Trance Sans by A. Cecilia Bautista

k k k kk k kk k

k k k Trance Sans

Trance Sans

by Ana Cecilia Bautista

font anatomy of the source font

Braketed serif Second vertical stroke curves inwards

Cap Height

Baseline

Rhap

Upturned tail, emulates calligra

Expressive and elongated leg extending to next letter

Slanted strokes on most lowercase stems

Transitional bracketed serif

Slight diagonal stress with overshoot

psody

Ascender

High stroke contrast

X-Height

Humanist serif

Descender

aphy

Teardrop Terminal

Bembo Std, Francesco Griffo, 1496

uppercase letters

C AA BB C D EE FF GG HH D I I JJ KK LL M M R R

N O O PP Q Q N T UU VV SS T W XX Y Y W ZZ

lowercase letters

abcd efghi jklmno pqrstuv w x y z e af bg ch di j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

numerals

0

0 9 0 9 8 1 1 8 2 7 2 7 3 6 3 6 4 5 4 5 5 4 5 4 6 3 6 3 7 2 7 2 8 1 8 1 9 0 9

88

0

0

symbols

.,:;!?'" “ ”« »}_&#@ ™©§%* +-™ = < >/(){}[]€

say, say, otha

brot a

brot

tha b

,

evolution

g

final letterform

source font & skeleton

applied brush

Bembo

Trance

brushes -163deg. 35% 9pt

Thickest brush used as a base for almost every single character. Thiner brushes where then applied to harmonise the whole font and to balance the weight between letters such as capital M, N and H and lowercase letters related to b (d,p,q) and n (m,h,u)

Stem looked too thick compared to bowl, slightly thiner brush applied on it to create balance within the final shape

-163deg. 35% 7.5 pt

Uppercase letters such as S and Z and lowercase letters like h, k, m, z and those related to v (w,y) consisit solely of one stroke, for their shapes appeared to be too heavy at some angles in comparison to the other letters that were using the exact same brush

-166deg. 35% 4pt

-163deg. 35% 7pt

Specially thin brushes can be found at characters such as multiplication/ division sign, punctuation and diacritic signs related to comma and apostrophe (, ; “”‘’) and at lowercase i and j's tittle

font sizes in use 22pt/25pt

12pt/16pt

History at the boundaries of gender Charles Hamilton, a travelling medicine-seller in 18th-century

Somerset, was a dapper, charming suitor, wooing a landlady’s niece and settling into the role of husband until, in 1746, the newlywed bride denounced their marriage as fraudulent.

After a Glastonbury jury ruled Hamilton had impersonated a man, news of the young mountebank’s trial and shaming led Henry Fielding to cash in with a sensationalised work. This now largely forgotten entry to Fielding’s catalogue of reprobates and rakes gave newspapers a term for people like Hamilton, who had been assigned female at birth, lived as men and legally married women: the ‘female husband’.

11pt/15pt

10pt/14pt

The challenges of interpreting the fragments of evidence about these people’s lives, written by those who had the social and economic order of marriage to defend, becomes in Jen Manion’s hands a masterclass in historical rigour, empathy and craft.

Joining Hamilton in this transatlantic history are a cast of figures brought to the page through new digital technologies and exhaustive archival research: the innkeeper James Howe, a ‘model citizen’ until an extortionist forced her to adopt female identity to clear her name; labourers like James Allen and Henry Stoake heading working-class households; cross-dressing soldiers and sailors, some well-known to history and others not; the independently wealthy Albert Guelph, the frontiersman Joseph Lobdell and the disparate individuals whom the press started calling ‘female husbands’ in the late 19th century as this social category born of 18th-century property relations started to break down.

All were objects of fascination for the literary culture. None could continue their lives as men after the events that brought them into the historical record.

Writers then and now have held them up as exemplars of rebellious women, while more recently others have celebrated them as ‘trans ancestors’, or tried to reveal their ‘real’ gender. Manion, in contrast, sets cis (non-trans) people’s fascination with trans people’s identities aside.

Refusing to be ‘bogged down’ in details of how female husbands and their wives took bodily pleasure "Female Husbands“ questions are instead steeped in trans and

gender-non-conforming people’s daily lives (of which Manion too has some experience) and the press, literary and legal sources that mediated their practices and relationships.

It is radical enough to sidestep, as Manion does, the ‘distraction’ of pronouncing on the logistics of couples’ sexual relations, let alone to allow that their crossing of gender boundaries might sometimes have made them objects of desire. Manion’s book is just as attentive to how these lives unfolded within systems of race, empire and domination, noting the violence of settler colonialism that enabled Lobdell’s livelihood on the frontier and the entanglements with slavery surrounding the Howes’ docklands inn.

When Manion refers to the book’s subjects as ‘they’, it is not to cram them into a 21st-century non-binary identity, but to convey the boundlessness with which the 20th-century writer Leslie Feinberg wrote of gender: to force them into female categories they demonstrably rejected in life traduces their efforts, yet too many of the hus-

bands moved between male and female 10pt/14pt gender expressions for ‘he’ to apply to them all. By holding ‘the gender that people embraced, negotiated and became during their lives’ as the closest historians can come to truth, Manion’s writing is a beacon for representing gender variance in the past.

If ‘Female Husbands’ deals with a period that historians once struggled to make legibly queer, Barry Reay’s ‘Trans America’ picks up the story of sexual and gender indeterminacy when modern identity terms coalesced. Reay’s main interests are the emergence of ‘transsexual’ as a category in the 1960s and 1970s for those desiring surgical intervention, the 1990s ‘transgender turn’ when gender non-conforming people like Feinberg defined themselves outside conventional gender systems altogether, and the blurring of boundaries between sexual and gender identity that Reay worries may be forgotten if ‘trans sexual’ and ‘transgender’ become overly fixed categories themselves.

Female Husbands relies more on the author’s own archival

being crossed long before today’s identity labels emerged,

research , which covers the shifting transmasculine identities

it is Female Husbands that breaks new ground for what and

of the 1960s. While both books recover stories that should

how historians can find out about those lives.

7pt/12pt

not be forgotten and show sexual and gender boundaries

Catherine Baker/ Published in History Today Volume 70 Issue 5 May 2020. (2020, May 5). Rediscovering Trans History. Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://webcache.googleusercontent.com

50pt

39pt

Sé y deja ser Sé y deja ser

30pt

Sé y deja ser

23pt

Sé y deja ser

20pt

Sé y deja ser

17pt

Sé y deja ser

11pt

Sé y deja ser

Vivi e lascia vivere

13pt

Vivi e lascia vivere

18pt

Vivi e lascia vivere

21pt

Vivi e lascia vivere

25pt

Vivi e lascia vivere

31pt

Vivi e lascia vivere

typographic scale

34pt

Non tapered finials emulating calligraphic strokes

Wildly varying letter widths presenting strong stroke contrast

Cap Height

Dysph < >

Baseline

Small decorative tail with very narrow arc

Sharp cut at borderline

Open aperture and calligraphic terminals

font anatomy

Smaller overshoot at x-height than at baseline

Tittle slightly higher than cap height line

<

horia

Ascenderline

double-story lowercase

X-Height

>

Descenderline (y) Descenderline (p)

Diagonal and moderate stress with axis curves inclined to the left Upturning spur

Burly curved bowl

font characteristics

pdc% Wavy details on most round letters or signs.

Delicate distortion on capital letters such as A,H,K,N,R,U,X,Z. Straight lines become curves instead (for crossbars & diagonal strokes).

Lowercase a,g and k are unique double-store characters, since they show their own (original) distortion.

f

% Inside-pulling distortion at bowls (d,b,p,q), g's loop, c,e and a's counter.

Uppercase B, @ sign and numbers like 2,3,8 show a strong and tight curvature at the right top.

Uppercase/ascender letters end up at very sharp and straight cuts, while lowercase letters present more gentle, calligraphic-lookalike cuts and terminals.

AHR

TRA TRA TRA LIV LIV LIV mat mat mat

ANS ANS ANS VES VES VES tter tter tter

BPR

Inicial P shape, manipulated to fit letters

NM

Initial stem and serifs, distorted diagonals

EF

Extra arm added to original shape

OQCGD Same roundness, size and proportions; wave creation from C to G

IJ HL Same stem, inverted serifs for H and L

S KZ Independent letter shape

font relations

oec bdpq nmhur vwy ilj tf as g kxz

"o“ shape as basis; little pull towards the inside for e and c

"b“ shape mirrored for "d“ shape; details on bowl and different line weight added afterwards to crate distinction

"n“ shape, shoulder line weight and cuts kept for m,h and u.

Stem kept for r, but its shoulder became shorter and thicker

"v“ as basis for w and y‘s creation, "w“ middle arm cut off diagonally.

Added tail (descender) for "y.“

"i“ stem and tittle repeats at "j“, while stem is elongated for "l“. t and f‘s crossbar is identical in proportions

unique/ independent letter shapes

k k kkk kkk k Typeface designed by Ana Cecilia Bautista

Prof. Antonino Benincasa Andreas Trenker Emilio Grazzi Font created with Illustrator & Fontself

k k k k

Faculty of Design and Art Free University of Bolzano - Bozen WUP 2020/21