Contemporary science fiction is full of scenes of shifting from visible to invisible, from William Gibson’s book Neuromancer with the Panther Moderns media terrorist organization who wear mimetic polycarbon suits, to Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell with thermoptic camouflage. These scenes can be understood as speculative design precursors to the nanotechnological efforts to create materials which can bend light in order create invisibility for soldiers which made significant progress in March 2014 (Gao, 2014). This project uses methods from cultural studies, transgender studies, media studies and the materialisms of Deleuze and Barad to consider the politics, aesthetics and ethics of passing and translucency. What I am advocating is a strategy similar to Chela Sandoval’s differential consciousness, a strategy of shifting between different oppositional modes that had been used by women of color feminism, but deals more with the specific materiality of a shift from visibility to invisibility, and considers the space between these two states. Perhaps a close consideration of shifting can aid in the project of locating trans women of color in women of color feminism. 

Passing is a technique of modulating visibility in order to be perceived as belonging to a particular category, and there is an extensive body of literature on racial passing (Butler, Nakamura, Nyong’o, Wald). Passing is gesture that brings the contemporary racialized trans subject into an analogous relationship with the flickering digital signifier, where the performative utterance of making one’s body be read in a certain way reveals both its mutability and reveals that one’s body can be a sign with more than one signifier, like the digital image. 

Passing is not simply a question of being or becoming visible or invisible, but instead a question of attaining a particular form of visibility. Often, for trans women of color, the question of passing can be determined by the amount of light and the color of light reflected from one’s face and neck. This light can determine one’s ability to survive or not, as in the case of Islan Nettles, a black trans woman who was murdered in New York after her catcaller decided that she was a trans woman (Out Magazine, 2014). These instances of violence recall with undeniable force that passing is not simply a question of identity, but a poetics of relation, a politico-aesthetic articulated by Edouard Glissant. Passing involves both the modulation of visibility by the person who is passing but also the reception of that image by the viewer who makes a decision about whether or not a person fits into a particular category. 

Passing requires an observer, it involves the modulation of light, but that light needs to reach a retina, and in this moment the quantum mechanics of light are necessary to consider, which is why researchers working on invisibility cloaks are focusing on nanomaterials that are small enough to operate on quantum principles. Karen Barad has proposed a concept of relationally between identities based on these principles that she refers to as “intra-action”, describing agency as co-constitutive between people and objects, which one can see in operation in the moment of passing (Zylinska and Kember, 186). As passing relies on the judgement of an observer, its usefulness for a racial or gender coalition politics must be questioned. If our value to each other is defined by our passing status, we are leaving our political definitions in the hands of those who may wish us harm. By focusing on the moment of shifting, I hope to highlight the uncertain boundaries of the categories of people of color and trans women, focusing on the agency of people to self-identify with those categories, when they prove useful for building collective justice.

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 lives (“Looking for M-“, 579). 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” (“Passing for Human”, 248). 

The moment when one fails to pass and is murdered for failing 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 often 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. Both racial and gender binaries are hacked in the sense that they are opened up to multiple possibilities in the moment of shifting. The possible future that Keeling describes, where trans black youth may be able to live, and live without violence, holds open a space of potential similar to the way that sub atomic particles cannot be absolutely located in time and space, and thus exist in possibility space, such as an electron cloud. The moment of passing, or shifting, exists in a space of multiple possible futures, but as Barad explains, until the moment of measurement, these multiple possibilities all exist with equal reality. (Barad, Kindle Locations 5650-5652). Digital renderings of in-between moments of shifting, with their uncertainty and multiplicity, may be the most accurate representations of reality. 

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. Prosser’s main contention is that Butler criticizes Xtravaganza as reproducing heteronormativity for desiring a life in which she would be safe. Butler’s use of Xtravaganza’s story is intended to display the limits of performativity. Instead of “liberation from hegemonic constraint”, Butler says, Xtravaganza’s denaturalization of sex ultimately results in her death, ultimately reinscribing heterosexuality (91). Prosser points to the ethical value of Butler’s theory, in that it values transgression above a desire for normalcy, even at the expense of Xtravaganza’s life. 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” (Butler, 90). In fact, Xtravaganza was of Italian descent, and as such was not Latina, but white. Yet her misreading by Butler highlights the uncertainty of passing as white or non-white, the common conflation of Latinas and Italians, and the way that passing can shape historical record (IMDB). 

Butler rightly points to the ways that the violence of racism still affects cisgender Black women. Yet when she states that Black trans women’s “‘identification’ is composed of a denial, an envy, which is the envy of a phantasm of black women”, she repeats a common trope in queer and feminist theory where trans women are understood as deluded or suffering from false consciousness. I propose, instead, that Xtravaganza’s death was the result of a calculated risk that trans women 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. There are many variables one must calculate in the act of passing in order to avoid different forms of violence, such as whether or not one will be read as cisgender, black, latina, italian or white, and how these interact. While the intersectional model articulates the everyday process that racialized trans women go through when they consider the ways these characteristics interact, and the assemblage model helps us to understand these variables in motion, curving over time, an algorithmic model can add detail to the way this calculation may work over time, in different locations, in different kinds of light, in different socio-economic contexts, or based on any number of changing variables at a given time. Mattie Brice’s game “Mainichi” allows the player to experience a small simulation of this experience. In the game, one wakes up in the morning, and must decide, should I wear makeup or not, should I dress up or not, what choices might result in more or less violence? Still, one can never truly know whether one is passing or not. Both cisgender black and latina women as well as trans women are subject to the unknowably complex relational logic of passing. The uncertainty is a place of equivalence between trans of color experience and digital media, with pixels that change too rapidly to perceive, and is made visible and audible in the moment of the morph, the fade, the flicker, and the shift in Monae’s and other science fiction works. 

Next: Necropower, Opacity and Movement

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