Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANSlation (Trans in Translation: Multilingual practices and local/global gender and sexuality discourses in Polish transition narratives)
Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-08-31
TRANSlation examined gender transition narratives shared by Polish creators on blogs and YouTube. Specifically, it focused on the use and role of multilingual resources in trans-creating a new language of gender and sexuality within the Polish transgender community.
While people transcending gender systems of their cultures have always existed, they have not always had the language to verbalize their feelings and experiences. The modern definition of transgender as part of a person’s identity, and an earlier understanding of “transsexuality” as a medical disorder, have arguably developed in the West (predominantly in English-speaking cultures). Due to the global domination of the US-American culture, and the privileging of “Western” knowledges, these discourses have functioned as role models for countries and cultures aspiring to be “modern” to follow. Hence “Western” (itself a contested term) cultural discourses circulate globally as universal knowledge, while cultures not (fully) subscribing to them are often considered as lagging behind, not modern or progressive enough.
The Internet is a place where this Western discursive dominance can be observed – but also questioned and challenged. TRANSlation aimed to resist viewing Polish transgender discourses as “Western” inventions “imposed” on the local trans community, by tracing the history of Polish transgender discourses against the background of Poland’s modern history and its place along the West/East divide, and by redefining multilingual practices as linguistic resources used strategically by Polish transgender social media users in order to represent their experience in personal, individual, subjective, and localized ways. The overarching goal of TRANSlation was to offer an important contribution to the social and scientific understanding of this experience through an exploration of the creative language of transition stories within the Polish socio-cultural context.
Gender transition in Poland is challenging due to the lack of a gender recognition law and a national protocol of trans-specific healthcare. Through the study of transition narratives, TRANSlation explored – and confirmed – the need for the introduction of modern gender recognition laws and medical transition standards that do not reproduce outdated ideas, are culturally sensitive and individually customizable. This position was reiterated in various communication and public engagement activities conducted with LGBTQ+ and transgender rights NGOs and activists in both Poland and the UK, where the project was based.
While people transcending gender systems of their cultures have always existed, they have not always had the language to verbalize their feelings and experiences. The modern definition of transgender as part of a person’s identity, and an earlier understanding of “transsexuality” as a medical disorder, have arguably developed in the West (predominantly in English-speaking cultures). Due to the global domination of the US-American culture, and the privileging of “Western” knowledges, these discourses have functioned as role models for countries and cultures aspiring to be “modern” to follow. Hence “Western” (itself a contested term) cultural discourses circulate globally as universal knowledge, while cultures not (fully) subscribing to them are often considered as lagging behind, not modern or progressive enough.
The Internet is a place where this Western discursive dominance can be observed – but also questioned and challenged. TRANSlation aimed to resist viewing Polish transgender discourses as “Western” inventions “imposed” on the local trans community, by tracing the history of Polish transgender discourses against the background of Poland’s modern history and its place along the West/East divide, and by redefining multilingual practices as linguistic resources used strategically by Polish transgender social media users in order to represent their experience in personal, individual, subjective, and localized ways. The overarching goal of TRANSlation was to offer an important contribution to the social and scientific understanding of this experience through an exploration of the creative language of transition stories within the Polish socio-cultural context.
Gender transition in Poland is challenging due to the lack of a gender recognition law and a national protocol of trans-specific healthcare. Through the study of transition narratives, TRANSlation explored – and confirmed – the need for the introduction of modern gender recognition laws and medical transition standards that do not reproduce outdated ideas, are culturally sensitive and individually customizable. This position was reiterated in various communication and public engagement activities conducted with LGBTQ+ and transgender rights NGOs and activists in both Poland and the UK, where the project was based.
The project was carried out at the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University. First, a corpus of social media data was created, consisting of 27 blogs (textual material) and ca. 600 YouTube videos (multimodal material). In the first months of the project, ethical considerations turned out to be of central significance, leading to the division of the project into four separate phases, each using different data, methodologies and ways of engaging with research participants and thus requiring separate ethics reviews. This ensured that ethics formed an inherent component of the entire research process, and resulted in an article for Qualitative Sociology Review (currently in print).
Next, a study of the use and functions of multilingual practices was conducted on the basis of the corpus. A classification system of these practices was created, discussed at length in an article submitted to the journal Multilingual Margins. These practices were found to fill lexical gaps, fulfil expressive and stylistic functions, mark a speaker’s individual style, and ultimately help YouTube creators reconcile the “global LGBT sociolect” with the language legible to their audiences as they made sense of their identities and experiences for themselves and translated/explained them to others.
Next, a multimodal analysis of selected YouTube videos was undertaken (article accepted for publication in Communication, Culture & Critique), focusing on the strategies of localizing transnational narratives within the Polish socio-cultural context. Polish YouTubers were found to prioritize the collective building of knowledge and providing information on available transition pathways. It was shown how the archiving function of YouTube was employed to document subtle changes they went through over time. Multimodal and multilingual resources were shown to frame the collectively produced knowledge in more individualized ways, and travelling narratives that require the labour of translation/localization were teased apart from stories that might have developed locally.
The third research article, currently in print in the journal Zeszyty Łużyckie, explored the history of Polish online gender transition discourses, conceptualized in terms of two main stages – “Transnet 1.0” of anonymous, text-based blogs documenting individual experiences and “Transnet 2.0” of YouTube videos created by openly trans activists. This phase of the project traced this discursive history against the background of Poland’s own transition from a (nominally) socialist state to a modern democracy, which has not followed a simple, straight-forward path to progress allegedly exemplified by the “West”. The history of attitudes towards the transgender community throughout Poland’s democratic transition and its traces in contemporary online discourses paint a more complex picture.
A vital component of this project was collaboration with academic and non-academic partners and stakeholders. Networks were established and maintained and collaborative activities undertaken with colleagues at Cardiff University, as well as colleagues at the University of Bremen, Groningen, universities in Poznań and Gdańsk and Stony Brook University in New York.
A Facebook page was set up communicate the project to, and keep in touch with, transgender activist networks, mostly in Poland. Collaboration with these networks included exploratory fieldtrips to Poland, online meetings, in-person workshops, participation in an LGBT film festival, and participation in a scientific panel discussion during a public transgender visibility event in Poznań. A full-length project report will be published in Polish in an open-access queer studies journal and disseminated across activist networks involved in these activities.
Next, a study of the use and functions of multilingual practices was conducted on the basis of the corpus. A classification system of these practices was created, discussed at length in an article submitted to the journal Multilingual Margins. These practices were found to fill lexical gaps, fulfil expressive and stylistic functions, mark a speaker’s individual style, and ultimately help YouTube creators reconcile the “global LGBT sociolect” with the language legible to their audiences as they made sense of their identities and experiences for themselves and translated/explained them to others.
Next, a multimodal analysis of selected YouTube videos was undertaken (article accepted for publication in Communication, Culture & Critique), focusing on the strategies of localizing transnational narratives within the Polish socio-cultural context. Polish YouTubers were found to prioritize the collective building of knowledge and providing information on available transition pathways. It was shown how the archiving function of YouTube was employed to document subtle changes they went through over time. Multimodal and multilingual resources were shown to frame the collectively produced knowledge in more individualized ways, and travelling narratives that require the labour of translation/localization were teased apart from stories that might have developed locally.
The third research article, currently in print in the journal Zeszyty Łużyckie, explored the history of Polish online gender transition discourses, conceptualized in terms of two main stages – “Transnet 1.0” of anonymous, text-based blogs documenting individual experiences and “Transnet 2.0” of YouTube videos created by openly trans activists. This phase of the project traced this discursive history against the background of Poland’s own transition from a (nominally) socialist state to a modern democracy, which has not followed a simple, straight-forward path to progress allegedly exemplified by the “West”. The history of attitudes towards the transgender community throughout Poland’s democratic transition and its traces in contemporary online discourses paint a more complex picture.
A vital component of this project was collaboration with academic and non-academic partners and stakeholders. Networks were established and maintained and collaborative activities undertaken with colleagues at Cardiff University, as well as colleagues at the University of Bremen, Groningen, universities in Poznań and Gdańsk and Stony Brook University in New York.
A Facebook page was set up communicate the project to, and keep in touch with, transgender activist networks, mostly in Poland. Collaboration with these networks included exploratory fieldtrips to Poland, online meetings, in-person workshops, participation in an LGBT film festival, and participation in a scientific panel discussion during a public transgender visibility event in Poznań. A full-length project report will be published in Polish in an open-access queer studies journal and disseminated across activist networks involved in these activities.
The project made significant progress beyond state of the art, achieved all its objectives and is expected to continue exerting impact in the years to come. While the research question formulated in the Proposal is believed to have been answered, many questions pertaining to the Polish transgender community and its online/social media practices remain open. The ethical approach to studying vulnerable communities that was developed during the course of this project may be applied by other researchers and inspire further discussion, leading to important innovations in research ethics. The Fellow will continue collaborating in established networks within academia and beyond. Working together with transgender activists and NGOs in Poland and communicating project results to the medical community, policy makers, social workers, teachers and family members of young transgender people, including through the social media platforms they enjoy using, the Fellow hopes to make significant contribution to the scientific and social understanding of gender transition and the language used to narrate it.