Dr Tobias Wiggins (he/him), Canadian academic and multidisciplinary artist, is joining our Gender-Fluid residency in May-June 2024. Find out more about him and his plans for the residency.
Broadly, Tobias’ work aims to address the continued pathologization of gender variance and to support trans- competent care and social advocacy. His arts-based practice has spanned multiple mediums, including documentary film, experimental video, digital storytelling, zines, and most recently, ceramics. At Athabasca University he developed and coordinates the “Trans Lab,” which is an arts-based research lab that produces affirming, intersectional, and anti-oppressive qualitative research.
His research program centers on transgender health and sexuality, queer visual culture, arts-based methodologies, and psychoanalysis.
In the past year, Tobias has begun to develop a project on “transphobic countertransference” – or the ways that unconscious prejudice against transgender people is felt and potentially acted out. During the residency, he will work on developing the arts-based components of this research programme. In particular, he will explore different artistic mediums for the qualitative study of the phenomenon of transphobic countertransference, including ceramics, poetry, storytelling, photography, and digital video.
Tobias writes: “Arts-based research, or “research-creation,” has the capacity to draw us into the intermediate space of what psychoanalysis calls the uncanny. The uncanny is an affective register where you sense that something is deeply familiar, yet is also, somehow, totally unrecognizable. As a researcher using multi-media art, I am able to explore the aspects of transgender experience that, although deeply familiar, are also strangely unreachable through the traditional written forms in academia.”
Studio 88 Artist Residency 