Remixing Transfeminist Futures

Abstract

Abstract There are likely many ways to remix transfeminist futures. As a scholar-vidder, I focus on vidding as one form this work might take. Vidding is an especially affective form of remix art that renders literal the Foucauldian imperative “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” In disturbing what was previously considered immobile, fragmenting what was thought unified, and not hiding the cuts with which it does so, vidding produces affective surplus. It is not only that a vid disassembles source media, but that its reassembly produces more than a new text; it also, often unpredictably and inexplicably, generates entirely new affects. Taken up as a transfeminist creative critical praxis, vidding could challenge the transphobic and cissexist common sense on which our reality relies, including its teleological histories that cast trans as “new,” ignoring the contributions of trans people to feminist and queer movements and the historical and geographical range of gender variance; liberal discourses that approach trans as yet another matter of civil rights, neglecting how visibility renders trans people more susceptible to violence and surveillance; and media narratives which tell the same fetishizing, isolating, and tragic stories of trans lives time and again. Through my analysis of three of my own transfeminist vids, I introduce the digital humanities methodology “remixing transfeminist futures” and propose we remix our transphobic, transmisogynistic, cissexist reality so as to make perceptible a future when trans people, queer people, people of color, and all women and femmes are free.