Burn Out: Affective Labor and Trans Archives

• In Event: Theorizing Trans Archives

Abstract

Examining archived correspondence between biomedical professionals and trans community advocates, this paper documents a decades-long strategic effort to recruit the care labor of trans subjects, valorizing them as stakeholders and experts while simultaneously asking them to deploy such (unpaid or underpaid) labor and expertise in the service of consolidating forms of hierarchical biomedical authority that rendered medical and sexological professionals, rather than trans subjects, experts on trans lives. Utilizing feminist and queer theorizations of negative affect, it argues that the ensuing burn-out has played a crucial role in trans-affirming transformations of both health care and archival practice.

Presenter

• Hil Malatino, Penn State University