UC Irvine

In a world that continues to be anti-trans, it remains urgent to compile and theorize transgender worldmaking projects and histories. “Refusing Spectacle: Trans Latinx Counter-Security Media” explores trans Latinx worldmaking through intentional mis/uses of digital and analog media. This project unpacks the deep entanglement between ethnoracialized gender and disciplinary structures through the works of trans activists who build community while resisting the structures that aim to isolate, criminalize, and stigmatize trans people of color. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that trans Latinx communities’ resistive mis/use of media, which I term “counter-security media,” turns resistive media praxis into a trans worldmaking tool.

This dissertation looks to examples of counter-security media that span a spectrum of analog and digital media: from letter-writing activism for incarcerated and detained trans communities, to social media campaigns that collect physical letters to reach detained trans Latina/x migrants, to the use of multiple platforms and tagging practices by trans Latinx micro-celebrities on social media platforms, to the strategic use of visibility on social media for trans and queer migrant communities at the Mexico-US border.

While gender may typically be thought of as a personal expression at the individual level, it is also expressed at systemic levels—built into racist disciplinary practices in prisons and immigration detention centers, and into the way that trans expression online is policed. This project asks: how might gender nonconformity be expressed at the systemic level? How do trans activists and communities navigate the vulnerability that comes with trans visibility? This dissertation focuses on creative mis/uses of media as a means of expressing gender nonconformity and building trans Latinx community within some of the very institutions that remain so invested in maintaining gender norms.