Trans Media Moments

Abstract

For transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming people, emergent media technologies offer new outlets for self-representation, outlets that often last for only a brief moment. This article examines trans culture on the website Tumblr during the period from March 2011, when the authors began researching the platform, to May 2013, when Yahoo! paid creator David Karp over a billion dollars for the site. Through auto-ethnographic dialogue about the loose social networks within Tumblr to which the authors contributed during this phase, the article explores ephemeral aspects of self-representation at the intersection of postmodern art practice, sexual politics, and queer subjectivities. From at least 2011 to 2013, people collectively oriented in opposition to dominant discourses of gender and sexuality used Tumblr to refashion straight cisgender norms and to create everyday art in a hybrid media space.

YouTube as Educator: A Content Analysis of Issues, Themes, and the Educational Value of Transgender-Created Online Videos

“…Fink and Miller (2014) point to the mainstream media's focus on professional, middle-class transgender persons as a limitation that leads many transgender individuals to the Internet. According to these authors, it is "the silences and fetishistic misrepresentations in public culture around trans existence" that lead transgender individuals to cyberspace, which itself "facilitates information exchange and self-exploration for many trans people" (p. 614).…”

“…Both YouTube and Tumblr have been identified as spaces where transgender cultural production occurs (Fink & Miller, 2014;Raun, 2015;Tompkins, 2014). As Raun (2015) has highlighted, video blogs, or vlogs, can act as a mirror, allowing individuals to record and upload videos depicting their actual likeness.…”

“…The Internet, in a sense, frees individuals to self-present their gender identity in a way that the offline world does not (Stone, 1995). It also creates a safe space for transgender cultural production (Fink & Miller, 2014).…”

Authenticity, validation and sexualisation on Grindr: an analysis of trans women’s accounts

“…This move has reportedly helped to attract more trans users (Levesley, 2015) while also limiting the expression of wider transgender representations on such devices (Dame, 2016). In light of the fact that trans people are actively using these devices, and given some of the unique issues that are beginning to show (see Fink & Miller, 2014, for a discussion of trans people on Tumblr), how trans people experience their use of these apps, and themselves as users, warrants greater research attention.…”

The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back : Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy

“…In the wake of street-level uprisings to protest antiblack racism in 2014, the New York Times deemed the moment the "Age of Tumblr Activism" (Safronova 2014). Numerous academic media scholars (Fink and Miller 2014;Renninger 2015;Oakley 2016;Dame 2016) have shown how Tumblr operates as a social counterpublic for spreading information about alternative sexual and gender identities, often in the context of these identities' intersection with race and ethnicity. The site's ease of use, multimedia hosting capacity, open-ended space for including (or not) identifying information, and minimal censorship of pornographic material have all been suggested as reasons that young marginalized people, including a disproportionate number of women of color compared with other social networking platforms, have found an intellectual and interpersonal home on the site (Fink and Miller 2014;Guillard 2016;Oakley 2016).…”