Call for Papers: TRANS MEDIA STUDIES

Issues of mediatization, in particular (media) visibility and its consequences, are formative for a broad range of discourses surrounding trans experiences. While increased (affirmative) media representation of trans people became associated with potential political agency in the mid-2010s – famously coined in the US as the Transgender Tipping Point –, in 2025, these discourses are dominated by questions of violence through and in media exposure. With the rise of authoritarian forces, discriminatory policies against trans, inter, and gender-nonconforming people do not only continue, but also make them the central target of a demonizing and reactionary rhetoric, and of repressive politics against bodily and gender self-determination. This escalation can be understood as an extension of violence. BIPoC trans people, for example, have long been and continue to be exposed to severe gendered and racialized violence and discrimination. In queer and trans of color critique, various approaches have been analyzing these conditions for years, particularly with regard to the ambivalent relation of invisibility, hypervisibility, and vulnerability.

Trans Media Studies refers to the eponymous research field that is slowly becoming more established in the Anglophone world. It deals with the contemporary as well as historical political and media conditions of gender(ing), transitions within and beyond the binary gender system, and its transgression. The interdisciplinary field of trans studies with its critical approaches to historical, theoretical, and epistemological questions serves as the central point of reference. Taking shared areas of interest and inquiry into account, like the critique and analysis of subjectivation, gendering, normativity, the constitution of bodies and selves, this issue also relates to neighboring disciplines such as gender and queer studies, critical intersex studies, and inter* studies.

Besides questioning and re-evaluating German(-speaking) media studies through the lens of trans studies, this issue aspires to expand trans media studies beyond the US context. Therefore, contributors are invited to re-examine established media theoretical discourses. The field of gender media studies, which investigates the interdependence of gender and media, offers promising possibilities for further research. In addition, trans media studies might be able to tackle questions of trans- and intermediality from a new perspective: Which (binary) concepts structure notions of distinct media, their boundaries, transitions, and their theorization? What does this mean for our understanding of hardware and software, backup and update? To what extent does a concept of transition that is rooted in (trans) gendered experience potentially enable the politicization of media-technical contexts?

While working towards further establishing trans media studies, it is also essential to consider questions of situating and decolonizing and to involve researchers and trans experiences/historiographies beyond the Global North. Overall, the issue follows the mutually productive resonances of trans and media studies to investigate the specific material-discursive, medial, and technological constellations that shape – and are in turn shaped by – trans experiences, gendered life, and desire. A project of particular political and epistemological urgency.
In addition to bringing together media studies research on transness and the opening of trans studies for media studies, this issue explores how both fields can challenge each other with mutual questions and demands.

The ZfM (Journal of Media Studies) is one of the largest peer-reviewed academic publications for media studies in German-speaking countries. Financed by the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaften (Society for Media Studies) whose more than 1,500 members receive the journal as a printed copy, the bi-annual publication is also made freely available to the public under an open access (OA) licence. Whilst the ZfM aims to promote diverse perspectives from a global academic community and welcomes international submissions, it also maintains German as its main language, which is why all articles that have successfully passed the peer-review process will be translated into German before publication.