Esmé Hogenkamp recieves grant for Post doc research

About the research project Transmasculine Visibility in/as Celebrity Controversy

The last decade has seen a steady growth of trans visibility, but this development has gone hand-in-hand with an intensification of transphobic rhetoric, anti-trans legislation, and violence against trans people. While debates around trans visibility take place anywhere from the global to the intimate level, they are perhaps most fiercely debated in popular culture, where celebrities often function as a central reference points. Here, moments such as Elliot Page coming out as trans, or Kristen Stewart expressing a desire for more body hair but become complex ideological battlefields about gender. This often happens with little regard for these actors’ own identities, with trans male and non-binary actors as well as gender non-conforming, cisgender actresses alike serving simultaneously as sites of transmasculine affirmation, imagination, and identification, and as sites of intense scrutiny and ideological conflict. In other words, they are controversial.

The project “Transmasculine Visibility in/as Celebrity Controversy,” will explore how these moments of controversy around gender non-conforming celebrities produce and structure trans visibility in the platform economy. Approaching controversy as both a social phenomenon (a collision of trans-affirmative and anti-trans positions) and a technological one (with platform algorithms designed to encourage and amplify conflict), the project moves away from transmasculine visibility as a matter of representation and towards the technological, economic, political, and cultural infrastructures that organize visibility itself. From this perspective, it asks how transmasculinity visibility emerges in and through controversy; and conversely, how its controversy-driven visibility shapes the discourse around, the meaning of, and the boundaries between female and trans masculinities. Foregrounding visibility and controversy as mutually constitutive, the project aims to shed light on how platform environments shape the possibilities, limits, and stakes of contemporary trans visibility.