Biometric Technologies, Gendered Subjectivities and Artistic Resistance

This chapter takes as its point of departure the fact that trans and non-binary people face obstacles to mobility and migration, making experiences of border-crossing challenging or even impossible. While recent legal interventions that recognise non-binary gender have attempted to rectify some of the problems faced by trans and non-binary individuals, biometric security technologies like body scanners create further challenges for gender-diverse communities when crossing international borders. This chapter draws upon interviews conducted with trans and non-binary respondents to evaluate experiences with border-crossing to help understand this dynamic whereby governance strategies become more inclusive, while bureaucratic structures and security technologies pose new obstacles. Amongst this increasingly securitised landscape, artistic forms of resistance can offer a means of subverting discriminatory policing and surveillance practices by posing alternative visualisations that reveal and challenge their supposed objectivity. The concluding section turns to such practices of creative resistance by artists like Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Zach Blas, and Ma Liuming to offer illustrative examples of how (gendered) recognition can be contested and reconceived through art.