Resisting the Enclosure of Trans Affective Commons
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Published:September 2023
Thinking with and through the trans mundane means focusing on ordinary affects over and against an ongoing cultural emphasis on trans visibility and representation. Emphasizing affect over visuality opens the possibility of thinking through an ensemble of bad feelings that stubbornly attend trans experience: anxiety, rage, fatigue, exhaustion, anger, fear, loneliness. Such bad feelings work to articulate the widespread trauma ordinariness that subtends trans arts of living. This trauma ordinariness renders trans folks more easily targeted by emergent forms of predatory capitalism. Trans healthscapes in the United States are rapidly intensifying due to the recent emergence of venture capital–funded hormone subscription and telehealth services that prey on trans trauma ordinariness in order to profit off the most marginalized sectors of trans populations. This chapter examines the proliferation of these services as a telling nexus of trans precarity, neoliberal predation, and negative affect wherein conceptions of trans justice and freedom become winnowed down.
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