Mediated Trans Futurities

Abstract

English Abstract: For trans and gender non-conforming people a future body is not necessarily a spectacularly enhanced or technically optimized but, above all, a liveable one. Hormones like testosterone and estrogens sometimes materialize the promise of a trans futurity with and for that particular body. At the same time, the bodily effects of these hormones are not foreseeable and, all the more, not predictable, even though video blogs that document gender transitions might give this impression at first glance. The article takes a closer look at the phenomenon of trans vlogging and discusses trans vlogs as participating in practices of imagining and enabling im/possible futures. The interest is the entanglement of media practices of self-documentation, hormonal alterations of bodies, processes of gendering and racialization within these practices and their effect on temporality: Which bodies have a future available at all – as uncertain and precarious as it might be?