up with the idea of creating an interactive multimedia history exhibit. It will be more work, but there is the potential of soliciting community involvement, which is very appealing to me. Also, it could be presented in various situations and tweaked to the audience. It would start on campus, but then I would hope to put it in more queer places, like at next year's Translating Identities Conference.
More to come as the idea unfolds...
I've come up with the idea of creating an interactive multimedia history exhibit. It will be more work, but there is the potential of soliciting community involvement, which is very appealing to me. Also, it could be presented in various situations and tweaked to the audience. It would start on campus, but then I would hope to put it in more queer places, like at next year's Translating Identities Conference.
More to come as the idea unfolds...
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