Drawing from my book in progress, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, this talk proposes an aes-thetic history of transgender as an identity in formation. I mobilize the handmade as a conceptual rubric to describe the ‘felt’ labors of transgender self-making, looking to performance art and visual culture as an antidote to the ontology of wrong embodiment (“being trapped in the wrong body”). Deploying ideas of craft—too frequently dismissed as low art, skilled labor, or ‘women’s work’—the handmade connects transgender to collective process and quotidian aesthetics. Through a series of artistic case studies, I will talk through the interconnectedness of fiber and feeling.

Co-sponsored with the Cornell Public History Initiative