Trans(forming) Archives: Speculative Biographies of Ethiopians Between and Beyond Genders

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and ‘70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora.