Cyborgs, Dolls and Passing Narratives: Trans-femininity in Popular Music

The Cyborg is a figure that has been used by feminist scholars as a metaphor for feminist issues and transgender identity because the embodiment of both transgender people and cyborgs challenges binary understandings of male/femaleness and human/nonhumanness respectively. This comparison has also suggested the potential of reading cyborgs as passing figures who attempt to perform normative social identities; however, scholarship analyzing Cyborg figures has not explored this in ways that are specific to trans-feminine people. By combining contributions from the theory of gender performativity and research on transgender linguistic practices and identity construction, I perform a visual and textual analysis of the music of three trans-feminine artists: Kim Petras, Chase Icon, and Arca. These artist’s bodies of work, I argue, are united by an engagement with self-representative cyborg figures that can be analyzed to present a spectrum of normative to nonnormative models of trans-feminine identity. Their respective engagement with these Cyborg figures diverges from “stealth” or invisibility as the predominant models of trans-feminine embodiment, and instead marks a shift towards more selfconstructed and expansive possibilities for transgender identity