embodiment

During the [[055 - Feminist Scrapbooking]] episode of my podcast [[librarypunk]], we had on feminist scrapbooker Kristin Tweedale to talk about scrapbooking as a mode of information and knowledge management and how to do it in anti-capitalist ways. One of us (I’m blanking on who) mentioned someone in the family having a scrapbook with all the pictures removed. Not only was the scrapbook empty, but it had once been full of photos that were no longer there....

The [[189 - Library Socialism & Usufruct]] episode of the [[Srsly Wrong]] podcast mentions that writing in library books is not defacing or destroying them; rather, “value” is added because the library lends out the thoughts and scribbles of everyone who had that book before. Even if an item hasn’t been scribbled in, the library, in theory, is still lending that item with its entire history of having been used and enjoyed by others....

Opera queens (gay men who are fans of opera) collect the ephemera of opera to a degree which borders on hoarding: recordings, programs, pictures, signatures, interviews, memories, etc. There is no larger system by which they capture or organize this information, nor is there anything these men do with what they collect. Instead of using personal knowledge management systems, opera queens are personal information management. They are the tool which captures information....

If metadata is the sum total of what can be said about any information object at any given time, then the bodies of trans people undergoing medical forms of transition are living, always-changing metadata records. They are the information object, and they are also what can be said about the information object. My transsexual body is a catalog, a finding aid, of every testosterone injection I have given myself in my thigh, of the parts of my body I have willingly destroyed to create something better in their wake, of the process of teaching myself to shave my face (which is way different than shaving your legs, it turns out), of the ways my sexuality changed, of the hours of speech and movement therapy I did, of the fact that I’m still afraid to use gendered bathrooms in public after 4 years....