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Whitney (Whit) Pow
Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
Media, Culture, and Communication
Whit Pow (they/them) is a media historian whose research lies at the intersection of transgender media studies, trans of color critique, queer theory, electronic art, and video game and computer history. Their current book project looks at the ways that trans programmers and game designers were historically contesting the limitations of the computational, and thus critiquing the limitations of the institutional.
Pow centers the concept of mediation to identify the way that the lives and bodies of trans people of color are mediated by the state through archives and bureaucratic documents like birth certificates, immigration forms, and sign-in sheets as well as medical diagnostic practices ongoing today like those documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and its many iterations. Pow's work examines how these very much racialized biopolitical and necropolitical processes of documentation, enumeration, and surveillance of trans BIPOC exist today in the oftentimes “invisible” or normalized logics built into computers and computational systems like software, video games, artificial intelligence, and online networked media.
Pow's work centers transgender studies and trans of color critique in our understanding of software studies, computer history and critical science and technology studies (STS), placing trans life at the heart of our understanding of these institutional processes of documentation and surveillance, normalized through our everyday interactions with computers.
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- “How the Computer Taught Us to See.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 39, no. 2 (116) (September 1, 2024): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11207789. (PDF)
- "Critical Game Studies and Its Afterlives: Why Game Studies Needs Software Studies and Computer History." Just Tech. Social Science Research Council. June 5, 2024. DOI: doi.org/10.35650/JT.3071.d.2024. (PDF)
- “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors.” Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 197–230. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.1.197. (PDF)
- “Reaching Toward Home: Software Interface as Queer Orientation.” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 81 (Spring 2018): 43-56. https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8105 (PDF)
Essays and Other Writing
- “Glitch, Body, Anti-Body.” For the special issue on glitch edited by Rosa Menkman for Outland: An Online Art Magazine for the NFT Era, December 14, 2023. https://outland.art/legacy-russell-glitch-feminism/ (PDF)
- “Outside of the Folder, the Box, the Archive: Moving Toward a Reparative Video Game History.” ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories Vol 1, No. 1 (July 2019). https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/76 (PDF)
- "All Bones and Blood and Breath: Remembering Barbara Hammer,” Autostraddle, March 28, 2019. https://www.autostraddle.com/all-bones-and-blood-and-breath-remembering-barbara-hammer/
- “That’s Not Who I Am: Calling Out and Challenging Stereotypes of Asian Americans.” Gendered Lives, Intersectional Perspectives, Seventh Edition. Eds. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. New York: Oxford University Press, 84-88. https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/gendered-lives-9780190928285?cc=us&lang=en&