What Does Trans* Do?

I suggested this one-sheet zine project after hearing that it was uncertain when the course “Transgender Studies meets Art History,” offered during the fall of 2022, might be offered again. On our last day of class, our classmate Kieran summed up our experience in the class well when he said: “I’m not coming away from this class thinking, ‘oh, I know about trans,’ but it opened the way I interact with the world.” I thought the wider school had to know what exciting discussions were happening in the basement of Tyler. The zine, comprised of words and images (one/person in our class), which reflect our different backgrounds and worldviews, is not meant to “educate” others about trans, but to suggest the question “What Does Trans* Do?,” the prompt given to us by our professor Alpesh Kantilal Patel for our final project for which each student was asked to put together a constellation of twenty images that responded to this query. These images played on a flatscreen near the gender-neutral bathroom on the ground floor of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture building. Copies of the zine were placed alongside the monitor for anyone to take, spreading the seed of queer futurity out into the world.

-Yoona Lee, Tyler Class of 2023