| Amanda's Opening Statement continued... |
| Regardless of our own particular relationship with the ghost of our gender-whether we follow the lead of our ghost, wrestle with her, have trouble hearing her call, fear her, or feel that we have betrayed her-this relationship has made us intimately familiar with the experience of being haunted. For us, haunting is not a brief and ephemeral affair; it is instead a sustained, dense, and embodied experience � one that forever changes us. We are beings transformed by the spectral.
Personally, I have found it empowering to be attuned to the ways in which my body is haunted. Doing so has helped me to let go of my sense of control over myself, it has forced me to trust in the power and generosity of others. In a sense, communing with ghosts is one way that I maintain a religious practice. Other than the ghost of my gender, there are many ghosts who persistently haunt me. I hold embodied memories of those times that I have been hurt by others, just as I hold memories of those times that I have hurt others. Both kinds of memory linger within me, and both periodically flare up inside me, deeply shaking my stabilized sense of self. Sometimes, for instance, when I remember the ways that I�ve been insensitive and irresponsible to women in my life, I have trouble seeing myself as a woman as well. Other times, when I remember ways that others, mostly boys, have hurt me in my life, I have trouble remaining present with, or respecting, myself. These memories remind me that I am a broken individual, someone deeply cut through with empty places � sites that serve as the physical rem(a)inders of violence, death, broken trust, depression, and unfulfilled cravings. I can�t cover over these places, or forget them. I need to find ways to live with them in order to be fully myself, in order to live into a body that I believe in, that I am present within. I have to trust that these empty places will heal, and I know that I, alone, am not in charge of their healing process. I am also haunted, though in a different way, by memories of those who have come before me, those who have already passed from this world. Hundreds of years ago, for instance, my ancestors lived outside of the law in the borderland between England and Scotland. Their lawlessness led an English Archbishop to thoroughly curse the entire Armstrong family, all the way down through the generations. Despite the fact that this curse was later overturned, and despite the fact that I don�t believe in the divine power of Church representatives, this curse somehow makes me feel, in a very subtle way, alienated from the Church, kicked out. In this way, I still feel in my gut the weight of history, the force of those who have come before. But my ancestors, my family, didn�t simply live under the repressive thumb of the authorities, Church and otherwise, down through the generations. After being exiled to the United States, the Armstrongs, like almost all other European families in the so-called new world, were conscripted to serve the brutal system of white supremacy that was being built in the US. As a result, we benefited materially from the systematic oppression of people of African descent, Native people, and Asian people. Here, we became honorary members of the elite. This history also haunts me, as the legacy of white supremacist violence profoundly structures the world that I live in. No one can live today and not be deeply affected by the continuing effects of slavery in the States, the genocide of Native people that accompanied the Anglos� westward expansion, or the imperialistic endeavors of the Western powers. The ghosts of those brutalized by these realities haunt the present. Looking to history outside the frame of my ancestry, I am especially interested in tracing the lives of gender variant people who lived in previous times, as I consider these individuals to be part of an extended family. There are so many ways that we, as gender variant people living in the present, remember our dead, thus keeping alive the memories of those who have come before, and ensuring that those who have passed will continue to animate our communities. Aside from the website, the myriad vigils, and the more private acts of memory and mourning, we mourn our dead by carrying forward the struggles that they, first, inaugurated For instance, the founders of the Silvia Rivera Law Project in New York City are self-consciously following in the footsteps of Silvia Rivera, a tireless advocate for people of color and low-income queers and trans people. As part of the work of remembering and honoring the struggles engaged by gender variant people throughout history, I am especially interested in remembering those people who struggled to live into a religious lifestyle, who worked to transform themselves into ethical and full human beings as part of their work to transform themselves into the people they knew themselves to be. Thus, I was overjoyed when I discovered that some historical records do testify to the reality of such people. In the early days of Christianity, for instance, a significant number of individuals passed as men in order to enter monasteries. Reading the stories of these passing monks, I found myself identifying quite closely with their lives. Here were people who did not separate their religious practice from their efforts to live into the gendered embodiment of their choice. They were living into their genders, while also being fully Christian. Their Christian practice seemed to be animated by a hope in the libratory potential of this new religion, a religion that preached the brotherhood of all people, dissolution of rigid social stratification, and the possibility of a world revolutionized through love. Surely this religion would accept them as the people that they knew themselves to be. |
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