Gender Matters Speaker Series

September 2022 Gender Matters Speaker

Rendering a History of Trans Care: Ethical Reckoning in Visualizing the Public/Private Spaces of Trans Tumblr 
Speaker: Jack Jen Gieseking
Wednesday, September 28 at 12pm to 1pm EST
 
Registration is required in advance.
 
Abstract
How do trans people carve out and stitch together spaces and cultures of their own, while navigating legal, social, political, economic, and medical structures of oppression? How do digital trans ecologies afford and/or limit trans people in their production of culture, access to accurate medical knowledge, organizing against unjust laws and policies, and developing a sense of self? Finally, what is at stake in making visible / visualizing the semi-private digital spaces of trans lives to speak to these patterns? In theorizing the possibilities and limits to data visualizations through trans theorist Hil Malatino's theorizations of "trans care" and "side affects," I draw upon a one-million+ Tumblr post dataset of trans related hashtags I collected from 2014 to 2022. I pay special attention to the issues of privacy, private space, and data ethics in social media as both a site of trans cultural production and health knowledge.

Jack Jen Gieseking is an urban, cultural, and digital geographer, feminist and queer theorist, and environmental psychologist. Jack recently resigned from the University of Kentucky over a lack of equitable healthcare for trans people and LGBTQ student support, and he is now a Research Fellow at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Hampshire College. Their first monograph is A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008 (NYU Press, 2020). Jack is Managing Editor of ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography. They can be found on Twitter at @jgieseking or via his website jgieseking.org.