Christoffer - Liminal Data Lives: Aestheticising Trans (In)visibility as Algorithmic Distance

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Liminal Data Lives: Aestheticising Trans (In)visibility as Algorithmic Distance

Christoffer Koch Andersen

1. Algorithms >< Transness

Algorithms are presumed to exponentially enhance our lives, but for trans people, algorithmic spaces are violent, and at worst, deathly. Behind the veil of neoliberal techno-optimism, algorithms perpetuate colonial and cisnormative violence that anchor a binary default, where the only possible ‘human’ becomes the white cisgender human - forcing transness out of existence from not fitting the codes making up the valorisation of human life[1][2][3][4][5].

How do we carve out liminal spaces of distance in proximity to, but away from this algorithmic gaze of death? I propose conceptualising the aesthetics of trans lives as uncodeable and as liminal data lives to establish a disruptive strategy of algorithmic distance. How might this uncodeability allow us to consider (im)possible ways of living and distance as resistance?

2. Trans Flesh, Coded Death: Algorithmic Valorisation of Binary Life

Algorithms classify humans into categories embodied by “the bodies that do the interpreting and reacting to the information they provide."[6] . Transness—with its infiniteness, messiness and mutability—works against the algorithmic operations and their binary definiteness, fixedness, and immutability, which renders trans people either hypervisible as a deviance or invisible and erased. This imposes a violent gendering of the human in accordance with colonial cisnormative rules of classification as the distinction of who should live and who must die by “performatively enacting themselves/ourselves as being human, in the genre specific terms of each such codes’ positive/negative system of meanings”[7]. 

"As someone exploring queer understandings of more-than-human kinship, I found your text deeply resonant with my own interests. This passage, in particular, struck me as incredibly powerful: "In relation to bodies, transness—with its infiniteness, messiness, and mutability—works against the operational principle of algorithms and their binary definiteness, fixedness, and immutability, which renders trans people either hypervisible as a deviance or invisible and erased." Instead of framing these technologies as simply failing to capture trans identities, how might we interpret this act of failure—and the inherent partiality it reveals—as central to our witnessing?" [Maya]

Trans people exist in a liminal space; as codeable by being hypervisible in deviating from binary code, which positions trans people as targets for violence through failure to conform to the necropolitical algorithmic order of life and death; and as uncodeable as algorithms cannot comprehend transness, but computes transness to not exist in the first place. These affects of ‘improper life’ stick to transness from its aberrations from binary structures, which strip the trans body of its human possibility as a coded death. 

"I really appreciate how you rethink the aesthetics of trans lives as an entrypoint to examine algorithmic violence. That seems a very powerful take. What particularly stood out for me as central is how "transness is fundamentally uncodeable." [Ruben]

3. Aestheticising Transness as Algorithmic Distance

Utilising the aesthetics of transness to elucidate algorithms involve “sensing – the capacity to register or to be affected, and sense-making – the capacity for such sensing to become knowledge”[8], wherein trans bodies “offer fleshly blueprints for the unbuilding of binary understandings”[9]. This operationalisation opens trans algorithmic experiences and translate these into refusal of algorithmic systems. Trans people inhabit a liminal yet powerful space of sensing the algorithmic between the visible/invisible, codeable/uncodeable and liveable/unliveable, where trans ‘error’ in contrast to cisnormative data lives encode a distance that encourages tactics of refusal for algorithmic infrastructures to be reimagined; a space where algorithmic infrastructures are troubled, distorted, and glitched from how transness exists in/against the code. 

"You describe for us the relation between algorithms and trans bodies as a liminal distance that starts at the point of rejecting or ommitting transness from available/possible categories that are necessary for binary logic that define algorithms. This is the trap that trans people find themselves in, or as you say, they inhabit this space and in this praxis of living they 'sense' and 'refuse', trouble, delay, distort and glitch algorithmic infrastructures. What kind of relation do these errors generate between bodies and algorithms?" [Magda]

Transness embodies an ‘in-betweenness’ that infiltrates binary code, renders it futile as universal truth and effectuates distance to the reductionist algorithmic readability of humanness towards redefining the means of be(com)ing human. By not fitting into binary code, transness strategically activates a fugitive resistance against algorithmic violence from embodied investment in failure; cutting over, falling through and obscuring flows of code towards liberatory, autonomous and plural algorithmic futures.

  1. ↑ Amaro, Ramon. The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. Sternberg Press, 2022.
  2. ↑ Andersen, Christoffer Koch. "Wrapped Up in the Cis-Tem: Trans Liveability in the Age of Algorithmic Violence. Special Issue: Ruptures, Resistance, Reclamation: Global Feminisms in Digital Age." Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice. 2025, Forthcoming. Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/tracm
  3. ↑ Costanza-Chock, Sasha. "Design justice, AI, and escape from the matrix of domination." Journal of Design and Science 3.5 (2018): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.21428/96c8d426
  4. ↑ Shah, Nishant. "I spy, with my little AI: How queer bodies are made dirty for digital technologies to claim cleanness." Queer Reflections on AI. Routledge (2023): 57-72.
  5. ↑ Scheuerman, Morgan Klaus, Madeleine Pape, and Alex Hanna. "Auto-essentialization: Gender in automated facial analysis as extended colonial project." Big Data & Society 8.2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211053712
  6. ↑ Wilcox, Lauren. "Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare." Security dialogue 48.1 (2017, 17): 11-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010616657947
  7. ↑ Wynter, Sylvia. "Human being as noun? Or being human as praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto." (2007, 30). https://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Wynter_TheAutopoeticTurn.pdf
  8. ↑ Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative aesthetics: Conflicts and commons in the politics of truth. Verso Books, 2021. (33).
  9. ↑ Halberstam, Jack. "Unbuilding Gender". Places Journal. (2018). https://doi.org/10.22269/181003
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