Jake Frances Ferguson (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
jake.ferguson@kcl.ac.uk

Trans archival fabulations: the (counter-)archival in ‘contemporary medieval’ trans artistic and poetic practice

This practice-led, autotheoretical research project explores how medieval archives are engaged with, extended, remediated and contested within contemporary trans artistic and poetic practice. Placing Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’ in conversation with trans theory, this project conceptualises these engagements as ‘trans archival fabulation’. That is, a counter-archival practice and ethics of care that works ‘with and against’ medieval archives to interrogate the often violent cisnormative operations of power within them while simultaneously locating resources for trans resistance and subversion. Building on Black transfeminist critiques of (trans)normative visibility and legibility, these fabulations do not attempt to discover or represent medieval ‘transcestors’. Instead, they put forward trans not as an identitarian category but as an affective cross-temporal relationships grounded in resonances, shimmers, residues, and sparks. In the process, these practices form an archival trans temporality that messes with linear ideas of straight cis time, weaving together medieval and contemporary, gesturing towards a more liberatory future. Complicating the institutionalisation of trans archives, this interdisciplinary project proposes the radical activist potentials of (counter-)archiving in artistic and poetic practices, exploring the politics of activist art, small presses, and grassroots archiving collectives.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Carl Kears