Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Report by Ellen Zitani
During a Saturday afternoon session, attended by approximately 50 people, we held a roundtable discussion on the methods of doing transgender history. Organized by Shane Landrum, a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Brandeis University, the roundtable’s participants included Landrum; Brenda Marston, an archivist for Cornell University Library’s collection on the history of sexuality; Raymond Rea, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Minnesota State University (Moorhead); and Ellen Zitani, a Ph.D. candidate in European History from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Ellen also served as moderator/chair.
The roundtable’s goals were to explore the intersections between transgender history with women’s and gay and lesbian history, as well as to discuss the emerging methods of research (archival, technological, interdisciplinary and theoretical) available in this field. And finally, as the original proposal stated, the roundtable hoped to “discuss the emergence of multiple transgender histories, each of which builds on existing feminist and queer scholarship in a different way.”
Ellen began the discussion as the roundtable was organized chronologically, as well as thematically. Her paper, “Lina Poletti: Examining the Gender Expression of One Early-Twentieth-Century Italian ‘Masculine Girl'” was organized in two parts. The first part reviewed the lessons learned from the last twenty years of literature on female masculinity. The second part applied these lessons to the case of Poletti, who had been simultaneously claimed as lesbian, transgender and genderqueer by the same researcher. Not faulting the researcher, but noting the varied signs given by the sources, Ellen understood the confusion and did a more literary analysis, concluding that Poletti should not be claimed as either of these. Instead, the title, “masculine girl,” which was given by her friends and lovers seemed to be more appropriate. She was, indeed, a gender-non-conforming person, though in no way passed as a man, nor was transitioning from one gender to another. The label of lesbian was more appropriate, though not a term she would have used herself.
Keeping with the Italian theme and moving forward in the twentieth century, Raymond showed a short clip from his film, The Sweet New, an adaptation of his stage play by the same name. The film follows three generations of an Italian-American family: in the first generation, Leo emigrated and was interned under the Enemy Alien Act; in the second generation, Lorenzo assimilated through a legal name change; and in the third generation, Kyle changed his name and underwent a gender transition. As Raymond related, during the play’s run in San Francisco, the audience was a mix of Italian-American and LGBTQ people, demonstrating the script’s ability to see a common thread of migration through the themes of emigration and gender transition. This method—of linking gender transition with emigration—could open up new lines of research for historians. Raymond’s paper challenges historians to question what other lines of inquiry we might utilize in our projects on transgender histories. As Ellen mentioned in her comments after the papers concluded, how could histories of race or class also find ideological parallels with the idea of transition?
After Raymond, Shane presented comments from his paper: “Transgender People and Their Birth Certificates in US History: New Research Using Digital Methods.” He discussed how the history of birth certificates can tell us a lot about transgender people’s struggle with identity documentation. Shane presented two lines of thought in his work. First he gave a history of birth certificate documentation in the U.S.; then, he discussed the digital research tools he used to write this history. Just five years ago, he said, he would not have been able to conduct this research as he relied on keyword searches in databases to find newspaper articles that pertain to his topic as well as genealogical websites. As the organizer of this roundtable, Shane also asked the audience to share their experiences with research technology, as it seems to enable the projects of transgender histories in a way that would have seemed impossible in the near past.
As Shane asked how digital technology has enabled the writing of transgender history, Brenda asked how the transgender movement enabled the creation of transgender archives. Organizations, she said, need to be around long enough to fill their storage spaces before they feel the need to find an archive. She pointed to trends in scholarship, too, that have helped facilitate these projects and alerted book dealers to the academic attention to the subject. Finally, she discussed the privacy issues related to collecting the archives of gender non-conforming people.
This issue of privacy was an overlap between Shane and Brenda’s papers. Both share a concern for the privacy of transpeople who may not want to be outed as trans even after their death. So these confidentiality practices are certainly a unique aspect to this historical process.
The questions at the end were brief. One student asked about research practices and how they have changed while the general concensus was that basically we have more access to sources and a greater ability to search for what we need within those sources than we had before. Additionally, a few other researchers in the audience shared their experiences in doing transgender history.
As an overall impression, the roundtable was attended by a great variety of people from the conference, young and old—demonstrating that perhaps this line of historical inquiry is both cutting edge and a legacy of queer history in general. The main point that everyone walked away with was that this history could not have been done as adequately without the newly available research technologies.