Whit Pow (they/them) is a media historian whose teaching and research lies at the intersection of transgender media studies, trans of color critique, queer theory, queer of color critique, electronic art, and video game and computer history. Pow received their PhD and MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and their BA in English Language & Literature with a double minor in History of Art and Global Media Studies (Film, Television, and Media) from the University of Michigan.
Pow's work has been published in Flow Journal, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, among others. They are a recipient of the NYU Center for the Humanities Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation's Career Enhancement Fellowship, and the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the Trans Games Digital Zine Project, directed by Ari Gass and Teddy Pozo.
Pow's first book, Unmediating: A Trans Media History is now under contract with Duke University Press and will be published with the ASTERISK trans studies book series, edited by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, Jian Neo Chen, and Marquis Bey.
Pow's research centers the idea of mediation to identify the way that the lives and bodies of trans people and people of color are mediated by the state through archives and supposedly "non-representational" media including bureaucratic documents like birth certificates, immigration forms, sign-in sheets as well as medical diagnostic practices ongoing today like those documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and its 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 and networked media.
(Photo credit: Joel Jares)
Selected Publications
Books
Pow, Whitney (Whit). Unmediating: A Trans Media HIstory. Under contract with Courtney Berger at Duke University Press, as part of the ASTERISK: Gender, Trans- and All that comes After trans studies book series edited by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, Jian Neo Chen and Marquis Bey.
Articles
Pow, Whitney (Whit). “The Noise Hits All at Once: A Trans History of the Votrax SC-01 Voice Synthesis Chip.” Flow Journal: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture (associated with the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin). December 2, 2025. https://www.flowjournal.org/2025/12/noise-hits-all-at-once/
Pow, Whitney (Whit). “How the Computer Taught Us to See” (Peer Reviewed). Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 39, no. 2 (116) (September 1, 2024): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11207789.
Pow, Whitney (Whit). "Critical Game Studies and Its Afterlives: Why Game Studies Needs Software Studies and Computer History” (Peer Reviewed). Just Tech. Social Science Research Council. June 5, 2024. DOI: doi.org/10.35650/JT.3071.d.2024.
Pow, Whitney (Whit). “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://www.whitneypow.com/articles/glitch-body-anti-body
Pow, Whitney (Whit). “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors” (Peer Reviewed). Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 197–230. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.1.197.
Pow, Whitney (Whit). “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
Pow, Whitney (Whit). “Reaching Toward Home: Software Interface as Queer Orientation in the Video Game Curtain” (Peer Reviewed). The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 81 (Spring 2018): 43-56. https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8105