Collective Reading Session #3: to attest to with Dagmar Bosma
1 June 2024
Some reflections by Staci Bu Shea
We gathered for the third collective reading session on Saturday, 1 June within the exhibition Tough and Tender by Dagmar Bosma. From a trans-centered perspective, our time together focused on the many transformations throughout a lifetime, the complex process of the endocrine system, and culturally and materially informed perceptions about aging and plasticity.
Our salt bowl (and saucer, pictured here) was now completely enveloped with salt by the last session’s water evaporation. This time it carried our reading and conversation around instances of ambiguous loss, the kind that doesn't involve emotional closure or clear understanding, usually cultivated within a temporary threshold (no longer here but not quite there) where resolve is often met with a struggle of agency. Grieving can become disenfranchised when the particular grief is not recognized or we don’t get enough support that it’s legitimate. To that end, it felt really important to acknowledge the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Gaza and elsewhere during our introduction. There’s actually too much of a dissonance for many of us to gather without doing so.
Dagmar introduced the waiting list indication for gender affirming care from UMC’s website. They passed around copies of this document (in the second photo) where they had imprinted a large antique iron key by way of oxide transfer. We discussed the document’s bureaucratic language, the itemized and categorized list, and the quantified medicalization of gender and institutional gatekeeping. Dagmar noted that the word for regret (betreuren) in “we regret that we cannot help you more quickly at this time” is also another way of saying “mourn.” Waiting is latent with grief.
As one of the book editions for the show, Dagmar rust-dyed Herculine Barbin’s memoirs. During the reading session we passed his personal copy around, taking turns reading from any page and taking guidance from Dagmar’s underlined passages. Here we noted the entanglement of institutionalized heteronormativity. Herculine was an intersex person socialized as female, living in a convent in the 19th century, and was institutionally forced to the male gender because of her homosexuality. We embodied and listened to her passionate character aloud, sensing her power, sensuality and spiritual enlightenment.
We then took fifteen minutes or so to read a segment from J. Logan Smilges’s chapter “Disidentifying Silence” about old and aging trans and gender nonconforming people and silence as an antidote to the transnaturalist timeline from one gender to another authentic and complete one. Of special interest to me, Smilges opens the chapter with a question about trans and disabled embodiment of dementia. Mitch, a participant of the photoenthographic project “To Survive on This Shore,” asks “what if I forget if I am trans?” We discussed and then closed out this segment with two from our group reading aloud Smilges’s closing paragraphs. If Mitch does forget, “then silence will be waiting to catch him, to hold him, to keep him in a realm of gender nonconformance that isn’t perfect or necessarily what he wants but might be just enough to keep alive, to keep him out of the ground, suspended by a gender that doesn’t have a name.”
Dagmar invited artist Huub Kooijman (us around him in the third photo) to share a reading of his work drawn from his high school agendas. Like with Herculine, we were back to the felt and intimate experience of someone’s story and this time playful with references relatable to those of us born in the 80s/90s and a seriousness that is universal. While passing around and looking into his old agenda, Huub shared anecdotes and details of puberty, the almost unbearable lightness of profundity experienced as a teenager, from novel discovery and sprouts of hair to awkwardness and disproportionate bodily growth. He wove encounters with his father’s ALS and frontotemporal dementia diagnosis, which I couldn’t help but revere as an invaluable practice of writing grief as a way of making sense of our ongoing relationships even after loss.
Afterwards we ate a vegan Portuguese caldo verde. Instead of chorizo, I infused sun dried tomatoes with liquid smoke and soy sauce, and instead of collards we had Lacinato kale partly harvested from Maartje’s balcony. Perfect summer soup and to hold us after the session. Many thanks to the participants who came. And special thanks to Seon for their help in the last steps of cooking.