Counter-Security Media: Trans Latinx Creative Resistance Across Carceral, Bureaucratic, and Digital Borders

Dan Bustillo
Gender Studies
UC Los Angeles

Counter-Security Media: Trans Latinx Creative Resistance Across Carceral, Bureaucratic, and Digital Borders is a book manuscript that maps trans Latinx life-making collectivity through the strategic mis/use of analog and digital media. Drawing from interviews and media analysis, this book theorizes trans Latinx activists’ creative negotiations of the deeply gendered and racialized security systems that structure our lives. These dissident media mis/uses, which I term “counter-security media,” allow us to find each other across the structurally produced isolation of carceral institutions, bureaucratic structures, and media platforms. Counter-Security Media bridges the fields of transgender studies, Latinx studies, and media studies by attending to the inventive mis/use of routine media forms—from the creative uptake of the letter genre in sex-segregated prisons and immigration detention centers which re-script gender contra carceral disciplinary uses of gender, to the use of community-issued identity documents to offer alternative forms of state legibility in trans documentation and undocumented activisms, and to the inventive use of transition vlogs to publish critiques of anti-trans discrimination on social media platforms. Each of these forms of counter-security media offers politicized collectivity as a communal response to structural forms of racialized and anti-trans violence.