The Soul of History: Breaking the Silence of Biography
Written by Quinnae Moongazer
September 7th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3005 (http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3005)
I was not so happy as I looked in the pictures on my parents' walls. It was something that resonated with me as I read a beautiful, radical poem by Jo Carillo 'And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You' which used as a leitmotif pictures of Latinas working under the sun that might hang in the livingroom of a blanquita radfem. Like so many things in the anthology- This Bridge Called My Back- that poem is immortalised in, it made me think, not just about its own very important subject which is, alas, an all too salient issue even today... but about the pictures that were once on my wall too.
They were windows into a very particular past, a past that is assuredly a minefield on multiple levels. Much has been said, including on the pages of Questioning Transphobia itself, about those pictures. How they can oppress, or how they can liberate. It vexed me because as a budding sociologist I'm easily entranced by questions of meaning, and constantly working upon my mind was a need to decipher the meanings of those pictures in my own life. Not just the meanings of the photographs themselves, but what they represented.