Embodying Liminal Data Lives

Encoding The Aesthetics Of Trans Bodies As Algorithmic Distance

Abstract

The idea that algorithms are infinitely improving our lives is presented as an undeniable truth, but for trans people, algorithms have violent, far-reaching implications. Behind the veil of neoliberal techno-optimism, algorithms perpetuate colonial and cisnormative legacies that anchor a binary idea of life, wherein the possible ‘human’ becomes the white, cisgender human, which in return violates and denounces trans people from not fitting the binary codes embedded into and making up algorithmic systems. Instead of complying with neoliberal beliefs in algorithms or falling short on critique, this article theorises the aesthetics of trans lives as embodied liminal data lives as a strategy of sensing distance to algorithms from the tactical uncodeability of transness in opposition to the binary confinements of algorithmic technologies. Taking this stance, this article asks: How can we create spaces of distance to algorithms in a world inherently entangled with them, and how can the liminality of trans data lives allow us to consider (im)possible ways of living and distancing as forms of resistance to the reality of algorithmic violence in which we exist?