Current Projects:
#transtok: Digital Vulnerability in an Era of Hateful Algorithms
Trump Era politics has exacerbated transphobic rhetoric propagated between communities through the digital platform TikTok. While this holds true for all social media, TikTok’s unique algorithm and the incomparable “For You” page catalyzes a broader audience reach internationally. It is the algorithm which generates predictions and mediates content (tiktoks) to its users. I explore how these users form attachments or a collective body of independent groups: the collective body of trans* users and the collective body of conservative right users.
The feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed asks, “How do emotions work to align some subjects with some others against others?” If Ahmed posits emotions as the thread that align subjects, these collectives are a result of love. Love for being trans* and in community with those who identify as such, and love for heteronormativity and shared hate for trans* people, creates these attachments. I ask how we can understand the creation, proliferation, and instigation of these fixed transphobic ideologies through the agency of a digital platform. Through “reading and recognition” of transphobic media objects (tiktoks), we become conscious of our [trans*] body’s pain and the “mark” or impression left on it. What follows is a “reconstitution of bodily space” amongst trans* users, accomplished in numerous ways including as an act of resistance in an effort to create “physical space” in the digital world.
As we enter a period in our nation’s history with threats to democracy and transphobic public policy, no time has merited our attentiveness for trans* media scholarship than at present. We trans* scholars have the opportunity to write about our experience and emotionality in media. Contributions to trans* studies in relation to queer scholarship is skewed and I aim to shift this by contributing my voice.
Jude K Velez 