Encoding Trans Archival Memory: Critical Reflections on Archiving Digital Trans Resistance

by
Christoffer Koch Andersen

Who embodies an archivable body? Whose lives are considered valuable enough to enter the archival history of our cisheteronormative reality? Which identities become carefully preserved in archives, and which are consequently pushed to the margins to be dismissed? Inside these various archival considerations, trans lives have historically been subjected to oppression due to not conforming to hegemonic structures of colonial, capitalist and cisnormative power (Martino and Omercajic 2021; Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). These structures and their violences against trans nonconformity have been implicating and restricting how our histories, communities, knowledges, liveability and potential futures can fruitfully materialise. Considering the erasure of transness in historical memory that stems from these legacies of violence enacted against our bodies and identities (Dickson 2021; Miles 2020) together with the the ways in which contemporary anti-trans politics are mediated through the transphobic logic of algorithmic structures (Hicks 2019; McQuillan 2022; Shelton 2021; Upadhyay 2022), I wonder: How might we refuse anti-trans violence and overturn the “non-archivability” of trans bodies to make them archival (and thus memorable) as a restorative trans feminist project of resistance? As Snorton puts it, what are the possibilities for archival practice as a process of “inventing strategies for inhabiting unlivable worlds?” (Snorton 2017, 21). By archiving our personal lives as activist ammunition for political justice, what might the potential of digital archives mean for feminist, queer and trans futures? Foregrounding these questions, how can we reject the normative dismissal of trans bodies through digital archives as an intimate politics of refusal and restoration? And how may digital archives strategically aid our activism and community practices to recode trans affirming spaces?

Existing as trans during recent years has left me exhausted as my ability to authentically live has been narrowed, my identity turned into a global political scapegoat, and my body appropriated as fuel in pseudoscientific fear campaigns. Wherever we look or click around, our visions are clogged up with violence: another anti-trans bill aimed at our liveability; another brutal murder of someone similar to us; another algorithm suggesting transphobic content; another article toxifying our identities; another piece of legislation making pleasure, yet alone survival impossible; another removal of our right to access education, bathrooms, sports and public spaces; another accusation of us being dangerous; and another individual in power publicly degrading our existence (HRC 2023; Miles 2022; Montiel-McCann 2023; TLT 2023). The hostile anti-trans politics infiltrate the intimacies of our personal lives and liveability as our identities are the sources of our heaviest sufferings and greatest potential for joy, which make our political practices inherently personal and our archives fundamentally political. From witnessing endlessly entangled violence, I argue, we must conceptualise the archive as inherently political, naturally activistic and as a subversive, intimate and reaffirming antidote. As such, insisting on the personal as being political asserts that our intimate lived experiences—those archived in the past and those we are currently archiving—unveil structures of power, marginalization, and oppression (Rosa 2023), but also enable the means to resist them and imagine other ways of living. By archiving our personal lives and lived experiences of resistance against violence, we foreground historical accountability, community care, and radical hope by resurfacing alternative possible futures that we could not otherwise reach. Archiving our experiences in the present serves as an opportunity to conceptualise the digital archive as a simmering space for the liberatory potential of trans politics (Rawson 2013; Watson et al 2024) and “glitch” binary colonialist, capitalist and cisheteronormative assumptions (Russel 2022) within and beyond the archive. As such, digital archives enable us to accentuate our activist efforts and their digital advances, hack the algorithm to prevent another history of trans erasure and further embed transness into the digital world. The digital trans archive functions through new temporalities and specialities (Caughie and Meyer 2019), centers a community logic of accountability to those “whose belongings have become [our archival] ‘collections’” (Nowviskie 2019), disrupts white cisheteronormativity in institutionalised LGBTQIA+ archives (Billard 2023; Brown 2022), and aids our understanding of further, yet undertheorized digital archival practices (Cover 2019) to strengthen our global restoration of trans memory politics. From these digital affordances, an immediate spatio-temporal connectivity between trans communities emerges, where the logging of resistance practices as they happen breaks the temporal delay in archiving and magnifying trans resistance globally. The radical politics of digital trans archives do not solely refuse the oppression of our lives, but carve out potentialities for digital future spaces of sustainable living that reverberate in the archive, online, and our material reality. From these considerations the curation of the Archive of Digital Trans Resistance emerged as a counterhistory to (re)accentuate trans memory against erasure across borders, time, and temporality.

Portrayed in Figure 1.1 below is an overview of the community-curated Archive of Digital Trans Resistance from my MPhil in Education (Knowledge, Power & Politics) at the University of Cambridge. As a trans scholar and activist, I began conceptualising the archive based on my personal frustration about the global intensification of anti-trans violence aimed at my community over recent years and how it has been politically, culturally, and digitally enabled. In response to these violent anti-trans politics, I felt an urgency to assemble an archive of resistance, where we, as a collective trans community, could come together to curate the archive across time, space, and cultures. The archive stretches over multiple decades to merge past-present resistance practices, 9 different countries, 9 official archival holdings,^[1] 56 textual materials, 46 photographic materials and contributions from 40 different trans individuals and organisations. The archive thus encompasses various forms of bodily, visual, and textual resistance against anti-trans violence mediated through photographs, leaflets, documents, posters, images, and designed graphics—all foregrounding an aesthetic digital archive of our resistance as a creative force that cannot be represented by binary systems and without our trans community involvement.   

I sought to make the archive as community curated as possible. Attending to the official archival holdings, I first searched for materials related to trans resistance practices and ended up with four keywords: “Community,” “Demonstration,” “Protest,” and “Resisting.” In connecting past resistance practices to the ones of the present, I also circulated a call for contributions on my social media platforms and hung posters up around Cambridge. Trans individuals and organisations reached out to share their digital photographs, illustrations and texts related to resistance. Aware that Instagram is a platform for political activism, I explored hashtags such as #TransCommunity, #TransLives, #TransResistance, #TransProtest and #TransRightsAreHumanRights over a two-month period and reached out to multiple individual trans people and organisations, explaining the rationale of the archive, and asking if they wanted to contribute their work. Lastly, I made sure to circulate previews of their work in-progress and share the final online archive before publication. Even though I assembled and creatively designed the archive itself, the Archive of Digital Trans Resistance—from its theoretical inception and data collection, to its final materialised result—stands as an inherently collaborative creation that exemplifies the collective power of our trans community.

The Archive of Digital Trans Resistance manifests both as an archival collection of trans activism for historical redress as well as an epistemological political project of liberation to engineer future spaces for trans representation, justice, authenticity, joy, care, and sustainable liveability. The Archive of Digital Trans Resistance encourages a progressive and futuristic politics of memory that builds on the past, considers the present, and envisages liveable digital futures to come. The digital archive meditates the past in relation to our present by highlighting our historical legacy of resistance in fighting for political justice, but also how we mobilise resistance beyond the limits of past activist and archival capabilities to advance our resistance by appropriating digital tools in our quest for liberation. Therefore, I suggest that readers immerse themselves in the digital archive by following the website link either before, while or after reading this commentary to comprehensively grasp and feel the nostalgic and novel affects, materialities and liveliness of trans resistance as a whole and holistic embodiment. The archive should by no means be understood as exhaustive, but as an example of how to curate a digital community archive, digitally archive resistance, and conceptualise the archive as a political tool.

Surfing in the Archive of Digital Trans Resistance means to encounter various modes of resistance that, individually and collectively, across the analogue past and the digital present, resist violent oppression and reimagine new trans realities emerging from the archive. We actively reject consistent erasure and lack of representation beyond flashy performativity, and become the creators of our own histories, their emergence, and continuation into the digital realm. Thinking about our community existence in a way that extends beyond simple survival, such as through that of digital archives, is politically vital to undermine hegemonic narratives about the historical unintelligibility of transness (Heyam 2022). In this way, from digitalizing and circulating our lived resistance practices as a (re)writing of trans history, we tend to Cuboniks’ (2018) question that asks, “Why is there so little explicit, organised effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends?” (Cuboniks 2018, 17) and answer it by utilising the digital archive as a technology to write ourselves away from the memory politics of trans lives defined by loss and normative control. Instead, we steer toward a progressive politics of trans memory defined by temporal strength through sharing our own authentic, self-recorded practices of resistance. We repurpose the digital affordances of trans liveability into the networked fabric of the digital reality we are increasingly living in. Further, the digital archive enables us to visually witness empowering and identifiable snippets of our own history merging together with pixelated artefacts. These artefacts create a sense of radical hope for our continuous survival, pleasure and liveability.

By closely examining the archival front pages that embody the change between Past Trans Resistance and Present Trans Resistance (Figure 1.2), the embedded modalities of past and present simmer inside their fleshy materiality. We see the affective visual discrepancies between the fadedness of the past and the vibrancy of the present together with the disparity between bold visual statements and the sheer size of collectivism. This past-present entanglement energises “the affective force of the past in the present, of a desire issuing from another time and placing a demand on the present” (Freccero 2007, 184), where there is a need to continuously and simultaneously resist and innovate. This past-present digital visuality makes it possible to highlight both the immense beauty and the detrimental violence within trans historical activism and resistance. By utilising the archive to refuse anti-trans violence, relegitimize transness, and create restorative transfeminist futures, we draw on our legacy of community activism and resistance to exceed the constitutive limits of the archive towards desirable futures (Hartman 2008, 11).

In arguing for the political potential of digital trans archives to building affirmative future spaces, I aim to exemplify how past-present forms of trans resistance materialise digitally and how this might inspire future transfeminist and queer archives, as well as radical politics and community world-building practices. Central to this future potential is a transfeminist ethics of care that “stresses the ways people are linked to each other and larger communities through webs of responsibilities” (Caswell and Cifor 2016). If digital archives document our personal lives and continuously act as political catalysts for change, they are only effective if they are built through community curation, shared responsibility and co-ownership. Cultivating the digital potential of archiving trans lives, I think of the digital trans archive as an extension of what Zepeda (2018) calls “queering the archive.” I call for “trans(gress)ing” the archive, and turning it into a subversive sociopolitical tool that “transforms the institution with possibilities of inclusivity for social justice and the rewriting of histories” (Zepeda 2018, 94), but also imagine not yet realised affirming spaces for counteracting the erasure of trans histories and promoting liveability. The archive functions as a “technology of identity” (Rohy 2010, 354), allowing for an investigation of historical-digital transness and a conceptualisation of how violence is both resisted and constantly reimagined through an openness towards the evolving potential of digital archiving, digital identities, and resistance practices. Engaging in the ongoing digital archival practice of merging past and present trans resistance towards potential futures refuses anti-trans violence and converts the “nonarchivability” of trans bodies into eternally archivable bodies. The archivability of trans bodies becomes legitimised by the temporal strength of our trans communities and the politics of trans memory made visible through digital archives.

By foregrounding the productive community force of digital trans archives, I seek to:

1. Show how digital trans resistance practices build on the past to conquer oppression in the present, pulling together fragments with the aim of restor(y)ing the trans body as archivable.

2. Argue that digital archives embody everyday community practices that are core to remembering and restoring our history while also producing our future histories, and

3. Feature scholarship that goes beyond abstractly discussing the impacts of digital archives to also exemplify how specific digital archival practices, modes, or efforts can be translated into community activism towards political justice and liberation for queer, trans, and other marginalised groups.

The act of drawing together the past and present hopefully inspires new forms of resistance through digital spaces and methods. In this way, digital trans archives mobilise an intimate politics of refusal and restoration that strategically aid our endeavours in recovering trans histories, purposing novel tools of resistance and coding trans future spaces. Digital spaces are central to trans participation, belonging, resistance practices, and world-building, where The Archive of Digital Trans Resistance, I argue, is a way of unapologetically existing as trans and creating a visual record of togetherness in opposition to global violence.

Acknowledgements

I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has made this archive possible – to all official archival holdings and archivists as well as the independent trans organisations and individuals contributing with materials to this digital community archive. Without you, this restorative resistance would not exist.

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^[1] The 9 archives: The Digital Transgender Archive, LGBTIA+ Periodical and Ephermera Collection Princeton University Library, Fondo Editorial Sarmiento, Departamento de Archivos de la Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library Digital Collections, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, The Internet Archive, TS Lesbian Herstory Archive, and the University of Victoria Transgender Archive.

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