ABSTRACT
Airport scanners have become a site of trans* and genderqueer anxiety and performativity much in the same way public toilets served those roles for generations of gender and sexuality warriors and resisters. A new generation of LGBTIQ assimilation has not tempered the politics of visibility in such spaces for trans-masculine and femme-presenting women. If trans* has become hypervisible in an age of social media, femme queer sexuality and gender expression have become even more invisible. The now everyday experience of body scanning as a process of entry for airports and other “secure” areas both overtly and inadvertently categorizes and marginalizes gender outlaws. This chapter draws on critical autoethnographic narratives as well as feminist, trans*, and queer scholarship as lenses through which to question the everyday politics of invisibility and security and to break down binaries in human and more-than-human intersubjectivity. It is our aim and hope that this work offers readers new and resistive ways of performing the rainbow of queer selves possible in contemporary communication scholarship.
