aura Crawford is a 24-year-old thinker, drag king, poet and work-in-progress who grew up in Kingston, Nova Scotia, population 3000. She is a self-identified transgendered, big bodied PhD student who for me embodies many of the current waves within the queer movement and is an important voice regarding the shape of things to come for all of society.
With a kind, humourous and giving personality, she challenges my assumptions, un-thought-out niceties and conclusions and has led me to think more as well as differently.
Currently living in Edmonton, Laura is doing her PhD at the U of A, which a University of Western Ontario prof lovingly told her was home to “Canada’s queerest English department.” Her dissertation is on 20th Century Architecture and Transgender.
Laura’s use of architecture is not just a clever cross-discipline look at the transgender experience but a useful employment that draws upon the practical and metaphorical aspects of the word. Architecture is the science or art of building, and when coupled with the already used metaphor of construction to examine everything from our identity to our reality, transgender can be seen more as an “artful practice of the body rather than something from the inside having to be dealt with on the outside,” as she says.
She has sectioned her study into two prongs: the first looks at architecture considering transgender, as it exists now. The best example of a building with transgender sensibility is Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbo, Spain. For Laura the much talked about Bilbo Affect has nothing to do with “starchitecture” and everything to do with how a building can embody ideas beyond the hetronormative ones. Gehry celebrates curves in exchange for straight lines (no pun intended) and creates confusion by blurring the lines between exits and entrances (pun intended).
The second prong of Laura’s work examines ideas about being born trans and the idea of constructing a trans identity. Using a house as a metaphor, she explains that in a way we are all given a home and how we chose to interact and inhabit determines how we choose what the house looks like, how we interact with the house and how the house is part of the world. “Transgender reminds people that there is a responsibility to use our bodies to intervene in our own lives,” she says.
At 5’9”, with short, wavy Superman hair and with a tie around her neck, Laura is proudly androdgous. Her appearance is a culmination of her physical, gender and sexual self. “I wasn’t born transgender” says Laura. “Transgender is not separate from being big or separate from who I want to fuck—when I was small I was a different gender.”
The physical body and desire are connected for Laura—she thinks we do a disservice to ourselves by trying to divorce them from each other and see desire as only something “natural.”
As a founding member of Alberta Beef, a Drag King troupe born out of Judith Halberstam’s 2007 visit to the U of A, Laura is able to put theory into practice. With a fluid crew of between seven and nine members, Alberta Beef playfully and poignantly examines the spectrum of masculinity and femininity. Beef’s legendary and crammed shows at Prism have been an eye opener and an opportunity for Edmontonians to consider gender and the role of drag in a broader sense.
One day over cheese buns (on the glamourous 109th Street Save on Foods patio), I ask Laura why she thinks there is so much transphobia within the queer community. “Transgender causes anxiety because it challenges assumptions and identities like gay and straight,” she answers. For example, I suggest, if a guy is gay, and we assume this means he is attracted to masculine traits among other things, why is he not attached, or at least open to being attracted, to Kathleen Turner? Oprah? Martina Navratilova? (And since we are inquiring—how many lesbians are attracted to Kalan Porter?)
As the alphabet soup of acronyms expands to include the growing diversity within the queer community, transgender illustrates the ineffectiveness of our current labels and allows us to consider we might never have enough. Laura’s lens on transgender helps us to go further and empowers us to examine our personal role in the construction of our own bodies and attractions freeing us in many ways from the victimhood of circumstance.
“Questioning is something that can be done,” she argues, “it can be rewarding, fun and change your life.” The problem is not enough people take the time to do their own investigations because in our society, Laura says, “we always have to know who we are—it’s hard to let things remain in question, yet those moments I didn’t know lead me to some of my greatest moments of understanding.
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