Hello, I'm Whitney (Whit) Pow.
About me
I’m Whit Pow. I am an Assistant Professor at New York University in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
I am a media historian and theorist of digital and computational media, electronic art, and computer history through the lens of queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, trans of color critique, and critical race studies.
My work centers the concept of mediation to identify the way that the lives and bodies of queer and trans people, Black and Indigenous people, and people of color are mediated by the state through archives and bureaucratic documents like birth certificates, immigration forms, and sign-in sheets as well as medical diagnostic practices ongoing today like those documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and its many iterations. My work examines how these very much racialized biopolitical and necropolitical processes of documentation, enumeration, and surveillance of queer and trans people and BIPOC exist today in the oftentimes “invisible” or normalized logics built into computers and computational systems like software, video games, artificial intelligence, and online networked media.
My research engages with feminist and intersectional science and technology studies (STS) and computer history, crucially working alongside scholarship in transgender studies and trans of color critique in order to center queer and trans people of color at the heart of our understanding of these institutional processes of documentation and surveillance, normalized through our everyday interactions with computers.
Book project
I’m currently working on a book titled People Orientations: Toward a Transgender Software and Video Game History.
My work centers queer, trans, and feminist interventions in video game, software, data, surveillance, and technology studies. Central to my research is the knowledge that computational media technologies were built around the existences and histories of queer and trans people and people of color.
Articles & REsearch
You can click on the ARTICLES page on my website in order to view and download PDFs of articles I’ve most recently published. My research projects include:
How the Computer Taught Us to See, an article published in Camera Obscura. Here I use the method of the “horizontal cut” in order to look at the history and development of the visual metaphor of the file, the folder, and the document on the computer desktop as emerging at the same time that racialized medical diagnostic surveillance systems were shifting with regard to the definitions of “queer” and “trans” (or transgender) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is still used today by healthcare professionals.
A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors, which focuses on early trans histories of home computing, glitch art, and the software error, situating the glitch as a historically trans methodology through Jamie Faye Fenton.
Critical Game Studies and Its Afterlives: Why Game Studies Needs Software Studies and Computer History, a field review published on Just Tech by the Social Science Research Council. In this field review I reflect on the past, present, and my hopes for the future of critical game studies, linking the study of games to ongoing antiracist, feminist, queer, and trans critiques of games, play, software, and computer history and science and technology studies (STS).
Glitch, Body, Anti-Body, an invited article for a special issue of Outland edited by foundational glitch artist Rosa Menkman in conversation with Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism. My article, “Glitch, Body, Anti-Body” places the breakdown of the organizing metaphor of the computer’s graphical user interface alongside the breakdown of the metaphor of my own body after being diagnosed with Acute Hypoxic Respiratory Failure from COVID before vaccines were widely available. This article re-thinks the relationship between virality, glitch, disability, and the complex relationship between the metaphor of the screen, and the metaphor of the body.
The Specter of the Chinese Room: The Queer of Color Origins of Artificial Intelligence, an article about the queer, trans, and xenophobic origins of artificial intelligence and their intersection with immigration policy from the 1960s to 1980s