Preliminary Programme

In 1968, amidst a broader investigation of the national security implications of homosexuality in armed forces, British Admiralty officers found themselves in a conundrum: many of the courts-martial that had prompted the investigation involved affairs not between men but between male sailors and Singaporean transgender women. Drawing upon oral histories, Ministry of Defence correspondence and contemporary press coverage, this paper seeks to complicate existing accounts of Cold War “lavender scares” with a consideration of how race, class and gender identity inflected judgments about the blackmail risk Singaporean “Sisters” posed to their British partners. As with the far more extensive U.S. historiography of sexuality and Cold War security culture, most accounts of this period in Britain focus on gay middle-class intelligence officers who, it was thought, might betray state secrets rather than risk exposure. However, the majority of naval ratings discharged for sexual relationships with Singaporean trans women hardly fit this profile. In fact, as one Admiralty officer put it, carousing with Singapore’s transfeminine entertainers in the Bugis Street nightlife district was “the ‘done’ thing”: unlike their disgruntled shipboard medical officers, ordinary ratings on shore leave did not seem to regard their partners as men and seldom kept their exploits secret. And the orientalist language with which some Ministry of Defence officials discussed the “extraordinary” beauty and feminine elegance of these women—most of whom were of Chinese or Malay origin—made clear that trans women and their partners constituted a special case. From the Admiralty inquiries held between 1968 and 1973, it is possible to discern ways in which gender, race, class, and lingering imperial ties entangled in the actual intimate practices of British military personnel, offering a glimpse at the tensions within a security state often portrayed as an oppressive monolith. (Show less)

This paper addresses the significant social change that can be traced in Spain around the issue of transsexuality, transgenderism and trans experiences, from a multidisciplinary perspective (visual studies, history and social anthropology). Taking as an object of analysis a series of film and media documents, as well as interviews and ethnographic observations carried out between 2013 and 2018, a trajectory will be drawn that takes us from the peripheries, the persecution or the exotic fascination of the seventies and eighties to the legal and socio-cultural stabilization of transsexuality that is currently taking place in the key of identity and by means of stories about trans children and youths.
The historical period from 1970 to 2013 will be analysed from the point of view of the transsexuality in visual culture. To do this, a genealogy of concepts and modes of representation of trans reality will be presented in order to define the trajectory that begins in the margins of cities, in marginal neighbourhoods, and in the world of shows, but also in imaginaries that link trans bodies with the exotic, the different and place them in spaces of otherness. This point may be seen clearly in documentaries such as La Esmeralda: historia de una vida (Joaquín Arabide, 1981). From there, a gradual evolution will be observed throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, in which their presence in the media, cinema and visual arts is not only more usual, but also in more positive, unproblematic and combative ways, such as those shown, for example, in the film “Guerriller@s” (Montse Pujantell, 2010).
Next, we will provide some socio-cultural cues that explain the social change that has been experienced during the last decade on trans issues (2010-2018) and that leads to the central position the debate on trans childhood (and its legal framework) is currently occupying in the discourses of LGBTI+ activism, the educational system, public policies and the media. In this process, there have been fundamental milestones such as the retransmission of the documentary "El sexo sentido" (2014) on Spanish public televisión, the emergence of a statewide association of families of “transgender children” and the approval of specific legislation. The increasing social acceptance of this reality in Spain is rooted in a shift of approaching, which is the one that tries to address this communication: from the understandings in terms of sexual or moral deviation characteristic of Francoism and the period of transition, towards the essentialist understanding of transsexuality (understood as a cerebral identity that manifests itself from childhood) that is currently gaining strength and that is contributing to legitimizing and displacing towards the centre what had previously been considered deviant, exotic or abject. In this process, returns to gender order and emancipatory advances coexist. (Show less)

Fleeing violence, homo-transphobia and sometimes family threats, LGBTI migrants and refugees are one of the most vulnerable populations in Europe. According to ILGA, 78 countries worldwide still criminalize same sex relationships, and five of them even apply death penalty. Whereas a growing interest has surrounded asylum claims based on sexual orientation, little if any attention have been paid to the specificity of requests related to gender identity and expression.
Dozens of trans people leave their country every year in search of a safer life. Landing in Italy, or passing through to go elsewhere (except to be sent back in fulfillment of the Dublin Treaty), they can apply for refugee status, and Italian territorial commissions tend to grant some forms of protection to trans as well as to gay and lesbian applicants.
Getting in touch with the Trans Identity Movement (MIT), a renowned association for trans rights and health in Bologna, they usually disclose the need for hormone replacement therapy, barely asking for treatments. "I need my transition... Can you give me hormones?" is the usual question addressed to social workers and peer operators. However, as in Italy transition is regulated by law (L.164/1982), trans people will be able to get therapy only after several specialists agreement, at least psychologists and endocrinologists.
Hormones are cultural substances. Just like other parts of human body they are subjected to narratives, knowledge and experiences that contribute to shape the ways people perceive and represent their action on the body. In this paper i will focus on the specific negotiation required when the trans person is a migrant or a refugee. Dealing with transgender refugees reception entail a negotiation of the cultural meaning trans people assign to hormones as the magic substances that mold the desired body. How to deal with practices and representations that slip out the institutionalized route of trans experience? What's the boundary between personal experience and health? How to take seriously their notion of estrogen and antiandrogens and their knowledge of their work on the bosy? Basing my arguments on a ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna with trans refugee enrolled in a pivotal project lead by MIT this paper aims to discuss and complicate the frame within which we assign multiple meanings and activete different practices to deal with hormones and trans health within the refugee reception system in Italy. (Show less)