The Early 1990s and Its Afterlives: Transgender Nation Sociality in Digital Activism

Abstract

This article considers the continuities afforded by digital platforms for reactivating the 1990s Transgender Nation politics, by providing a means to bond like-minded people into imagined nations cohered into an affective public. The media archeology approach facilitates the investigation into stylistic and conceptual continuities between the 1992 and 1994 Transgender Nation’s “direct action” and militant politics into cases of digital activism from 1995 until 2016. The article further tracks early queer and trans connection and discord into later digital incarnations. The author considers digital culture as a significant site for personal and group transformation, but finds in the touchstone activities of Transgender Day of Remembrance an imagined community styled by necropolitical attunements. Direct actions online are still fueled by contesting hostility to trans life, but the critique of transgender marginalization must also account for sexual and racial dynamics.