On Thursday, 27 May 2021 at 8pm Bangkok time, the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford, the United Kingdom, will present an online lecture with Microsoft Teams on Queer Oral History and Transfeminine Experiences of Britain, 1970-1989.
The speaker will be Ms. Fleur MacInnes of Christ Church College, Oxford, as part of the Faculty of History Modern British History Seminar.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes a number of books on different aspects of gender studies in the United Kingdom and around the world.
Students in the Master of Arts Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Thammasat University, may find the lecture useful.
TU students who wish to participate are invited to write to the following booking email:
As the homepage for Ms. MacInnes explains,
My research explores the experiences of transgender women in the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. This project aims to further the knowledge of the Women’s Liberation Movement in three ways. Firstly, it builds upon transgender history in Britain through a feminist lens. Secondly, it historicises experiences of trans women in the 1970s and 1980s. Lastly, it seeks to integrate the experiences of trans women into feminist history, rejecting the notion that they are incompatible.
The Gateway to Research Portal (GtR) of the United Kingdom (UK) Research and Innovation (UKRI), enabling users to search and analyse information about publicly funded research, adds the following information:
Abstract
A pioneering social movement for women, the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) dominates the history of feminist activism in post-war Britain. Mary Adams argues that the development of the movement revealed that British feminism was exclusionary towards women who were not white, middle class and heterosexual. My doctoral research expands this argument, demonstrating another discounted category of women: transgender women.
Transgender lives are a growing interest in historical study. Susan Stryker, founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative, revolutionised research on the social history of trans and gender non-conforming people in the United States. In Transgender History (2008), Stryker classifies the 1970s and 1980s as ‘difficult decades’ for trans people. Cressida Heyes has identified that trans liberation and feminism have been portrayed as conflicting movements, and Talia Bettcher has developed this analysis, suggesting that centring experiences of trans people in feminist analysis could raise points towards the understanding of intersecting oppressions of women.
Histories of the WLM in Britain are extensive. The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project (WLOHP) is a notable piece of research from this field, producing interviews with fifty key activists in the WLM. The criteria for interviewees in this project, however, did not include a variant of gender identities. My research questions investigate the agency of involvement of trans women in British feminism, and whether a lack of representation was a conscious choice or a forced exclusion. Answering these questions will build a more comprehensive understanding of the current relationship between feminism and trans liberation.
Many activists working to improve the social mobility of women were resistant to the word feminist, perceiving it to encompass a set of social categories. Natalie Thomlinson has written on the position of Black women in second-wave feminism, suggesting that white feminists were stuck between being aware of racial inequality, and a failure to turn such awareness into action. Thomlinson argued that the growth of the Black women’s movement fostered communication between Black and white feminists. I will investigate whether this communication can be extended to interactions between cisgender and transgender women.
I will be undertaking oral history interviews with women who publicly identified as transgender in the 70s and 80s. Two studies focusing on the WLM have galvanised this project; the aforementioned WLOHP and ‘The Heart of the Race: Oral Histories of the Black Women’s Movement’. The Brighton ‘Trans*formed’ project has a rich collection of oral history interviews from trans people, allowing me to develop the framework for this project. My research will connect these categories, filling the historiographical gap of the experiences of trans women in the WLM.
The notion put forth by Bobby Noble that ‘a trans-feminist reconceptualization seems vital’ will be built upon to further analyse the status of trans women in feminist history. This approach enables the use of a wider range of source material, and the application of queer and feminist theory. Literature from organisations such as the Trans Action Organisation, Self Help Association for Transsexuals and the Beaumont Society illuminate the resources available to trans women during the WLM.
This project will further knowledge of the WLM in three ways. Firstly, it builds upon British trans history through a feminist lens. My research contributes to the range of trans history and develops Noble’s suggestion of a reconceptualization of feminism through trans studies. Secondly, it historicises experiences of trans women in the 70s and 80s, providing agency to the women at the centre of the project by using their experiences as key material in analysing the trans-feminist position. Lastly, it integrates the experiences of trans women into feminist history.
The project research supervisor is Professor Jane Garnett, Tutor in Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford, a specialist in intellectual, cultural and religious history, mostly since the nineteenth century, including the study of gender and visual culture.
Among books owned by the Thammasat University Library involving transfeminine experiences of Britain are some written by Jan Morris, a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.
As James Morris, she was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, which made the first ascent of the mountain.
She was the only journalist to accompany the expedition, climbing with the team to a camp at 22,000 feet on the mountain. The news of the successful climb was announced in the press on 2 June 1953, the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
As she wrote in a later memoir,
I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest. The mountain had been climbed, and I had already begun my race down the glacier toward Katmandu, leaving the expedition to pack its gear behind me. I heard from the radio that my news had reached London providentially on the eve of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. I felt as though I had been crowned myself.
Eleven years later, she began transitioning to life as a woman, one of the first high-profile people to do so in the modern era.
Morris described her transition in Conundrum (1974), her first book under her new name, and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment.
TU students may access Conundrum through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)