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Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis

Female Android Hackers and Femme Camouflage

As Anonymous demonstrate, the ability to shift between informatic opacity and spectacular visibility is what matters most for a contemporary political movement to enact change within a neocolonial regime facilitated by global digital networks. Monae’s character Cindi Mayweather demonstrates this ability to shift from spectacular to invisible in many ways. One way is that over time, her gender presentation shifts between android gender on the cover of “Metropolis: The Chase Suite”, butch or masculine in “The ArchAndroid”, and femme in “The Electric Lady”. In the narrative described, in the ArchAndroid, she is “the Alpha Platinum 9000, a droid optimized for rock performance, often cloned but never equaled. Cindi is on the run, having fallen in love with the human millionaire Anthony Greendown – a pairing which, in Metropolis, is against the law”21. Yet in The Electric Lady, Monae is exploring the history of black feminists such as Assata Shakur, living in hiding and having a movement of people not in hiding who are in solidarity with her.

In the video for “Primetime” we see Cindi Mayweather, both an android and a programmer of androids, hacking black female androidsand presenting a femme gender appearance. One might describe this as a kind of femme camouflage, exploiting the perception of femmes as ineffective or unimportant to hide her revolutionary anti-droid slavery agenda. This femme disturbance of the logics of visibility and representation recalls Keeling’s black femme function. Still, Mayweather’s android gender seeps through in the wide eyed gaze Monae performs in photographs, a kind of gender presentation that exceeds racialized expressions of masculinity or femininity. Monae states “"The lesbian community has tried to claim me… But I only date androids”22. Her embodiment may be seen to borrow from Little Richard, another black, queer, gender non conforming figure central to developing the style of rock and roll that Monae’s music follows at times. Yet given the way that her performance of android is at times presented as her own life story, Monae’s gender presentation may be seen as a form of Taquiyya, a shia form of what Nandita Biswas Mellamphy calls “hypercamouflage” that advocates complete invisibility through living among the enemy²³. Mayweather’s underground life in “The Electric Lady” follows this pattern.

In the video for “Primetime”, the interface through which Mayweather programs her android gogo dancers is a translucent interface which appears in the surface of their skin. Offering a possible reimagining of the idea of This Bridge Called My Back as this interface called my back, the backs of these androids are interfaces for their types of movement, and the interfaces are translucent, able to be hidden or made visible in an instant. Throughout the video, translucent interfaces hover around the performers. While these interfaces have been made popular through films such as Minority Report, Monae’s use of them materializes a future that sees black people as the operators of powerful computing devices.

Further, Mayweather’s control over the transformation her own body imagines the black trans person, with the ability to shift their shape and color outside of gender norms, as the paradigmatic example of a futurity beyond the racialized apocalypse of android hunting, brought on by android intelligence surpassing that of humans, which is referred to as the singularity and Monae says is her vision of the future24. In an interview with io9.com she articulates that her goal is not just to create speculative fiction, but to prepare people to be able to survive the impending apocalypse. To do so, Metropolis relies on histories of slavery, colonization and black feminism to create models for resistance in a future where computing devices not only surround us and surveil us, where they are on our backs, where they make constitute us, where we are media.

Next: "Post", Algorithmic Time

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Necropower, Opacity and Movement
These questions resonate with necropolitical gravity for masculine trans or gender non-conforming people of color as well, like Sakia Gunn, a masculine black woman who some described as trans and who Kara Keeling looks to in order to consider the temporality of black queer lives¹³. These moments reveal how the trans or gender non conforming person of color becomes less than human, becomes disposable. The flickering moment where Cindi Mayweather demonstrates how the first necessary step for Mayweather to become visible is for her to shift from inhuman to human, from android skin to a skin that passes as human. Keeling ties the digital to a specifically black subjectivity with the multiple temporality of many simultaneous possible futures, saying “even the European has been simply passing for ‘the human’ all along and… black subjectivity and black culture, those very concepts created to serve as ‘the human’s' Other, provide the most fertile soil to till for ways to understand what it means to be "human" in the digital age”¹⁴. The moment of failing to pass that results in death reveals the complex interplay of race and gender in which non-white gender non-conforming bodies are seen as less than human and therefore disposable and gender-non-conforming bodies are seen as pathologically flawed and therefore less than human and therefore disposable, yet bodies of color that meet white beauty standards are seen as passing for human. The black and white binary which promises death for black women is temporarily subverted through the strategic use of white beauty standards by black trans women who are able to pass as cisgender women.
The meaning of racialized passing has been an issue of contention between transgender studies and queer theory, such as in the writing of Judith Butler and Jay Prosser, yet Prosser’s critique of Butler does not address the interplay of race that Butler describes as playing a major role in Venus Xtravaganza’s death. Butler sees Xtravaganza’s death as “a tragic misreading of the social map of power” which “falsely constitutes black women as a site of privilege”, by someone who “cannot overcome being a Latina”¹⁵. I propose that Xtravaganza’s death was the result of a calculated risk that trans women of color understand they are taking, that her reading of the social map of power was accurate, because there is a fundamental uncertainty in the act of passing. One can never truly know whether one is passing or not, and cisgender black and latina women as well as trans women are subject to the unknowable relational logic of passing. The uncertainty is a place of equivalence between trans of color experience and digital media, and is made visible and audible in the moment of the morph, the fade, the shift in Monae’s and other science fiction works. Many planes in the assemblage of passing intersect to determine whether a trans woman of color will live or die.
Achille Mbembe describes how necropower finds its model in the colonial regime of governance, saying
the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity. Instead, colonial terror constantly intertwines with colonially generated fantasies of wilderness and death and fictions to create the effect of the real... As the Palestinian case illustrates, late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical.¹⁶
Mbembe points to Foucault’s definition of racism as the basic structure of a mode of politics that finds it’s purest contemporary example in the occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian resistance are also a remarkable example of the modulation of visibility, in that only through sheer invisibility can one hide dozens of rockets in an occupied territory as heavily policed and surveilled as Palestine. Yet for the resistance to survive and achieve efficacy in the regime of networked digital images, they must be able to modulate between states of absolute invisibility and spectacular visibility as their rockets fly in the air captured by the digital cameras of reporters and distributed through global media networks on television and the internet all around the world.
On July 18^th, 2014, Anonymous, the global hacktivist movement, performed #OpSaveGaza in solidarity with Palestine, a “coordinated cyber-attack” which has “taken down over a thousand of crucial Israeli websites”¹⁷. Artist and theorist Zach Blas has written about the relevance of Anonymous for queer politics, calling techniques like theirs “informatic opacity”, the ability to be opaque to informatic surveillance as seen in the NSA’s prism program and biometric facial recognition systems. Blas’ writing is based on decolonial theorist Edouard Glissant’s writing. Blas writes “Glissant’s aesthetico-ethical philosophy of opacity… is paradigmatic: his claim that ‘a person has the right to be opaque’ does not concern legislative rights but is rather an ontological position that lets exist as such that which is immeasurable, nonidentifiable, and unintelligible in things”¹⁸. What I would add to Blas and Glissant’s ideas is that the ability to be nonidentifiable is exercised daily by trans people who simply pass, or by femmes of color who can be unnoticed when passing through a dangerous situation. What matters most is not the moment of being opaque or invisible, or the moment of being visible and therefore representable, as so much identity politics has focused on, but the ability to shift between being visible and invisible. Following Deleuze, Bergson, Massumi and Keeling, I am arguing for a focus on movement over position in order to account for the contemporary realities of the fields of mediation that form the ground for contemporary western identities, but also to account for the lives of trans people of color for whom shapeshifting is not only a desire, but a necessity for survival.
Yet the modulation of visibility is not only a form of resistance, it is also a form of oppression, as Mbembe points out in the case of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which relies on techniques of “hologrammatization” and creates a situation in which “invisible killing is added to outright executions”, and a discussion of androids would be incomplete without a consideration of drones, that operate with invisibility only belied by aurality, though a deep consideration is beyond the scope of this paper¹⁹. Relying on Fanon’s accounts of colonial space, Mbembe adds to this that the goal of the occupation is to “render any movement impossible”20.
Next: Female Android Hackers and Femme Camouflage
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