Reflecting on the discursive nature of the home, Dr Caterina Nirta’s paper 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.

Reflecting on the discursive nature of the home, Dr Caterina Nirta’s paper 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 image, 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 and fragmented histories in favour of more palatable, unambiguous, no-space and no-time embodiment, easier to recognise and govern.