In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monáe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

“In this beautifully written book, micha cárdenas directs us to look at how the algorithm, as analytic and praxis, holds the possibility of trans of color survival. Deftly moving across numerous geographies, texts, and fields of inquiry, Poetic Operations is a bold contribution to trans of color studies.” — C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

“micha cárdenas’s powerful new work extends intersectionality as a mode for understanding the relationships between race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and other axes of power, oppression, and resistance. Doing important theoretical and analytical work in its analysis of trans of color media arts practice, Poetic Operations will be useful for those working in media studies, digital studies, trans studies, and art history, as well as anyone interested in interrogating power.” — Sasha Costanza-Chock, author of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

micha cárdenas is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as coauthor of Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs and The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities.

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