Exploring gender, diaries and binaries through visual essays

In 2019, I started a series of mini sketchbooks: a safe place to draw around fertility, trans pregnancy, chestfeeding, medical transition, parenthood. During this research project I want to find ways to translate this archive of drawings into a collection of short visual essays. I’ll take the constraints of the initial sketchbooks as a formative guide. I’ll work with the spontaneity and looseness of the drawings and with the sequentiality of the booklets. I want to figure out how to use the day-to-day of the sketches as an approachable access to the trans theme. I’ll experiment with short pieces of narrative as this will give me the freedom to try different narrative styles and explore narrativity in general. Conversations with other trans and queer authors and individuals will help support the narrative and make the story broader than only my own. I aim for a socially relevant, loose collection of readable visual essays. A small piece of quiet, visual activism in a world where the space for gender varition is often narrow.