In a time of trans visibility predicated on the Time magazine's much-heralded and much-contested “transgender tipping point” (Steinmetz 2014), what role do trans culture and digital media play in deciphering or short-circuiting trans progress narratives? In Trans Exploits, Jian Neo Chen begins their compelling study of trans of color art and activism by reflecting on Time's 2014 cover article, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” observing how its “technical administering of civil rights . . . advance[s] the internal and external frontiers of American empire” (3). By exploring a range of both established and emergent artists in film/video, performance literature, and digital media, Chen pushes against the seeming absorption of the transgender subject into a new chapter of the US settler colonial narrative. As Chen argues, trans of culture artists, including those working from Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous positionalities, “address and attempt to rework . . ....

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