“Many transsexuals keep something they call by the argot term “O.T.F.”: The Obligatory Transsexual File. This usually contains newspaper articles and bits of forbidden diary entries about “inappropriate” gender behavior. Some transsexuals also collect autobiographical literature. According to the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program, the medical clinics do not, because they consider autobiographical accounts thoroughly unreliable. Because of this, and since a fair percentage of the literature is invisible to many library systems, these personal collections are the only source for some of this information.”
Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (p. 5)
Hello again, one day after Non-Binary Awareness Day in the United States!
I’ve been working with zines as a creator and a scholar for about four years now, a passion spawned out of the COVID-19 pandemic and my fear of climate change. I’ve been very aware recently of the temporary nature of technology and our current systems of living as we sprint towards worse storms, more fragile governments, and vastly elevated dictatorial corporate interests. In my other life, working as a post-production troubleshooting technician at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, I see how quickly file types, cables, and computers become unusable, and that terrified me as an aspiring filmmaker in my early twenties trying to tell stories that last. So… zines! Zines are physical – I can hold my stories in my hands and give them to a friend, sell them at a store, or hold them in my own OTF as a record of my life.
I have officially started my deep dive into Urania this week with transcribing scans of the documents provided to me by Glasgow Women’s Library into a Google document. This will make them more easily searchable and will also enable me to start my word frequency tabulations. I’ve been working on a way to analyze groups of documents for similar word usage, ways of discussion, and common topics to determine semiotics within a group, particularly focusing on transgender identity and philosophy. I completed a test of these techniques by analyzing a group of 36 trans-written present-day zines and articles published in trans zine presses. I looked at word frequency, zine topics, common visual symbols, and how authors broached philosophical concepts. Two interesting preliminary takeaways: a) “trans” and “people”were the most commonly used words, but they were also closely followed “want” and “think” which shows the reasoning behind creating these zines; and b) these trans authors love to ask open-ended questions with no intention of providing an answer. These zines were about imploring the universe and the people in it to think through the systems we’re stuck in and find a better way.
I will be doing a similar analysis of Urania, which I will expand upon by additionally investigating how specific UK and trans medicine historical events are discussed (and which are excluded), which authors are repeatedly published or given places of importance within issues, and how the documents themselves are put together.