Making Trans History through the Otherness Archive and Curating Transmasculine Film.

This essay—part academic paper, part interview, part personal reflection—uses The Otherness Archive (OA) as a starting point to explore the possibilities and limitations in creating a transmasculine film archive. Founded by London-based trans artist Sweatmother, the OA is the first open-access online archive of transmasculine moving image. Open to institutional resources but skeptical of existing historiographic methods and archival structures, the OA aims to create a new transmasc film history, one based on mutual aid and community support—by transmasc people for transmasc people. Sweatmother refers to the transmasculine community whose work they intend to preserve and showcase as a group of "friends." I contend that referring to the transmasc community at large as "friends" enables a collapse of past and present, local and global, which in turn allows the OA to dream belonging otherwise—and start a conversation about gender variance across media, genre, space, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]