CGF - Seminar: Lived lives, liveable lives: Reimagining trans and intersexed embodied lives through autobiographical accounts of the past
Marie-Louise Holm, University of Copenhagen
How did intersexed and trans people of the past live and transition at a time when no category of trans or intersex existed? This question has been the point of departure for my PhD thesis. Through the reading of a Danish historical source material from the 1910s to 1970s, I have explored what kind of life narratives were articulated by persons who would today be perceived and categorised as trans before the category of transsexualism was introduced and the trope of the life story of a genuine transsexual was firmly established. In particular, I have focused on studying articulations made in autobiographical and other experiential accounts of the embodied lives of trans persons which since the 1980s and until recently were defined within Danish sexology as unliveable and therefore undesirable. With a point of departure in postmodern ethics, which focus on the embodied encounter between people and the unknowability of the future rather than define an ethics of right and wrong, I experiment with rereading and rearticulating the autobiographies in complex ways that does not present a person’s life as either a success or a failure.
Bio: Marie-Louise Holm researches in the areas of feminism, the history of medicine and technology, and bioethics. They have published articles on trans history, feminist and queer theory, as well as a book with Morten Hillgaard Bülow on notions of masculinity in the history of sex hormone research in Denmark. They have recently finished a PhD project on 20th century experiential and medical accounts of intersexed and trans persons at Tema Genus, Linköping University. Currently, they are external lecturer teaching responsible conduct of research at the SCIENCE and SUND Faculties at the University of Copenhagen, and they are project manager for the TRANSIT support groups for transgender youth at LGBT Denmark.