Building upon the ideas presented in this talk and the 2021 SA/AS article “Minority sexualities, kinship and non-autological freedom in Montenegro”, Shared Freedom was a collaborative ethnographic study of sexuality and gender in Montenegro, supported by a 2022-2023 Wenner-Gren Engaged Research Grant. Two results of this research are the blog Shared Freedom and the amateur film Trans Magic.
The film “Trans magic” emerged from the collaboration of four trans people, Almir Bećović, Nikola Ilić, Hana Konatar, and Teodor Stojanović, and a cis anthropologist, Čarna Brković. Throughout 2022, the trans members of this research collective led ethnographic diaries, recording their reflections on the families they were born into and the families they chose. This film showcases selected stories from those diaries.
Summary:
Families can suffocate people. After coming out as a trans person, family members often consult fortunetellers, seeking new interpretative frameworks to comprehend transness. The answers they receive vary. Sometimes, fortune-tellers exhibit transphobia, while other times they introduce new interpretative categories, suggesting that family members should love the person for who they are, regardless of their sexuality and gender.
Families can also be nests of freedom. Liberation is a long-term endeavor that requires continuous work on changing oneself-in-the-world. In the best case, families can offer a safe space to enjoy and find respite from the cruelties of the world. The families we choose can become places where we share reproductive labor and care work in a fairer manner. Families that are nests of freedom are often multispecies communities of dogs, cats, plants, and humans.
Creating a family that is a nest of freedom is akin to doing magic. This film describes how this has been done in Podgorica.