Trans/materiality: Digital Media and the Production of Bodies
2021-11
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Trans/materiality: Digital Media and the Production of Bodies
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2021-11
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There are many instances in scholarly writing and pop culture in which transgender identity is invoked as a metaphor for the fragmenting, decentering, and virtualizing effects of digital media and technologies, contributing to cultural tropes that imagine transgender people as unreal, futuristic, and unknowable. In response, this dissertation argues for an understanding of the link between digital technologies and the post-1990s iteration of transgender as a material, historical assemblage composed (at least partially) of media elements, bodies, and systems such as surveillance culture and big data that participate in processes of gendering and racialization. In attempting to rethink the trans/digital technology assemblage in a way that accounts for the material reality of trans bodies, practices, and lived realities and the material stuff of digital culture, each chapter engages with a specific material aspect of new media. Engaging with each of these different types of media necessitated using slightly different methods in each chapter including social research (primarily interviews), cultural analysis, and autoethnography. Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, which proposes a posthuman model of performativity that takes into account nonhuman entities, is employed throughout the project. This makes possible a nuanced theorization of the trans body, one that does not stop at the enactment of gender at the body’s surface but also takes into account the way that trans bodies materialize in concert with a host of other matter, beings, and forces, including digital media and technologies. At times my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters produce a productive trans friction that creates new possibilities for trans modes of being. At other times, my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters result in transnormative efforts to eliminate friction. The variability of these findings exposes the incongruousness of the trans/digital technology metaphor which attempts to fix transness as a stable entity that can stand in for specific qualities of digital technologies and media. Instead, this project shows that transness is situational and that the relationship between transness and digital technologies is multivalent.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2021. Major: Theatre Arts. Advisors: Margaret Werry, Sonali Pahwa. 1 computer file (PDF); 233 pages.
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Gentleman, Rye. (2021). Trans/materiality: Digital Media and the Production of Bodies. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/226651.
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