As February is LGBTQ+ History month we thought we’d ask Dr Kit Heyam a few questions about their groundbreaking work on trans possible history. Kit is a trans awareness trainer, heritage practitioner, writer and academic at Queen Mary, University of London, who co-created the highly popular #RainbowPlaque initiative. Their academic work has covered topics as diverse as the reputation of Edward II, print cultures in medical history, and the First World War.
Kit, thanks ever so much for taking the time to talk to us. We’ll start with a simple, but very important question, why is queering the past so important?
For me – and as I think more people are gradually becoming aware – queering the past is politically and ethically important – both as a way of combatting arguments against queer rights which weaponise the idea of ‘tradition’ or the claim that queer identities are a new invention that lack the legitimacy provided by historicity, and as a way of providing a sense of historical contact, community or recognition for marginalised people today. This is particularly urgent when it comes to trans pasts, for two reasons: firstly because the arguments that frame trans people as ‘new’ (often as simultaneously trivial, a flash-in-the-pan trend and a potent new threat) has had significant political impact in recent years; and secondly because, to a great extent than the history of queer sexuality, the existence of trans experience in the past is often comprehensively denied. I wrote about this in relation to First World War history in my article ‘Gender Nonconformity and Military Internment: Curating the Knockaloe Slides’ (Critical Military Studies: Special Issue, ‘Curating Conflict’, 2019), where I discussed the experiences of AMAB (assigned male at birth) people who lived as women in the Knockaloe internment camp on the Isle of Man, and how we should approach telling their stories. I’m also writing about it at more length in a new project (still under wraps for now, but keep an eye on my Twitter for an announcement in the next few months!) In this newer project, I’ve also been thinking more about the things that a queer gaze (and particularly a trans gaze) can do for historical methodology: encouraging us to take people from the past on their own terms rather than forcing them into predetermined categories, and helping us to question how our standards of what constitutes historical evidence were shaped.
What methodological tools have you developed to help tell these histories?
As well as what I mentioned above, I’ve been working with colleagues from the University of Plymouth and V&A Museum on a new toolkit for ‘Gendering the Museum’. This work came out of an AHRC-funded project I worked on in 2018-19, called ‘Gendering Interpretations’: an international collaboration between Plymouth and the V&A in the UK, Lund University and the Vasa Museet in Sweden, and also Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. Our toolkit, which will be published later this year, gives a practical guide to finding new gendered stories in museum collections by investigating the life cycle of an object and of other objects like it. At the V&A, it enabled us to reveal stories including the centrality of working-class women’s labour to the museum’s textile collection, and the trans possibilities hidden in a lift-the-flap print. With my colleague James Daybell (who was the principal investigator of the Gendering Interpretations project) I also have a chapter on ‘Gendering Material Objects in Heritage Practice’ forthcoming in the Routledge International Handbook on Heritage and Gender.
To build on the heritage work you just mentioned, what are the challenges and opportunities of presenting gendered pasts in public spaces?
Public spaces, and the sense of ownership that multiple stakeholders feel over them, inevitably present challenges – particularly when it comes to contested histories. Many histories speak to multiple communities at once: for example, stories of AFAB (assigned female at birth) people presenting as men to join the military are often both the history of defiant women and the history of trans men. Rather than grappling over who gets to ‘claim’ these histories, I’m keen that we find new ways to embrace their multiplicity. One productive way I’ve found to do this has been through a project called #RainbowPlaques, which I co-developed with Helen Graham at the University of Leeds in 2015. #RainbowPlaques workshops invite queer people to make cardboard plaques – a visibly queer version of the iconic blue plaque – which mark public spaces that they feel are significant to queer history. Importantly, the ephemeral nature of the plaques makes space for sharing speculative and personal histories, enabling multiple perspectives on the same history to sit alongside each other. The display of the plaques in public spaces also enables them to shift who gets to feel a sense of belonging and ownership over a place: for 24 hours or so, they can make a city feel visibly queer.
Finally, because we’d be remiss if we didn’t ask about ephemera given our project, how has ephemera been influential in your work?
As I mentioned with #RainbowPlaques, I think ephemera offers great methodological opportunities – but it’s also, of course, a type of evidence. In my work on Knockaloe Internment Camp, I drew on photographs and camp newspapers as evidence of how people felt about living as women within the camp. More broadly, evidence of queer social life – particularly in periods when being outed as attending a queer event wasn’t necessarily safe – is so often ephemeral, surviving only by chance in flyers, newspaper advertisements or community knowledge. If we don’t pay attention to ephemera, those kinds of experiences might be lost for ever.
Kit, thank you for speaking to us about such fascinating and socially important research. Where can we find out more about your work?
You can follow me on Twitter @krheyam or check out my website.
You can find Kit’s article on the Knockaloe slides here.
If you cannot access the article because you are not affiliated with a university, get in touch with us via the contact form and we’ll help!