Trans of Color Poetics and Lesbian Potentiality

Session Submission Type: Experimental Session

Abstract

In this author session, a panel of trans and queer media studies scholars will respond to the first books Poetic Operations (Fall 2021) by micha cárdenas and Lesbian Potentiality (Spring 2022) by Rox Samer, both of which are forthcoming from Duke University Press and both of which theorize liberatory methods of thinking with and through activist art and media.

Poetic Operations proposes algorithmic analysis as a method to articulate a trans of color poetics, by focusing on digital art that contributes to the survival of trans and gender non-conforming people of color. Learning from, and extending, intersectionality, algorithmic analysis includes studying existing algorithms, writing new ones, and identifying operators and operations. This book extends transgender studies through decolonial theory, women of color feminism, queer of color critique and media theory. In order to decolonize algorithms, an algorithm can be understood to have a similar form, and effect, as a ritual. Thus, the focus is shifted to understanding the actions, or operations, in trans of color art, rather than the categories. Poetic Operations focuses on identifying the survival strategies trans people of color have used for centuries, which are expressed in poetic gestures in artworks ranging from poetry, to music videos, performance and digital games. Through prison abolitionist safety networks, transnational performance, community-based design and collaboration to build solidarity, the artworks in this book work to reduce violence against trans, gender nonconforming, travesti and two-spirit people. The operations of cutting, shifting and stitching are articulated in chapters on Giuseppe Campuzano, Janelle Monáe, Mattie Brice, as well as the author’s own artworks, considered as practice-based research.

Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s explores how 1970s feminists took up the sign of the lesbian in their creative and cultural reimagining of gender and sexual existence. Feminist art, literature, music, and films circulated through feminist communities, encouraging the mass imagination of what being lesbian could come to mean. This book turns specifically to feminist film and video and feminist science fiction literature, finding them to have facilitated this work of imagination in an exceptional manner. Offering a queer and trans study of the archives of feminist media cultures, it reveals that what “lesbian” signified in the 1970s extended beyond tangible and immediate possibilities to signal the potential to completely reconfigure social life. In the lesbian futures feminist filmmakers, science fiction writers, and their audiences and readers imagined, the creation of the meaning of lesbian existence would not cease but would look, sound, and feel entirely different than it did in the 1970s present. In short, the Lesbian, under the purview of potentiality, becomes a heuristic for illuminating the contingency of history. Lesbian potentiality provides queer studies but also transgender studies and feminist, queer, and transgender media studies with a way of connecting potentialities past and present that neither obfuscates, nor reifies their differences. It is a method of illuminating social movement history that also attends to privations—the what was and the what could have been.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association 2021

Chair

• micha cardenas, University of California Santa Cruz

Panelists

• Rox Samer, Clark University

• Susan Stryker, Stanford University

• Alexandra Juhasz, CUNY Brooklyn College

• Jian Chen, The Ohio State University

• micha cardenas, University of California Santa Cruz