Category: Academics

Stood behind the lectern draped with her own keffiyeh, Lewis spoke about the need to fight fascism. I must admit I didn’t actually notice the keffiyeh until she muttered the word ‘inshallah’ much later, which I’ll explain when we get to it. But just to highlight up front how clueless Lewis and academia generally is towards an ideology which would happily vaporise them in an instant.

Two hours. Two hours of Del LaGrace Volcano (formerly Della Grace but Deborah Diane Wood originally) talking non-stop. You would expect an artist looking back over her massive oeuvre to spend at least some time speaking eloquently of her interest in portraiture and composition but no, all we got were anecdotes about all the people she had known.

Setting the scene, Gust told us that day had been a day of action for Palestine against genocidal violence (aka Hamas refusing to release further hostages with no sign of the Bibas kids), puberty blockers had been banned for trans kids, there was an athletics ban for trans women, etc. All of this was ‘boring’ and ‘depressing’ and so Gust turned to history of trans people to cheer herself up. Namely, mermaids (or merfolk, as she mostly failed to remember to call them).

The book arose from ‘ethnographic* and archival research among queer-, trans people, feminists and sex workers’ and was about the ‘everyday troubles with transness in social and institutional life’ in Istanbul, Turkey, since 2016.  She wanted to know how trans people dealt with such ‘state power’ in everyday negotiations.  It was her claim that there were two currencies – violence and intimacy; hence ‘violent intimacies’ were an ‘entanglement’ that trans people were caught in.  Therefore, the book offered a novel (i.e. stupid and cockeyed) concept and was obviously chosen in lieu of actual evidence of real violence, the traditional got-punched-in-the-face sort.