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Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis

Passing

Contemporary science fiction is full of these scenes of shifting from visible to invisible, from William Gibson’s 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 2014¹⁰. What I am advocating is a strategy similar to Chela Sandoval’s differential consciousness, but deals more with the materialities that allow a shift from visibility to invisibility, and considers the space between states or modes. Perhaps a close consideration of this flickering can aid in the project of locating trans women of color in women of color feminism. 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.

Passing is a technique of modulating visibility in order to be perceived as belonging to a particular category. Passing is gesture that brings the contemporary 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 woman¹¹. 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 Glissant has articulated. 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. This relationally inherent to passing indicates the problematics of shaping resistant movements according to passing status, as such a gesture puts the shape of movements in the hands of dominant groups.

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 the co-constitution of agency, which one can see in operation in the moment of passing¹².

Next: Necropower, Opacity and Movement

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The Flicker

The flicker. Created by the cut and the algorithmic computer generated imagery of the morph. The android reaches their hand up to their ear, inputs a code, and flickers from white to black. They could said to be hacking the black and white binary. Yet this is more than a binary transition, as they are flickering from a white artificial skin of plastic or metal, to a human brown skin of an african-american woman. The crossing is in multiple planes, and by slowing the video down in digital video editing software one can see that it also includes a slight movement, a slight change of shape. The scene is quick, a few seconds at the beginning of “Many Moons”, the introductory video for Janelle Monae’s extensive three part concept album, Metropolis, a post-apocalyptic science fiction “emotion picture”¹. What is important here, though, is not the states before or after the flicker, but the ability to modulate visibility. Modulating visibility, which may include changing one’s form, location or appearance, may be called shifting.

Janelle Monae has stated that the main character of her third album, “The Electric Lady”, could “absolutely” by a transgender woman². On June 9, 2014, Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of Time magazine in an article titled “The Transgender Tipping Point”³. As the article’s title conjures, many people saw this as a historic moment indicating a widespread acceptance of transgender people, and the event was made possible by a black trans woman, a trans woman of color, who came to fame through Netflix, a digital streaming video service on the internet. And yet, within days of the issue’s printing two trans women of color in Atlanta, the city that Monae’s label the Wondaland Arts Society calls home, were assaulted on a train, and in the following month four trans women of color were murdered⁴.
How can one understand this moment, in which a trans woman of color is being hailed by so many as advancing “civil rights” and freedom from discrimination and violence, while trans women of color continue to be the number one target of murder and violence in the US among LGBTQ people, and black trans women continue to be the most targeted group among trans women of color.^5,6 Laverne Cox has described this moment as a “state of emergency for trans people”⁷. Her formulation calls for a consideration of Agamben’s state of exception as it applies to human rights discourses, and Mbembe’s reformulation of Agamben’s claims as necropolitcal for colonized subjects, or trans people of color who share histories of colonial violence. The form of contemporary governance has been described by Mbembe as necropolitical in that it no longer only promises to ensure life for citizens, it also promises to guarantee death for those deemed other, including non-citizens who attempt to cross national borders, racialized groups and gender non-conforming people⁸. What enables this violence to exist simultaneously to the discourse of an emerging transgender rights movement is the modulation of visibility. This modulation can be seen enacted by oppressed peoples and by institutions of neoliberal, necropolitical power that define the contemporary moment. A focus on a static state of visibility or invisibility is insufficient to account for what Kara Keeling has referred to as the “digital regime of the image”, characterized by a mutable, flickering, signifier⁹. This mutability is the specialty of trans women of color who face multiple forms of violence on a daily basis, shifting their body and appearance as necessary for survival, at one moment passing invisibly as a cisgender woman and at another standing on stage speaking out against racist, transphobic violence.
Next: Passing
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