micha cárdenas – författare

In this special issue, contributors imagine the reconstructed social realities and worlds made possible through the materializing of trans times. Critical trans studies and trans political struggles intervene in the spatial-temporal orders that set and regulate the boundaries of knowledge, life/death, embodiment, movement, and social value established to secure the heteropatriarchal white settler state, liberal civil society, and the nation. Seeking to question and envision our collective trans futures, as well as the idea of futurity itself, the authors depict conceptions of transfeminist solidarity, tropical aliens, and new understandings of Black and trans solidarities that challenge the trans/cis binary.

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cÁrdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cÁrdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cÁrdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle MonÁe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cÁrdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.