In this paper I develop a novel account of dehumanization, and use it to help think through the various ways in which trans and gender diverse people are dehumanized in the current political context. The standard way of conceptualizing dehumanization is as a certain kind of attitude: it is a matter of seeing others as less than human. On my alternative, dehumanization is instead a matter of what is done to people. And what is done, I argue, is excommunication from the category of the human. This approach, crucially, requires us to reconceive the human as a social, rather than a natural, category; that is, as a social status that is conferred upon us, rather than a quality inherent to us. Dehumanization involves denying someone that status, thereby removing them from the category of the human. I identify three modes through which dehumanization can manifest: as an attempt to change the rules about who counts as human; as a refusal to treat certain others according to the rules for how humans ought to be treated; and as a failure to accommodate certain ways of being human within the social imaginary. All three modes of dehumanization, I suggest, are evident – and increasing – in the contemporary public discourse about trans and gender diverse people. 

This study is part of a doctoral thesis that analyses autobiographical narratives of trans people. It seeks to demonstrate the mutually constitutive quality of material things in human life by bridging the gap between human and object, between nature and culture and between the tangible and intangible divides. This study of quotidian memories reveals how social, cultural, political and material contexts influence remembering and dis-remembering. It also seeks to investigate how bodies mediate collectively constructed dominant memory models of gender while serving as a site of contestation for personal and collective dimensions of autobiographical remembering in trans people’s lives. The trans narratives chosen for this study are Sissy by Jacob Tobia and A Truth About Me by A. Revathi.

Contemporary discourse on transgender subjectivity is often about our embodiment: what it means (culturally, politically) to have a body that dissents, and the social effects of living in a gender dissenting body. All this conversation about embodiment forms a phenomenological vacuum, giving rise to an emergent field of trans affect studies that asks; what is it to know and feel disembodied? Being out-of-body or out-of-time in my visual arts PhD thesis is primarily and foundationally investigated as both quotidian and structured. My artistic research reaches towards two minor and complex histories that utilise/d and advocate/d for mentation practices to achieve spiritual transcendence. The first site is my childhood upbringing within the Australian branch of a fringe spiritual community, The School of Practical Philosophy; the second is the archival ephemera of the early trans justice organisation the Erickson Education Foundation (EEF), held in the Transgender Archives collection at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Whilst at first seeming to be sharply unrelated histories, with the first operating through a dogmatic system and the second through grassroots epistemologies, they formed in the same historical period (the late 1960’s) and are both attempts to organise in contradistinction to the force of capitalism and the singular, coherent, linear Enlightenment individual. Complementing a description of my research in progress, I will show a reel of rushes from the previous week of filming on site at ‘Mahratta’, a property owned by The School of Practical Philosophy.