gender.network

Abstract

Gender.network is an artist project, a growing digital archive of flyers, photos, artwork, cartoons, letters, poems, ephemera, and other visual culture from the 1960s-90s, created by trans*, two-spirit, nonbinary, and trans-adjacent activists, organizers, and artists. The curation of this archive has been guided by hundreds of conversations and interviews with trans and queer elders, community members, archivists, and scholars. This essay reflects on the tension between the competing needs of the archive of “things” that this project is identifying and organizing, and the living communities that this project seeks to serve. As an attempt to bridge these two poles, this essay listens to some of the voices and strategies of the history of trans* visual and print culture.