Whitney (Whit) Pow
Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
Media, Culture, and Communication
Whit Pow (they/them) is a media historian and theorist of computational media, electronic art, and computer history through the lens of queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, trans of color critique, and critical race theory.
Pow centers the concept of mediation to identify the way that the lives and bodies of queer and trans people, Black and Indigenous people, and 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 queer and trans people and BIPOC exist today in the oftentimes “invisible” or normalized logics built into computers and computational systems like software, video games, artificial intelligence, and networked media.
Pow's work engages with feminist and anti-racist science and technology studies (STS) and computer history, crucially working alongside scholarship in transgender studies and trans of color critique in order to center Blackness, Indigeneity, and people of color 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 and Brian Droitcour 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&