Bent Street 5.1

Description

In this midyear 2021 edition of Bent Street, guest editors Sam Elkin and Yves Rees from the Spilling the T Collective bring a special trans and gender diverse community focus: essays, poetry, polemic, memoir, fiction, and imagery that explores and celebrates gender diversity. In this edition, trans creatives bring an acute understanding of how embodied subjects construct and perform gendered selves - an understanding that though sometimes borne of pain and trauma, and sometimes met in joyful euphoria - creates memorable art ... foregrounding nuances often eluding the cis gaze. A distinctive trans lens dissecting how gender works - for all people, cis and trans - shines through in this special issue.

Informations

• Publié par: Clouds of Magellan
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780645193534
• Langue: English

Extrait

Soft Borders, HardEdges

Bent Street 5.1 : Australian LGBTIQA+Art, Writing & Ideas

a special edition focusing on thetrans and gender diverse community


Edited by:

Sam Elkin
Yves Rees

Series Editor-in-Chief: Tiffany Jones





Clouds of Magellan Press |Melbourne
©2021. Copyright on the contents of Bent Street remains with individualcontributors.

Allrights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced withoutpermission of the individual writers and artists.

Bent Street: Australian LGBTIQA+ Arts, Writing& Ideas is published twice yearly by Clouds of MagellanPress, Melbourne. www.cloudsofmagellanpress.net

bentstreet.net

ISSN 2652-659X (Print) ISBN:(paperback) 978-0-6451935-1-0 ISBN: (ebook) 978-0-6451935-3-4

Series Editor-in-Chief: Tiffany Jones Editorial Advisor: Dennis Altman Contributing Editors and Bent Street ambassadors: Ashley Sievwright,Gordon Thompson, Guy James Whitworth, Margie Fischer, Henry von Doussa.
Bent Street logo: Andrew Liu
Design: Gordon Thompson
Publication and distribution, LightningSource, through eBook Alchemy. ebookalchemy.com
Cover image: ‘Vessel’ by SamuelBeatty —https://www.samuellukeart.com/
Back cover image: ‘Kalypso’ by Jamie James— http://jamesphoto.com.au/
Acknowledgement

Bent Street acknowledges the Traditional Custodiansof country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea andcommunity. We pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging,and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Contents

Introduction – Tiffany Jones
Spilling the T – Sam Elkin & Yves Rees

Turned our alright – BronRichardson
Abandon –Jordie Slonim
Thrive –Jamie James
Shae
Yūgen – Kait Fenwick
Skin Canvas – SavZwickl
Trans Conception – DamienW. Riggs, Carla A. Pfeffer, Ruth Pearce, Sally Hines, and Francis Ray White
Plumb Drop + … Ruth Dahl
Vessel – Samuel Luke Beatty
Love Comes To Town + – Tazz Hislop
Yours or Other + … Adele Aria
Trans Health: Thinking Globally – Raewyn Connell
Bluebottles – Brooke Murray
Transcend – Lucy Nicholas
From Kakuma – Clair Brianz
Refuge in Sweden – Purity
A Night on the Town – Mel Romero
Kay
Visibility and Exhaustion – Bryson Charles
in-cis-ions – good judy
This is my Story – Stacey Stokes
An Image of Teague – Teague Leigh
Labels – Anastasia Le
AJ
QUEER ME CRAZY//ALLIES (ALL-LIES?) – Ruq
Speaking back to the binary: from isolation to community – Alex Lee There Are No Single Stories – Ryan Gustafsson
Kalypso
Telling the Truth – Blair Archbold
The ‘Dreambreaker’ – Kathy Mansfield
Kelly 4 Shannon 4eva More – G. Jae Curmi
Cassy
Chains – Noah Silvereye
Weed Farm – Cat Cotsell
COVID Exercise Bike – Erin Riley
Indi
I call myself ‘trans’ – Kai Ash
Bittersweet – Kin Francis
The Ascension of Non-Cis Jesus – by Guy James Whitworth
Build your archive armour for gender euphoria – Reid Marginalia I am Free – Stevie Lane
Joel
Seahorse – Susan Lardner & JessicaWard
T-wenty20: Lockdown Island – Tiarn
Best Day Worst Day Podcast – Interview with CB Mako
You – Nat Hollis
Don’t ask don’t tell – Rowan Richardson
Carol
Jamie James
Dysphoria, My Teacher – Jaxson Wearing
Waves – Nate McCarthy
The Right Fit – Theo Dunne
‘I Will myself’ – Elwin Schok
Static – Maddox Gifford
Introduction TIFFANY JONES
Welcome to Bent Street , which now bends around the soft borders andhard edges of gender, in guest editors Sam and Yves’ trans special issue. Theyensure our street twirls around the tongue-twisters, spoonerisms, stitchingsand paint daubs of talented mixed media artists who depict the art of living –like good judy, Samuel Luke Beatty and Sav Zwickl. We wind through the writingsof poets like Kait Fenwick, Adele Aria and Ruth Dahl; and spiral through thestories of trans refugees Claire and Purity as they travelled across variouskinds of borders in and from Uganda to Kenya, or Kenya to Sweden.
Our road also whorls around significant contemporary thinking on transissues fresh from the professoriate: Sociology Professor Emerita Raewyn Connelldiscusses the most important issues from a perspective that centres trans peoples’interests. Gender and Sexuality Studies Associate Professor Lucy Nicholasexplores tensions and potentials for greater common ground across feminism,LGBT rights, trans, and queer gender interests. A team led by PsychologyProfessor Damien Riggs considers how men, trans/masculine and non-binary peoplenegotiate conception against a context of social norms.
Finally, we veer onto the main drag and byways of gender diverserepresentation; picturing Jamie James’ photography of thriving communitymembers and collecting Reid Marginalia’s gender euphoric archive armour alongthe way … Buckle up!

Tiffany Jones—Editor-in-Chief
Spillingthe T SAM ELKIN & YVES REES
Yves: Sam, this special issue of BentStreet had its origins in the Spilling the T Collective. How would youdescribe that project?

Sam: The Spilling the T Collective is atrans and gender diverse writers’ group that we set up as part of TransgenderVictoria’s SPARK peer support project in early 2020. We basically set it up tofoster more trans and gender diverse people to get to know each other, sharetheir stories, provide peer-to-peer feedback and get published. We had intendedfor it to be an in-person workshop series at the Wheeler Centre, but due to thepandemic, we had to re-jig it to be an online workshop and guest speakerseries. It kicked off in May 2020 and we had over thirty trans and genderdiverse people participate from across so-called Australia. We had some reallyamazing guest speakers address the group along the way like the award-winningpoets Ellen van Neerven and Rae White, as well as the comedian and performanceartist Krishna Istha. We ran a second workshop series in late 2020 too thatMarcel Liemant facilitated, who was one of our round one participants and anaccomplished YA fantasy writer.
Did you enjoy beinga part of the writers’ group?

Yves: Yes – perhaps especially due tothe online aspect. Although going digital was a COVID-induced necessity, itturned out that operating as a virtual writers’ group actually enhanced theexperience. It allowed us to include and connect with trans and gender diversewriters from all around the country, rather than just those living in physicalproximity to the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne’s CBD. We ended up with writersfrom Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, regional Tasmania, Brisbane, Newcastle andelsewhere. Given that trans and queer communities tend to cluster around Sydneyand Melbourne, it was very meaningful to connect with trans and gender diversefolk living outside these southeast metropolitan hubs. These writers taught mea great deal about the diversity of trans experience and provided a much-neededsense of community at a time of physical isolation from queer spaces. Our pivotto digital platforms also allowed us to hear from international guest speakers– including Thomas Page McBee, a US trans memoirist, journalist andscreenwriter who zoomed in from his home in California. Finally, the Spillingthe T experience opened my eyes to the sheer size and enormous talent of thetrans writing community. I had expected only a handful of participants and wasblown away when we commenced the first round with over thirty writers.
What did Spillingthe T teach you about trans writing in this country?

Sam: Almost everyone we met along theway, whether they came to every session or just a couple made a huge impressionon me. Some of them were really hurting, struggling with poverty, alienatinghealthcare and the administrative burden of day-to-day living. Some of them hadbeen through really hard times before, but were now living their best lives. Somany of us have experienced chronic traumatization from familial and communityrejection and many of those experiences really spilled out onto the page in oneway or another. Despite that, no two stories were ever the same. I also thinkpeople got heaps out of reading each other's stories, as many hadn’t really hadaccess to a lot of trans and gender diverse writing before. Some participantshad had a few essays or poems published in Australian literary journals before,but most had just been writing for themselves, and didn’t really see a clearpath to publication anywhere. It just made me feel quite motivated to do what Icould to create that pathway for trans and gender diverse people. It’s muchless burdensome to share your own experiences when you don’t have to worry thatpeople will think that ‘this is the only trans experience’. So, yeah, more than anything, I think thisproject taught me about the power of taking the time to invite marginalisedpeople to come together as a group and be creative. You can see the results ofgiving people a deadline in this anthology! It’s inspiring.
Do you feel likeSpilling the T Collective impacted on your own writing in any way?

Yves: The Collective gave me a sense ofbeing part of something bigger than my own story. The Spilling the T experience,combined with our work guest-editing this special issue of Bent Street ,made me realise that my personal trans writing is situated within a broadercultural moment in which trans and gender diverse people are telling their ownstories en masse for the first time. Of course,