Digital Me

Trans Students Exploring Future Possible Selves Online

By Z Nicolazzo, Alden C. Jones, and Sy Simms

SERIES: The American Campus

Rutgers University Press

The internet is where trans people have come to become. Creating an identity in digital space can be important for how trans people learn about themselves, their communities, and the possibilities available to them. While the internet and digital space is not the only way of coming to understand oneself in a community, it is a space of liberatory possibility and creativity. There is room to invent what may not yet exist for gender on the edges of what many consider to be “real.” For many, digital life can be the site of play, joy, and connection –even while the internet is not a harm-free space nor universally available. This book seeks to understand the complexities at play in the digital realm and the implications that have for gender, digital life, and higher education.

A smart, useful and frankly overdue study of gender-marginalized people finding self and building community in the chaotic spaces of social media, online cultures, and digital platforms that permeate our lives.'
Susan Stryker, Author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

'Digital Me is an exciting, timely contribution to ongoing academic and public conversations about the role of the internet in trans and queer lives. With a fresh set of data to work with, the authors richly theorize the online worlds of trans self-making and community-building. I trust this will soon become a dependable resource for trans college students and those who care about them.' V Varun Chaudhry, Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University

Although institutions of higher education have been important producers of queer and trans theories of gender, those theories have not led to radical changes in how institutions organize themselves as spaces of white, cis gendered, heteronormativity. In response the authors ask what might the future of higher education look like if we take seriously the world and self-making creativity of trans students? A deeply moving book, Digital Me bears witness to the cultivation of online trans lives, and provides sustenance, for students and teachers alike, for those who want to expand the world building possibilities of trans life and knowledge. Victoria Hesford, Author of Feeling Women's Liberation

Z Nicolazzo is an associate professor of trans* studies in education in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, and the author of Trans* in College: Transgender Students' Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion.

Alden C. Jones is an assistant professor of practice in higher education at Merrimack College.

Sy Simms is a doctoral candidate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

Part I Logging On
Introduction
1 Searching for Ourselves Online
Part II Trans(form)ing Online
2 The Internet as Spatial
3 The Internet as Temporal
4 The Internet as Affective
5 The Internet as Sartorial
6 The Internet as Communal
7 The Internet as Visual
Part III Prismatic Possibilities
8 The Multiplicity of Trans Life Online
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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