Trans embodiment: notes on building a house you don’t want to live in.

Reflecting on the discursive nature of the home, the domestic space par excellence, this paper problematises the narrative of trans embodiment as a journey home. It proposes a reading of the trans body as an archive built and performed in order to navigate the medical and legislative norms that govern its narrative. It draws on Derrida’s notion of archive as a “house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates … those who commanded” to explore how archives of ideal images, enactments, histories and gender representation materially build structures that house ideal narratives and project them onto the body, encouraging individuals to dissipate or simplify - or forget, to use the terminology of the archive - their own complex histories in favour of more palatable, unambiguous, no-space and no-time embodiment, easier to recognise and govern.