Eliza Steinbock
Framing Stigma in Trans* Mediascapes: How does it feel to be a problem?
– Spectator
Journal article 2017

About

This article concerns Anglo-American media coverage of trans lives and deaths. It investigates the discursive framing of trans people as only valuable in their death, both in the mediascape at large and repeated in the sharing of media items within trans communities. Underpinning the necropolitics of trans loss of life are a number of unsavory stigmatizing agendas that become startlingly exposed in two key transmedial moments in early 2014 by trans women of color, Laverne Cox and Janet Mock. Their interventions offer possibility models for answering the delicately, or forcefully, unasked question of “how does it feel to be a problem?” from the other world (W.E.B. Du Bois).