Explorations in Media Ecology - Gender and Media Ecology, Jun 2021

Despite having become more visible in popular and academic discourses over the last half decade, trans* selfies are not new. In this article, I examine an early set of trans* selfies featured in a sexploitation periodical published in the United States during the early 1960s. I show how numerous media, including bodies, clothing, cosmetics, photographs and magazines, produced a socio-technical environment through which trans* subjects composed alternative gender expressions and identities, formed intimate networks and created conditions of possibility for the eventual re-emergence of trans* selfies via digital social media platforms. Merging trans* theory with media ecology, I develop trans* media ecology as a conceptual frame from which to locate the always imbricated – but never complete – becoming of gendered bodies and media. Methodologically, trans* media ecology adopts three guiding principles: (1) genders are media, (2) genders depend on media and (3) genders and media change.

Expecting parents are often eager to learn the sex of their baby. Gender-reveal parties offer a community or family celebration of that information, often complete with clichéd pink or blue colour coding. Common practices include party games, competitions between Team Boy and Team Girl, and the colourful surprise reveal via confetti, smoke, balloons or food. Not only is the term ‘gender-reveal’ inaccurate (at best sonograms reveal biological sex), the practice privileges stereotypical gender binaries and legitimates pre-birth personhood under the guise of merriment, appropriating the unborn body as a contested discursive site. The gender-reveal party enhances reliance on medical technology and consumerism, retrieves traditional superstitions about pregnancy, obsolesces privacy and reverses into the commodification of both mother and child. Gender-reveals do not necessarily celebrate the pregnancy or the mother. The gender-reveal party functions to reinforce traditional cisgender binaries and constructs gendered expectations for the child even before birth.

These pieces of COVID-19 poetry in their pixelated form follow McLuhan’s playful use and misuse of the phonetic English language. They contribute to media ecology a continued poetic exploration into how our blurry presences in physical and digital spaces engender our landscapes at varying degrees and levels of experience. Through poetic exploration of this envirusment, I invoke the inherently insufficient and terminally playful qualities of language; both enabling and disabling our dualistic experiential accounts of proximity, relations and visceral corporeality in present-COVID. Depending on which dimension readers interpretatively focus on while reading, their own unique personal frame will guide their own unique translation.

With these pieces, I’m exploring the rich history of wimmin’s handicraft as a feminist poetic praxis. In today’s saturated, technomediatic world, domesticity and handcraft often get left out of discussions of ‘media ecologies’. What happens when we incorporate the feminist practices of care, fragility, uniqueness, domesticity and craft into an increasingly digitized and mass-produced means of publishing and sharing literary work? Using found objects, Letraset and thread, these ‘offline’ poetic works explore an unmediated intimacy with poetic materials; in the tactility of hand-to-object care and contact, an oft overlooked ethics of intimacy and vulnerable surfaces. With these pieces I am also thinking alongside the work of feminist theorist Sara Ahmed who thinks of feminism as ‘a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility: to take care’. Against the masculinist impulse for permanence and enduring legacy in poetics, these pieces make space for radical openness: working with transient and precarious materials and media not only quells the ego, but allows for a greater responsiveness to and engagement with the world and the conditions that shape it.

Communication may be understood through its manifest meaning or through the medium in which it is expressed. The latter approach begins from the material social relations and technologies that constitute the medium of communication. This approach has a certain similarity with affect theory understood as a pre-cognitive focus on bodies and technologies. An affective network sets up the manifest subject–object, or human–machine, relations with a subjectified anxiety. The objectification of intelligence produces a fundamental anxiety about what it is to be human. I attempt to determine where thought may yet intervene in a world of algorithms which is pervaded by anxiety.