The Creative Resistance of Trans of Color Culture, Technology, and Movements

Abstract

The Creative Resistance of Trans of Color Culture, Technology, and Movements Natalie Erazo (bio) Jian Neo Chen’s Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019 Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement, Jian Neo Chen’s book debut, engages transdisciplinary critique through the examples of trans, gender nonconforming, and disabled artists and activists of color working across film, performance, literature, and digital media, among other cultural practices. Chen locates radical aesthetics and activism that challenge dominant paradigms ordering the world according to racial and colonial binary sex/gender systems (4). Taking as its departure point the 2014 Time magazine cover featuring actress Laverne Cox announcing the “transgender tipping point,” the book critiques the ways in which racialized trans identity has become minoritized in our neoliberal multiculturalist climate and absorbed within the capitalist free market system, yielding merely symbolic rather than tangible structural change. Instead, the book locates trans of color identity outside the confines of nation-states, and it centers communities that continue to emerge and resist singular definition. Chen builds on the legacies of foundational trans of color community-builders Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and activist scholars such as Christopher Lee and Emi Koyama, whose contributions were often eclipsed by the predominantly white leadership of the first wave of transgender organizations in the 1990s. Using trans in accordance with the likes of Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, Chen highlights the adaptive, relational, and liberatory possibilities of opening up trans to other meanings and to inclusiveness of gender nonconforming and variant identities and expressions (5). This challenges the pathologized perceptions of transgender identity and embodiment held by white settler-colonial binary and medical systems as well as conventional Western [End Page 260] notions of family and kinship. Focusing on Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx artists and activists, Chen draws connections between embodied experiences of “racial gender displacement and subjugation” and the interrelated legacies of U.S. imperialism, colonization, and captivity, both within and beyond national borders (4). Nodding to Michel Foucault’s “biopolitical genealogies of state and social power,” Chen offers crucial considerations about state policies and carceral infrastructures that create power imbalances within society, ascribing “affective hierarchies of social value including the criminal and civil, sick and productive, perverse and moral, foreign and native” and justifying systemic policing along these lines (16). The first chapter, “Cultures,” explores performance, the body, and sensation and the ways in which Asian bodies have been constructed by the West. Trans migrant Korean performance artist Yozmit uses performance as a way of expressing trans embodiment and the “body’s potential metamorphosis through gender” (33). Citing Judith Butler, Chen illustrates the ways in which the subcultural practice of drag performance has been connected to the “imitative structure of gender itself” and a method for deconstructing gender altogether (34). In her 2012 performance, “Sound of New Pussy,” which appears on the cover of the book, Yozmit plays with the surface and depth of gender expression through the use of unveiling mesh-screened skirts, thereby challenging the cisheterosexual order of vision. The performance “gestures toward a different web of sensory relations between outer and inner life and body” (38). Similarly employing the use of veiling, queer nonbinary Indonesian Italian American artist Zavé Martohardjono blends Balinese dance with Black and Latinx ball cultures and challenges Oriental-ist perceptions of the veil as a symbol of traditional feminized domesticity. Whereas the act of unveiling represents a demystification of the invisible within the Western imaginary, Martohardjono’s use of unveiling “only reveal[s] more gender shifting and threat” (52). Throughout the book, Chen offers rich discussions of film and digital media technologies as conduits for aesthetic experimentation and subversion. In her 2008 short film Shape of a Right Statement, trans Chinese American visual artist and activist Wu Tsang offers tribute to trans autism-rights activist Mel Baggs’s 2007 video In My Language, in which Baggs calls attention to the ways in which disabled people are pathologized under hierarchies of communication and thought. Chen argues that Tsang’s “incongruent” image-making practice mirrors the alienated social histories of racially...