The Transgender Internet
My monograph-in-progress, The Transgender Internet, explores the role of digital technologies in constructing what is now called “gender identity.” I argue that the outsized role of transgender individuals in building the infrastructure of the early internet explains how key aspects of what has become digital culture-- pseudonymous communication, transnational organizing tactics, and vernacular counter-surveillance practices, to name a few-- emerge from trans cultural logics. Furthermore, my book intervenes in digital media history and transgender studies by exploring how white Anglophone trans digital activists argued against alternative gender formations, leveraging the Global North’s networked infrastructure in order to build “trans politics” in their own image.
Image: AEGIS Newsletter, Dallas Denny personal archive. NB there is no evidence to suggest that Tama Janowitz is transgender.
Technoprecarious
Technoprecarious is a co-written book project by Precarity Lab (Cassius Adair, Iván Chaar-López, Anna Watkins Fisher, Cindy Lin, Silvia Lindtner, Lisa Nakamura, Cengiz Salman, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, and McKenzie Wark).
Abstract: Our project advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies--whether apps like Uber built on flexible labor or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users--have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also furthered increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, women, indigenous people, migrants, and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.
AU: Alternate University
I’m editing a fanfiction-inspired creative collaboration called AU: Alternate University which imagines an alternate universe of academe. Produced by those who do not have ownership stakes in academia— adjuncts, ex-academics, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, non-academic community members— AU will challenge readers to confront an uncanny and surreal world, familiar yet decidedly not our own: one in which department meetings morph into activist collectives, or “diversity and inclusion” programs are run by black and brown teenagers, or in which sexual harassment reporting procedures actually work.
AU: Alternate University is being produced as part of the Rethinking Careers, Rethinking Academia series at University of Kansas Press. Series editors are Erin Bartram and Joseph Fruscione.
