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B4 W6: Gender, Art and Activism - Trap Door

“Dark Shimmers: The Rhythm of Necropolitical Affect in Digital Media” / Micha Cárdenas (pp. 161-181)

"Algorithms deliver death cooly, emotionlessly, through coded, logical decisions. The emotional and affective impacts of our lives unfold around the contours of these digital, time-stamped moments." p.163

"The dramatic increase in visibility for trans women of color in 2014 was followed by a significant increase in the number of murders of trans women in 2015." p.163

"the assemblage model introduces ambiguity and that the mathematical basis of assemblages can be modeled through algorithms." p.164

"algorithms, understood most simply as a list of ingredients and a series of steps, are uniquely suited to the understanding of oppression today as it is managed by digital technologies." p.164

"the presence of digital media time stamps goes beyond a desire to record personal experiences; it reveals the way our communications are stored in databases for future use by entities that are not us." p.166

"Affect moves through space and time in graduations of intensity that increase and dissipate, and time stamps can make that movement." p.166


See Vindu Goel, “Facebook Tinkers With Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry,” New York Times, June 29, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30 /technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry. html; and Samuel Gibbs, “Facebook Denies Emotion Contagion Study Had Government
29. “Statement: Do Not Militarize Our Mourning; Orlando and the Ongoing Tragedy Against LGBTSTGNC POC,” Audre Lorde Project, June 15, 2016, http://alp.org /do-not-militarize-our-mourning-orlando-and-ongoing-tragedy-against-lgbtstgnc-poc.
and Military Ties,” Guardian, July 4, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014 /jul/04/facebook-denies-emotion-contagion-study-government-military-ties.

"Facebook and other social media corporations profit off of every click and every scroll. Contemporary social movements' usage of these platforms to spread data benefits the information economy that sells users' demographic data to advertisers, who pay per thousands of impressions and per click." p.168

"The harm that people cause one another through the spread of affects such as shock, grief, and numbness on social media is an example of how the lines of subversion/resistance versus hegemony/power are not so clear." p.169

"the incitement to media visibility and the proliferation of media images that it generates is a technique of power." Herman Gray "Subject(ed) to Recognition" in this text 169

"The lifting of the [military] ban and the happy incorporation of transgender people into the US military further cements a trend made clear by the visibility of Caitlyn Jenner's right-wing politics in the popular media: there is no longer a link that can be assumed between transgender experience and radical politics, if there ever was one." p.170

"What does "trans visibility" mean? For trans visibility to be a reality, there would have to be an essential trans identity to make visible, but there is not." p.170

"Often, trans experience begins with an affective claim to futurity that rejects the truth of the visible" p.170

"the more powerful the media one posts on social networks, the more money corporations make." p.178


 “Spiderwomen” / Eva Hayward (pp. 255-279)

Embodiment - the sense of being bodily: my body hurts

Transpose: "to change something into another form, or to transfer to a different place or context: transmutations but also translations and alterations in modes of life and death" p.255

"transsexuality is not about authenticity or originality, but reveals how bodily feeling and desire are constituted socially and spatially." p.256

"By "transitioning," I do not mean a monolithic movement between states, rather I mean simply an emergence of a material, psychical, sensual, and social self through corporeal, spatial, and temporal processess that transfigure the lived body." p.258

"Black transwomen and transwomen of colour are already marked by dehumanisation, by the racialised limits of "the Human."" p.260

"Might web-building best articulate (from concatenation to skelatisation) the act of extending bodily substance through sexual transition; that is to ask, does webbing, and the capacity to weave, describe how transsexuality is also an expression of the body (from sociopolitical to psychical to corporeal) as an address and as a habit?" p.262

QUESTION END OF 264-265

"on a scalpel of desire along a hormonal riptide, I am crossing the matter of my body on a bridge of sensation, moved along by desire" p.265

"Transposition is the energetic force prior to finding an object, prior to dominating, or submitting to, an object. It may be that identities (selves and others) are compromise formations, but they remain necessary if also precarious and unavoidable temporary." p.266-7

"Senses and their subtending registers are reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual milieus (i.e., eyes see only so much; ears hear only a fraction of the sounded-out information in an environment; the unbearability of the world is edited, repressed, managed for livability)." p.267

"The movement of affect with perception creates texture, which propagates embodiment, leaving marks and traces." p.267

"It is not that transwomen, even transwomen who survive through sex work, are at "greater risk of HIV" because of sexual practices - this reasoning is an effect of homophobia and racism - rather, transwomen are at risk because of racism and transphobia and the violent sociopolitical regimes that make transphobia and racism a necessary feature of what constitutes modernity." p.269

"the affair between the felt-body and the lived-body is also enacted through habitation, the ecosystem of which the self is part" p.269

"To be trapped in the body, then, is about building-out, unraveling, and unknotting so as to rework the territory of embodied self, to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment." p.273

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