Sasha de Buyl

The medium of fiction affords a rare opportunity to restore the lives, communities, and relationships that history has, often wilfully, forgotten. With support from the Schools of Critical Studies and History, this practice-based project considers the expressive potential of narrative to confront the historicisation of queer and trans people. Seeking out glimpses of futurity in trans cultural artefacts, the project surfaces material traces of trans lives, to imagine trans futures and conceptualise new approaches to trans narrative form. The project will not only explore narrative forms of trans-temporality but embody them, as the creative output is itself a formal example of what the project seeks to critically examine.

Building on methodologies of gender historians like Mo Moulton, the project blends archival traces with contemporary intersectional trans perspectives to rekindle intergenerational connections and empower trans communities to imagine more hopeful trans futures.