Trans Exploits

“Jian Neo Chen's book Trans Exploits is essential because it centers and uplifts trans people of color. This work is critical because it highlights the contributions and impact of trans people of color and their influence in shaping our culture, politics, and movement.” - Jennicet Gutiérrez, Trans Latinx Activist

"In Trans Exploits, Jian Neo Chen focuses on the foundational and ongoing racial displacement of trans people of color from systems of white supremacy, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and white trans communities. Through conversations with a diverse range of artists and activists, Chen explores a rich series of cases in which trans people of color use digital media to create new expressive spaces and comment upon their displacement. This book will be important for a wide range of fields, including cinema and media studies and trans of color critique. ” - C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

“Trans Exploits is a valuable meditation on unsettling and redefining the relationship between trans of color culture and technologies of representation. . . . This text charts numerous points of entry for any reader interested in the converging histories of US expansion, dispossession, and detention.” - Christopher Joseph Lee, TSQ

“The biggest strength of Trans Exploits lies in Chen’s deft ability to unite such a range of examples. It is testament to the book’s methodological intervention: trans exploits might thus be seen as a term to capture the different creative and strategic responses to racialized and gendered forms of power, surveillance, and regulation.” - V Varun Chaudhry, GLQ

“Chen deploys trans of color as always in flux, as in relation with others, as a praxis of solidarity, and as refusal of all colonial and capitalist logics. . . . Remarkably, as Chen navigates the vast temporal and spatial frames, without conflating one context/community into another, they carefully historicize and contextualize each contemporary artist and their trans embodiments.” - Nishant Upadhyay, American Quarterly