Finally sitting down to work here, to actually write, and bemused by the obstacles that seem to emerge. Last week, I opened the document I’d been working on, only to discover it was blank. Today, I’ve been using the laptop all morning to do the endless things that seem to conspire to keep me from writing my book, including writing letters of support for other people’s applications, entering appointments into the calendar, fixing paypal nightmare, etc. I’d told myself that at 11 I would stop this and actually start writing. Even though I’d been using Word all morning, at 11:08 it froze. I had to restart the computer. It froze again. The twirling circle thing seemed endless…while waiting, the sounds around me grow louder. The son of sam German shepard next door barks every few seconds, for no apparent reason. The sound of a hose is louder than it should be, given it’s 5 stories below me. I seem to forget what I should be doing. Does writing about writing count as writing? I don’t think so. But maybe it’s a start.

A warm congratulations to PhD candidate Sarah Tracy, who has been selected as the 2012/2013 Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute here at the University of Toronto. 

Sarah research concerns the politics of food, life, and health/debility in North America. Her dissertation considers MSG as a transnational biotechnology phenomenon, a global food additive - and alleged toxin — originated in Japan that increases its consumer’s taste response to savoury food. Sarah’s work explores how MSG presents a commoditized mechanism for reconfiguring the metabolic processes of living things, bringing into focus the larger question of how bodies are constituted in on-going relation with the diverse living matter that they inhabit, encounter, and engaged. To address this broader dynamic, Sarah’s work examines the boundaries of food, drug, toxin, and organism through MSG’s role in food development, consumption, and regulation at the iconic Campbell’s Soup Company. 

Congrats, Sarah! 

Four of us from the Toronto Photography Seminar are at Rutgers to attend the symposium organized by colleagues Tanya Sheehan and Andres Zervigon on the “Photography and Its Origins.” For more about the event, see: http://developingroom.com/events

Congrats to Ariel Leutheusser for presenting original research drawn at the Transecting Society conference at the University of New Hampshire, April 2012. Her paper was “Without a Roadmap to Myself: Queer Masculinity and Affect” and emerged from her work in USA400 Queer Feelings, Fall 2012. Go, Ariel!

“’Is this the ‘New Normal?’ Suggestions for Coping with the Tough Parts of Your Partner’s Transition”

I’ve entitled this short piece ‘Is the New Normal,” because shit happens during transitions, and non-transitioning partners are often are wracked with anxiety and fear (in addition to the transguy, of course). Most of us, from what I’ve learned, want to do all we can to support the transition—even those who eventually break up. When scary and painful stuff happens, partners are often afraid that this is how things will be post-transition: ‘is this the ‘new normal’? Because if so, I can’t handle it.” Transitions are unmapped terrain for everybody. Normally, in a healthy relationship, when scary things happen, the partners can turn to each other for clarity and reassurance. But in a transition, the transguy often can’t meet those partner’s legitimate needs in this area: he’s often doesn’t know the answers to questions either, and is often overwhelmed himself, as he transitions into his new embodied self. He can shut down or act out, further freaking out the confused and anxious partner.

So this is a note to partners who connected with their transguy before his transition, who want to make it through, together, and who are in the first 1.5 years of the ‘transition,’ however you define it. Here is a list of five suggestions on how to deal with the difficult patches, drawn from 28 interviews thus far with partners of transguys.

1. Be patient. Whatever is painful and unacceptable probably won’t last past the initial 9-12 months. Mark your calendar if you have to, but don’t try to make any big decisions in the midst of the first year; in the vast majority of cases, whatever it is you’re experiencing is not usually the new normal, but it is just a phase as the transguy gets used to his new being. Some of the most difficult relationship developments that the partners have noted include: a breakdown in communication, as the transguy withdraws, intentionally or not, as a way to cope; emotional hardship, including depression, anger, anxiety, fear, frustration, arrogance, narcissism; sexual withdrawal, as in some cases the transguy’s libido seems to evaporate for a time, despite T; the emergence of the transguy’s interest in having sex with additional people, usually men; a pressing need to hang with other men, trans or otherwise, which may mark new patterns of socializing.

 2. Don’t take it personally. It’s not usually about you, even though it might seem like it is at the time. See 1, above.

3. Pick a confidant, someone (besides your partner) to talk with regularly about the tough stuff, someone who has your back without judgment about what you and your partner are going though. If you’re lucky, maybe you live somewhere where this is a partners’ group, as we have in Toronto. Don’t expect your partner to meet many of your emotional, psychological, and (sometimes) sexual needs during this period, as most simply can’t, as much as they wish they could. Partners usually report isolation, as they often feel they don’t fit any of their former communities, and unfortunately the ‘trans community’ is often not welcoming of partners, and continues to define ‘trans’ narrowly, as specific only to the trans-identified person. So partners have to build their own support network, without violating the confidentiality needs of the transitioning partner.

4. De-center the transition. Be present for your partner in his needs around the transition, but try not to have it be the only things going on in your lives together. Make time for other things; talk about other topics; don’t bring up the transition unless he does; avoid interrogating him about every little nuance.

5. Take care of yourself, most important of all. If you are in one of the many situations I’ve come across, where you’re doing a lot of the care-taking work (emotional, financial, medical), ask for help from friends; don’t be a martyr and do it all yourself. You may later resent your partner for it later, especially if due to his own crisis he can’t see or appreciate your work in this area. Make sure you keep up your own interests outside of the relationship, including connecting with friends and family, exercising, eating well. This is especially important if your partner has had a major surgery, if he’s on medical disability, or is dealing with newly diagnosed depression or anxiety. You won’t be doing either one of you any favors if you get overwhelmed and consumed: avoid your own nervous collapsed in year 2 when your partner is out of the transition woods, so to speak, by taking care of yourself, too, in year 1.

Congrats to Talia Linz!

Warm congratulations to Talia Linz, who’s exhibition, Age of Consent, opened in Toronto on at the Doris McCarthy Gallery on April 12. See below for a exhibition description.

Teenagers are highly visible and highly mythologized agents of contemporary western culture. This demographic is targeted earlier and earlier as consumers, sexual beings and biocapital, with the mass media and advertisers in particular appealing to and exploiting the teenage drive to both conform and individualize. As Anita Harris notes in All About the Girl: “It is primarily as consumer citizens that youth are offered a place in contemporary social life.” Yet being “young” is generally equated with inexperience and uninformed naiveté, and consequently teens are pitched as questionable in the knowledge and articulation of themselves.

The growing presence and power of youth and the deluge of fears and anxieties around their behaviours, desires, and choices, have been reflected in and influenced by popular culture. Artists, musicians and filmmakers provide us with a cultural lineage of “misbehaving” teens, from the idiosyncratic films of John Waters to the recent Twilight series. Ideas of play, excess and experimentation figure large, as does the negotiation of systems of authority and the development and projection of self-identity. Teenagedom is often conveyed (and at times experienced) as flanked by compulsions of socialization and anti-socialization, and much of its representation swings between these poles. So teens are both violent and vulnerable, highly sexualized and innocents needing protection; bored, apathetic and unproductive while also the key to the future.

Age of Consent brings together the work of six Canadian and international artists who look at adolescence in various forms, exploring experiences (real and projected), perceptions (internal and external), myths, dreams and desires connected to this demographic and this time of life. For all the artists, the question of the adult spectator (and creator) begs interrogation. These youthful representations must be, after all, the projection of adult fantasies and desires—idealized, sentimentalized, regretful, abandoned. They tap into the connection between temporality and adolescence, which is often framed as emblematic of the liminal, a transitional phase to move through to achieve a more stable state of being. There is something in the works in Age of Consent  that celebrates wading in the uncomfortable unknowing of adolescence, and asks how this paradigmatic period shapes the formation of the self and continues to inform adult subjectivity.

Congrats to Nick Matte, PhD candidate in History, University of Toronto. He gave a great interview on CTV news about Miss Universe contestant Jenna Talackova, who had been kicked off the contest for being a transwoman. Go, Nick!

I’m going through some recent interviews, and the topic of a partner being called ‘transphobic’ emerged (yet again). Here is an excerpt from a recent interview on the topic:

“I’ve been called transphobic so many times I can’t even count. I got in a giant fight with my ex, who’s a trans guy, because he was very identified with a certain kind of lesbian non-profit work before he transitioned and I said something like, “Don’t you ever miss being a lesbian.” He was so offended, he was like “I was never a lesbian”. But he said lesbian like it was just the vilest thing and I got really very annoyed and was like, “Well I was under the impression that you weren’t against lesbians,” when we were right in the middle of having sex (laughter). I’m a feminist and if a straight bio guy talked about lesbians that way I would never have anything to do with him, why should I accept that from trans guys? I mean you could be any kind of guy – you don’t have to be a homophobic, lesbian-phobic, sexist guy – and I don’t accept it. And that doesn’t make me transphobic, that makes me somebody who is taking you seriously as a trans guy who I expect to be a feminist if you want to have a friendship with me.”