Within the past 15 years, the cultural and political visibility of trans people has grown at an unprecedented rate; at the same time, social media increasingly mediates and shapes people’s coming together, activism, politics, and public expression. Social media provides the infrastructure for the counterpublics of trans people and their allies, and even enabled them to disseminate counterpublic discourses to a wider audience. Mainstream media and political visibility for the existence of trans people and trans movements has likewise increased.

However, rather than eliminating violence or oppression faced by trans people, increased visibility might at times exacerbate violence against trans people—a phenomenon trans studies scholars call the paradox of trans visibility. In the United States and internationally, the existence of trans people and their access to various spaces currently faces heightened opposition, as gender populist political discourses frame trans people as potentially threatening or even violent.

In this thesis, I ask how trans bodies, identities, and violence are articulated in affective publics? What implications does this have for trans and other bodies in society? The dissertation addresses the politicized co-articulations of violence and trans bodies and the trans paradox of visibility through four sub-studies. The sub-studies examine the affective articulations of trans bodies and identities in a trans counterpublic, in videos of real violence shared on a user-generated entertainment platform, in the rhetoric and campaigning of the Christian right, in the frames of the International Trans Day of Remembrance, and in intersectional activist rhetoric that politicizes and reframes other frames of violence.

Methodologically, the research combines the idea of following affect with the cultural studies idea of doing research as studying contexts and articulations. The research implements a critical-reparative approach that is open to surprises but interested in intersecting power relations. The dissertation combines internet research with feminist theorizing on the relationships between rhetoric, affects, and bodies.

The case studies of the dissertation show that affective-discursive media practices bring people together into affective publics around trans bodies, trans identities and violence. Frames, figures, and stories of (un)belonging bring people together into different affective publics, where emotions are attached to trans bodies and identities in ways that can impact the lives of trans and other people. The affordances of online platforms can further amplify affective responses and accelerate the attachment of affects to trans bodies and the coming together of people around these affective practices. Simultaneously, the intensive dissemination of affective frames via the internet offers activists the opportunity to seize and destabilize such frames.

The relationship of the trans publics to society and its prevailing discourses turns out to be ambivalent. I show how the transmasculine counterpublic I studied participates in trans world-making by circulating complex stories of trans bodies and identities. My analysis reveals how TDoR’s framings of violence that focus on a singular trans identity produce powerful affects that are then channeled into Finnish trans activism. I critically examine how such affective framings obscure intersectional causes of violence. In one case study, the entertainment-based sharing of violence against trans people on a video-sharing service further continued the symbolic violence against the trans women already present in the violent situation, even as this video offered intersectional activists the opportunity to grab and reframe both the video and the violence faced by the trans women.

This dissertation extends the US-centric research debate on the articulations of violence and transness in trans activism to the European and Finnish context. Instead of discussing trans visibility in a unitary manner, I propose that researchers should consider trans visibility through a layered conceptualization of multiple publics that seek to disseminate their own framings and, at least occasionally, gain broader visibility.

Media brings people together in ways that evoke emotions and affect, with social media being particularly affective. I argue that the expansion of trans visibility enabled by the internet and social media is a pharmakon, that is, both medicine and poison. Rather than presenting a solution to the affective politicization of transness through mere rational argumentation, I emphasize the possibility of affective-reflective solidarity and a tactical relationship to trans visibilities.