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- Creators: Aizura, Aren
Description
Never Fully What It Is is an electronic/pop music performance constructed with the intent of exploring the interplay between digital sound and gender in the context of my own transition throughout the past year. Thematically, the project focuses on issues of emergence and authenticity in the contexts of trans identity and queer feminism, drawing from literature regarding debates about queer assimilation and gendered associations within systems of genre. It aims not to encapsulate the whole of my transition, but rather to focus on the forces shaping it. From a sonic perspective, the techniques used are largely drawn from hyperpop and other experimental and/or queer genres. The resultant performance is an attempt to understand itself, as a digital body and as an encapsulation of how it feels to be young, transgender, and online.
ContributorsPoonawala, Reyna (Author) / Hayes, Lauren (Thesis director) / Bauer, D.B. (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Arts, Media and Engineering Sch T (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
There is currently a proliferation of images of transgender youth in popular discourse, many of which reflect the threat to capitalist heteronormativity that transgender young people pose to contemporary U.S. society. This veritable explosion in media visibility of transgender youth must be critically examined. This dissertation explores media economies of transgender youth visibility by examining media and self-represented narratives by and about transgender young people in contemporary U.S. popular discourse to uncover where, and how, certain young transgender bodies become endowed with value in the service of the neoliberal multicultural U.S. nation-state. As normative transgender youth become increasingly visible as signifiers of the progress of the tolerant U.S. nation, transgender youth who are positioned further from the intelligible field of U.S. citizenship are erased.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
ContributorsReinke, Rachel Anne (Author) / Switzer, Heather D. (Thesis advisor) / Aizura, Aren (Committee member) / Anderson, Lisa (Committee member) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016