Digital Identity
Any feminism today that does not explicitly address the violence faced by transgender women of color is incomplete in that it reproduces that violence through exclusion. How can a trans of color feminism, a form of praxis that includes theory, activism and cultural production, be created today to account for the historical absence of trans women in women of color feminism and the continuing fact that trans women of color are the number one target of violence among LGBTQ people in the US? How can this movement be built in a moment being described as post-identity, post-racial and post-feminist? Any claims of “post” rely on an imposition of temporality, in which these categories might be able to be described as “over”: identity is over, race is in the past, feminism is over. Yet Kara Keeling calls attention to the multiple temporalities of possibilities of queer and trans of color lives without violence when she asks,
“firmly rooted in our time, might we nevertheless feel, even without recognition, the rhythms of the poetry from a future in which M — might be? Might we allow those rhythms to move us to repel the quotidian violence through which we currently are defined without demanding of the future from which they come that it redeem our movements now or then?” (Keeling 2009, 579)
To account for some of these claims of “post”, one can look to Keeling’s work to reconcile women of color feminism, with the contemporary regime of the digital image through the equation “I = Another”. Advocating a digital identity politics, Keeling states “‘I = Another’ does not jettison identification as a political strategy but introduces difference into the equation,” and “this formulation of identity as difference captures the sense of transformation, rather than rupture, that characterizes many liberation movements in their contemporary configurations and describes the processes of identity and identification facilitated through the media that sustain, educate, challenge, and recollect those movements” (Keeling 2011, 56). Keeling's equation may be seen as a simple form of algorithm, which are usually made up of a series of instructions, including variable declarations and flow control statements, and her description of the formulation points to the digital media that is constitutive of both individual and collective identities today. The operation of the shift can be seen as a basic element of algorithms as well, such as when bits are shifted to compute mathematical operations, or when the contents of memory are shifted from one location to another in assignment statements. Circuits can also be used to embody algorithms, either with analog electronic components, such as wire and logic gates, or with stitched conductive thread. While the shift and the stitch are operators I am proposing as elements of a trans of color poetics, the algorithmic is an aspect of contemporary identities that is both within them and emerges from them. Algorithms both constitute the media that inform how subjects and movements are formed, as well as being created by those subjects on a daily basis as they form heuristics about how to interact with the world.
To advance this formulation of identity in difference that Keeling uses to reconcile Audre Lorde’s “house of difference” with algorithmic media, interactive digital media, I look to Tara McPherson’s claim that analyses of the visual representations of digital media are incomplete as long as they do not account for the code that produces them (2012, 35). This claim extends queer of color critique’s claims that analyses that are do not account for the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality are incomplete.
There are many dangers to consider when using an algorithm as a model of identity or a description of a strategy for avoiding violence. Certainly, one doesn't want to be become an emotionless android who simply follows a program. Further, the danger of internalizing the very tools being used to control populations by contemporary governments seems clear. My aim in introducing the algorithmic as a concept to model identity is to take advantage of mental models available in order to theorize and strategize with. Recognizing that the algorithm is a tool that can be used for oppression or for liberation, it is still a model available for thought, like mathematics, physics or physical metaphors. Further, as I elaborate further in later chapters, algorithms can be useful models outside the realm of the digital, by looking to the similarity of an algorithm and, for example, a recipe for cooking arepas.
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