Abigail Hebert

Last Friday, Elias McEaneney ’27 unveiled his Student Voices collection, “Working / Out / Gender,” in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library (H-L). The collection’s focus is on the intersection of labor and gender, an area of study that McEaneney has been interested in for a long time. He began working to put the collection together by approaching Humanities and Media Librarian Carmen Greenlee last spring, and later spent hours over the summer researching which pieces to include.

McEaneney spoke at the opening reception about his process of finding the theme of the collection. Much of it comes from his own personal experience making sense of his gender through an academic lens.

“I started thinking about my relationship with gender…. I am trans [female to male], and I started socially transitioning in early high school,” McEaneney said. “That’s something that has been a very active process in my life. I’ve had to grapple with what masculinity means to me. And I paused and I was like, ‘What else has shaped the way I look at the world [in] the same way?’”

The collection includes a vast amount of material, from academic sociology texts to literary fiction to movies and television like “Mulan” and “Breaking Bad.” Many of the academic texts were core texts to McEaneney, like “Who’s Afraid of Gender” by Judith Butler, an especially important piece of academic work for him growing up.

“I grew up in a more rural area outside of Austin. It’s better than a rural area outside of basically any other city in Texas. But, still, it’s rural, and it’s Texas,” McEaneney said. “Having some of those frank discussions, and seeing not only my experiences, but also the experiences of a lot of my peers kind of reflected in [Butler] was very eye-opening for me. It’s part of the reason that I have a soft spot for nonfiction.… I love seeing the very real stories and histories within that too.”

Also important to the collection’s conception was McEaneney’s involvement with disability justice. McEaneney is the president of the Disabled Students Association, as well as an active member of the College’s Accessibility Task Force.

“Disability and disability justice [are] very foundational to the way that I look at the world and look at advocacy in general. If there was a third kind of hidden theme in here that’s not as explicit, it is definitely disability,” McEaneney said.

McEaneney emphasized how disability justice centers bodily autonomy, a theme he brings to his gender, labor and general activist work as well.

“One of the big core tenants [of disability justice] is centered around the almost intersectional nature of bodily autonomy.… I think every effort towards liberation or toward improving one’s circumstances has to be built on some level of respect for that community’s autonomy,” McEaneney said.

McEaneney is the sixth student to participate in the Student Voices program at H-L. When speaking about his process in an interview with the Orient, McEaneney explained how important previous collections were in inspiring his work.

“Seeing how [past curators] connected their personal experiences to their Bowdoin experience or their academic path, and seeing how they were very courageously talking about their own experiences … that has caused sometimes tension [and] sometimes this really beautiful growth,” McEaneney said.

Greenlee, who worked as an advisor for McEaneney’s summer work, finds the collection immensely inspirational. She noted that, while most student curators order about 80 percent of the pieces they’d like for their collection and find the other 20 percent in H-L, McEaneney did the opposite.

“[McEaneney] brings a level of intellectual curiosity, that tremendous experience and exploring…. He pulled together something that is really representational and inspiring as well, highlighting the kinds of things we have in our collection,” Greenlee said.

During the opening reception, Greenlee brought up the possibility of creating a more expansive online collection, which McEaneney is excited to work on.

“I want to talk to people, want to go bother some more professors, stuff like that…. I can’t necessarily dedicate hours and hours at a time multiple days a week like I was [over the summer]…. A silly little part of me is like, ‘Can I get it over 100? Can I get 100 items in that online collection?” McEaneney said.

“Working / Out / Gender” will be on view for the rest of the school year, and McEaneney hopes that it will inspire the next student curator into building their own collection of work.

“I hope my collection is able to inspire someone else to go up to [Greenlee] or somebody and be like, ‘How do I do that?’” McEaneney said.