Not being trapped in a body, being trapped in a museum.” This metaphor made me reconsider the trans visibility trap in light of the history of museums as sites of collection, colonization, and surveillance. It creeps and it slithers, it infects and it disappears. Living inside a museum’s necropolis is a rich metaphor. As alive as I felt, I also felt face to face with the proximity of my potential death this split continues to visit me in the form of recurring dissociative episodes.
I remember the first time I wore a skirt in public-on the bus to a club-I kept imagining a coroner’s exhibit of my own body, splayed in blood. The image of a suicide museum concatenated with the darker side of my own experiences of body dysphoria, as well as encounters with both internalized and external transphobia: a precarious experience of gender that can feel adjacent to death. This includes all those pushed to die by suicide. The metaphorical “trans girl suicide museum” places baer’s transition against a gruesome history of violence toward trans women. That it fronts a ketamine journal / meme starter pack about transitioning signals hannah baer’s brand of dark humor and her taste for glib, self-aware provocation. Hesse Press, 2019.Ī title like trans girl suicide museum is its own trigger warning. Trans girl suicide museum, by hannah baer.
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