''BECOMING ITS OWN BEAST": NEGOTIATING PROTEST SPACE AT CAMP TRANS 2010

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

© Copyright by Patricia Morris, 2011

Theory, Culture and Politics M.A. Graduate Program

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••I Canada ABSTRACT

"Becoming its own beast": Negotiating protest space at Camp Trans 2010

Patricia Morris

This thesis is based on interviews and fieldwork conducted at a protest called

Camp Trans. Camp Trans is organized each year in opposition to the Michigan Womyn's

Music Festival (MWMF), with the stated intention of protesting the Festival's "womyn- born womyn" admission policy and the incumbent exclusion of trans women. Billed as a protest space with "room for all kinds of womyn," some Campers came to Camp Trans in

2010 hoping to find a protest of the MWMF and, alternately, others came in search of a trans-centric gathering space where they might meet 'their community'. This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of the tensions that arose out of Campers' seemingly incongruent expectations of what the space ought to be, and it addresses the question of how a space defined by and built up through protest of another space might yet be a bounded community gathering space that is "its own beast." At the heart of this thesis is a commitment to exploring critically some of the ways that anti-oppression activists are negotiating relationships, vulnerability, and responsibility when they do not share

"common ground."

Keywords: Camp Trans, Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, Michfest, protest space, transgender, feminism, lesbian separatism, community

H PREFACE

When I first set out to do research at a week-long protest camp and gathering space for trans people, I envisioned a very different project than the one that I describe in this thesis. I certainly did not imagine that the events of that week we spent in the woods would be precipitated by threats to attendees' physical safety, and I could not have predicted that those threats would leave the lot of us divided along gendered lines. I am troubled by the significance of beginning this text with a story about the violence that occurred that night. I am reminded of a piece by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie

(2009) in which she talks about the dangers of 'the single story'. She tells us that this:

... is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become... Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person (f 17).

Overwhelmingly, trans people are reduced to victims of violence in the stories that are told about them, and these stories too often gloss over the nuances and complexities of people's lives, bodies, and experiences (Hale, 1998, p. 314). As popular news media, activists, and academic texts begin sharing stories of violence against trans people more and more widely, I echo blogger Jos Truitt (2010) in thinking that now more than ever

"we need everyone to see trans folks as complex, valuable people, not just dead [and damaged] bodies" (2010, f 5). It is becoming clear that we need more stories.

It is, then, with some irony and no small amount of trepidation that I find myself struggling to preface this thesis with a story about violence against trans people. I do so because the violent encounter in the road that night pushed those of us who'd gathered in protest to explore questions of vulnerability and recognition, and because the answers we

iii produced pressed us to insist on new ways of recognizing trans people's vulnerability that are not contingent on the presence of dead and damaged bodies. To get to this insistence, though, we first need to know something of the event that prompted it.

On the second evening of that week, the whole group of us organized ourselves quickly after a camp organizer announced that people were starting to gather up the road.

We set out with some haste down a dirt road that runs through the centre of a national forest just outside of Hart, Michigan. For one week each August this road connects two encampments that are situated in opposition to each other; one is called Michfest and the other Camp Trans. On this particular evening the group of us who'd gathered at Camp

Trans started to make our way from our encampment to the other. As we walked, we chatted animatedly about the events and performances to come, carrying our gear— chairs, hula-hoops, guitars, and a pot full of stew intended for dinner— rather haphazardly. When we arrived we climbed the small knoll just across from the front gates of Michfest, joining the attendees from inside those gates as we nestled down into the tall grass and trampled a collection of burdocks and prickly shrubs in pursuit of comfort. The knoll on the other side of the road was set to be the stage for the evening, and soon after we started to settle in an organizer took to that stage to welcome us. Before we'd managed to arrange ourselves completely, they1 began to offer a history of the relationship between the two encampments.

1 Where I do not know the preferred pronoun of the folks I am talking about or in those situations where I discuss folks whose preferred pronouns fluctuate and change from encounter to encounter I use the pronoun 'they'. 'They' was frequently described as a "gender neutral option" (Camp Trans Info Sheet, 2010) and many Campers relied on it as a way to avoid accidentally misgendering Campers whose pronouns they didn't know or had forgotten. This is a difficult move to justify considering the number of Campers who used 'they' as a gender-specific pronoun which was meant to reflect their genderqueer identities. I use 'they' in this text in an attempt to avoid misgendering folks, even though this doesn't seem quite right.

IV In the commotion of organizing where to sit and where to look and where to put the hula-hoops and guitars, I didn't notice a tow truck pull up. It became difficult not to notice it, though, as the welcoming began. Sitting to my left, up the road about ten feet, the driver and his truck took up an incredible amount of space. His truck was nearly the width of the road, and as it idled it filled our nostrils with exhaust and ours ears with the steady revs and various backfires of its aging engine. It was nearly impossible to hear any of the history the organizer on the knoll was relaying, and while they kept speaking in the face of the exhaust and backfire most of our heads were turned in the truck driver's direction. I was uncertain about approaching the driver about his engine. There is something about white men in trucks that often just doesn't sit well with me. It is the way they so often rev their engines at the stoplights just outside of my house, and even more so it is the way so many of them jeer down at me from the cabs of their trucks while I'm cycling by. I spend a great deal of time wishing white men would step down out of their trucks. In retrospect, though, I do wish this particular man had just stayed in his truck.

As we sat looking on, a masculine-identified organizer gathered themselves to approach the driver. They leaned in close to the open window to talk with the driver, and although I could not hear much of anything over the noise of the engine, people who were gathered closer to the encounter sent word back in whispers to the group that they'd asked the driver to turn off his engine, at least until the car he'd been sent to tow was close by. The driver continually refused. As I looked on from some distance away their discussion grew, visibly, more and more heated. The organizer's furrowed brow, scowl, and rigid posture told those of us looking on from a ways back that the conversation was not going well. As I turned around to scan the crowd for my newest friend, Clara, the

v organizer's yell whipped past my ears to reach even those people who were standing at the far end of the road: "Hey! This guy just threatened me!" As I turned back around,

reorienting my body more fully in the driver's direction, people all around me sprung up

and rushed to stand with the organizer. As people surrounded his vehicle, the driver got

out. His hands shook noticeably with, what I assumed at the time, was anger. In hindsight

I am more inclined to read his shaking hands as evidence of his fear, and yet for some

white men in trucks there is often precious little distance between these two emotions.

He stood in the road, hands shaking, yelling at the people standing around his

truck. Through those closest to the confrontation we learned that the tow truck driver had

prefaced a request to one trans woman in their midst to move out of his "fucking way" by

calling on her as a "dude." When she and the others standing with her corrected his

gendered language the driver responded uneasily, telling them that he did not care what

"it" was, so long as "it" moved. When no one moved out his way, standing their ground

and refusing the give up their space, the driver gathered the tow chain and 'J' shaped tow

hook from the back of his truck and wielded it at the people surrounding him. And then, just as quickly as the situation had escalated, the immediate physical threat was diffused.

A Festival volunteer from inside the gates of Michfest hurried out to break the crowd

apart, just in time for the front gates to swing out into the mess and for the car in need of

a tow to sputter and heave its way out into the road.

The threat of extreme physical violence hung over the folks standing just up the

road from me, in front of a man whose hands were shaking and holding a hook and chain

of formidable size. At the time I didn't believe he would push beyond the initial show of

bravado into physical violence, and I am grateful that he did not. This thesis would be

vi much different had he followed through with his threats of physical violence. Learning

about those moments when he objectified and dehumanized a group of trans women, though, has left me far less certain about his intentions and capacities for violence. People went back to our encampment just down the road scared and worried about their safety, having faced a man wielding a weapon who explicitly dehumanized them. It is because of the fearful and objectified bodies that crowded into my tent with me at night and

snuggled up close at campfires throughout the week that I remain committed, throughout this piece, to naming this encounter as violence. To name it otherwise might be read as trivializing people's experiences, and I think the work we did and the experiences we had that week in August were anything but trivial.

vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1 have, over the course of this writing, incurred many debts. 1 should begin by thanking the wonderful people I spent time with while I was at Camp Trans: Candice,

Nicky Click, Rocco Katastrophe, Harvey Katz, Robin, Clara, Dutch, Evelyn, Tori, and

Andy. Thank you, in particular, to those from that group who let me interview them and to those who made me laugh when things threatened to grow too depressing that week.

Thank you, as well, to the folks from Peterborough, ON who let me interview them about safe spaces before I left for Camp Trans: Claudia, Eilrahc, Hannah, Emma, and Chris.

Their insights into this project were crucial as I wrote the proposal for this work.

My supervisors, Barb Marshall and Anne Meneley, offered critical advice with kindness and humour, and I know that I am quite lucky to have worked with people who turned work around quickly, complimented the writing when it was good, and encouraged me from the very beginning to 'envision it done'.

Thank you to my friends and to my colleagues in the TCP graduate program for excellent discussions and support. Of special note in that bunch are: my program's assistant, Nancy Legate, for always having a chair and an ear to lend me when I was in need of friendly advice; my mentors in New Brunswick—Alison Belyea, Karla O'Regan,

Thorn Parkhill, and Russ Hunt—for their continued support from home; and Katie

MacDonald and Laura Greenwood, who both talked to me all day, most days, on Gmail chat and helped me work through ideas when I stumbled in my work.

Thank you, as always, to my family—Ma, Pa, Mess, and Nan P.—who continued to call every day, even when I was cranky and wanted most to rush off the phone. Thank you, as well, to my two cats who I love beyond measure and to the three best kids in the world—Finlay, Spencer, and Ashton Geddes—for being such great feminist influences.

My partner, Karolyn Martin, left her family reunion early to come with me to

Camp Trans. At the time of this research I still did not have a driver's license, in spite of an entire summer spent vowing to get right on that, and so Karolyn also drove the entire way from New Brunswick to Michigan. For this and many other reasons, I am exceedingly grateful that she insisted on coming with me. She is a very smart and compassionate lady, and I could not have done this work without her.

IX TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii PREFACE iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii TABLE OF CONTENTS x LIST OF FIGURES xi GLOSSARY xii

INTRODUCTION 1 METHODS AND RESEARCHING DIFFICULTIES 4 THEFIELD(S) 10 JUST A WEEK IN THE WOODS 13 "BUT THEY DIDN'T COME"AND OTHER REASONS FOR PROTEST 16 CHAPTER 1: RAISING THE 'FUCKFEST' FLAG 19 LOCATING OUR EXPERIENCES 23 "ITS OWN BEAST" 27 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 30 COMMUNITY MEETINGS 33 "LET THE TRANS WOMEN SPEAK!" 36 RAISING THE 'FUCK FEST' FLAG 39 CONCLUSION 41 CHAPTER 2: SHE TALKS OF COCKS AND TRIGGERS 42 GATED COMMUNITIES 46 ELIDING AND PRODUCING DIFFERENCES 48 BLOOD MYSTERIES 53 COCKS AND TRIGGERS 55 SLOWING DOWN 58 DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL 60 LIKENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY 64 CONCLUSION 67 CHAPTER 3: REDNECK MUGGLES AND HILLBILLY PATRIARCHS 69

MUGGLE SPACE 72 MOBILITY AND PRIVILEGE 74 FEELING OUT OF PLACE IN MUGGLE SPACE 79 ENCOUNTERING LOCALS 82 TRANS-LITERACY AND APOLOGIES 85 TRANS WITHOUT THE 'VESTITE' 87 'THAT'S WHAT WE CALL IT AROUND HERE' 88 CONCLUSION 91 CONCLUSION 92 REFERENCES 100

x LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Flyer for vigil 12

Figure 2: Map of Michigan 14

Figure 3: Map of Camp Trans 15

Figure 4: Womyn on Michfest stage 16

Figure 5: Modified 'Goosebumps' cover 17

Figure 6: Michigan intersection 19

xi GLOSSARY

Transgender—{adjective) an umbrella term popularized in activist and academic circles that people use to describe themselves and other folks whose gender expressions or/and

identities differ from those which are conventionally expected to correspond with their assigned sex at birth.

Trans—{adjective) an umbrella term intended to describe a wide variety of folks who identify as transexual, transgender, transfeminine/masculine, and genderqueer people

(among others). 'Trans' is sometimes used in addition to these terms, rather than as an umbrella term.

Transmasculine—{adjective) refers to "a range of trans people who identify as 'male,'

'masculine,' or 'men,' but who were assigned a 'female' gender identity at birth"

(Cavanagh & White, 2010, p. 225). The term is also spelled 'trans-masculine' and 'trans masculine'.

Transfeminine—{adjective) refers to "a range of trans people who identify as 'female,'

'feminine,' [and/]or 'women,' but who were assigned a 'male' gender identity at birth"

(Cavanagh & White, 2010, p. 225). The term is also spelled 'trans-feminine' and 'trans feminine'.

XII Genderqueer—{adjective) a term that many people use to describe themselves and other folks whose gender identities fall outside of dichotomous understandings of gender (i.e. female/ male, woman/ man, feminine/ masculine) or are a combination of genders.

Womyn—(noun) a neologism used in place of 'women' that is intended to subvert androcentric language and understandings of identity which "position 'man' as the root of woman's identity" (Revilla, 2004, p. 87, emphasis in original). While it is relatively infrequent, I have also seen it spelled "wimmin." "Womon" is typically the agreed upon singular form of "womyn/wimmin."

Queer—(adjective/verb) a term that was once "at best, slang for homosexual, at worst, a term of homophobic abuse" (Jagose, 1996). In recent years the term has come to be used quite differently, often as an umbrella term that is intended to describe a whole host of culturally marginal and anti-heteronormative practices, theories and people.

Transphobia—(noun) refers to the overt, implicit, and often institutionalised oppression of trans people. Transphobia can manifest as fear, aversion, exclusion, and hatred of trans people. While the term is used quite widely, it has come under some critique for the ways it conflates bigotry and oppressive forces with phobias and related emotional reactions

(cf. EmilyEmilyEmily, 2011).

xin Transmisogyny—(noun) refers to the overt, implicit, and often institutionalized oppression of trans women/ transfeminine people. It arises out of the intersection of transphobia with misogyny.

Cis— (adjective) the prefix 'cis', from Latin, means 'same side'. In the context of gender studies and gender-focused activism, 'cis' also serves as shorthand for the term

'cissexual'. Julia Serano popularized the term 'cissexuaP to describe "people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned" (as quoted in Cavanagh & White, 2010, p. 223).

Cissexism—(noun) a system of oppression that includes the assumption that everyone is or should be cis, as well as the organization of spaces in service of this assumption and folks who meet its requirements. This assumption gives way to the idea that trans people are "less legitimate than, and mere imitations of, cissexual genders" (Serano, 2008) and to the related idea that trans people are not 'truly' the sex/gender they self-identify with.

Festies—(noun) short-speak for 'attendees of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival'

Herstory—(noun) a neologism which points to 'history' (both the term and the recounting of events) as androcentric. It attempts to decenter men and masculine suffixes, and to bring womyn and feminine suffixes into sharper focus. While this term is most frequently associated with second-wave and lesbian feminisms (cf. Valenti, 2007), many

Campers used it regularly.

xiv Hirstory—(noun) a neologism that, in much the same spirit as 'herstory', points to

'history' and 'herstory' (both the terms and recounting of events) as cis-centric. It attempts to decenter cis people and cis suffixes, and to bring trans and genderqueer people and pronouns into sharper focus.

Passing—(verb) in the context of gender studies and gender-focused activism, a term that means being read or seen by others as the gender with which one self-identifies. While many trans people maintain the importance of 'passing' as the gender they self-identify with, others object to the term because it implies that someone who 'passes' is engaging in deception and is not truly the gender they present themselves to be. The term also places emphasis on the way trans people are viewed by others, rather than focusing on the ways folks self-identify, and can work to uphold binary understandings of gender.

Pre-operative—(adjective) refers to a person who self-identifies as trans and is considering, planning, or hoping to undertake medically assisted transition or is planning to undergo surgical intervention to assist with their transition. Surgical intervention is most commonly known as 'sexual reassignment surgery' (SRS). In recent years there has been a push from activists to call this form of intervention 'gender confirmation surgery'

(GCS).

xv Post-operative—(adjective) intended to describe a person who self-identifies as trans and has undertaken medically assisted transition or has undergone surgical intervention to assist with their transition.

Non-operative—(adjective) refers to a person who self-identifies as trans and is not considering surgically assisted transition.

Butch—(adjective/noun/verb) a term people use to describe themselves or other folks who are primarily lesbian and/or dyke-identified and typically present as masculine in appearance and behaviour. The terms 'soft butch' and 'stone butch' are frequently used to identify the degree to which a person identifies as butch.

Femme—(adjective/noun/verb) a term most frequently used primarily to describe effeminate queer women (trans and cis alike). While the degree to which individual femmes embrace and play up femininity is continually debated, the term 'high femme' usually refers to queer women who value and play up femininity almost to the point of parody. Recent work on femme identity has attempted to confront the invisibility of femmes in queer and other contexts, arguing that while femmes may be perceived as women who embrace traditional, patriarchal gender roles and expectations, they actually live "as another gender expression entirely: femme" (Stark, n.d., p. 3-4).

xvi 1

INTRODUCTION

There is never one geography of authority and there is never one geography of resistance. Further, the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination —Steve Pile, Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance, (1997, p. 23)

In the late nineties and into the early parts of the next decade a protest camp called Camp Trans drew crowds of several hundred people. The majority of those people were trans women and their allies who travelled to a small tract of land an hour outside of the small town of Hart, Michigan, to take up temporary residence in protest of the

Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF). Trans women and their supporters set up their tents and laid out their sleeping bags on a small, shrub-covered knoll directly across from the front gates of the Festival. They gathered there for the first time in 1993, in that space where a trans woman named Nancy Jean Burkholder was deserted by the Festival community in 1991. That year Burkholder was expelled from the Festival in the middle of the night, not two days into the gathering, under the pretence that as a trans woman they had violated the Festival's long-standing "womyn-born womyn-only" admission policy (Tea, 2003, p. 62). Camp Trans was formed in response to Burkholder's expulsion, with the stated intention of protesting the exclusion of trans women from this women- only space.

The protest began small, with four or five women in attendance the first year, and the number of attendees rose steadily from there. The community quickly exceeded the small space in front of the Festival's front gates, and the knoll was eventually abandoned in favour of a larger clearing just up the road that could accommodate the growing number of protestors. In its early years Camp Trans was, as journalist Michelle Tea 2 described it, "a fiercely engaged and deliriously celebratory protest" (2003, p. 66). By the time I arrived in 2010, though, the gathering was drawing crowds of far less than the three and four hundred people it had previously hosted. At any given time that week in

August there were between thirty and fifty people milling about in the clearing, and maybe ten or so more off doing errands or swimming at the lake. The community that was taking shape in that space was both small and quite different from the group of deliriously celebratory protestors Tea (2003) described. Many Campers were actively pushing for a shift away from overt forms of protest against the Festival, and the goal of trans women's inclusion at the Festival was no longer shaping the space in the same ways it did when Camp Trans was first organized.

A push for the redefinition of Camp Trans as a trans-centric gathering space independent of the MWMF was prompted by threats of its dissolution in 2006. That year,

Festival organizer Lisa Vogel stated in a press release that Michfest volunteers would no longer "question anyone's gender" (2006) at the front gates of the Festival. She wrote:

From its inception the Festival has been home to womyn who could be considered gender outlaws, either because of their sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous, etc.) or their gender presentation (butch, bearded, androgynous, femme - and everything in between)... Michigan provides one of the safest places on the planet for womyn who live and present themselves to the world in the broadest range of gender expression. As Festival organizers, we refuse to question anyone's gender. We instead ask that womon-born womon be respected as a valid gender identity, and that the broad queer and gender-diverse communities respect our commitment to one week each year for womyn-born womyn to gather (2006).

After this proclamation, the Festival began operating under what Campers described as a de facto "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) imperative, and front gate volunteers began admitting trans women. With trans women accessing the Festival without significant 3 barriers, the rationale for continuing on with a protest aimed at inclusion became unclear.

As one Camper put it:

Camp Trans, as it may have once existed, has receded into history. This is in part due to MichFest's tacit "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" attitude to those transwomen who can 'pass' and are willing to go undercover within the gates of the MWMF2... I'm asking for transwomen to find ways to help ourselves and build our community where we don't have to ask for the permission of trans-misogynist institutions and their gatekeepers for the right to exists (Ann Amoli. 2010,f 2-3).

While many Campers continued to insist for some years after the policy was modified that protests ought to continue, Campers like Ann Amoli have since been struggling to redefine the space as distinct from the MWMF.

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2 Insofar as the DADT policy insists that trans women don't "tell" that they are trans, it insists that they must 'pass' as non-trans in order to attend 1 pick up on some of the trouble with this insistence in later chapters. 4

When 1 began my fieldwork in August of 2010 Camp Trans was, as one

Camper told me, well on its way to becoming "its own beast." In spite of this transition from protest Camp to trans-centric community space, the original grounds for protest— both metaphorical and physical—had not been abandoned entirely. Campers have gathered in vigil at the site of the first Camp Trans for several years, hoping to memorialize the space and commemorate the original goals of the trans women and their allies who once gathered there in protest. It was at this vigil, on the second day of Camp

Trans 2010, that Campers encountered the tow truck driver who threatened them with physical violence (outlined in the preface to this thesis). Campers also encountered

Festival volunteers that night in the road, and as the tow truck driver uttered his threats it became painfully clear that most had no intention of intervening on Campers' behalves and that a great number of them intended to align themselves with the tow truck driver. In the days following the vigil, Festies' failure to support Campers in the road that night prompted a renewed concentration on protest at Camp Trans.

Methods and researching difficulties

The events in the road on the night of the vigil had very practical and immediate implications for my research. As the dynamics at Camp Trans shifted in response to this encounter and as the shape of the space shifted to accommodate protest I found my research questions and methods fluctuating all too quickly. The tentative interview questions I'd developed before I left quickly became too broad, not broad enough, too personal, not personal enough, too risky to ask, and all in all a bit too far off the point.

That I suddenly wasn't sure what to study, or how to study it, became apparent in my 5 interview with a Camper named Andy . Near the middle of the interview we had this conversation:

Tricia: Nice. That's good. Alright. Um. Let's see here. Oh, I feel like some of my questions are just out-dated by now. Like "how are you finding Camp so far" is like so big. Andy: I abstain [chuckles]. Tricia: Yeah, like it is, it's way bigger than I thought it would be. Andy: 1 guess I'm not understanding what the focus of your research is. Do you know what the focus of your research is? Tricia: My focus? Yeah. Um. We can talk about it? Yeaaah. It's, like, I did interviews in Peterborough, where I live half the time, ah, about, like, queer spaces and gender variant spaces, and I tried to look at how like physically like—how to build them. And so it started off kind of, like, ah, yeah, it started off kind of like as an interest in building those spaces, like, physically, and ah, yeah, I think is coming out of, like, this stuff around spaces not being very inclusive and open to people who are in Peterborough. Sort of, like, the way things are structured and whether they actually promote the spaces that they want to promote.

Andy asked me if I knew what the focus of my research was well into the interview, some time after I'd read zim my consent form and obtained proof of zis

"informed consent" on tape. It is clear that my response to zis questions about my research were not terribly informative, though. The bits of what sociologist John

McKendy (2006) calls "narrative debris"— fragments, false starts, disfluencies, non- lexicalized sounds, and various other forms of verbal stumbling—that litter my response

3 Some of the names in this text are pseudonyms, and some are not. I have not indicated which are pseudonyms and which are not when I write about the people I interviewed and spent time with at Camp. When I discuss public performers who have been outspoken in other public forums about their performance at Camp Trans I have not changed their names. Where I mention my partner, Karolyn, I use her given name instead of a pseudonym. She graciously gave her consent to be included as a secondary character in this thesis. 4 Andy uses what ze described as "genderqueer pronouns." Some genderqueer pronouns commonly used at Camp in place of 'she'/'he' were: ze (pronounced like the letter 'zee'), s/he (primarily textual but sometimes pronounced shu-he), they (a pronoun usually considered to be plural, used to describe one person). Some genderqueer pronouns commonly used in place of 'his' and 'her' were: hir (pronounced 'here'), zon (pronounced just as it looks), zis (pronounced like 'his', with a 'zzz' sound to start off), their (singular form of the plural possessive pronoun). 6 point to the sorts of trouble I had articulating my research focus. Theorizing on the fly is bound to be a bit messy, and while many of the stumbles that pepper unrehearsed speech mean very little, McKendy argues that some stops, starts, "urns," and "ahs" are laden with meaning and can tell us a great deal about how people negotiate conflicting subject positions and narratives (2006, p. 473-474). That my attempts at explication are punctuated by "likes," "ahs," and "yeaaaahs," as well as tentative questions about whether we might "talk about it?" is telling of the ways that ideals of "informed consent" enjoined me to position myself as being quite sure of the intentions of this research before it was complete, even as my experiences doing research were marked by uncertainty and shifting focuses.

That my focus was shifting rapidly became clear, too, as I tried to find folks to interview and a place to interview them. The encounter with the tow truck driver, combined with the divisions and fractures that formed in the community as we all tried to negotiate the appropriate response, had people feeling scared and anxious. On more than one occasion folks who had agreed to an interview for the following day packed up their tents and left in the middle of the night. Leaving under the cover of darkness became a bit of a theme, and I woke up each morning wondering how many cars would remain parked at in the parking lot just outside my tent. Some Campers went home, and at least one trans woman I had hoped to interview left Camp Trans and purchased a ticket for

Michfest because she didn't feel safe at Camp. The irony of a trans woman leaving Camp in order to attend the very Festival she had come to protest left me wondering just what kind of space we were building at Camp Trans. We were building a space, after all. It just 7 didn't feel much like the fiercely engaged and deliriously celebratory protest for which we'd hoped.

My study attempts to explore the space we were building at Camp Trans that

August, and following French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (2000/74) I argue that spaces are not simply the ground upon which conflict occurs. They are themselves objects of

struggle, and as such there is important work to be done to understand their shape and production (p. 321-5). In this thesis I take up the work of queer and feminist human

geographers, many of whom draw on Lefebvre's early insights, in order to argue that performance does not

take place in already existing locations: the City, the bank, the franchise restaurant, the straight street. These 'stages' do not preexist their performances, waiting in some sense to be mapped out by performances; rather, specific performances bring these spaces into being (Gregson & Rose, 2000, p. 441).

Following human geographers like Gregson and Rose, I explore several ways that I saw

Campers performing protest spaces into existence and I consider the shapes they took.

Often examinations of protest spaces focus exclusively on what is being resisted, and

resistance to an occurrence becomes "the predominate mode of understanding what is being attempted" (Martin, 2006, p. 791). In these analyses the shape and character of the

spaces those protests5 are performing into existence are concealed or neglected in the

analysis (Pile & Keith, 1997, p. xi; Bozzoli, 2000, p. 197; Martin, 2006, p. 791-792).

5 In his examination of the different historical uses of the term 'protest' Geoffrey Nunberg remarks that: Sometimes a social change can announce itself in the dropping of a preposition. It used to be that when you used the verb "protest" to mean "object to" you had to add "against" — "She protested against her mistreatment." Then in the early years of the twentieth century, Americans began to drop the preposition and say things like "He protested the government's policy." As it happens, it was around the time that people started using "protest" with a direct object that they also started to think of protest as a kind of direct political action, aimed at mobilizing public opinion against a particular policy. That's when you begin to see phrases like "protest demonstration," "protest strike," and "protest movement (2002,11-2). It would have been difficult to ignore the shape of the space we were creating at

Camp Trans, though, as interviews grew more and more difficult to do in that space. The interviews I did manage to do were tense, and listening to the recordings now reminds me of the hushed tones, furtive glances, and vague references to the encounter in the road that punctuated the process. I interviewed three women—two of whom identify as trans and the other a cis woman who came to protest in solidarity—as well as a trans masculine identified person, and one person who identifies as both trans and genderqueer. While I left the choice of where to conduct interviews up to the folks I interviewed, their choices were limited. Camp Trans takes place in a remote section of a national forest on a cleared plot of land no larger than a football field. We set up our tents in the woods around this clearing, and most folks wanted to be interviewed there because the woods offered welcome shade from the oppressive Michigan heat. The woods offered very little privacy, though, and this influenced how folks were able to talk about their experiences. Campers came and went regularly, and more than once someone crawled out of a nearby tent that I didn't know was occupied when I first sat down to talk with people.

The chances of being overheard during interviews were high, and the stakes of being so became apparent at a community meeting after I conducted my first interview.

The woman I interviewed was questioned publicly about some of the thoughts and experiences she'd shared during our interview earlier that day, and while she assured me that she'd shared these same thoughts and experiences widely well before our interview,

Nunberg's argument that people have come to think of protest as "a kind of direct political action" resonates well with the ways I heard Campers using the term at Camp Trans 2010. When I use 'protest' in this thesis I am drawing on that usage. I also use the term somewhat synonymously with the term 'resistance'. Following an interview I did with a participant named Emma, I view protest as "an instance of resistance." This interview was part of a set of earlier interviews I did about safe spaces in Peterborough, Ontario in the spring right before I left for Camp Trans. 9 the experience left us both unnerved. 1 couldn't quite shake the feeling that interviews in that space might put people at risk. This unsettling suspicion, combined with the large number of potential interviewees fleeing from the space, meant that I did far fewer

interviews than I had originally set out to do.

While my research could not be as interview-driven as 1 had hoped, it did turn in

surprising and fruitful directions that I did not anticipate before I set out for Camp. The encounter with the tow truck driver pushed Campers to write, and in the months

following Camp I spent a great deal of time reading the accounts they produced. I

followed the trails Campers left on the Camp Trans discussion forums and other social

networking sites and I arrived at their blog posts, comments, vlog journal entries, open

letters, and other accounts of the tow truck driver's threats. These cropped up quickly after Camp ended, and I spent the better part of three months after Camp ended continually refreshing these pages and trying to stay caught up on new additions in the

comment threads. Each account of the tow truck driver's threats I read received well over

150 comments, and commenters continued to post responses well into the early winter months. Similarly, documents relating to the relationship between Camp Trans and

Michfest were plentiful. The debate surrounding trans women's exclusion from the

Festival has left large electronic and paper trails, and I pursued these trails before I left for Camp Trans and for several months after it ended. I read press releases, letters, newspaper articles, flyers and academic texts that reference the debate. The bulk of these documents are archived at the Michigan/Trans Controversy Archive . Others are

6 This is an online archive of most of the printed and electronic documents that are concerned with the relationship between Camp Trans and Michfest. These documents include newspaper and magazine articles written about the two festivals, press releases issued by Festival and Camp organizers, open letters written about the controversy, interviews with Festival and Camp organizers, and academic articles. The archive is 10 discussed on the official Camp Trans and Michfest discussion forums, and I followed the links and references provided there to blogs and other writing about the relationship between the two encampments.

This thesis draws on these documents and the comment threads written in response to them, and the analysis presented here comes out of an engagement with these accounts as much as it comes out of my experiences and interviews in 'the field'.

The field'(s)

As the epigraph from Pile cited above proposes, maps and other portrayals of resistance as the simple underside of domination often fail to account for the complexities of the spaces being mapped. This is certainly true of Camp Trans, insofar as it was organized in protest of a Festival that is, itself, a site of resistance against mainstream patriarchal culture. The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival—often referred to quite affectionately as Michfest, or simply Fest—is a weeklong gathering devoted to celebrating womyn's music and culture (Cvetkovich, 2010; Tea, 2003, p. 61). It was first organized in 1975 by Kristie Vogel, Mary Kindig, and Lisa Vogel under the name We

Want the Music Collective. It continues to be a vibrant annual gathering for cis womyn of all ages under the sole direction of Lisa Vogel (Lo, 2005, f 5). The Festival is rooted in what many have described as "lesbian separatist politics,"7 and while it is not directed

maintained by activist/author/academic Emi Koyama, and it is accessible at http://eminism.org/michigan/ index.html. 7 Early advocates of lesbian and feminist separatism, such as Charlotte Bunch (1987), held that separatism involves women and girls withdrawing from personal relationships, work, and all other aspects of day-to­ day life in order to combat patriarchy together, away from men and male-dominated institutions. This could be temporary, or long-term. While 'lesbian separatism' has been used to describe what occurred at Michfest in the 1970s, Kathy Rudy argues that 11 exclusively at lesbians, it does continue to draw us in large numbers. Michfest is often considered to be, as one fervent commenter on the Michfest discussion forums put forward, the "Crown Jewel of Lesbian/Amazon/ DykeAmazon Nation" (Master Amazon,

2010).

The Festival takes place just up the road from Camp Trans, on six hundred and fifty acres of privately owned forest land (Pink Elephant, 2009, f 1). Each year this forested area is "transformed" into

... a city built from the ground up by feminist values. This city relies upon the unique energies of each womon to bring [the] conscious community to life, and the shared experience of thoughtful living extends from [the] annual community out into the larger world (General festival information, 2010, f 6).

I am quite sure I owe my critical admiration of this space to my parents choosing to raise me in a town that, at least at the time of my coming up and coming out, felt much like a

"wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness" (Kingsolver, 2006, p. x). The idea that rural space could be overrun by feminists, and most particularly by feminist dykes8, is thrilling for a lady like me who has always held fiercely to the idea, in spite of the growing body of literature that elides it, that feminist dykes and feminist movements

any name I use to represent the kind of feminism that dominated many communities in the late 1970s and 1980s will be unsatisfactory. To call these communities essentialist is to impose on that time a theory configured largely in the 1990s; to call them lesbian feminists or lesbian separatists focuses too deeply on sexual preference when most believed that the underlying political commitment was to feminism (and many understood themselves as bisexual or asexual (2001, p. 193). The relationship between feminism and lesbianism is still being negotiated at the Festival. 8 While all attendees certainly do not self-identify as dykes and while many would take issue with the label, scholarship about the Festival frequently identifies Michfest as a gathering that is integral to "dyke subcultures" (Cvetkovich, 2003) and authors use the term frequentlyan d mostly without qualification (see, for example, Browne, 2010; Halberstam, 2005). This is not only as a refusal of the 'straightened up' language of political correctness, but also as an unapologetic reclamation of a derogatory category. I use 'dyke' it in this text, most times in place of 'lesbian', because I follow these authors in thinking this term describes the subculture better than the politically correct 'lesbian', which has become rooted the mainstream. 12 can be nurtured in unique ways in rural spaces. It is, though, unsettling that several sources (cf. Kendall, 2008; Browne, 2010/2009; General festival information, 2010) describe this space as a "city" and assume a need to "transform" this space before it can become supportive ground for feminist dyke culture. I take up perceptions that queer bodies and feminist politics are necessarily at odds with rural space more fully in Chapter

Three of this thesis. For now, it suffices to make this point to begin elucidating some of the diverse reasons I approached the festival gates with a divided heart.

Karolyn and I approached these gates with a great deal of skepticism and uncertainty, in part because of the transmisogynist admission policy and the urban-centric rhetoric surrounding the Festival, and in other part because GoogleMaps grew less and less specific with its directions toward the end of the trip. Just as an argument about my navigational abilities was about to get heated, we saw the vehicles: cars, vans, camp trailers, and trucks emblazoned with rainbow flags and bumper stickers lined up on a narrow stretch of dirt road waiting to get inside the Festival gates. The line was long, but not nearly as long as Campers told me it had been that morning. Candice, a woman I interviewed later in the week, told me about her experiences with the line-up earlier in the day, just before the gates opened:

Candice: First group of us that went out, the first time I went out, it was between 11:00 and 12:00 so right before they started letting them in, everyone was like out of- out of their vehicles, you know Tricia: hanging out Candice: yeah, a lot of people in groups of chairs, and a lot of people just kind of sitting in their cars, because these are people that plan to kind of come early and sit there obviously. These people are damn hip to this festival they put on Tricia: Yeah Candice: So they were ready to, you know, like to either camp right outside the gate or—or I seen a couple of groups do that or you know at the butt crack of dawn, and get their place in line and set their chairs up and have a mini warm up party 13

Tricia: Yeah Candice: It's just cool, you know? Like, the spir—the whole spirit of this place is pretty cool

A sight similar to the one Candice described reassured us that we had, indeed, found the

Festival. Folks were still out of their cars, chatting and hula-hooping and sitting in lawn chairs when we arrived. By now 1 have convinced myself that I looked rather dumbfounded with my face plastered to the car window, looking out and trying to act casual as I waved back at the womyn who mouthed "hello." I'd never seen such a critical mass of queer womyn, and Karolyn and I nodded in agreement when the Campers who drove in just before us remarked about the "amazing queer energy" they felt from the people lined up for Fest. That queer energy seemed to create, as Jonathan Kemp (2009) argues queer energies often do, "a trajectory of critical force" (p. 4), and that force was propelling some womyn's bodies toward the gates. This amazing queer energy pushes and shoves at other womyn's bodies away, though, and on our drive in I pushed myself to consider critically the ways my cis womon's body is privileged in this push and pull. The push against trans women's bodies is what set many Campers on their ways to Camp

Trans to protest the Festival's exclusion of trans women, and it's what originally set me on my way to do research at Camp Trans.

Just a week in the woods

In addition to transmisogyny, the Festival has been "infamous as a site of problematic cultural feminisms and essentialism, inadequate racial diversity, s/m bashing and other forms of anti-sex politics, over-the-top political correctness and lesbian 14 processing9, and goddess-worshipping spirituality" (Cvetkovich, 2010). Photos of ostensibly white womyn in headdresses playing timpani-esque drums with great enthusiasm litter the official website, and commenters on the official Michfest discussion forums make frequent references to an "Amazon spirituality" that seems to involve:

.. . Magic and Potions and Charms so rare

and feathers and stars for your Amazon's hair (Amazon Trader, 2009),

among other things. These photos, poems, and infamous problems illustrate that there are significant issues with the ways the Festival is conceived and built. Accordingly, the

Festival has encountered substantial backlash from attendees and outsiders alike since its inception. This backlash, though significant in many respects, has also been ripe with

"dismissive generalizations or repudiations" that, Ann Cvetkovich (2010) argues, fail to account for the complexities of womyn's varied experiences there. In these repudiations womyn who attend or wish to do so are often called upon to explain why they would even want to attend a Festival with such a reputation, where so many womyn are not welcome and supported. The Festival's significance in many womyn's lives and the importance of the feminist organizing that happens there are often downplayed by folks who argue that the Festival is just "one week in the woods" (Cicely, 2008), or that a

"diluted 'feminism' [is] promoted there" (laughingriotgirl, 2010).

These dismissals of the Festival often turn, at times in the same breath, into admonishments and expressions of suspicion about trans women who wish to attend. As a

9 Lesbians are, stereotypically, quite invested in 'processing'. This 'process' involves dissecting situations, discussing various oppressions, and talking about things (particularly problems in relationships) for a prolonged period. 15 commenter writing under the screen-name Rebecca asks on a discussion forum about

Michfest:

I do wonder why so many transwomen feel they must attend mich fest? isn't it possible to allow the only womyn born womyn space to remain that way? attend one of the other zillion festivals? why try so hard to take away from us? so much space out there for everyone.. ..if you aren't welcome, why try to be there? (2008)

Dismissals of the Festival as one of many, or as just a week in the woods, often turn into accusations and suspicions about trans women's motives. They are portrayed as folks who want to take away even the smallest of pleasures from "womyn-born womyn" at a

Festival that doesn't mean much at all. Julia Serano (2008), though, points to the inadequacy of these portrayals. The Festival is, she says, a space of vital importance to many trans women. She writes:

... this is about us being able to have a voice within feminism more generally. MWMF is not only the world's largest annual women-only event, but historically it's been a focal point for dialogues and debates on a wide range of feminist issues. As someone who has experienced firsthand the substantial difference between what it's like to be treated as a woman and as a man, and who now experiences both misogyny and trans-misogyny in my day-to-day life, I have found feminism to be an indispensable foundation for me to make sense of my experiences and to articulate the obstacles and issues that I face. For many of us who are trans women, this is about having a voice in a movement that is incommensurably vital to us (p. 7).

The Festival is incredible in many ways, and it continues to function as a hub of feminist political organizing. People continue to wait all year to return "home" to the Festival (cf.

Kendall, 2008, p. 2; Browne, 2010, p. 141; Bergquist & McDonald, 2006, p. 261), and many of the trans women 1 interviewed and spent time with at Camp Trans very much wanted to attend. 16

"But they didn 't come " and other reasons for protest

These women's desires for inclusion at the Festival have not gone uncontested.

While trans women who can afford to purchase tickets have been able to do so under the

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" admission policy since 2006. they are most certainly not welcomed onto "the land"10 by all who attend. Campers' desires for inclusion became a particularly contested issue back at Camp, too, after a several trans feminine identified

Campers were misgendered and threatened by the tow truck driver. These Campers called the extraordinary nature of the Festival into question after Festies and Festival volunteers refused to support Campers in the road just outside of their Festival's gates. A monologue written by the Camper who was most directly threatened and misgendered by the tow truck driver points to the ways Festival attendees failed to support trans women. She writes:

If Michfest is so powerful, so charged with womyn energy, then why did no one's clit pick up the vibes of this guy threatening queers and women with a chain? Why did no one's feminist senses tingle? The moment that tow truck driver drew that chain, the earth should have split open, Mother Earth emerging from the fault. The moment that tow truck driver drew that chain, the sky should have cracked open, the Moon goddess floating down on a cloud. The moment that tow truck driver drew that chain, Mother Earth and the Moon goddess should have spilt their menstrual blood into pot. They should have tied him by the ankles with their flowing pubic hair, drowning him head-first while Ani Difranco's self-titled album played in the background. If Michfest is what it claims itself to be, then every clit and cunt on the land should have engorged with blood and fury, and with hand drums in hand, they all should have marched together to rupture the ear drums of patriarchy's offspring. But they didn't come. There was no death by drum circle. The earth and sky did not split open. All that happened was, once back at camp, I popped a klonopin and cried alone in my tent (Curiouser Jane, 2010).

10 Festival-goers refer to the grounds of Michfest as "the land." I heard from several Campers that "the land" was once owned by the Festival organizers, but that it was sold some time ago to recover some of the money the Festival loses each year. Apparently a gay male couple now own it and lease it out to the Festival each year. While I have found no mention of this sale in my searches, several Campers told me this was the case. 17

This encounter with the tow truck driver, along with the failure of womyn-born womyn

Festival attendees to support Campers in the face of his threats reinvigorated debates about whether or not Camp Trans ought to be built in opposition to the Festival. The

Festival has a long history of denying trans women access to the Festival on the basis of their coercively assigned sex at birth and ostensibly "male" genitalia, and in Curiouser

Jane's extensive references to bodies that have clits and cunts engorged with blood and fury I can hear a response to her own questions about why Festies did not come to support her. She is arguing, albeit implicitly, that the primary reasons Festies did not come to support her were caught up in their perceptions that trans women are not "real" enough womyn to stand alongside.

This sentiment was echoed and elaborated, too, when a Festival volunteer who was working the front gates attempted to diffuse the encounter with the tow truck driver.

She argued with Campers as she tried to break apart the semi-circle of Campers that had formed around him and his truck, telling them that the tow truck driver who had threatened them had "done more for the Festival" than those Campers ever would. In this moment, as the Festival volunteer positioned herself alongside a man still wielding the tow truck hook and chain with which he had threatened to kill a trans woman, it became clear that not only were trans women's lives not valued and considered worthy of support by many Festival attendees, but were even more abject in the eyes of some than the man who threatened "queers and women with a chain" (Curiouser Jane, 2010).

This encounter with the tow truck driver and Festival attendees who positioned themselves alongside him precipitate the debate I take up in this thesis about whether 18

Camp Trans ought to be a space of resistance or "its own beast." The encounter in the road that night prompted a renewed concentration on protest, albeit a much different kind than the foremothers of Camp Trans intended, and it inspired debates about whether

Camp Trans ought to be a site of fiercely engaged protest or something of "its own beast'* where trans people can find safe harbour from the likes of white rural patriarchs in tow trucks. In the chapters that follow I focus on the ways that Campers negotiated their messy ways through, with, and around the binary of "protest versus its own beast." In

Chapter 1 I explore struggles about the mission of Camp Trans, and focus on a specific moment when a small group of Campers claimed space by modifying and relocating the banner where the mission was written. Near the middle of the week a group of Campers removed this banner from the gathering's Welcome Tent, modified it to read 'Fuck Fest,' and raised it as a flag around a grouping of tents they later dubbed "Camp Tranarchy11." I situate this flag-raising as a struggle for self-definition in Chapter 2 by considering the ways the MWMF has influenced the production of boundaries around Camp Trans. In

Chapter 3 I return to the grounds of Camp Trans to explore and interrogate some of the x- ic and x-ist assumptions that made up debates about the mission, and I focus particularly on the problematic ways those rural spaces that surround Camp Trans were positioned in attempts to define the space as "its own beast." This thesis explores the sometimes uncomfortable ways the shape of that beast was maintained.

11 "Tranarchy" is a neologism that combines "trans" with "anarchy.' 19

CHAPTER ONE

Raising the 'Fuck Fest' flag: Making space at Camp Trans 2010

But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us —Miranda July, Ten true things, (2007, p. 135)

Travel tales

Campers told me that Michigan is shaped like a mitten, but I couldn't get much sense for its shape from my standpoint in the passenger seat of the car. The highway through Michigan, from the border at Sarnia, Ontario to Hart, Michigan, took us through small towns and past bigger cities like Grand Rapids, Flint, and Detroit. For the most part, though, the highway was a narrow strip of asphalt laid down through the center of a forest. If I ignored the oppressive heat and the road signs with maximum speeds written in miles, 1 could imagine that we were driving on the highway in New Brunswick that runs between my parents' house and Karolyn's family home. The roads were similarly lined by juniper trees, large birches, and a few white maples, and the shoulders were littered with road-kill and pieces of rubber from blown out tires. Road-kill looks the same everywhere I've traveled and, perhaps a bit melodramatically and certainly in nervous anticipation, I wrote at length about dead deer as symbolic of the risks of this travelling we were doing.

Karolyn drove and we listened to the radio, tired of talking to one another after twenty-six hours in the car. We heard about elections in Michigan from talk radio hosts, and the shock of one candidate's campaign announcement stopped me short of completing my litany of road-killed animals, redirecting my focus in the middle of a 20 sentence. As a woman candidate for governor denounced another candidate for his 'pro- life' views, calling them not pro-life enough, I got knocked sidelong into what Michelle

Tea (2007) aptly calls a "body memory. For a weird and confusing second," she says,

"you're there " (p. ix). It's something like deja vu; a memory that makes your body tingle with until-then forgotten feelings, but without the disorientation that so often accompanies deja vu. I was there, and where I was was in that same car, eight hours earlier, at the Canada-United States border trying to convince the border guard that the

Michigan Womyn's Music Festival actually does take place within the boundaries of the nation-state he was guarding. At the time I was surprised by the border guard's questions and by his suspicions about the Festival; nevertheless, as we drove along that state- regulated road listening to candidates promote themselves as really pro-life, I was struck by just how far off to the side of the road the two festivals take place. Each moment served as a strong reminder that they are built in the margins, both politically and quite literally.

We told the border guard we were crossing the border in search of a feminist

Utopia, rather than bound for the trans-centric protest camp just down the road from it, because we hoped the womyn's festival would be a more recognizable destination. We planned this in advance, talking it through all the way from our motel with the duct tape covering the holes in the wall and the pillows with bits of someone else's scalp on them in Kingston, Ontario to the long line-up at the border. We planned to tell the guard we were bound for the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival because we hoped that it would make our border crossing easier. While the guard didn't know much of anything about the MWMF and was particularly incredulous that two Canadians were on their way to it, 21 this choice almost certainly facilitated our passing. In light of the trouble trans and genderqueer people often have with border crossings, and more generally with inappropriate gender markers on government-issued documents like passports (cf.

Namaste, 2005, p. 49; Hines, 2007, p. 54; Pratt, 1998, p. 181), it was advisable not to cast doubt on our officially documented gender identities by telling the guard we were bound for a trans-centric gathering smack-dab in the middle of the Northwest corridor of the state he was guarding. This is, of course, a privilege two cis women who seem to "look like what they are," or at least what they are officially documented to be, have written into their skin (Walker, 2001, p. 182). Considering popular opinions that womyn's festivals draw dykes in large numbers the guard might have read us as such and this might have caused us some trouble. We are, though, both white, middle-class, fairly feminine women who hold passports. If borders are leaky, permeable, and porous, as

Margrit Shildrik (1997) proposes, then this portion of the barrier had holes just about the right size for bodies like ours to squeeze through.

This long drive, undertaken in the wolverine state's stifling heat, on roads lined with animal carcasses, makes for a narrative of entry into the field of Camp Trans that resonates well with the "[c]olonial-style heroic tales of adventurers battling the fierce tropics" (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 13) that predominated in early ethnographic writing. Travel narratives like these have been critiqued for the ways they rely upon and reproduce sharp distinctions between 'home' and 'the field' and, in so doing, render invisible complex processes like colonialism, globalization, and capitalism which connect ostensibly disparate spaces (cf. Pratt, 1987; Visweswaran, 1994). Many argue that tales like these, that chronicle battling borders and risky road-kill, reproduce the fantasy, so 22 thoroughly upheld in early ethnographic writing, that the researcher is doing fieldwork in isolated and bounded communities

Figure 2 Map of Michigan (2001) with route from the border at Sarnia. Ontario to Hart Michigan traced on12

There were, to be certain, complex systems of oppression binding these spaces of

'home' and 'field' together in my work. My home in what is now called Peterborough,

Ontario and my tent just outside of present day Hart, Michigan, for instance, were both constructed on stolen Anishinaabeg land. These spaces are surely interconnected, and I wasn't quite able to follow Malinowski's (1922/2008) lead in imagining that I was suddenly set down, surrounded by all my gear, alone in a bounded community (p. 4). In this chapter I explore the "process of'bounding' and 'bordering'" (Newman, 2003, p.

121 did not take any photos at Camp Trans I was cautioned, along with all new Campers, not to take photos if there was any chance a Camper who had not agreed to be in the shot could be captured on the film This seemed to be because there have been problems, in previous years, with Campers being photographed without their knowledge and subsequently being 'outed' when those photos were placed on social media sites Most of the photos in this text are courtesy of Google and products of internet searches (figure 2, 5, 6) One is a scanned copy of a flyer I collected that week (figure 1) One photo is reproduced here with permission from the photographer (figure 4), and another is a map a Camper drew for me (figure 3) 23

134, emphasis added), rather than the figment of the already bounded community. I began with a travel narrative because I understand these sorts of stories about people's journeys to the space as part of that process. I understand stories like these and the

moments when we shared them as part of the work we did to produce Camp Trans as a

different sort of space than those we travelled through to arrive there. Campers were

doing a great deal of work to produce this space as one that is bounded and distinct from

other, primarily transmisogynist spaces like the one where they were nearly "brained with

a Tow-truck hook" (stinkmusic, 2010).

These concerns with the production of bounded space beg us to ask where exactly

we were when we were following Gloria Anzaldua's example and claiming our own

space with our "own lumber, [our] own bricks and mortar and [our] own feminist

architecture" (1999, p. 44). They generate difficult questions about where we were

situated when we were producing Camp Trans as a distinct space. It is for this reason that

I begin writing, rather uneasily, from my standpoint in the clearing at Camp.

Locating our experiences

Camp Trans is located on the shoulder of a long and winding gravel road that runs through thick woods. The primary community space is a clearing, just off the road a ways. Campers told me that the clearing formed when a fire struck this area of the woods

a few decades ago. Everything grew up again except a gap in the tree line at the edge of the road and this near perfect square clearing where the community tents, porta-potties,

and large fire pit are located. It was hot in that clearing, and for those of us standing

around in it the only respite from the beating sun was in the shade of the seven open air 24

tents. The thick material of the tents kept the heat in, though, and given the choice

between beating sun and stagnant hot air I often chose the sun. When the stench from the

porta-potties began wafting over from where they sat bordering the woods, around the

mid-week point, the heat started to feel even more oppressive. We were like ants under a

magnifying glass out in the clearing, with my hair so hot I thought it might burst into

flames and my bladder so full it might explode. Porta-potties baking in the sun are a last

resort, and I almost never used them in the afternoon heat. We were all still drinking

coffee, though, in spite of the heat and the acidic liquid's diuretic tendencies.

Periodically the more committed coffee drinkers would slog water from the jugs

that sat just outside the kitchen tent over to the large, stainless steel pot inside the tent.

After the heavy lifting came the trouble of lighting the propane burners to boil the water.

To do this we lit sticks with a lighter, and hoped that throwing them at the burner and

pulling our hands away 'real quick' would suffice. It usually took three or four tries, and

more often than not the distinct smell of propane hung in the air for far longer than was

comfortable. Once the water was boiling, we added the coffee, waited (some more patiently than others), and then strained out the grinds using whichever handkerchief

looked the cleanest at the time. It was black because milk and half-and-half were, of

course, practically and politically inadvisable at a vegan camp out. The coffee was

always just a bit too strong, and without 'moo juice' to disguise its limitations it tasted

like a mixture of mildewed handkerchief, dirt, and dark roasted beans to me. Campers

stole almost all of the coffee we drank that week from the food storage facilities at

Michfest, though, and I imagine that for many Campers the coffee we drank "on Lisa

Vogel's tab" tasted all that much better for this clandestine history. 25

Looking around the clearing, sipping coffee from a blue plastic cup, I could see all of the structures emphasized on the map that Dutch drew for me during our interview.

Each structure he noted sat in roughly the same places he drew them: the kitchen tent, the medic tent, the stage, the workshop areas, and the wooded camping area beyond the clearing that was subdivided by substance and sound concerns. The highlighter yellow dome tent that Karolyn and I shared that week was in the 'substance quiet' section of the woods, where substances like pot and alcohol were popular but not usually consumed in rowdy excess. We were just back from the clearing, in between the last two porta-potties, near the parking zone. That last porta-potty was consistently the only one that had toilet paper remaining at the end of each day, and we counted ourselves lucky for our proximity to it even as we cursed it on account of the smell.

Figure 3 Map of Camp that Dutch drew for me, with a legend I added for clarify 26

When we were in the woods we spent most of our time around our tent, or in the

'loud substance-free' zones located in the woods behind the kitchen tent. The 'substance

loud' section of the woods really was quite loud, and the majority of the orgasms 1 heard while I lay awake in my tent at night happened in that neck of the woods. While many people had come with a partner and were strictly monogamous, others did not and were

not. Clara told me that she often feels a great deal of pressure to have sex when she

comes to Camp, particularly when she's single. The space, in some ways, encouraged it.

The Welcome Tent featured an active "Personals Board." This board was drawn directly

on to the canvas of the tent and people posted their "looking for" ads on post-it notes so

that it could be reused. The ads ranged from interests in specific activities, like "looking

for butt play," to interests in specific people, like "Frances, your face is very

symmetrical." Some were meant as a joke, like "looking for someone to smack my bug

bites," and quite a few led to hook ups and arrangements of other sorts.

While the mass of post-it notes attached to the Personals Board and the splashes

of colour on the map show that Camp was alive and full of excitement, most of my time

at Camp was spent in nervous and hushed conversation with other Campers near their

tents. The middle of the week was supposed to feature

trans activists from around the country presenting workshops designed to give you the tools to organize around issues that affect trans people in your own community—health care, discrimination, employment, HIV, lower-income resources. This is the "meat" (or textured soy protein, if you like) of CT and is not to be missed! (Info for Campers, 2010, ^ 19).

The meat went missing after the confrontation with the tow truck driver, though, and the

bulk of the workshops were cancelled. Many were cancelled because the facilitators did 27 not arrive to facilitate them, and a few others were called off because no one came out of the woods at the designated times to attend them. Time moved slowly, with so little to do, and at the time Dutch drew me his map most people were gathered in small groups near their tents, talking in hushed voices about the tow truck driver and other Campers. Quite a few cars were gone, too; people were off swimming and bathing at the nearby lake, and

some were undoubtedly searching out cell service in Hart. 1 knew my friend Robin had

set out for a daytrip to Lake Michigan because I helped her push her car out of the clearing that morning (she got a deal on her rental car because it wouldn't reverse!). A few people were also, somewhat begrudgingly, chopping vegetables for dinner in the kitchen tent. While the work that week was supposed to be shared amongst all Campers who were physically able to share in it, the vast majority of the work-shifts were taken on by the same few people. 1 cleaned up an excessive amount of trash in the clearing that week, and Karolyn and I went on a few trips to get potable water. These were all pretty regular activities for Campers that week—my favourites being trips to Hart to send text messages and laughing with Robin while we pushed her car out of the clearing.

"Its own beast"

Dutch's representation of Camp seemed accurate enough, though we quibbled about the details of his map during our interview. While his map shows that the clearing was a green space, I was adamant that the grass was sunburnt, yellow, and dying. It crunched under my flip-flops and my one attempt at walking barefoot left me regretting my choice as the scorched grass cut into my feet. I grew more cautious about what was

lurking under the grass, too, after several cars got flat tires driving through it on their way 28 to and from the parking area. A hot haze hung over Michigan that week, and the grass didn't stand a chance. The haze made everything look dull, the way colours look in

British sitcoms to people whose eyes are accustomed to watching American television.

The haze did disappear at night, and the Northern Lights and thousands of stars were visible. I counted six shooting stars on my third night at Camp, as I lay in the clearing with Karolyn and Clara listening to the sounds of acoustic guitars and the musical saw drifting over from the stage tent.

These moments, of course, cannot be captured and contained in a map. Dutch's map brings the layout and scale of Camp Trans into focus quite well. His map captures in two dimensions some of where we worked, played, chatted, and debated in three dimensions. That this map is a "mirror of reality" (Caquard & Dormann, 2008, p. 55) and that it might represent a territory which pre-exists its mapping are, though, contentious claims. Some critical cartographers propose that maps are at least as much implicated in the production of territory as they are representative of it (cf. Biggs, 1999, p. 385;

Newman, 2005, p. 407), and to a certain extent Dutch's map is implicated in the production of boundaries around Camp Trans. It is worth noting that the page on which the map was drawn forced the cartographer to cut off terrain. The spaces beyond the clearing and beyond the first few metres of woods fall off to the sides of his page, and when I read this map alongside Dutch's stories about coming to Camp Trans to meet his community I can see the map helping him to say: '"This is mine; these are the boundaries'" (Harley, 1989, p. 14). In staying within the lines of the page, and particularly in drawing a map that dropped off just short of Michfest and surrounding areas, Dutch drew a map of a Camp that was "its own beast." 29

In his interview, Dutch also constructed a connection between this beast and the queer and trans communities of which he considers himself a part. He told me he comes to Camp Trans each year, in spite of the expense of traveling so far from home, because he likes "getting a-a different perspective." He went on to tell me that:

having been in the military and not around the queer community very often, like, the best I got was like pride parades, you know? Which is not really a strong version of the queer community as a very capitalistic yadda-yadda version. For me this is very raw and intense and, um, I'd not been around a lot of trans people when I had come out because there wasn't a lot, you know. I knew a couple of gays in the military, but that was it. And I live in Northwest Kentucky. There are still not a lot of people. While I am north of some bigger cities, it is another world and I don't like being in cities for other reasons, so I have a hard time going to those kind of events, so this is a great opportunity for me to be deeply immersed in the queer community and more specifically in the trans community and see people of all kinds of variations in their lives: sexual, ah, or gender expression or whatev-whatever you want to call it, and a lot of these people are just awesome people. Just people you want to know. That's the biggest reason I come is the people, you know? And-and learning more about, ah, my community.

Several other Campers echoed this sentiment when they shared their stories about why they'd come to Camp Trans. Robin, for instance, told me about her journey to Camp and her immense excitement about reconnecting with the trans community in Michigan:

I-I-I've in the last, I I-I'm I guess I've kind of become a little more interested in looking into the trans community after a very long hiatus of being away from it throughout most of the previous decade. So, this is my first um visit to Camp Trans, 2010, um, after hearing about it for many years and wanting to go, but wasn't able to. [...] I was in particular very excited when I drove up from the south end of Minneapolis where I pick up my rental car. Um. I—on Wednesday afternoon I actually had to pull over somewhere near Holland, Michigan, and just try to calm myself down as I-1 told myself "Okay, I know I'm excited about going to Camp Trans, but I just—I'm going to get too excited. I just need to pull over, maybe go to a fruit stand, get some berries and peaches" [laughs]. 30

Robin's story about stopping for peaches because she was too excited about Camp Trans highlights some of the hopes and expectations she and many other Campers held close about the space. Nearly all of the folks I interviewed and spoke with in depth described

Camp Trans as a point of entry into "the trans community" and as a gathering space for an otherwise decentralized group of people13. These stories about journeying to Michigan to meet "my community," in some instances for the very first time, relied upon and reproduced a connection between a people and their place.

While I am sceptical of projects which take "the association of a culturally unitary group (the 'tribe' or 'people') and 'its territory as natural" (Gupta & Ferguson, 2008, p.

341), in many ways the events following the encounter with the tow truck driver were

Campers' attempts at (re)producing a connection between their community and its place, at a time when the two were threatening to unravel.

Mission accomplished

Camp Trans and the community that gathers there have been threatening to disband and unravel since 2006. That year the DADT imperative, in theory, began to facilitate and enable trans women's attendance at the Festival in spite of the "womyn- born womyn" policy's persistence. While Campers have accessed the Festival illicitly for years by stealing through the woods, the DADT imperative enables trans women to

13 The idea that Camp Trans is a point of entry into the trans community and that it is a gathering space for an otherwise decentralized group of people is reflected, too, in the number of calls for research participants that are posted on the Camp Trans community discussion forums. These projects are rarely concerned with Camp Trans, and are instead call outs for trans participants who are willing to participate in projects concerned with their experiences and identities. Student researchers, in particular, have treated the online component of Camp Trans as a place to access "the trans community." 31 access the Festival through the front gates, so long as they do not "tell" that they are trans. I pick up on this idea of "telling" in more depth in Chapter 2; for now it suffices to note that many trans feminine identified Campers embraced this shift in Festival policy, albeit with a great deal of apprehension, and many Campers began to attend the Festival shortly after Vogel offered her statement. As more and more trans feminine identified

Campers began to follow suit in the years that followed the policy shift, the fate of Camp

Trans steadily grew more uncertain. What had at one point been a space organized around protest and united under a common mission of advocating for trans women's inclusion was suddenly on unstable ground.

When I arrived to do research in 2010, the same mission that had defined Camp

Trans in most of its earlier incarnations continued to define and orientate the space. Soon after the location of Camp changed to accommodate the growing number of attendees, a

Camper painstakingly painted the mission on a piece of tarp and affixed it to the side of the Welcome Tent. The mission faced us in the woods, and it was clearly visible from most standpoints at Camp. It read as follows:

Our mission is to educate the attendees of Michigan Womyn's Music Festival about the 'womyn-born-womyn only' policy with the end goal of broadening that policy to include ALL self-identified womyn (as cited in Koyama, n.d.)

This mission statement is, to a certain extent, ambiguous insofar as its grammar offers

Campers a certain amount of interpretive flexibility. While it is possible to come away from a reading of this statement convinced that the end goal of Camp Trans is to broaden the policy in order to include all self-identified womyn in Festival policy, it is also 32 entirely possible to come away convinced that the end goal is to broaden the policy in order to include all self-identified womyn at the Festival. Both of these readings imply a causal connection between policy changes and Festival attendance, and it hardly seems to matter much which way the statement is read. It is only now, as the DADT imperative enables some trans women to access the Festival without a policy change, that Campers are struggling with the question of whether or not the "end goal" of Camp Trans has been accomplished.

Many Campers felt uneasy about the status of the mission statement, and it became a salient theme in each of the interviews I conducted. Candice, in particular, was conflicted about the status of the mission. Her voice was full of anger and frustration as she told me:

Candice: I had already decided that when I woke up, I was going to go down and tear the mission down [from the side of the Welcome Tent], like today. Tricia: Oh really? Because you don't feel like it's supportive or—? Candice: Because it's not the fuckin'—it's not what goes on here! Yeah that fucking shit. I would have gone right over there, and thrown it into the fire. That's how, you know, that's how I feel about it. Tricia: Do you feel like it should still be the goal, or like, are you just—? Candice: It's accomplished! It's done—there's trans women—there's like eight trans women in there.

While Candice echoes the sentiment that the mission is accomplished when she tells me that "It's done—there's trans women—there's like eight trans women in there," she also expresses her anger and disappointment that advocating for trans women's inclusion is

"not what goes on" at Camp anymore. The question of whether or not the mission had 33 already been accomplished was neither answered nor dismissed with any ease, and the issue came to a head in the days and nights following the encounter in the road the night of the vigil.

Community meetings

Public debates about the mission began brewing at Camp Trans 2010 at the first community meeting after the encounter in the road. This meeting was, one Camper told the group, "for planning, not processing." It was organized for the purpose of planning a response to the Festival volunteers who did not support Campers when they were threatened in the road that night, and it was emphatically not intended to be the place for open discussion of people's emotional responses and assessments of the events. This particular meeting began much the same way as every meeting that week began: someone rang the dinner bell, announcing that the meeting was set to start, and the lot of us moved toward the fire pit. We sat around the fire in a circle, some of us on chairs and a great many more of us on blankets and sweaters on the ground, waiting anxiously as a Camp organizer set out an agenda for the meeting. Meetings were typically an opportunity to welcome newcomers into the space and a chance to work out logistics: who would be responsible for cooking meals, getting supplies, finding firewood, and cleaning up garbage that accumulated in the clearing the next day. By way of introducing ourselves we went around the circle and told each other our names, followed by the pronouns we use. Among the pronouns offered at the meeting were the well-known 'she's', 'he's',

'they's', and 'ze's', and then some that I assumed were playful and silly, like 'cat pronouns' and 'negation.' I am still unsure whether or not I ought to have put them to use 34 when I talked about "not's sweater" or "meow's tent." Like other Campers, I tended to default to "they" to describe those Campers whose pronouns weren't purrrrfunctory.

We started the first meeting after the vigil with introductions and plans for the following day. It was only as it grew darker and a bit cooler that people began proposing responses to the events on the road the night before, and newcomers to the space sat on and listened as those who had been most directly threatened in the road called Festival volunteers out as proponents of violence against trans people. In response to this, one

Camper proposed a march through the Festival in a protest that would be modeled after a march undertaken in 1999 by a group of trans activists and the Chicago contingent of the

group The Lesbian Avengers. This group marched through Michfest, from the main gates to the primary day stage, in support of an inclusive Festival. The group "went toe-to-toe with angry lesbian-separatists intent on harassing the trans-contingent out of the festival

grounds. The Avengers provided moral and physical support [to] the activists, escorting them through the grounds and engaging in group shouting matches with indignant

separatists" (GenderPac press release, as cited in Koyama, n.d.). The group was

successful in raising awareness about trans women's inclusion, but was critiqued heavily by Festies and Campers alike for its confrontational tactics. Entrance, without invitation,

into a so-called 'womyn-born womyn-only' space was read by many Festies and

Campers alike as an assault on safe space (cf. Gabriel, 2000).

The march planned for 2010 did not end up taking place because of heated contentions around its planning. There were concerns regarding the proposed tactics for the march raised by some Campers at Camp Trans, who feared that those doing most of 35 the planning were trans men who intended to pose threat to Festival attendees' safety.

There were rumors, Candice told me, of the march being used to promote violence

against Festival attendees:

Candice: You know, like I said when they planned the march, I was all about, ah, all about it. "Sure. Let's do this." Tricia: Yeah Candice: not realizing that people meant violence, by, you know— Tricia: -by "march" Candice: Yeah. Or wanting to use the march as a front, you know? I heard someone else say this too here: use the march as kind of a, with uh, ulterior motives. Tricia: Wow, I didn't hear that. Candice: Yeah. To start more violence—to start a more violent action, um, and, I don't know. It's kind of what's scared me [about the plans for a march] Tricia: Yeah Candice: You know, around here, it scared me. It's what scared—three trans women left yesterday because they didn't feel safe here because they

can tell there are implications of violence.

Several Campers discussed what role physical violence ought to play in any sort of

retaliation against the Festival. A small contingent of trans women and trans feminine-

identified Campers felt that, as women, they should not be violent and that they should

not be violent, in particular, toward other women. The threat of physical violence along

with virulently anti-lesbian and at times anti-woman sentiments that accompanied this

threat led a small contingent of trans feminine Campers to gather for a trans women's

caucus in the hours after the planning meeting to discuss the gendered dynamics of the

planning process. During this meeting they discussed what they saw occurring at the

community meeting: trans men and trans masculine people playing leading roles in the

planning and implementation of a response to the events on the road in spite of the fact

that it was a trans woman who had been misgendered in the road that night. Camp Trans 36 has gradually grown to include many more trans masculine and genderqueer identified people over the years. While many trans masculine and genderqueer Campers attend

Camp Trans as supportive allies to trans women in their goal to obtain inclusion in the

Festival, many of those present at the trans women's caucus felt that trans women had

been displaced from the centre of the space in recent years.

"Let the trans women speak!"

In spite of some Campers' desires for a trans feminine focused space, many perceived Camp this year to be "OVERRUN with trans-male people" (Mountain, 2010).

The planning meeting at the campfire seemed to confirm this, as trans women's concerns

about trans men entering womyn's space were brushed aside. At one point during the

meeting, a femme shouted out: "let the trans women speak!" to call attention to the

gendered dynamics at work. The result of the trans women's caucus was a statement that

Candice read at the next community meeting, on Thursday night. The statement informed

Campers of some trans women's intentions to abandon Camp Trans in 2011 in favor of

claiming a small space in the Festival to devote to trans women. Candice continued

reading, elaborating on women's rationale that Camp Trans had abandoned its original

mission to support trans women's inclusion in the Festival, and that Camp was primarily

becoming a trans-centric gathering space for all trans people. In the search for trans

women-specific space, many trans feminine-identified Campers had decided to work

from within the Festival to protest the womyn-born womyn policy "on the ground."

While the vast majority of us sat in shock as Candice read the statement that some

trans women would be taking up space at Michfest the following year, another group of 37 trans feminine-identified and genderqueer Campers began to protest. These folks argued that the vast majority of them had not been included in these discussions nor the formulation of the statement. One of these Campers, who had been present during the discussions, felt that their objections to this statement were blatantly ignored by the caucus as it was being written. This Camper felt incredibly invalidated when the statement that purported to represent the "voice of trans women" (some totally artificial bitchez, 2010) did not include their voice. When they told us all later at a community meeting that if anyone told them they were "not trans woman enough" they would "throw them on the fucking fire," it became clear that they felt as though the reading of this statement had refused and elided their gender identity. Moreover, I hear them saying that specific standards had been set for trans womanhood at Camp, standards which their gender identity apparently fell short of. While popular narratives at Camp positioned the preponderance of trans masculine-identified attendees in correlation with the push for violent tactics, another trans feminine-identified Camper wrote about the ways trans feminine-identified people's voices were lost in this narrative:

I think Camp Trans was totally trans male spectrum dominated. Full stop. There was also a small group who wanted to utilize violence against anything and everything. Full stop. And part of that small group were trans women and other trans female spectrum people, in about the same percentage that were at Camp. (I just want to emphasize this because so much degendering was flying all over the place at Camp) (anarchafemme, 2010).

These two Campers speak to some of the issues that many Campers had with the statement which came out of the trans women's caucus. Many of those critical of the trans women's caucus' statement had expressed earlier in the week that they had no interest in ever attending the MWMF, and they responded to the statement with a great 38 deal of anger that trans women would want to abandon their community in favor of a community where people who had threatened and misgendered trans women were welcomed.

In addition, many Campers began to express concern that statements which connect women with non-violence so easily rely on stereotypes about "meek" and "mild" women (Malice, 2010). In connecting women with non-violence we have moved, some

Campers wrote after Camp had ended, "from woman-as-womb to woman-as-estrogen- levels and woman-as-peaceful-loving-responses-to-oppression" (some totally artificial bitchez, 2010). Accusations regarding the "assimilationist" and "pacifist" tactics of the writers of the statement began to make their hasty and hushed rounds around Camp.

Graffiti informing Campers that "pacifism is privilege" began cropping up on the inner walls of the porta-potties around the middle of the week. For some Campers, pleas for pacifism and the suggestion that women ought not to use violence as a protest tactic were equivalent to complicity in the violence enacted against trans women in the road the night of the vigil. Violence, they argued, is "what has been taken from us, and today we need to take it back, from tow truck drivers and transphobic music festivals" (some totally artificial bitchez, 2010). While we'd started the day organizing a protest against the

Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, we ended it with some trans women organizing to attend the Festival because they did not feel safe in the space at Camp Trans. It became more apparent that the boundaries around Camp were shady, at best, and their total dissolution was all but imminent. 39

Raising the 'Fuck Fest 'flag

The night after that community meeting, several trans women left Camp under the cover of darkness for fear that they would be physically hurt in the night by the folks advocating more violent actions. The following morning I snuck away from the hubbub of Camp to drink coffee and eat pop-tarts with my newest friend and fierce femme performer Nicky Click14. As we sat. looking down from the semi-remote area where she'd established her temporary residence, she told me that the mission had been removed from the side of the Welcome Tent. She heard a group of Campers removing it during the night, and it was now hanging from a tree in a section of the woods that ran diagonal to us. It had been modified with spray paint to read 'Fuck Fest.' As the week progressed the group of tents organized under the 'Fuck Fest' flag drew closer and closer together and they began supplying their own food. At one point, as we waiting for the dinner bell, a contingent from the area marched single-file through the woods and proclaimed that if dinner did not suit them that evening they would enjoy "avocados and fists" at their campsite. Some of us not included in this campsite began to call the space

'the bunker' and at times the war imagery did not feel terribly out of place.

Arguments also broke out on the Personal's Board. Someone wrote an anonymous

letter discussing their uneasiness with the actions of the folks who'd torn down the mission and their apprehension about what they might do. There were rumors that these folks had vandalized equipment at Michfest. This sort of back and forth continued, with

Campers of the insurrectionary politics persuasion responding to the anonymous author

14 'Nicky Click' is a stage name and persona. The performer describes herself as "doing Nicky Click" (Click & Gonzalez, 2010), and this is the main persona I saw her doing at Camp Trans. While 'Nicky Click' is her best known stage name, she also does 'Petunia Pie', 'Cactus Rose', and ' JoJo the clown'. 40 with a letter signed "Camp Tranarchy." The group of tents gathered under the 'Fuck Fest' flag had named their tract of land within Camp Trans. Even before it was named, though, the rest of us had begun to treat the space quite differently. When Karolyn and I were lost in the woods searching for a friend's tent we were careful not to step into this territory and few new Campers set up their tents close by after the flag was raised. While the woods were not expansive, most of the rest of us gave Camp Tranarchy a wide berth and adjusted our routes through the woods in order to avoid walking through their territory.

By mid-week, many of the Campers who had arrived before the events on the road had packed up their tents and driven off, many of them afraid and fed up.

Community meetings, while still maintaining some semblance of structure, were largely dominated by members of Camp Tranarchy, who yelled at each other almost as often as they argued with Campers who hadn't set up camp beside them. Tension, fear, and anger were palpable in the stifling Michigan air. Yet there was something significant in this raising a new mission for Camp as a flag. This flag-raising was a moment when Campers raised the issue of tactics in relationship with the mission. That flag-raising was a way of

"holding their ground," so to speak, and a way of establishing "staying put" and taking up space as a means of resistance. I see the 'Fuck Fest' flag as a declaration that the boundaries of Camp will stay strong, even as the Festival dissolves its policies and it seems outwardly like there is no more need for a counter-protest. It is not coincidental that the flag Camp Tranarchists raised was the former mission of Camp Trans. In so doing they oriented the space in a particularly adversarial way to face the Festival. It was a way of holding their ground, however uneasily, through protest. 41

Conclusion

It would have been difficult to stay the same course after the encounter with the tow truck driver, and that night of the vigil quickly ushered us into a very different kind of week than the one we'd all envisioned when we first arrived. In the days following the vigil, many Campers called for a direct response to the events of that evening and our small community quickly became divided about where and how we ought to focus such a response. By raising the 'Fuck Fest' flag in the midst of heated debates about the tactics that ought to be used in protest of the MWMF, members of Camp Tranarchy insisted that protest against the Festival was crucial. In this chapter I argue that Camp Tranarchy's flag-raising was an attempt at claiming space and staying in place, at a time when many

Campers were threatening to abandon Camp Trans in favour of the Festival across the road. The 'Fuck Fest' flag and the shows of force against the Festival committed under its banner were attempts at rooting a community in place through resistant action, at a time when the stability and coherency of that community was being called into question.

In hindsight, the 'Fuck Fest' flag-raising and the actions taken by Camp

Tranarchy against the Festival, rather than against the tow truck driver, are intelligible. At the time, however, I was taken aback by this decision. Given that the tow truck driver offered the most immediate physical threat that evening, he seemed to me the more suitable target for our resistant action. The mission eventually came to read 'Fuck Fest', rather than 'Fuck Patriarchy15', though, and I wonder about why it might have been that members of Camp Tranarchy turned to Michfest, rather than the tow truck driver, as they

15 In her blog post about the events in the road that night, Curiouser Jane referred to the tow truck driver as "Patriarchy." He was, according to a fair number of Campers, an incarnation of the system of oppression. I return to this reference in Chapter 3. 42 formulated plans to fight back. In order to begin addressing this, I begin the next chapter with another snippet of the story from the night of the vigil. 43

CHAPTER TWO

She talks of cocks and triggers: Festival policies and questions of embodiment

If her body were a section of land, she would be surrounded by coils of barbed wire, protected by Doberman pinschers snarling. No Trespassing. —Suzette Mayr, The Education of Carmen, (2000, p. 148)

I stand on the sandy road that runs between the two encampments, at the boundary of womanhood. I don't want woman to be a fortress that has to be defended. —Minnie Bruce Pratt, Border, (1999, p. 84)

The boundary of womanhood

As we gathered in the sandy road to remember trans women's past struggles on the night of the vigil, a great many of us also expected that moment for remembrance to serve as its own sort of resistance against Festival policies. Memorialization was supposed to be linked, however obliquely, to protest on the night of the vigil. I certainly stood together with a group of Campers at this vigil-cum-protest, just outside of the

Festival gates, with this expectation in mind. We were joined shortly by a small contingent of Festies, many of whom were wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the message

"Trans women belong here [at Michfest]." For a time it seemed as though we would all unite under this missive. All in attendance that night were bent on tearing down the "No

Trespassing" sign that, at least metaphorically, continues to hang and address trans women from the front gates of the Festival. The tow truck driver interrupted our efforts before we'd even gotten started, though, and our freshly forged solidarity was quickly called into question as Festival volunteers came out from inside the Festival to support the tow truck driver. The volunteers acted "as barriers between Camp-goers and the 44 driver all [the] while commending him for his valor" (some totally artificial bitchez,

2010, f 2), and any allegiance we Campers had formed with Festies came under threat.

A number of Campers continued to challenge the threats the tow truck driver had uttered long after the driver had broken away from the group. As he moved around to the back of his truck and began connecting his tow chain to the broken and rickety car he'd come to collect, a small group of Campers gathered in a semi-circle around the lone front gate volunteer who remained after the original confrontation broke up. She was standing her ground, with her back pressed up against the side of the tow truck. It was difficult to pick words out of the muddle of raised voices from where I stood, just back from the crowd, with a small group of Campers and Festies.

What we could hear from that distance did not bode well for the relationship between

Camp Trans and Michfest. Their argument was tense, and though she stood up quite as tall as she could as she faced the crowd and their questions, her voice faltered as she rebutted each of the Campers' statements.

The volunteer's stutters, disfluencies, and false starts suggested that she was struggling for the language to articulate her reading of the tow truck driver's threats. She was struggling to root the tow truck driver's reactions in fear, and she was stubbornly rebuffing Campers insistences that "this guy (the tow truck driver) is a violent motherfucker" (Bex, 2010b). In her struggle the volunteer drew an analogy between the tow truck driver and a woman standing alone, surrounded by a group of threatening men.

I suspect she drew the analogy because she wanted to make the fear she saw in the driver's stance intelligible to the Campers facing her, and yet the knowledge that his hands shook as he wielded a tow truck chain elicited little sympathy from Campers who 45 had been threatened by those same shaking hands. After Camp ends a Camper will write about the fear she saw in his eyes that night, and she will say triumphantly about that fear:

[a]t least I can go to the grave knowing what it feels like on my thighs to saddle them around his waist for once, knowing what it feels like to unabashedly tighten my muscles around him and fuck him over, instead of having to bend myself over the bed all the time. For once my knees got a break (Curiouser Jane, 2010).

The volunteer's analogy of a woman standing alone worked to position the driver as victim and Campers as aggressors, and in many ways this analogy resonates well with

Curiouser Jane's positioning of herself and her saddling thighs. It was, though, the volunteer's comparison of the group of Campers with threatening men that had trans feminine identified Campers and their supporters advancing on her position. This analogy is not innocent, for trans feminine Campers have long been denied access to the Festival on the basis of the threat their ostensibly 'male' bodies pose to women who have experienced violence perpetrated by men (cf. Nicki, 2006; Cvetkovich & Wahng, 2001;

Heyes, 2003). This hirstory of exclusion and misgendering was rushing at the volunteer's comments on the road, propelling them forward and giving them more force when they hit Campers. Not only her words and analogies, but her very body standing as it was in opposition to Campers at "the boundary of womanhood" (Pratt, 1995, p. 184) came to represent the much larger problem of how trans women's bodies are positioned in

Michfest's policies and in defences of those policies.

Over and over again that night Festival volunteers positioned Campers as abject to womyn's space. They were positioned as different—as folks who cannot seek shelter under the umbrella of womanhood—and in spite of the violence they endured that night 46 they were positioned as the primary aggressors in the encounter on the road that night. In this chapter I ask about the particular conditions under which it became so difficult for

Festival volunteers to perceive Campers' lives as precarious, as lives in danger, at the vigil. I argue that these volunteers have inherited narratives about trans women, told most often in defence of the Festival's womyn-born womyn policy, that foreclose the opportunity to understand trans women as both vulnerable and as like them in some way.

I explore these connections between vulnerability and likeness in the sections that follow by outlining popular narratives that are told about trans women's lives and bodies in defence of Festival policies. In the next section I return to the front gates, because they can serve as a point of entry into this discussion of likeness. The gates are, after all, the point of entry for bodies; the space where the "feminist desire to police bodies" (some totally artificial bitchez, 2010) is most readily enforced.

Gated communities

Many Campers wanted to access the Festival this year and, as Candice told me, might be "damn hip" to it if not for their exclusionary "womyn-born womyn" policy and the prohibitive cost of admission . There are borders around Michfest, be they economic, morphologic, or physical. The front gate is guarded and admittance is regulated, and yet the gate itself is quite unassuming: a few simple metal bars that could be swung over to open or close the gate, and two short side barriers. It looks much like

16 The Festival was quite expensive in 2010. It could have cost anywhere from $65 (the lowest cost to attend on the last day)-$550 (the upper end of the cost for the entire week), depending on when womyn arrived and on their income level. Tickets could be purchased any day throughout the week, but the length of the ticket always covered all remaining days of the Festival. Day passes were not available, except for Sunday, which was the last day of the Festival. Womyn were encouraged to pay the highest price they could so that the Festival could continue to offer subsidized rates to lower income womyn. Tickets were cheaper when they were purchased in advance, and the price went up significantly if they were purchased at the gates (Tickets, 2010). Considering the large number of trans women who are underemployed (cf. Spade, 2006), this price proves prohibitive for many. 47 the gates that block off access to logging roads to through traffic. After the fanfare of the first day of the festival, the gates often faded into the landscape. We drove past them several times a day without as much as a second glance: on our way to town, to the lake, to fetch water, or to sneak away from the tension of Camp to get pizza and extra-large

Colas with Nicky Click and a full carload of restless Campers. While the gate can prevent cars from entering, it would have been simple enough to step over if a front gate volunteer's back had been turned.

The borders around Michfest are porous, and at times Campers' bodies squeezed through. The land is not fenced in, and the sparsely wooded area that separates the grounds of Michfest from the main road is not patrolled regularly by Festival security.

We could hear music playing from their largest stage if we sat along the tree-line later at night, and sometimes we could hear laughter and talking from the "Brother Sun" camping area, where womyn with 'male' children between the ages of five and ten were allowed to camp. Campers often snuck through the woods into the Festival at night, too, for a variety of purposes. These trips are how we managed to acquire coffee for the week "on

Lisa Vogel's tab," and they enabled many trans women from Camp Trans to meet and talk with trans women who were working inside the Festival.

The gates are easy enough to step over or step around if one's body is adept at that kind of stepping. For many, though, the gates continue to be a significant site of

struggle. Along with the dusty road that runs through them, they are intricately tied up in the hirstory of Camp Trans and Michfest. Bex's (2010a) description of the sign she sees hanging there—tattered, faded, crooked, and still hanging on—begins to demonstrate just 48 how imposing the gates can be for someone who is hailed by the possessive adjective she sees on that sign:

It seems like the much of the world has a sign hanging on it that's invisible to many. I try to point it out to my friends of privilege and sometimes they see it, and sometimes they try too hard to convince me it's not there. It says, "Enter at your own risk!" It hangs in every bar. It's stenciled on every sidewalk. It's in the break room of every employer. And I see it hanging tattered, faded and crooked by a single hook outside michfest. It's time to take it down (Bex, 2010a)

The sign is still hanging on, and yet it is only hanging by a single hook at Michfest. Trans women have been admitted to the Festival since 2006 and each year they carve out a space there, along with their allies; nevertheless, the sign continues to hang at the front gates to warn trans women that while their gender expressions might be welcomed and left unquestioned, their bodies are only welcomed if they are able to escape scrutiny.

Eliding and producing differences

Focused on in isolation, the accounts of Festies policing trans women's bodies that members of Camp Tranarchy have written might overwhelm readers. Their anger is palpable when they write that Festies police bodies "to ensure they [a]re adequately

Woman enough to build a positive 'sisterhood' away from patriarchy, the political power of which apparently cums from the barrel of a penis" (some totally artificial bitchez,

2010, f 2), and I might as well 'cum' on and admit that their language is hard to hear.

Their words are defensive, though, and it is important to contextualize at least some of them as mimicry. These totally artificial bitchez distrust the monopoly self-identified womyn-born womyn have had over accounts of their lives and their bodies at Michfest.

Their language is often borrowed from Festies' own defences of the womyn-born womyn 49 admission policy in which trans women have been and continue to be positioned in ways that refuse them definitional autonomy over their own bodies and experiences.

The conclusion that trans women ought to be excluded from womyn-born womyn-only space is not one that is reachable through citation of the policy alone. This coherent move from policy to exclusionary practice takes a great deal of work, and the proponents' arguments as I will set them out here are rationales that help bridge this gap between a womyn-born womyn-only policy and trans women's exclusion. While Festival organizers maintain that the Festival has operated under this policy since its inception,

some Campers told me that this policy was created to support and legitimate the expulsion of Nancy Burkholder in 1991.

The womyn-born womyn attendance policy continues to regulate admittance into the Festival, at least in the sense that it has not been officially repealed. While many

Campers considered Vogel's initial statements in 2006 to be a triumph, Vogel quickly released a clarifying statement that demonstrated otherwise. She wrote:

I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honorable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space - as do all communities who create space together... If a transwoman purchased a ticket, it represents nothing more than that womon choosing to disrespect the stated intention of this Festival (Vogel, 2006).

In this statement Vogel privileges the experience of girlhood as the defining characteristic of the category womon-born-womon (Serano, 2007, p. 241). When Vogel begs of trans women honour and respect for womyn who have "the experience of being born and living 50 their life as womyn," she is positioning sex assignment at birth as a foundational experience, and as one that is necessary for admittance into the "cisterhood"l7 nurtured each year at the Festival. This experience of sex assignment at birth is necessary, Vogel and proponents of the Festival's policy argue, because it is on the basis of this sex assignment that children are socialized. Trans women, in accounts like these, are "not natives to an originary femaleness but latecomers, aliens, and thus not bona fide women"

(Prosser, 1998, p. 171).

These arguments persist, though, in direct contradistinction to many trans women's articulations of their coming up experiences. In response to these arguments and the ways various proponents of the womyn-born womyn policy make uncritical use of the qualifier "MAAB1 " to legitimize the exclusion of trans women, commenter

Chelsea Sayre writes:

First of all, MAAB is just another way to reassert society's discrepancy and obsession with the genitalia of transwomen. You don't know how I was socialized as a child or what my trans-story has been, so please understand that you cannot tell anything about me using the word MAAB other than at ONE point in my life ONE authority figure asserted I was male. New flash: a woman is not her genitals (2011)

In this passage Sayre begins to complicate and question the assumption that trans women do not have girlhoods, calling attention to the ways medical assessments of trans women's bodies and experiences are privileged over their own self-definitions and lived experiences. The presumption that trans women were socialized as boys based on

17 A play on 'sisterhood,' this term challenges the idea that all women are united in a common 'sisterhood' by pointing to the ways that Festies' conceptions of sisterhood are often cis-centric. 18 MAAB (male assigned at birth) and FAAB (female assigned at birth) are references to the way bodies are sexed at birth. This sexing at birth is typically based on the appearance of genitals, and official documents (i.e. birth certificates, government-issued I.D.s, and passports) reference this original assignment, unless otherwise requested. Alternatives and modifications to this acronym used in the blogosphere are: CAFAB/CAMAB (Coercively assigned female/male at birth) or AFAB/AMAB (assigned female/male at birth). These alternative acronyms bring the assignment, rather than the bodies of those so assigned, to the centre of the discussion. 51 coercive male sex assignments at birth is widely held logic, and yet here Sayre begins to question both the assumption that sex assignment necessarily results in normative socialization and the assumption that coercive sex assignment and the way folks were treated as children ought to be prioritized over trans women's self-definitions of their bodies, identities, and stories. While many trans women do consider themselves to have been born women, these hirstories are unintelligible within Vogel's delineation of the category.

These arguments persist, too, in spite of various admonitions that these essentializing stories of girlhood fail to account for the nuances and intersecting identities that shape diverse womyn's herstories (cf. Allis, 2011). In Vogel's statement it is particularly significant that the term "experience" is singular and that it is preceded by the definite article "the." The use of definite articles is typically reserved for descriptions of shared knowledge and information (McKendy, 2008), and in Vogel's statement it points to a shared and singular experience that womyn-born womyn ostensibly share in that trans women cannot access. As it turns out, we are having the same tired debate: can we make universal claims about womyn's experiences? And moreover, if this is possible, who can make those claims?

This disregard for nuanced and intersecting identities and the resultant tendency to universalize womyn's girlhood experiences are some of the reasons that the Festival is so frequently dismissed as a "relic of the 1970s" (Cvetkovich, 2010). These dismissals are part of the reason I am hesitant to make these critiques of Vogel's statement. It is currently en vogue to confront second wave feminists with charges of essentialism and to 52

dismiss them on this basis (Heywood & Drake. 1997, p. 7). These dismissals and

confrontations often do precisely what Vogel does when she makes statements about the

shared experience of girlhood: they not only elide individual hirstories and positions, but

also efface the necessity of hearing and listening to them. As Elizabeth Spelman (1990) argues:

. .. positing an essential 'womanness" has the effect of making women inessential in a variety of ways. First of all, if there is an essential womanness that all women have and have always had, then we needn't know anything about any woman in particular... If all women have the same story "as women," we don't need a chorus of voices to tell the story (p. 158).

Vogel's pleas for womon-born-womon-only space presuppose that all womyn who attend

Michfest share common experiences, and in so doing they write over divisions within the

Festival. Indeed, there were many womyn within the gates of the Festival raising their voices loudly in resistance to the dominant narratives Vogel projects over them. 53

There is a strong movement from within the Festival to promote trans women's

inclusion, and stories of those actions got carried over to us at Camp Trans by Festies and

the always loquacious Nicky Click. Nicky snuck into the Festival for what she called "an

evening of debauchery" with "fierce Festie femmes" and a select few others, and she

returned in the morning with news of an event that took place inside the Festival in

support of trans inclusion. At the insistence of the popular feminist performer Sia,

womyn flooded the stage wearing white t-shirts with the words "Trans Women Belong

Here" in pink and black lettering across the chest during her show that evening. Many

more stood in the audience, in solidarity with this struggle. One commenter on an online

forum wrote that the photograph of womyn on stage in support of trans women's

inclusion (Fig. 3) "will start making it possible to heal the wound of abandonment trans

women have felt over the years of perceived silence around this policy and this place"

(Annie, 2010).

Blood mysteries

Many Festies, though, are more directly transmisogynist in their understanding of trans

women's bodies. When I interviewed Candice near the middle of the week, just after the

encounter with the tow truck driver, Evelyn came to sit with us near the end of the

interview and told us about her experience talking with a Festie. Her recounting of the

conversation can help to elucidate some of the difficulties Festies grapple with as they think about the policy. She told us:

Evelyn: Sandy and I just talked to an interesting Festie. She was approximately 60ish—it went alright. Candice: Was she a trans woman? Evelyn: No, she's all about having vaginas on the land and Candice: Really? 54

Evelyn: Well she's not, she just wanted to know—she was talking about how a woman had their six month old baby, and she was physically disabled so she couldn't camp in Sprouts19, and she was in another campsite and the six month baby boy and his penis was like so appalling to some of the woman there, they had to leave. A baby... like? Uh, I don't get it. Candice: Oh, my god. Evelyn: Anyways she came because she's supportive, but she just—Sandy handled her really well, and I think, 1 was like, "is it about organs? Because how long does a penis have to be to be a penis and not a clitoris?" Tricia: Right Evelyn: And the thing is—what happens when people want to call their organs different names? Candice: Like, I know several trans men do. Evelyn: Yes, exactly, and I was just like "really? Is it about people not wanting to have people be naked? What is it about really?" And she engaged us for a little while. She was pretty lovely in some ways. Tricia: I mean, at least she came [to Camp Trans to talk about it]? Evelyn: No, I'm glad she came Tricia: Did she come [to Camp] because she was supportive? Evelyn: Um, she came because she had some questions, she said. She wanted to know what was going to happen to Brother Sun Candice: How did, how did— Evelyn: Where are the boundaries for her? She was kind of like, in her unintentional way comparing trans women to local men who might want to be feminine for a week. And I was just like, "there's absolutely no comparison there."

In spite of Evelyn's insistence that there is absolutely no comparison there, for many

Festies this comparison is very convincing.

This conflation of trans women with cis men is perhaps best exemplified by a comment offered by blogger and aggressive poster on the Michfest discussion forums.

Master Amazon writes that Michfest

19 According to the information posted for campers on the Festival's website, there are three campgrounds where womyn with children are able to camp. The website informs womyn that "[c]hildcare is available in three different areas. Sprouts Family Campground provides a day camp and family campground for moms and all young children through four years of age. Gaia Girls Camp offers daily activities and supervision through the evening concerts for girls five and over. Brother Sun Boys Camp operates from 8am to midnight with a program of outings; crafts, cookouts, music, sports and campfires for boys aged five through ten. Located in a mix of forest and meadow, Brother Sun offers a fun, welcoming and secluded area for boys while preserving womyn's space in all other Festival areas. Please respect that all boys five and over, and their families, camp in Brother Sun for the week" (Community Services, 2010). They inform campers, further, that "fijt is required that sons five years of age and older enroll in Brother Sun and that they not travel into the general Festival grounds with you " (Brother Sun, 2010 emphasis in original). 55

.. .is a space by and for women only and in particular women loving women only, meaning Dykes, or women who love women on SOME level, whether it be physical, emotional, mental, psychic or spiritual or all those levels combined. There is a magic to that land, an Amazon magic, a magic that does not accomodate Y chromosomes, only XX. A gate, psychic, physical, emotional....because WE KNOW that differencef...] Only bio females can bleed, and only bio females can have multiple orgasms so that's who I am, and what I chase...and what I honor, those fantastic multiorgasmic Beings who I share the sacred Blood Mysteries with...and that's something NO MALEBORN could ever, ever be or do (2006).

In this post, as elsewhere, Master Amazon makes frequent use of the masculine pronoun

'he' to describe trans women, and articulates her sense that the category "womyn-born womyn" has everything to do with bodies that are assigned-female at birth. For Master

Amazon, the idea that "WE KNOW that difference" between trans women and non-trans women is rooted in "our" ability to uncover that difference through an examination of chromosomes, genitals, orgasms, and blood mysteries. Even setting aside critiques that would unsettle the universalizing idea that all "bio females" share sacred blood mysteries and a proclivity for multiple orgasms, for those of us who have no interest in bonding over our mysteries and successful climaxing this seems like a problematic foundation for the Festival.

Cocks and triggers

Campers called explicit attention to this comparison between trans women and cis men who enter womyn's space when they posted a series of photos on a website called

Lolz: Michfesters Say the Darnedest Things. The Campers responsible for this site gathered comments from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's online discussion forum and superimposed them over photos that further illustrated and satirized their comments. This photo: 56

Figure 5: Festie's comment superimposed over photo of the front cover of R.L. Stine's children's book The Haunted Mask from the popular Goosebumps series. The smaller text is a quotation copied from a Michfest forum. It reads: "They cut off their cocks, picked up a gun, and started terrorized womyn."

is particularly telling. In their modification of the title and the choice of a children's novel

about a haunted mask, Campers called attention to the conflations that Festies' and transmisogynist feminists like Janice Raymond (1979/1994)20 make between trans women and those cis men who, apparently, disguise their male bodies with masks and

other clothing in their attempts to enter womyn's space. Raymond and others who follow her in support of the womyn-born womyn policy at Fest often represent trans women as

agents wilfully choosing to penetrate women's communities. In these accounts trans women are portrayed as "maleborns" in disguise. These ideas are echoed in the

'goosebump' inducing suggestion that trans women "cut off their cocks" in apparent attempts at further disguising themselves.

Raymond's virulently transmisogynist book Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male was well- known to Campers and most had read the text or had at least heard of it. Raymond was a student of the late Mary Daly, and as Robin told me in our interview: Robin: Mary Daly is the most evil person I've ever met in my life. Just-just, um, and, you know, and I encountered her book in one of the few books I could find in my university library when I was in undergrad on transsexualism—I guess that's the old word—was The Transsexual Empire which was basically written by Mar Daly under the authorship of Janice Raymond. Hateful book. Tricia: Hateful book Robin: It-it-I-it just—it disturbed me and it saddened me. I felt so lost, you know, and it's so f—ah, I was in a lot of despair. 57

The idea that "they [trans women] cut off their cocks" is noteworthy, too,

considering the extensive debate that continues at Michfest around the admittance of pre-

and post-operative transexual women (cf. Gabriel, 2000). The Festie quoted in this

modified photo is arguing that even those trans women who have had experience with

medically assisted transition cannot access 'true' femaleness and are, indeed, threats to

bona fide women. Trans women who cannot afford or do not seek medically assisted transition have historically been met with even more resistance at the Festival (Serano,

2007, p. 239), for much the same reason the boy child Evelyn spoke of earlier was so

offensive to Festival-goers. 'The cock' figures prominently in these defences, and it is positioned not only as the defining characteristic of trans women's embodiment, but as that which makes womyn-born womyn feel most unsafe.

Michfest is often positioned as a safe space where womyn can process and heal

from experiences of male-perpetrated violence, and in their articulations of trauma

womyn-born womyn often place trans women "in the vicinity" of that trauma

(Cvetkovich, 2003, p. 3). In their accounts, trans women are positioned as potential perpetrators of sexual violence and their bodies are invested with the power and potential to trigger flashbacks of past trauma (cf. Nicki, 2006). One commenter, responding to a cis womon's passionate plea for trans women's inclusion at the Festival, wrote:

When are the women who support these men going to wake up and smell the rape? [Trans women] are men. They feel entitled to women's space, women's bodies, women's lives. They refuse to hear no just like men everywhere. Goddess forbid women draw a boundary and say no to men (Jaye Jill, 2011). 58

It is on the basis of sexual violence that trans women's exclusion from the Festival is often legitimated, and it is this basis that is most difficult to address without trivializing attendees' very real fears of cocks, triggers, and violence. This defence of the policy has, though, come under significant critique for the ways it so often relies on understandings of trans women as men in order to legitimate the position that trans women are threats to womyn-born womyn's safety21. What is lost in this argument, as elsewhere, is trans women's definitional autonomy over their own lives and bodies.

Slowing down

In the introduction I wrote briefly about the trouble I had driving past the Festival gates, and the trouble I continue to have critiquing a Festival that I can feel in the deepest recesses of my gut is an incredible place for many womyn. I can understand why womyn might get up, as my friend Candice told me they did, at "the butt crack of dawn" to line up to get inside the gates. For me it is mobility propelled less by a desire to get in to this specific place than it is by the desire for reprieve that can sometimes only be found by getting out of well-trodden streets. I am coming back to this chapter after a long walk on some of those streets with Karolyn. On our walk through the downtown core of the small city we live in we passed one man who asked us if we are sisters22, and another who

This defence of trans women's exclusion has also been critiqued for the ways it simplifies experiences of and reactions to trauma and for the ways it elides trans women's experiences with sexual violence (cf. Koyama, 2000). 22 In her text Queer phenomenology Orientations, objects, others (2006) Sara Ahmed recounts her experiences with a neighbour who asked her, similarly, if she and her partner were sisters after they moved into a house next door. About this type of questioning, she says that the "question reads the two women as sisters, as placed alongside each other along a horizontal line. By seeing the relationship as one of siblings rather than as a sexual relation, the question constructs the women as "alike," as being like sisters... Seeing "us" as alike meant "overlooking" signs of difference." (p. 95). This erasure of signs of difference, in many ways, functions similarly to the labelling of lesbian desire as the desire for the "same (sex)." Like the question about sisters, "[fjhe very idea ofwomen desiring women because of "sameness" relies on a fantasy that women are "the same" (p. 96). Campers often asked Karolyn and me if we were sisters, and I rarely knew quite how to respond. 59 stuck out and waggled his tongue in a way that was either supposed to advertise his mediocre cunnilingus skills, or was supposed to intimate that he would enjoy forced fellatio. It's after encounters like these that I come back home and let myself indulge that deep down in my belly ache for reprieve and safe space, and it's in these moments that I am least willing to come back to my academic work to confront problems with and critiques of these spaces.

It takes a great deal of effort to return to it, and to remind myself of what Matthew

Gutmann (1998) calls "the violence of ethnographic indifference" (p. 297). He argues that "ignoring politically dissident moods and activities [in our ethnographies], whether they are clearly voiced or muted and confusing," (p. 297) does violence to people. I bring this counsel with me when I return to my work, because it reminds me that my belly ache for the safe space Michfest purports to offer continually risks the slide into support for transmisogynist understandings of trans women's bodies. Claudia, a "mixed-race, queer, cis woman" I interviewed before I set out for Camp Trans reminded me of this when we spoke. Before I left for Camp I interviewed self-identified queer organizers living in

Peterborough, Ontario about their understandings of women-only spaces and their connections with safety. In our interview Claudia told me told me about her uneasiness with the concept of 'safe space':

Tricia: What do you think a safe space is? What do you think it looks like? Claudia: You know, this is really interesting because I hadn't really thought of the idea of challenging the idea of a safe space until that day that we were in Trans Feminisms class and [our professor] was like "we should really interrogate what it means to have a safe space," cause often, you know, a safe space, the idea of safe space is, you know, appealed to as a way to exclude people, right? As a way to exclude people. Like, protecting womyn-born womyn spaces is an opportunity to 60

exclude trans-identified people, you know? Which is fucked up. And it's like, "oh wow! That isn't actually 'safe' (quote/unquote) at all," you know? Tricia: Yeah Claudia: I think, like, when people think about safe spaces there's this visceral feeling, like there's just, ooh, just like you just need to feel, it's almost like this word 'safe' triggers this instinctual feeling of like comfort and feeling good, and I think we often invoke that term with like, feelings of not being challenged and feeling like people like us, and feeling comfortable to say things, right? And I think that that, that's good. It's good to feel affirmed by saying something and having other people be like, "totally, totally, you're so right." You know? Tricia: Yeah Claudia: Affirmation is good. It's a really positive thing. Tricia: Definitely Claudia: But I think so is being challenged. And. I think it's important to interrogate the idea of a safe space. Urn. Yeah. Well, just because it's sometimes used to, you know, protect privileged people Tricia: Yeah Claudia: who don't, who don't want the safety of that privilege to be ... Tricia: destabilized? Claudia: destabilized.

Claudia's cautions about the visceral feelings of safely haven't yet stopped ringing in my ears. I bring all of this counsel with me, now, as I write about Michfest's unofficial

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the ways it can be "appealed to as a way to exclude people," and the ways it prioritizes cis womyn's readings of trans women's embodiment over trans women's self-definitions of their own lives and bodies.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Trans women can go to Michfest, and indeed the year I conducted my fieldwork at least one trans feminine Camper left Camp Trans to do so. A few others considered following suit. Dutch told me that:

... this year, frankly, if people had the money, they're able to go and nobody said anything to them. Is Lisa Vogel gonna make a statement [denouncing the WBW policy]? Probably not. But does she really have to if we're getting onto the land and we're getting minimal harassment? I mean, there are women on the land who are getting harassed for having facial hair who aren't trans-identified in any way. There are women who are on the land who are getting harassment for shaving, you know, 61

and being very feminine, so you-you have to be realistic. There's a lot of, urn, bias going around that isn't just about trans. So even when they get on the land they may encounter some issues, but overall the fact that they're on the land and the majority of the issues aren't about them being trans, it's just that general bias, which is not okay, but I mean, it's there

Even though the 'womyn-born womyn' policy has not been repealed, the DADT imperative enables trans women to attend the Festival "legitimately" in spite of it. This is an important movement; nevertheless, the policy, along with Dutch's articulation of the conditions for it, seem to suggest that what characterizes "legitimate" attendance for trans women is exercising a consumer choice to purchase a ticket, combined with a quiet compliance and a refusal to "flaunt" and "tell" that they are trans identified. Access is granted, in other words, to trans women whose bodies 'pass' as bodies that were assigned female at birth.

Dutch does not advocate quiet compliance explicitly. Indeed he actively opposes the ways invisibility is mandated by DADT policies, particularly given his experience with similar policies that regulated his identity and visibility while he was in the United

States Air Force. In his counsel that "you have to be realistic," though, there is an unsettling imperative to acknowledge the durability and banality of the status quo. "Be realistic" is a popular idiom and, as Celia Kitzinger (2000) argues is often the case, idioms are difficult to challenge both "because their generality makes them independent of the specific details of any particular person or situation, and because they invoke and constitute the taken-for-granted knowledge shared by all competent members of the culture" (p. 121). Dutch's counsel that "you have to be realistic" positions harassment as a static and taken-for-granted 'fact of life'. 62

There is something similar at work, too, when Dutch says that "there's a lot of,

um, bias going around that isn't just about trans." These statements are troubling because

their generality positions harassment as static and omnipresent, and in so doing they gloss

over the very specific ways trans women's bodies are scrutinized and policed under the

'womyn-born womyn' and DADT policies. To refuse the validity of his statements or to

argue otherwise is to risk being perceived as unrealistic and irrational, or at least as

unnecessarily specific. They prompt the listener to affirm that this is the way things are,

but does not necessarily position them well to challenge it. Much as arguments which

propose that women ought to be careful in order to avoid rape often rely on

understandings that rape is an unfortunate fact of life, these arguments foreclose enquiries

into how this fact is actively maintained and into the requirements it places on trans

women to protect themselves against bias and assault by refusing to "tell." The DADT

policy not only insists that trans women pass

In an open letter she wrote to her friends who attend Michfest, a trans woman by

the name of Annie Danger pointed to this tension between her ability to attend the

Festival and the invisibility she feels is required of her in that space. In her letter she

highlighted her ability to go, but emphasized that in spite of this her body continues to be

invisible in that space. Her letter reasons, as others have, that the "legacy of this bigotry"

at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival runs far deeper than the assurances of her

friends that she is wanted within the gates. She wrote23:

I have edited out a few parts of the letter that discussed specifics about her relationships with the friends to whom she wrote this letter directly, and I have edited out those parts which seemed to me to be included for emphasis, rather than to explicate a new argument. This editing process is, of course, rife with problems. In many ways, a cis woman editing out some of a trans woman's carefully chosen words is 63

Dear you,

. .. This letter comes from trying to put my years of resent through this filter of loving: I feel hurt and I am writing because want to trust that you have my back as a transwoman. I am having a hard time separating your attendance of MWMF and your silence with me about this issue from your level of respect for me; for my body. I don't want to feel this way and I am willing to do the work to let go of a decade of resent, but I need your help. Will you help me?

... [Michfest] is allegedly a place of healing based on welcoming. A harsh toke for me: This is a place where I, on a body level even more than a political one, am profoundly unwelcome. There is no place I've ever been where my body and my experience of gender feel safe, wanted, welcome, supported, normalized, trusted, trustworthy. There is little or no safe space for transwomen. Not even at queer land, where we are often wanted in the abstract but not so much welcomed in practice. People don't seem to know how to think about transwomen. And for us to make a squawk about our treatment often runs the risk of being called out as misuse of the male privilege we were raised with. To be woman enough to share womyn's spaces, we must be good girls—we must be quiet.

... And now I feel pushed, finally, to say something because my lover is going. My love. And because of this, I am struggling to believe she really sees and loves my trans body because of it.

I am also speaking up because, in only the most technical of senses, I could finally go: I can purchase a ticket as an out transsexual woman (though one cannot find that information on the MWMF website). I have considered going... and I have come to a very solid conclusion: I have no moving reason to put myself through that emotional shredder. I cannot go there and not interact with this issue of trans- exclusion. It is on my body. To go and try to have fun, to do anything but loud and firey activism about this issue would be to leave my body. To disassociate further from a body I fight daily to be in.

... I understand that change is slow. That, technically, there are changes afoot. But I am writing to remind you that in the meantime, you have to actually show me that you respect the very real issue of transwomen's lives... I cannot forget that my body is not valid there. You cannot remain silent with me about this and expect me to trust you... I am asking you to speak up. I am asking you to make transwomen visible in this place where we are made invisible. I am asking you to be loud and loving and creative. I am asking you to rock the boat.

I hear many people who attend are in support of trans women attending, but I do not feel welcome. The culture of separatism amongst the organizers and the legacy of this bigotry are much stronger than the words "I really think most people would exactly the trouble with silencing Danger argues is occurring at Michfest. I tried to be attentive to this while editing, and I have included as much of her text as seemed reasonable for a thesis of this length. 64

want you there." This is not your fault, but if you are going to go there and remain close to me, 1 am requesting that you make it your issue in a much more visible way. Please do things while you're there that show me that you really respect my body. My life. My womanhood... I am asking you to love me as much as you love this festival.

Truly, Annie Danger

Danger's compelling demand for her body to be respected at Michfest has been carefully drafted to acknowledge that the Festival is supposed to be "a place of healing based on welcoming" (Danger, 2010). Michfest is quite surely a community that helps many womyn heal, and yet Danger is clear that her body is not truly welcomed in that space.

Trans women's bodies are, in many ways, "made invisible" at the Festival as a precondition of their being welcomed.

Trans women's invisibility is mandated by Festival policies, and yet the fact that trans women must conceal aspects of their identities in order to attend the Festival is often redeployed as evidence of their treachery. The Michfest discussion forums are replete with descriptions of trans women intent on "invading," "infiltrating," and

"threatening" womyn-born womyn's space and bodies. Even as their secrecy is mandated in Festival policy, the idea that trans women have a secret they won't tell further substantiates these suspicions. This narrative is difficult to circumvent, and as I think about ways this might be done I am reminded again of Adichie's caution: "show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become"

(2009,117).

Likeness and responsibility

Campers, and particularly trans feminine Campers, are shown as threats to womyn-born womyn's safety over and over again in defenses of the Festival's admission 65 policy. They are shown as infiltrators, too, in the unofficial "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that regulates which forms of embodiment are recognizable as 'like' or 'the same' as those womyn-born womyn who attend the Festival 'legitimately'. Those Festival volunteers who met us at the front gates on the night of the vigil held on to the single story about Campers that is told through the Festival's policies. This story of threatening and aggressive trans women was brushing up against us all as we watched Festival volunteers place their bodies in alliance with the local tow truck driver who threatened

Campers. In that moment it became clear to many Campers that they were not recognized as members of the Festival community, and were indeed considered by many to be more abject to it than the tow truck driver who threatened them. Festies' inabilities and unwillingness to recognize Campers' vulnerability to violence that night was most certainly bound up with this single story, and so too was their refusal to support Campers when their lives were put at risk.

These refusals bring me to a question prompted by Judith Butler's (2004) writing on precarity: at what cost did Festival volunteers establish "the familiar" as the criterion by which they discerned their responsibility to the group crowded in the road (p.30)? It became clear that many Campers suspected Festies would have responded differently had they recognized those who were threatened as womyn like them. I can hear this in one

Camper's rhetorical question: "[i]f a cis-woman was threatened with assault by a bio- dude outside the gates do you really think any staff would instantly jump to the perpetrators defense?" (Stinkmusic, 2010), and I heard this reiterated over and over again that week at community meetings. In that moment, standing at the "boundary of womanhood" (Pratt, 1995, p. 184) a small group of Festies implicitly fixed their 66 responsibility to a particular community of womyn like them, and in so doing they held on to the view that they were responsible only for those who were recognizably 'like' them in very specific ways (Butler, 2009, p. 36).

It was this refusal to recognize vulnerability, particularly, a refusal to recognize a shared vulnerability, to which Campers were responding when they formed Camp

Tranarchy. The protest members of Camp Tranarchy mounted was performed against the

single story told about them in Michfest's policies. This resistance comes through clearly

in one self-identified tranarchist's comment, when they say: "If having a dick and

considering myself a real woman is triggering to some people, then that is too bad"

(Suzie™, 2010). In arguing that norms of recognisability that circulate at Michfest do not account for their embodiment, Suzie™ is prompting readers to consider the specific

systems of oppression which support these norms. They call attention to "the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible" (Butler, 2009, p. 2), and they offer

a challenge to those norms. Suzie™ is offering this challenge when they tell readers, quite simply, that "that is too bad." This challenge is similar, too, to the challenge raised by members of Camp Tranarchy when they raised the 'Fuck Fest' flag.

In this flag raising, which was both a marking of territory and a modification of the mission of Camp Trans, I read a refusal to accept the transmisogynist norms of recognisability espoused in Festival policy. In refusing the original goal of Camp Trans to reform and change these norms of recognisability in order to accommodate trans women's self-definitions of their bodies, members of Camp Tranarchy insisted, instead, that "that is too bad." Through their reworking of the space of Camp Trans, members of 67

Camp Tranarchy refused to argue for a reform of these norms. Instead, they insisted that

Festies and Campers alike ask critical questions about the criterion by which these norms of'likeness' are established, and particularly about the ways in which responsibility has become affixed to familiarity and likeness at Michfest. They ask Festies and Campers alike to contend with the questions of "our responsibility toward those we do not know, toward those who seem to test our sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness" (Butler, 2009, p. 36). The responsibility they insist upon is not responsibility for a particular group of people, for this sort of responsibility requires a pre-existing and already well known subject or community in order to operate. They are insisting on responsibility to those who are not already known.

Conclusion

I read the 'Fuck Fest' flag raising as an insistence that Campers' vulnerability to externally imposed violence be recognized, and an insistence that Festies' responsibility to those so threatened "not in fact rely on the apprehension of ready-made similitudes"

(Butler, 2009, p. 36). The flag raising was a protest against the single story that continues to be told about Campers, and particularly trans feminine Campers, in those policies that regulate admittance into the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It is through this protest of transmisogynist norms of recognisability that members of Camp Tranarchy worked to establish Camp Trans as "its own beast" with which the Festival must negotiate its responsibility. I am, though, committed throughout this thesis to maintaining the importance of the critiques my friends raised of Camp Tranarchy's tactics. I am 68 committed, in part, because I wonder along with Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) "[w]hat would happen to our political imagination if we did not consider the state of being fragmentary and episodic as merely disabling?" (2002, p. 35) and in other part because I am committed to an analysis which focuses not only on what is being resisted, but on the space that is created for those who dissent in those instances of resistance. It is for this reason that I pick up these critiques again in the next chapter. 69

CHAPTER THREE Redneck muggles and hillbilly patriarchs: Rural space and Campers' struggles for safety

all day/ bitter branches of things I cannot say out loud/ sprout deviant from my neck/1 want to scream/ "all oppression is connected, you dick!" —Staceyann Chin, All oppression is connected, (2009)

Danger space

On the fourth night of Camp I was sitting in my tent, alternating between holding the flashlight in my mouth and tucking it under my still-sweaty armpits as I wrote about the events of the last few days. Karolyn was writing along with me, stopping every so often to fiddle with the flashlight she'd propped up on a stack of pillows. We were trying to make some sense out of what was happening in the wake of the confrontation with the tow truck driver. That moment alone in the tent was rare. Our friends Clara and Tori had been sleeping with us since the night of the vigil and the tent had been crowded with too many frightened and smelly bodies to attend much to writing about what was happening.

It was hot, as it was most nights, and we had the fly off the tent. The sounds of music, conversation, and people fucking24 were drifting over from other parts of the woods and I was left wondering, 'how can people possibly fuck at a time like this,' when most of us were scared, tired, and exceedingly filthy. As I sat listening to the sounds of people learning their own and others' anatomies, I was trying to work through the anatomy of this crisis. I figured that once I learned to name its parts I'd be able to uncover how it works and where we all fit into it.

This term was used by most to describe sexual activity, particularly during breakfast gossip when people sometimes shared their own stories and more often shared stories of the folks they'd heard. 1 use it here because we used it there, even though I am less inclined to label sexy times this way now that I am outside of this space. 70

Though fear was heavy there, people's steps seemed to have quickened under the weight of it. Camp organizers had been moving quickly to secure the boundaries around

Camp Trans ever since the confrontation with the tow truck driver, and Campers had been doing their own work to ensure that the space is safe and separate from the 'danger space' that surrounds Camp. Securing the boundaries was only one of several responses proposed the night of the vigil, though. In the readjust moments after the encounter with the tow truck driver, a Festie offered another proposal that I continue to recollect. As we stood together outside the Festival gates, looking on at the tow truck driver as he pounded away angrily at the broken vehicle he'd come to collect. I suspect the womon turned to the small group of us standing alongside her in hopes of cutting across our differences.

We were, she told us, a ragtag group of trans, cis, and genderqueer people who had all gathered on this wooded tract of land in rural Michigan with the common goal of fighting and opposing "the patriarchy"—of which this tow truck driver was surely an agent and example. This encounter with the driver held the potential to unite Campers and Festies against patriarchy, she thought, and she was hoping that we would use the remaining daylight to group together and plan a response against this agent of patriarchal violence.

Campers shifted uncomfortably at this suggestion, though, and when organizers urged

Campers to return to the clearing because it wasn't safe "out in the open" they also told

Festies they would not be welcome back at Camp that night.

Leaving aside for a time the significance of "the patriarchy" in this exchange, it is important to note that Festies were asked to give Camp a wide berth that night under the pretence that bounding off the space and denying admittance to non-trans people might 71 guarantee the safety of the more vulnerable and triggered Campers . This connection between distinct community space and safety has since extended beyond that one moment in the road and it continued to underwrite the struggles and negotiations

Campers were engaging with the week of Camp Trans 2010.1 heard this link between distinct space and safety made most clearly when, in our interview, Andy told me that when ze organizes a safe space with a collective ze works with in Ohio, ze wants to make that safe space distinct from the rest of peoples' lives:

Andy: 1 have these hooey notions cause I lived on a Buddhist center for a while and there was this, this idea of sacred space, I think, for me, informs my idea of safe space. Urn. And they talked a lot about ho—like that th—that sacred space needs to be held and that there need to be people there, and they-they had this oddly like militaristic group of people, but, this group of people who were there specifically to hold the space. And that meant like their presence was just there to remind people about the intentions of the space. Um. And so I kind of, I see a lot of anal- analogies. Parallels—that was the word. 1 see a lot of parallels in that and like, sort of how we approach safe space. That it's like, we [at the Ohio collective] definitely go out of our way to like welcome people into the space, and then establish that like "we are here and this is the norms that are exist within this space" and then to close it before you leave and be like "alright." You know. And, I don't know. "Then you can go into danger space" [chuckles]. Tricia: Like the outside world is danger space? Andy: [chuckles]. I mean, it's a space in which, like—something was said, um, I think at Camp Trans about like "well, shouldn't every space be safe space?" and like actually, I think that that for me it shows a certain amount of like lack of maybe knowledge about safe space, or lack of experience of what being in a safe space is like cause I think that like having that heightened level of like intentionality and like energy that you're putting and like focused energy isn't sustainable, really. [...] Like that's another part of our organizing [mandate] is like "make sure that the space is the space." You know? And like it's funny, like we talk about it as like "the space." Tricia: Yeah Andy: Um. Which has this funny—but no, it's distinct from the rest of our lives and that we are intentionally constructing something that is distinct from the rest of our lives and that that's something that we're doing together and so, I don't know.

Indeed, Karolyn, Clara, Evelyn and I, along with two cis women whose names I did not catch, were stopped by an organizer on our way back to Camp Trans after the threats were diffused. The organizer, having mistaken some of us for Festies, told us we would not be welcome at Camp that night. We had few other choices, considering the location of our tent and vehicles, and so we made the short walk back with some reluctance and with caution abounding about our roles in that space. 72

Campers were busy trying to make the space of Camp Trans into "the space." They were busy trying to make it separate and distinct from the danger space where they were threatened by a local tow truck driver, and in this process debates were raging about whether or not Michfest ought to be considered a part of that danger space. These debates were the focus of the two preceding chapters.

In the first two chapters I left aside the question of how the tow truck driver and those locals with whom he worked were positioned and understood by Campers. I did so in order to discuss the hirstories that led some Campers to turn in protest toward Michfest after the encounter with the tow truck driver. This chapter, though, pays much closer attention to that dropped thread of the rural tow truck driver, focusing specifically on the ways in which rural people and places are positioned in Campers' struggles to build a distinctly safe space. People all around me that week were talking about the space "out there" and the space "in here" in important ways, and their talk is productive. Campers were trying to articulate their sense that the grounds where the violent encounter with the local took place was already separate and unrelated to Camp, and yet by making these distinctions they were producing those grounds as the very breeding grounds for violence that they suggested they were fleeing. I argue that many Campers perpetuated the popular image of backwards hillbillies living in rural backwoods danger space, not to harm or offend, but rather to support the connections they made between boundedness and safety.

Muggle space

The space "out there," beyond the boundaries of Camp, is what Campers frequently referred to as "muggle space." "Muggle" is a neologism coined by J.K 73

Rowling in her famous Harry Potter series. This series consists of seven fictional novels, each of which follows a group of young witches and wizards through their school-aged years at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the context of Rowling's novels, "muggles" are non-magical people who know very little about the witching and wizarding world. Muggles have their own laws, social norms, and assorted technologies

and they are quite unaware of the existence of any other worlds, spaces, and ways of

living. With the increasing popularity of the novels the term "muggle" has taken on a

meaning that extends well beyond the witching and wizarding world and is now recorded

and defined in the Oxford English Dictionary: "in allusive and extended uses [muggle

refers to] a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in

some way" (2010). There is a sense in which Campers used the term to mark their

superiority over the people they called "muggles," and 1 return to this discussion later in

the chapter. The allusive uses to which this term was put at Camp were, though, much

more nuanced and certainly more fraught than an OED definition can accommodate.

Campers remobilized the term "muggle" to describe the primarily straight, white,

cis people they suspected make their home in those rural communities that surrounded

Camp and, following Rowling, they defined "muggle space" as community spaces

created by and in service of those muggles. In the context of Rowling's novels, it

becomes clear as the plots thicken that while witches and wizards must occasionally pass

through muggle space in order to conduct their lives, they do not find themselves

reflected and accommodated in it. Indeed, witches and wizards must conceal themselves

from muggles when they go out and about in muggle space for fear of exposing 74 themselves and their separate world . Rowling's descriptions of witches and wizards trying to move in stealth through the muggle world strike a certain resonance with the analysis of Michfest that I offered in the second chapter and they strike a similar resonance with Campers' articulations of their experiences moving through the rural communities that surround Camp Trans. Just as witches and wizards must conceal their identities from unsuspecting and rather daft muggles in Rowling's novels, Campers often expressed concern about passing well enough to travel into Hart and other nearby townships. This concern only intensified after the tow truck driver—a local muggle— threatened and misgendered a trans woman and, in so doing, confirmed Campers' suspicions that those who do not conform in muggle communities are met with violence.

"Muggle space" became a term Campers used to describe the space "out there," beyond the tree line, where trans and genderqueer people face significant threats and where they have very few opportunities to define the norms of the space.

Mobility and privilege

While many Campers expressed significant trepidation about muggle space, some of us did need to travel into it regularly to get supplies, and many more traveled through it quite willingly in order to get to the lake nearby. It would have been difficult to ignore that Camp relied on muggle spaces in order to function. Staying put inside the boundaries of Camp Trans required, to borrow Tom Hall's (2009) insight, a lot of moving around (p.

575). Most of our basic needs like food, water, and porta-potties were filled by stores and

26 Some witches and wizards are more adept at concealing themselves than others, and Rowling's novels are replete with humorous images of witches and wizards with long beards who take to muggle streets in clothes that aren't quite en vogue, spouting excitement about upcoming wizard sporting matches. 75 service providers that operated out of Hart and Walkerville. For instance, the result of a long-standing arrangement with a local campground was that each day Campers could make the half hour long drive in to town with our ten five gallon blue jugs, some of which were missing tops and spouts, to get water from the outdoor faucet at the campground. Organizers, too, spent a significant amount of time in Hart before Camp even began. They retrieved the tents, generators, and other supplies that helped make

Camp function from the storage locker they rent, and they transported it to the clearing in a U-Haul they rented in town. This uneasy reliance on locals for products and services begins to beg the question of whether or not mobility and reliance on other spaces are antithetical to Campers' efforts to construct a separate, distinct, and autonomous space.

At least some Campers needed to be mobile in order for Camp Trans to function, and as things grew heated and tense at Camp it became more and more desirable to leave the space. This was not, though, a privilege all Campers enjoyed equally. When I asked one Camper, Evelyn, to describe herself for me she included her access to a vehicle and her ability to circulate in spaces outside of Camp Trans in her description:

Evelyn: Um—I'm roughly a quarter century old, spent most of my life in the mid- West, spent most of my life ostensibly 'straight' until I began dating a woman when I was nineteen. I don't identify as a person of color. I am pretty middle class but was not always that way. I come from a pretty good home. I am educated. I own a vehicle. [Chuckles] Tricia: That last one is an interesting addition to the list. Evelyn: Heh, well, yes. Well. It's important about who I am to many at Camp. Tricia: Can you tell me a bit more about what you mean there? Evelyn: Well, it's just at Camp that I-I-I have ended up driving a lot of people back and forth and have relied a lot on the car for respite. During camp earlier in the week, things got heated. People were fighting. The tension was really high. Sometimes, it was almost imperative to leave for a bit. 76

In her inclusion of vehicle ownership on the laundry list of privileges she offered me,

Evelyn acknowledges that mobility and the capacity to travel in a variety of spaces were integral to the functioning of Camp and she equates this mobility with privilege. Many

Campers did not have access to a vehicle, and still others were cautious about passing well enough to travel safely through Hart and surrounding townships28. Mobility, here, is figured as both a privilege in and of itself and as movement made possible by privilege.

This refrain about privilege and mobility was common at Camp Trans and, while it would be remiss not to note the ease with which I passed through Hart and other rural areas in Northern Michigan, I am interested specifically in the work that statements like these did to produce and maintain a distinction between Camp Trans and muggle space. It would be difficult to deny that complex economic processes and social relationships connect Camp Trans with muggle spaces. In spite of this, in identifying the role that privilege plays in travel between Camp and muggle space Campers worked to position

Camp Trans as a place of safety, security, and understanding that was constructed in opposition to unsafe, ciscentric, heteronormative, and ignorant muggle space. This is, in some sense, precisely the work Camp organizers encouraged us to do when we gathered in Michigan. According to the website, organizers

The type of response Evelyn offered —one that emphasized the various ways she has and has not been privileged—was certainly influenced by the context in which she offered it. At Camp that week each of us was encouraged to be hyper-aware of our various privileges and oppressions and organizers struggled to institute an "accountability process that normalizes calling each other out on messed-up stuff' (Rye.Wild, 2011). This process of "calling each other out on messed-up stuff' was far from 'normal' for the vast majority of us, though, and at times it was productive of an exceedingly tense space. While many of the call-outs we offered one another that week were reminders to each other to 'check our privilege' and admonishments to be aware of the 'amount of space' we were taking up, other call-outs were attacks that were imbued with a great deal of anger. 28 Of particular concern was access to a trans friendly bathroom in Hart. For more on the difficulties some trans folks encounter in public restrooms more generally, see: Cavanagh, 2010. 77

believe that Camp Trans is the only place on the planet that has a majority of trans people in one place 24/7 for a whole week. This makes for an empowering, supportive, and amazing culture to surround yourself in! ... Being in a majority trans/genderqueer environment 24 hours a day for many days is a first for many people. It makes for a unique and amazing culture (Info for Campers, 2010, f 32-33)

We gathered in Michigan in hopes of building a community that would be emphatically different from those where we Campers regularly conducted our lives, and there is much that is incredible and useful in the conversations and articulations of experience that helped us do this type of work. Being in a majority trans/genderqueer environment 24 hours a day for many days was a first for me and many other people, and the spaces where we all regularly carry about our lives are often fairly oppressive spaces. In spite of this, concerns about the ways we went about escaping that space and creating a new sort of space continue to nag at me.

In thinking about this effort to build a space in opposition to muggle space, I am reminded of Eva Mackey's (2002) caution about the construction of Canada as

"victimized by external and powerful others" (p. 12). This image, she argues, "creates a fiction of a homogeneous and unified body, an image that elides the way the Canadian nation can victimize internal 'others' on the basis of race, culture, gender, or class" (p.

12). While a group made up primarily of gender-bending anarchists are certainly not comparable to the Canadian nation, it is notable that many Campers felt that the image of a safe and empowering community elided the ways they were victimized by that community on a variety of fronts. I discussed this at length in Chapter 1, and yet it is worthwhile to reiterate this point once more by sharing a particularly powerful quotation from the community discussion forums. Ida, a trans woman and dyke from New York

City, wrote in response to a call for input in planning Camp Trans 2077: 78

While I was at Camp last year I saw people perpetuate oppression along lines of race, class, gender, ability, age, and sexuality, but the horizontal, interpersonal and intergroup antagonism and hostility regarding differences of trans identity/experience was at least as much a pervasive and poignantly distressing dynamic. Binary vs. nonbinary, female-assigned vs. male-assigned, physical transition vs. nonphysical transition, younger transition vs. older transition, "passing" vs. "nonpassing," so-called "radical"/ "insurrectionist" vs. so-called "reactionary"/ "assimilationist," and pretty much any and every other dividing line was used to cut through other people's flesh. The Camp seemed to be a site for some sort of fucked up Olympics to see who is the most authentic and/or oppressed trans person. Who really benefits from a milieu where trans people are encouraged to attack each other in this way? (NYCDyke, 2011)

Ida's statement that Campers "cut through other people's flesh," along with the anger and the hurt I read in her response, are striking indications that this space was not necessarily as safe, secure, and understanding as it was intended to be. Nonetheless, Ida did offer suggestions for improving the space and she continued to maintain the importance of spaces like these for coalition building and radical politics. Many Campers felt and articulated a significant need for these kinds of alternative spaces and the safety they felt they offered, and the violent encounter with the tow truck driver did little to quell that need for safety. Articulations of this need often fell back on popular images of rural space as inhabited by white trash, hillbillies, rednecks and 'typical' rural ignorance for support, though, and it is here that I focus the remainder of my attention in this chapter.

If all oppression is connected, as Staceyann Chin (2009) argues in the snippet of the poem that opens this chapter, then it is integral to consider the ways that Campers relied on images of rural people as they struggled to produce safe space. It is best, then, to begin addressing this conversation from a standpoint out in muggle space, where I learned a great deal about how some locals talk about Camp Trans and the people who attend.

Feeling out of place in muggle space

My understanding of how locals talk about Camp Trans became more nuanced right around the halfway point in my research, on the Thursday of Camp Trans. We were out in muggle space, waiting for a tow truck at the intersection of Campbell Road and

County Road 67, a few miles from Camp Trans and about an hour outside of Hart. Much to the annoyance of Triple A, none of us could figure out exactly where we were. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight and Google Maps, do I know that we stood in the middle of Manistee National Forest on the isolated road between Hart and Walkerville.

The crash happened four or five hours before we made our way up to see it. A

Camper who had a license but hadn't put it to much use in the last few years borrowed someone's vehicle to drive a few people to the lake a ways from Camp, and they lost control of the Jeep on a turn. We heard about the accident back at Camp, as exaggerated stories of "totalled" vehicles and "severe concussions" passed from mouth to ear in quiet whispers. People had been cloistered off in small groups in various parts of the woods most of the day, but when news started travelling about an accident people came out of the woods into the clearing. We all wanted to find out what was going on. We learned that the Campers involved in the crash were just fine, bruises and one head bump aside, but the 1981 Jeep was lodged in a ditch and smashed into a tree. The sway bar was rumoured to be broken, and there was no way to move the vehicle without a tow truck.

While I cannot tell you where a sway bar is located on a Jeep, at the time the knowledge 80 that this bar was broken seemed to inform my opinion that the vehicle was badly

damaged.

That a tow was required had people scared. I was sitting with Andy near Dutch's tent discussing our fear for Campers' safety when ze asked me to confirm what ze was

seeing: a Camper who had just crawled out of a nearby tent was now loping through the

woods wielding a long, steel machete. She joined a group of Campers who were grabbing the metal baseball bats from the games box in the Welcome Tent, and when we reached

the tree line we saw that the whole group had piled into a vehicle. They drove away

quickly, presumably headed for the accident, and I started to fear not only for Campers'

safety but for the tow truck driver. Several people packed up their vehicles and left Camp

for good after they saw the machete. I remember agreeing with Andy that we would have

to leave if the Campers hurt or killed someone. In the moment I couldn't process why

someone would have a machete at Camp in the first place, and its presence confirmed for

me that this tranarchist couldn't be trusted. In hindsight I can't help but think about the

degree to which this trans feminine person must have felt threatened, and the extent to

which she felt she required protection from those threatening her.

The group with the machete came back quickly enough, though, with news that a tow truck was coming from a city just north of Hart. The tow truck driver who had threatened Campers would not be there, and so the armed car came back to Camp. With

adrenaline pumping but anxiety significantly reduced, Karolyn and I both turned mental

somersaults when Nicky Click asked us for a ride up to the accident. Harvey Katz,

Nicky's long-time friend and now solo member of the popular spoken work ensemble the 81

Athens Boys Choir29, was the disgruntled owner of the Jeep and he had hitched a ride up earlier to survey the damage. Katz and Nicky were both scheduled to perform at Camp

Trans this year, and Katz was set to perform the next evening. When Nicky asked us for a ride up to see him, we jumped at the chance to break up the monotony of the day and to escape the hostility in the clearing by gawking at a car crash and spending time with

Nicky and her friends. The day, thus far, had been exceedingly tense.

It was late afternoon when we got there. It was hot, and a song by the once popular music group Train was stuck in my head as we were waiting. Those readers who were the target audience of mediocre pop-rock in the late 90s might know the one I'm talking about—the one where they introduce that rather contradictory and beautiful lady:

Meet Virginia.

She never compromises. Loves babies and surprises. Wears high heels when she exercises. Ain't that beautiful? (1998)

The song was in my head as Nicky Click—high femme30 and outrageous performance artist that she is—played softball with Dutch, the former Air Force officer. Dutch was the pitcher.

Athens Boys Choir is a popular trans artist and its sole member, Harvey Katz, travels extensively in Canada, the US, and some parts of Europe. He performed at a conference that dealt with trans and genderqueer identities in Peterborough, Ontario the year before I moved here and has since developed quite a following in the queer music scene in North America. 30 When Nicky gave me and Karolyn her first CD she told us that her song "Two Femme Girls On a Roller Rink" was dedicated to us. The second verse goes: "Sony if this fucks with your rigid gay boxes/1 just really love hot femme foxes/ Yeah. I dress up and look girly and conventional/ Don't assume this presentation's not radical and intentional" (2006) and I like to think that in retroactively dedicating this song to us she was pointing to and making space for subversive qualities of our relationship and identities that were often glossed over at Camp Trans. 82

Figure 6. The intersection at Campbell Road and County Road 67. Katz's car was lodged in the wooded area, just next to the white sign on the left-hand side of the road. Photo by GoogleMaps: Street view.

Nicky was up at bat, and Dutch was lobbing balls from his position on the side of the

road closest to the crashed Jeep we had all driven up to investigate. Nicky Click was on

the other side of the road, standing hunched over with her knees bent in standard batting

position wearing high heels, short shorts, fishnet stockings, and a tank top that covered

very little of her ample bust. Dutch was in shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap and he

looked much more prepared for this impromptu softball match played across a country

road. Nicky was winding up her baseball bat a bit excessively, and when she hit a ball that just grazed the roof of our parked car Karolyn demanded that the game move into the large, overgrown hay field adjacent to the road. It turned out to be a good choice; not one of Nicky's balls stayed a straight course. She was, though, incredibly endearing as she dug in, in her high heels, to round the 'bases' in the hay field and to slide into 'home' to secure the win for herself.

Encountering locals

By the time the impromptu softball game started up we had been waiting for a tow truck for a little over two hours, and Katz had been waiting for over six. A few other 83 campers had driven up earlier with Dutch, and some of them were passing the time by smoking pot in the parked cars and others were chatting about the crash, or about Camp so far, or about the weather. We must have been a strange sight, what with Nicky stealing home base and cars filling with smoke and the whole lot of us standing around an aging

Jeep that was smashed into a tree. Fortunately County Road 67 is quite isolated, so very few vehicles passed while we waited. A cyclist, though, stopped in the middle of his ten mile bike ride to talk with us.

I noticed him approaching when he was still a fair distance away, and as he drew closer it became obvious that the road was too isolated to ignore his passing. By the time he was a hundred yards away he had already called out loudly for everyone to hear, to ask if we were injured and to ask if we were from out of town. While he framed this latter shout out as a question, as if his intention was to learn whether or not we were neighbours he hadn't yet had the chance to meet, it was intended as a statement confirming what he already knew: we were out of place. We stood out when we were pressed up against the backdrop of rural landscape, instead of folding into it. As Sara Ahmed (2000) proposes, there are:

techniques that allow us to differentiate between those who are strangers and those who belong in a given space (such as neighbours or fellow inhabitants). Such techniques involve ways of reading the bodies of others we come to face. Strangers are not simply those who are not known in this dwelling, but those who are, in their very proximity, already recognised as not belonging, as being out of place (p. 21- 22, emphasis in original).

Closer inspection, presumably, should have made our foreignness quite apparent to the oncoming cyclist, considering the out of state license plates, the eclectic mix of gender presentations, off-beat clothing choices, and the unease that was written all over at least two of the faces that were visible from where I stood. 84

He pulled his bike over when he reached us, and after confirming that we were not neighbours, he introduced himself as "a local" named Peter. He was wearing white runners, khaki cargo shorts, and a heavy white collared t-shirt like the kind my father wears for Sunday night dinners, with one of the three buttons undone at the neck. He looked to be white and in his early 50s, and his glasses were the sort that he could reach up and lick, if he were so inclined. The lenses extended down, far below his cheekbones, to end just above his smile. Compared with Nicky's fishnets and the hot pink pyjama pants I had just slipped on over my shorts to keep out the night air, my fieldnotes tell me that Peter-the-cyclist looked as though he had just "cycled over after a Sears catalogue family photo shoot." He was a nice enough man, though, and he fell into easy questions about the Jeep and the accident. He even offered to call a mechanic friend of his who lived close by and might be able to fix the Jeep then and there.

He tried to phone his friend several times, but had some trouble navigating the buttons on his cell phone and he couldn't find his number in the "Contacts" list. When he finally gave up trying different number combinations, I expected him to carry on with his bike ride. He stayed, though, and started up a conversation about where we were staying while we were in Michigan. Campers standing with me on the road were guarded about their responses to this question, offering only that we were camping "just up the road" with a few other people. I wasn't sure how much we ought to reveal for a number of reasons, some of which were tied up in the assurance 1 had offered organizers that I would not reveal the location of the Camp to non-Campers. 85

Trans-literacy and apologies

Peter let his question about where we staying go for a while, after we offered our

exceedingly vague reply of "just down the road." He kept shooting furtive glances at the

lot of us, though, and eventually, after drying up more small talk about the weather, it

seemed he wanted to know badly enough that he just came out and asked: "You all from that dyke camp?" Several faces registered smiles that teetered between shock and

confusion, and as he looked around, he rather awkwardly and apologetically explained:

"that's what we call it around here."

By 'the dyke camp' Peter was, presumably, referring to the Michigan Womyn's

Music Festival. We all understood this reference, and based on the expressions on my

companions' faces I gathered that we all suspected that Peter was not, to borrow Sheila

Cavanagh's term, 'trans-literate' (2010, p. 63) and that we all had some sense for why he might be uneasy about his description. Cavanagh argues that cis people "uttering

apologies may not always know why they are apologizing, although they may intuit that they have somehow committed an injurious (or nullifying) act" (p. 68). Peter's hasty

explanation of what people call the Festival "around here" was at once a recognition that he couldn't quite 'read' the genders of the folks standing around him and an admission that he knows some of 'dyke's' extensive history of use as an attack.

Peter was standing amongst a motley crew of vibrantly gendered folks, some of whom were trans masculine identified, and yet his question figured the group of us as potential dykes. Sheila Cavanagh (2010) adeptly considers the ways some cis folks who encounter people whose genders they have a difficult time 'reading' lack the language to describe and understand those genders. In these situations, she says, people often reduce 86 the gender trouble they perceive to homosexuality (whether the person self-identifies as

'gay', or not) (2010, p. 60). Cavanagh writes:

[t]he conflation may be structured by a lack of available terminology to shame and condemn trans people as a population distinct from those who are designated lesbian, gay, or bisexual... Foucault tells us that discourse sets parameters on what is thinkable, what is designated problematic, and how people are subsumed into various regimes of power. The conceptual and linguistic slippage between homophobic and transphobic graffiti indicates a culturally inscribed conflation between trans subjectivity and homosexuality (2010, p. 190)31.

Peter did not apologize, directly, for the ways that his question hailed Campers as 'dykes' and so conflated trans subjectivity with homosexuality. That he apologized at all indicated that he was uneasy about using the term to describe Campers, though, and

Cavanagh's insight that he might not know why is apt when applied here. His furtive glances at the lot of us reflected some of his uncertainty about who we were and how this term might relate to us. What I suspect Peter did know when he apologized was that

'dyke' has been used as a slur. It has been used to shame and condemn women (self- identified lesbians, suspected lesbians, self-identified feminists, suspected feminists, butches, and others) who challenge and disrupt the place of women in the "heterosexual regime" (Grant, 2000, p. 65).

Peter was drawing on and pointing to 'dyke's' extensive history of use as an attack when he used and apologized for his description, even though the use of 'dyke' is not necessarily something to be apologetic about in the context of the Festival. The term

'dyke' is particularly complicated when it is used to describe Michfest attendees because,

In his book Imagining Transgender David Valentine argues that many of the people he interviewed in the early 1990s in New York who were identified by social service workers and activists as 'transgender' often described themselves as 'gay' (2007, p. 120-121). It is important to note the ways in which this 'conflation' of homosexuality with trans subjectivity is not always problematic for the people described by those terms. 'Transgender' is a relatively new category, and the terms 'trans' and 'gay' are "only available in their contemporary meanings as discrete categories because of a central distinction that developed in the United States in the twentieth century between gender and sexuality" (Valentine, 2007, p. 57). 87 while not all who attend Fest would identify themselves as dykes, Michfest is a space where erotic dyke desire continues to be bound up with a desire for social change

(Cvetkovich, 2003; Browne, 2009; Taylor & Rupp, 1993). It is no small feat that the

Festival's organizers continue to be unapologetic about this connection, considering the

current academic and activist climate in which 1970s lesbian feminism is coming under

attack for promoting essentialism and relying on false universalisms (cf. Snitow, 1992;

Cvetkovich, 2010).

Trans without the 'vestite'

When we drove past the line-up of cars waiting to get in to the Festival on our way to Camp Trans, I saw a critical mass of feminists who were, to borrow Welle et al.'s terms, "all dyked out" (2006, p. 55). For someone whose feminist politics have almost

always been bound up in a lesbian identity, the drive in was overwhelming. It was

difficult to drive past the line-up on our way to a smaller encampment up the road, to critique those feminist politics and the dykes engaged in them. We all continued driving past the gates of Michfest on our way to Camp Trans, though, and a Camper told Peter as much. Laurie, a Camper whose reputation as a calming presence and mediator was mentioned by a number of others, told him that we were not at the 'dyke camp' but were actually camping "just across the road" from it. The unease amongst Campers about this line of questioning was palpable, and the care with which Laurie navigated their responses added to my sense that Campers did not want to share with Peter that he stood amongst attendees from Camp Trans. While he might know of the location of Camp, it seemed our status as gender-bending Campers was something to be guarded. 88

Going against all social cues which encouraged silence, Peter pushed on with the

conversation and asked: "You all from that transvestite camp, then?" Some campers

nodded slowly while Laurie responded quickly, "without the 'vestite,'" and added "It's

called Camp Trans." His face relaxed and he leaned in, finally starting to use his bicycle

as a support rather than a barrier between his body and the group of us. Relaxation was not the reaction to Laurie's language lesson that I was expecting. He added: "The protest

camp. That's what we call it around here."

'That's what we call it around here'

Throughout our conversation Peter tied his potentially offensive language, ostensible trans-illiteracy, and his specific terms for the Festival and Camp Trans back to the place he lives and the people he lives with. He positions this not only as his language, but the language of his community. He told us that his words were context-specific and rooted in this space that surrounds Camp Trans when he told us, repeatedly, that "that's what we call it around here" (emphasis added). That he roots their shared words in a rural space is important for the ways that I was able to hear him.

Scholars like Mary Gray (2009), Kath Weston (1998), Ed Green (2008) and

Judith Jack Halberstam (2005) have begun to interrogate the assumption, implicit in

Peter's apologies and presumed in much of the scholarship about queer lives, that queers either live or want to live in urban centres. The assumption has been, Halberstam writes, that queer "culture is rooted in cities, that it has a special relationship to urban life, and that... erotic dissidents require urban space because in rural settings queers are easily 89 identified and punished" (2005, p. 35). When considering who is included in the "we" of

Peter's statement, it is difficult to imagine that local queers are included in his collective pronoun and that, if they are, they actually want to be living in this town.

When Peter roots his community's language in rural place, he is calling on a common understanding that people living in rural spaces are backward, different, and less sophisticated than urbanites (Jarosz & Lawson, 2002, p. 9). The queers who come to

Camp Trans and Michfest from away are figured as different not only because they're queer, but because they are presumed to come from outside this community and small communities like it. His apologies, rooted as they are in rural space, can be heard as requests to view this language as a product of 'redneck' or 'hillbilly' sensibility.

Discussions about the dynamics between the truck driver and Campers were, in some cases, similarly suffused with this understanding that locals are not like Campers and Festies. This divide was articulated as a rural/urban divide, with rural communities figured as hotbeds of hatred where queers cannot survive. In her v-log about Camp Trans this year Candi Rose gets at some of what she suspects was behind the confrontation:

I don't really know what words were exchanged, um, the driver had moved his truck, but I'm not sure if it was before he moved his truck or after he misgendered a trans woman that was standing in this crowd. Called them 'he' and then referred to them as 'it'. You know, your typical stupid redneck, ah [...] you know. Your typical, like, "well, if you're not a male or a female, you're an 'it' and that's what I'm going to call you cause I'm a bigot" type response, and ah, at least that's what I gathered from it (2010).

When I asked Dutch earlier that week about his thoughts on the confrontation with the tow truck driver, he expressed his sense that the driver is a 'redneck' and that his ignorance comes from living where he does: 90

Dutch: I wish I had of been here for the incident that happened, um, because I feel like it could have gone down much Tricia: you mean the one on the— Dutch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one with Michfest [outside of its gates]. The chains and whatever. 1 mean, I don't know if it would have gone down differently, but I know oftentimes when I've approached, I'm gonna use this term, 'redneck' individuals Tricia: No. I know what you mean. Dutch: You know? I know exactly where it is. I've had shotgun rifle racks in the back of my truck before. You know, I get where it's coming from, and I get the ignorance. And we understand cause we live in Northwest Kentucky so there's a lot of people like that, so I think I could have handled that situation a little bit—I'm not gonna say better, but differently than it was handled

In these descriptions of the tow truck driver he is figured as a 'redneck' and, particularly in Dutch's response, his rootedness in rural space is described as integral to that this identity. When Dutch tells me that he gets "where it's coming from" and when I respond affirmatively and tell him that I know what he means we are articulating our shared understanding that people living in rural areas are 'redneck' bigots (with shotguns). Rural space is further articulated as one that few Campers understand when

Dutch tells me that the confrontation might have gone differently if someone with an understanding of rural contexts had been present.

This 'redneck' discourse invokes images of rural muggle space as "backward, different, and even threatening" (Jarosz & Lawson, 2002, p. 19), and Campers and locals used it in order to draw a clear distinction between the space of Camp Trans and the community "around here." This discourse was not deployed innocently, though, and in using it to make distinctions between here and there Peter and Campers drew on understandings of rural space which "reinforce mainstream classist, racist, and even regionalist thought" (Beech, 2004, p. 174). Rural whites, in the discourse of'rednecks', are racialized as "off-white" and tainted by their presumed poverty (Noble, 2006, p. 77). 91

By drawing on a racist and classist 'redneck' discourse Campers establish one space as

superior to the other, not because it was more subversive, meaningful and safe—as was the original intention of Camp—but because it was more sophisticated and richer.

Conclusion

Campers were threatened in rural muggle space and the erection of boundaries

and the reproduction of this space as different, backwards, threatening, and emphatically

separate from Camp are intelligible as reactions to the fear many were feeling. Many

queer people feel a great deal of fear in rural spaces (cf. Roirdan, 1996), and many folks have

moved and continue to move out of rural areas in search of larger, safer, and more diverse

communities (cf. Bauer & Underwood, 1995). What I want to call attention to, though, is the sort

of work that these narratives of exit from rural space do. In this chapter I argued that these

narratives rely on a contrast between progressive queers and backwards (emphatically non-queer)

rural folks that needs to be interrogated. In many instances, stories like these treat rural people

and the communities where they live as homogenous and uncomplicated, and in so doing they not

only render the idea of a good, long, rural queer life unintelligible but also obscure the fact that

even those queers who chose to leave rural areas did, indeed, live in them at one point. Campers'

narratives about rural space often relied on the idea that rurality and queerness are

incommensurable, in spite of the fact that many had traveled from cities to attend a queer week in the woods. In this chapter I argued that these conceptualizations of Camp Trans as a

separate community, and specifically Campers' equations of separate with safe, rely on

assumptions about the surrounding rural space and the forms of community that are possible there. 92

CONCLUSION

You don't go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive —Bernice Johnson Reagan, Coalition Politics, (1981).

It was one of those days at Camp Trans when time felt, as novelist Jonathan

Franzen (2010) put it so aptly, "at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chockfull second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour" (p. 114). We spent most of the day sitting in folding chairs around a small card table near Nicky Click's tent, in the area of the woods she nicknamed her "Femme Lair." The card table was covered with bottles of make-up, perfume, wigs, panty-hose, CDs, several two-litre pop bottles out of which

Nicky kept sipping, and an assortment of food wrappers. The boundaries of her "lair" were demarcated by fake flowers, ribbons, bows, paper dolls, and other small decorations that Nicky had attached to tree limbs earlier in the week. She used the flowers and ribbons to mark a path from the clearing to the lair, too, in order to help her find her way home. Karolyn and I found the lair that day by following the ribbons and flowers from the clearing, and we stayed for hours talking and debating and getting what, at the time, felt like very little 'research' done.

It was mid-afternoon, and I was painting my nails at the card table with some of

Nicky's bright red polish. We were in the middle of an impassioned debate about whether or not it's possible to hotbox32 tents. I suspect that we kept it up so long because it was such a relief to be talking about something other than Festies and the encounter with the tow truck driver. Nicky was adamant that a tent could be hotboxed, while I expressed

32 'Hotboxing' is the practice of sealing off a space, typically a room or a vehicle, to smoke marijuana. The exhaled smoke is not supposed to escape from the space, and the point is to breathe in the second-hand smoke for an added high. 93

some doubts. Considering the sounds and smells that leak out through their zippered

doors and mesh windows, I suspected that tents might not serve as the right sort of space

for this. Nicky kept coming back to her own tent to support her arguments, though. Her

tent was a truly terrifying tube-shaped "one person sleeping vessel" that dipped too low

in the middle and at one point nearly suffocated her in the night. That tent, she suspected,

would be perfect. The verdict on fire safety in flammable living quarters was still up in

the air when Nicky shushed us. She heard rustling in the woods around us, and with her

warning we tensed up and looked around for some sign of who was walking by.

While we could not see anyone around the lair, our conversation turned terse and

we whispered anxiously. Our talk was full of questions about what exactly we'd said just

before we heard branches snapping under unfamiliar feet, and it was replete with

assurances to one another that we'd spoken of things neither incendiary nor

inappropriate. In any case, we reassured one another, we'd not been overheard. All of the

conversations I had that week, including those inane ones about hotboxing and one

person sleeping vessels, were guarded and hushed. Many of us were on edge, and our

tension resulted in a constant vigilance about the words that came out of our mouths. We were engaged in a practice of self-regulation that had us carefully selecting and then

second guessing most everything we said. This vigilance was heightened during my

interviews, too, as we shifted away from casual conversation to talk about the climate at

Camp:

Candice: You know, around here, it [the climate of Camp Trans] scared me, it's what scared, three trans women left yesterday because they didn't feel safe here because they can tell, and there are implications of violence [looks around as twigs snap under foot nearby] 94

Tricia: Yeah. I know you have to take a look around, it's so awkward Candice: Yes, I know, it's the environment at camp that we have, we can't have an open conversation, and worrying about either triggering people or getting people upset by what we're saying, or you know.

Saying anything at all felt risky, lest we be overheard by Campers who disagreed with us, and the whole lot of us were engaging in a sort of "tightrope talk" (LaFrance &

McKenzie-Mohr, 2010). For LaFrance and McKenzie-Mohr, tightrope talk is the

"careful footing" required when people give accounts of their lives in contexts when they don't have access to the 'right' words to tell those stories (p. 52). At Camp Trans, we struggled to tell stories in a space where the language available for use was constrained and inadequate and, as one Camper noted, most stories would not be told until Campers

"went home and logged onto facebook" (dalicemalice, 2010).

Our time at Camp that year gave rise to incredible and overlapping stories that continued cropping up long after Camp ended, and yet these stories were not often told in that space at volumes that exceeded whispers. They were also seldom told in community spaces. Andy points to this when, during my interview with Dutch, ze interjected to say:

Andy: I guess it seems like, like something that I've been noticing is very much a breakdown in communication in that like people aren't really willing to listen to each other during these like large community meetings Dutch: Right Andy: and that like in these smaller like sort of more caucus-ey or like more informal like caucusing kind of Dutch: Mhm Andy: smaller discussions that are sort of groups of like ten or less people that people are listening to each other, but that in these larger groups the sort of like more dominating forces are like people who aren't very receptive to, like, listening and if there's not like that baseline of being receptive— Dutch: Right Andy: -then there's not gonna be any kind of resolution and there's not, like I don't know. 95

In zis statement that there are "dominating forces" who "aren't very receptive to, like,

listening" at community meetings, Andy is pointing to Campers' inabilities to hear and be heard. Robin, too, called my attention to her efforts to seek out people whose stories she thought were being lost and elided when she told me that she tried to "make an effort on- on Wednesday night after the meeting, even last night, to-to try to dialogue and try to empathize with the trans men." These interviews, along with my own experiences walking the tightrope between what I ought to say and what I wanted to say, bring into focus the ways that multiple stories were silenced in community settings in favour of a

single story about trans women's vulnerability and exposure to violence.

As I consider the stories that couldn't be told until we "went home and logged onto Facebook" (dalicemalice, 2010), I am reminded of Adichie's (2009) caution against the single story. There are, undeniably, problems with starting the story of Camp Trans

2010 with the encounter on the road on the night of the vigil; nevertheless, most stories that were told at Camp with any confidence at all began with a description of this encounter. The stories we told, then, were framed as stories about vulnerability from the very beginning and accordingly the actions we undertook that week became intelligible as responses to externally imposed violence. While I certainly do not want to downplay people's experiences of violence in what Andy called "danger space," I am cautious about this single story of vulnerability to violence in those spaces because it worked to obscure, as Robin put it, "the mote in your own eye33." It often drew on racist and classist images of 'redneck' rural space for support, as I explored in Chapter 3, and it

33 Robin is alluding to the following passage from the bible: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" (Matthew 7:3 King James Version). A mote is a small piece of wood, and presumably the beam is a much larger piece of wood. 96 often obscured the ways Campers hurt one another. A danger of this single story was that

Campers were conjoined to tell stories about victimization that left little room for trans people, and trans women in particular, to be intelligible as oppressive and implicated in perpetuating systems of oppression.

While starting stories in violence and vulnerability had particularly complicated impacts on the space we built at Camp Trans, this thesis also positioned Campers' stories of vulnerability as resistance to the single story told about them by Michfest's admission policy and front gate workers. This violent starting point and the subsequent story about trans women's vulnerability are not arbitrary. This story was a response to Festival-goers' refusals to recognize trans women's vulnerability to violence, and particularly a response to their refusals to see this vulnerability as one trans women share with so-called womyn- born womyn. This refusal to recognize both vulnerability and similarity began "many years ago" (some totally artificial bitchez, 2010, ^f 2), and erupted in 2010 when Festival volunteers failed to support Campers who'd been physically threatened and misgendered by a local tow truck driver. These volunteers, like many Festies before them, positioned

Campers as aggressors and as greater threats to the Festival than the man who'd threatened them. The Michfest discussion forums are replete with images like these, of womyn-born womyn persecuted and threatened by trans women intent on "infiltrating" and invading" their spaces and bodies.

In a context in which this narrative is so pervasive, it is difficult to imagine trans women as vulnerable. On my last night at Camp I spoke with Clara about this at length as we sat around the campfire, drawing in the dirt with sticks and building small castles in an effort to keep our hands occupied. She is a lover of science and mathematics, and she 97 expressed some scepticism that projects like mine could change anything at all. It will be statistics about violence, she told me, which will finally reach those Festies who adamantly oppose trans women's inclusion at the Festival. According to Clara, it is statistics about the number of trans women who have survived transmisogynist assaults, along with statistics about unemployment, homelessness, and domestic violence that will eventually effect change. Clara has a point. Violence is, as David Valentine (2007) writes, "a useful category for activism and moral argumentation" (208). Stories of violence have become "a central 'tool kit' in drawing the attention of the state—and others—to the lives of gender-variant people" and they have also been used to help constitute trans folks' experiences as ones "people should care about, write books about, legislate about" (Valentine, 2007, p. 211).

I worry about the use of statistics, though, because more often than not they offer up dead and damaged bodies as evidence of the living's vulnerability to violence. Even outside of the realm of numbers and statistical significance, Campers felt compelled to offer up dead and damaged bodies. One Camper wrote:

THERE IS NO CAMP TRANS. CAMP TRANZ IS DEADZ!!!!!!!

DEATH TO THE COMMUNITY THAT WILL WATCH A SISTER BE KILLED AND THREATENED BY A TOW CHAIN.

No one was killed at Camp Trans, and yet here a sister's body is offered up as evidence of wrongdoing in the road that night. Vulnerability and the incumbent need for protection, in these accounts, only becomes recognizable when a lifeless body is unearthed. In this formulation death, rather than a human life, imposes an obligation on us to respond. 98

While this thesis begins with a story about violence against trans women, it also explores an instance where Campers struggled for a different way to demand recognition of their vulnerability to externally imposed violence. When members of Camp Tranarchy raised the 'Fuck Fest' flag, they did so in order to intervene in a debate about how

Campers ought to respond to the violence in the road. In Chapter 1 I describe the ways the flag raising helped Campers insist that they were, indeed, vulnerable to externally imposed violence at the same time as it helped them advocate for aggressive and violent tactics. This dual insistence on vulnerability and violence, I argue, enabled members of

Camp Tranarchy intervene into the discourse that positions vulnerable trans feminine bodies as lifeless, frail, and damaged. I would argue that the 'Fuck Fest' flag was raised as an intervention into this story that roots vulnerability in lifeless bodies. Through their flag, active bodies that talk and breathe and move about insisted that new ways of considering trans women's vulnerability be negotiated.

The 'Fuck Fest' flag and the shows of force against the Festival committed under its banner were also attempts at rooting a community in place through resistant action, at a time when the stability and coherency of that community was being called into question. In some senses, the formation of a distinct gathering space for womyn who cannot and do not want to access the Festival can be read as capitulating to Festie's demands that Campers make their own event and "quit trying to hijack Fest" (Mare,

2006). When Campers raised the 'Fuck Fest' flag and altered the mission of Camp Trans, they began some of the work of pulling the two spaces apart. Indeed, their work resulted in a carefully considered move away from overt forms of protest against the Festival for

2011. Camp Trans 2011 took place a week before Michfest, and it was explicitly defined 99 as a trans-centric gathering space. There are plans in the works to change the location of

Camp in the years to come, and Camp Trans as it used to exist has "has receded into history" (Ann Amoli, 2010, f 2).

In spite of the ways these movements might be read as capitulations to Festies demands, it has been the primary concern of this thesis to emphasize the ways that distinct space in Michigan that year was formed through protest. When Campers raised the flag staking their claim to a tract of land outside of the Festival, they did so with a flag that insisted that opposition to that Festival was central to the definition of that space.

While Campers built their own beast, they did so through protest and, in so doing, I suspect they built a distinct space with which Festies still had to contend. This continuing relationship with Festival, then, begs the question: if Campers are not vying for inclusion and changes in Festival policy, what demands are they making on the Festival? I suspect that this space asks Festies to contend with questions of their responsibility to those "who seem to test [their] sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness" (Butler,

2009, p. 36).

The question of how we might live and work compassionately with people who are not like us is one that continues to weigh on me, long after Camp has ended.

Negotiating ways to organize with humans who are different—with whom we seem to share no discernible likeness—was particularly integral at a Camp where attendees were well-versed in feminist and queer theories. Most Campers had read a smattering of Judith

Butler's work and nearly everything Julia Serano had written, and many were prepared to say 100

[fjuck gender essentialism, recuperative consensus meetings, privileged feminist pacifism, and those apparatuses or people who seek to speak for any of us on behalf of women or trans people or anything. We will demolish it all. Get with us or get the fuck out of the way (some totally artificial bitchez, 2010)

Throughout the week it became clear that, for many Campers, it was integral to bring these theories to bear on our organizing, in order to negotiate how to move forward with resistance when consensus and essentializing ideas of'likeness' are neither achievable nor desirable. The idea that those of us who disagree ought to "get the fuck out of the way," though, is unsettling and far from a new model for organizing across difference.

In many ways, Camp did not amount to the sort of space I wanted to spend a year thinking through. It was oppressive, hostile, and full of tears and tightrope talk. All in all, it fell short of my expectation of "deliriously celebratory protest" (Tea, 2003, p. 66).

Campers left the space feeling hurt and angry, and most were prepared to abandon the

Camp and the community that gathers there entirely. There were, undoubtedly, moments that week when we began to struggle for something better. We began to struggle toward accountability processes and alternative ways of recognizing our responsibility to humans we don't like much and to humans with whom we can find no common ground.

Nevertheless, quite a lot of what Andy called "fucked up shit" happened at Camp Trans

2010, and at the time it certainly felt more like our small community was falling apart rather than negotiating better ways to live together. 101

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