UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Performance, Play and Design, and Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Dr. micha cárdenas has been awarded the National Women’s Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize for her book Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, Duke University Press, February 2022. cárdenas, together with co-winner Rana Jaleel, creator of The Work of Rape, also from Duke University Press, will probably be honored at NWSA’s 2022 conference this November, “killing rage: Resistance on the Other Side of Freedom.”
Named in honor of visionary feminist philosopher and author Gloria Anzaldúa, the prize is awarded for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that make significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship. Anzaldúa, an extended lively member of NWSA, was also a lecturer within the Women’s Studies Department at UCSC where she influenced a generation of scholars, offering such courses as Autohistorias and Women of Color in the US. Her groundbreaking book Borderlands: La Frontera (1987) was chosen as certainly one of the “100 Best Books of the Century” by each the Utne Reader and Hungry Mind Review.
“Considered one of the very best honors in Women/Gender/Feminist Studies, it is a landmark, field-transforming win!” says UCSC Arts Division Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu. “micha cárdenas joins the ranks of probably the most distinguished feminist scholars who’re expanding the sector.”
cárdenas’ book considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry so as to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a way she calls algorithmic evaluation. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By specializing in these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano’s holographic art, Esdras Parra’s and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry, Mattie Brice’s digital games, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic evaluation provides recent modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.
“Poetic Operations is arguably the primary major academic work to take care of the material in such detail,” writes Sofie Vlaad, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry. “How cárdenas uses the term [trans of color poetics] will likely develop into the usual by which other engagements with the term are measured.”
“I’m humbled by this honor,” says cárdenas. “This award is probably the most meaningful recognition I actually have received in my profession. Gloria Anzaldúa has been, and continues to be, certainly one of my primary inspirations, as a queer Chicana feminist who blended artistic practice and scholarship. She is a big a part of why I got here to UCSC—to be within the place where she taught, studied, and wrote. I’m honored to hold on her legacy. I hope that this award brings more attention to trans of color poetics, and helps proceed to determine transgender studies as a necessary part of ladies’s, feminist, and gender studies.”
cárdenas directs the Critical Realities Studio at UCSC, a hybrid studio/lab for critical theory and art practice. The studio engages multiple realities in art, including augmented reality and alternate reality games, in addition to other types of art practice, to interact with probably the most pressing issues the world faces, including climate change, gender violence, racism and colonialism, using algorithmic and intersectional methods.
cárdenas’ co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is co-editor of the book series Queer/Trans/Digital at NYU Press, with Amanda Philips and Bo Ruberg. She is a primary generation Colombian American.
Her solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries, and biennials including the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece, Arnolfini Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion in London, Museum of Modern Art in Latest York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, the Zero1 Biennial, and the California Biennial. cárdenas is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0.
cárdenas’ newest artwork, Oceanic: Queering the Ocean, a collaboration with UCSC professors Cynthia Ling Lee and Susana Ruiz, in addition to Gerald Casel and Huy Truong, will probably be screening on the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival on November 11, 2022. On October 11, she spoke on the event “Art and Tech in a Warming World with the Latest York Times” at KQED in San Francisco. Her next discuss Poetic Operations will probably be online on October 20, hosted by the Drescher Center for the Humanities and the Latinx and Hispanic Faculty Association on the University of Maryland.
This project was supported partially by a grant from the Arts Research Institute at UCSC. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at UCSC, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.