An Anthology of Silences

Slought and Penn Social Policy & Practice announce "An Anthology of Silences," a critical response to violence against transgender communities, beginning with the narratives of three transgender women of color that were recently murdered in Philadelphia: Nizah Morris, Stacey Lee, and Kiesha Jenkins. The project seeks to share information about their lives and the vulnerability of their experiences, and to call attention to social violence directed at the intersection of race, class and gender.

We are calling this "An Anthology of Silences" for several reasons. Universities and cultural institutions, both in the past and the present, have often been silent on issues concerning the transgender community. We attempt to respond here from the position of a university course in social work and social policy, and as individuals who primarily identify outside of the trans community but seek solidarity. We are also attentive to the acceptance and promotion of various acts of violence against transgender individuals and the community, particularly as concerns their representation in the media. If these violent acts are communicated at all, the victims are often not provided complex narratives. Who are these victims? What are they beyond their victimization? In raising awareness about these forms of silencing, we seek to make visible what is silenced, and to explore the limits and possibilities of solidarity and dialogue across social justice movements.

The title of the project also builds upon the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, who in reflecting on the fragments of discourse he unearths about internment in the Middle Ages, writes about the difficulty of making visible their absence and the absent meaning of their lives. "Lives of a few lines or a few pages," he writes, "gathered into a handful of words, where discourses really crossed lives; existences were actually risked and lost in these words." Building upon Foucault's insights, we are seeking to learn about the lives of these three transgender women. We will compile these narratives by interviewing their friends, family and community, as well as gathering traces of physical and symbolic violence by the state and media.

As the social scientist Erzsebet Strausz has argued, listening can be a transformative experience and "resists our usual ways of being in discourse, the habitual practices of reading, writing and speaking." Strausz suggests that only by seeing more, hearing more and feeling more can we begin to learn from the marginalized and invisible individuals that inhabit urban spaces. Strausz also questions modernity's assumption that more analysis, more objectification, and more detached observation is our path to truth and social justice. Instead, she argues for acknowledging and experiencing the lives of others with intensity and empathy.