[spectre] Trans Desire, my new book, is out now!

[micha cárdenas]

After a year of working with my publisher, Atropos press, my book
Trans Desire is out! It’s in a book with Barbara Fornssler, which is
how Atropos likes to publish shorter works. I’m really ecstatic to
have this book finally available to people, and to have gotten such
generous reviews from Avital Ronell, Sandy Stone and Diane Davis! I’m
so grateful to EGS for supporting their alumni by helping to publish
their work. Hopefully this will help me be able to publish my own,
longer book soon, which I can’t wait to do. So please, check it out on
amazon, buy a copy and leave a comment!

Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs

http://www.amazon.com/Trans-Desire-Affective-Cyborgs-C%C3%A1rdenas/dp/0982530994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275285719&sr=8-1

Trans Desire explores the ramifications of using desire as the basis
for contemporary political movements rooted in a struggle for
autonomy, from the perspective of a transgender person about to begin
hormone replacement therapy. It examines the affinities between
psychoanalytic theories of desire, queer theory and biopolitics, using
the work of theorists including Avital Ronell, Giorgio Agamben and
Judith Butler. Trans Desire proposes that radical queer porn is an
example of world building that effectively resists biopower without
turning to former movements’ demands for rights and legislative
reforms.

Reviews for Trans Desire

Micha Cárdenas takes apart the terms and implicit contract binding the
project of “Master Thesis.” What is it to master an object of inquiry
that resists boundary control or conceptual arrest? How does one
pursue a thesis when genre and gender assignments are continually
destabilized? Situated between soft rant and manifesto, between
autobiographeme and scholarship, between single and double authorship,
_Trans Desire_ bravely faces down the quirky habits of our bildopedic
culture, reformatting the very conditions of institutional submission.

- Avital Ronell

In this powerful meta-account of transgressive embodiments and
desires, Cárdenas enunciates a rousing, theoretically complex and
practically explicit politic of resistance which will resonate with
scholar and layperson alike.

- Allucquére Rosanne Stone

In Trans Desire, Micha Cárdenas offers a moving and provocative
exploration of transgender desire, its limits, and its potential for
biopolitical resistance. At an intersection of poetics and theory,
Cárdenas embraces a queer ethico-politics devoted to radically
challenging not only heteronormativity but the oppressive power of
Empire more broadly.

- Diane Davis



Affective Cyborgs is framed as a necessary departure from Donna
Haraway’s cyborg. Appropriated from the complex sexual politics of
BDSM culture, the figure of the “switch” is proposed as a new
possibility for conceptualizing agency in our encounters with
technology. A doubling of the cyborg body, the switch locates the
liminal space in which the binary of dominance and submission may be
explored as a contextual and meshed embodiment of contingency,
materialized via affective decision. This framing suggests new
directions for feminist philosophies of technology.

About the authors:

Micha Cárdenas [transreal.org] is an artist/theorist and a Lecturer in
the Visual Arts Department and the Critical Gender Studies program at
the University of California, San Diego. She received her MA in
Communication at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland
and her MFA from UCSD.

Barbara Fornssler is a PhD student at the European Graduate School in
Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and a writer whose research interests include
the body and technology, multimodal communication, and philosophies of
gender.


--
micha cárdenas / azdel slade

Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego
Lecturer, Critical Gender Studies Program, University of California, San Diego
Artist/Researcher, UCSD Medical Education
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org