Frida Hviid Broberg: "Trans*forming information activism: Corrective and analytic entanglements in digital trans information activism after ’the tipping point’"

Beskrivning:

Against a backdrop of scholarship that has framed queer and trans information activism as primarily a response to absence—whether of knowledge about LGBTQ+ lives or of adequate information infrastructures (Cifor & Rawson, 2023; Drabinski, 2013; McKinney, 2020)—I argue that the contemporary technological-cultural moment is defined instead by informational abundance, the circulation of anti-trans misinformation, and the hypervisibility of trans bodies (Gossett et al., 2017; Straube, 2020). Trans visibility appears like a sign of social and cultural progress, but while it “creates a vision of an otherwise ungraspable life”, this increased visibility also “come with a downside of cultural appropriation, growing transparency, simplified categorizations, and the violence of having become known.”(Straube, 2020, p. 57, p. 62) While “it is a fundamental acknowledgement of queer theory and activism that visibility does not equal liberation or rights” (Drabinski, 2013, p. 98), trans scholars point to a seeming paradoxical relationship between trans cultural visibility and anti-trans politics and violence, where the boom in media visibility, (the so called ‘trans gender tipping point’), has been followed by a peak in violent hate crimes committed against trans people (Gossett et al., 2017; Stanley, 2017) as well as anti-trans legislation in the US (Johnson, 2022) and anti-gender movements in Europe (Datta, 2025). LBGTQ+ users report an increase in hate speech directed at them at them online after CEO Mark Zuckerberg on January 7 2025 announced fundamental changes to content moderation policies across Meta platforms (Sherman et al., 2025). The changes included the termination of Meta’s partnerships with professional fact-checkers and the modification of the company’s Hateful Conduct Policy to explicitly allow anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech, such as “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation”(Hateful Conduct Policy, n.d.). Human rights groups also fear that the changes will cause an increase in misinformation directed at LGBTQ+ communities (Torek, 2025). In this context, trans information activists undertake a dual task: generating reliable knowledge while navigating, countering, and redirecting hostile informational flows. Through a conceptually oriented textual and visual analysis of two Danish digital activist initiatives—the fact-checking project Trans Tjek and the digital activist performance art project mariebjerre.com by artist-activist Ada Ada Ada—I offer a theorization of contemporary digital trans information activism after ‘the tipping point’ (Johnson, 2022), adding to existing theories of queer and trans information activism (Cifor & Rawson, 2023; Drabinski, 2013).

References

Cifor, M., & Rawson, K. J. (2023). Mediating Queer and Trans Pasts: The Homosaurus as Queer Information Activism. Information, Communication & Society, 26(11), 2168–2185. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072753

Datta, N. (2025). The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power. European Parlimentary Forum for Sexual & Reproductive Rights.

Drabinski, E. (2013). Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.The Library Quarterly, 83(2), 94–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/669547

Gossett, R., Stanley, E. A., & Burton, J. (Eds.). (2017). Known Unknowns: An Introduction to Trap Door. In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty (pp. xv–xxvi). The MIT Press.

Hateful Conduct Policy. (n.d.). Meta. Retrieved February 21, 2025, from https://transparency.meta.com/da-dk/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

Jasinski, J. (2001). The status of theory and method in rhetorical criticism. Western Journal of Communication, 65(3), 249–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310109374705

Johnson, A. (2022). Tipping Points and Shifting Expectations: The Promise of Applied Trans Studies for Building Structural Competency. https://doi.org/10.57814/98WE-XM94

McKinney, C. (2020). Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478009337

Sherman, J., Toledo, A. C., & Garfield, L. (2025). More Hate, Fewer Protections: Harmful Content on Meta’s Platforms in the Wake of Rollbacks, According to Users. Ultraviolet.

Stanley, E. A. (2017). Anti-Trans Optics: Recognition, Opacity, and the Image of Force.South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(3), 612–620. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3961732

Straube, W. (2020). Introduction: Visibility and Screen Politics after the Transgender Tipping Point. Screen Bodies, 5(1), 56–65. https://doi.org/10.3167/screen.2020.050105

Torek, B. (2025, January 15). Meta’s New Policies: How They Endanger LGBTQ+ Communities and Our…. HRC. https://www.hrc.org/news/metas-new-policies-how-they-endanger-lgbtq-communities-and-our-tips-for-staying-safe-online