ABSTRACT
The chapter looks at how Casa Chama, an NGO for transvestigender rights in São Paulo, Brazil, practices a politics of trans care in its communicative practices to support the historically stigmatized and marginalized trans population. Through Dean Spade’s toolkit for social movements working in the framework of mutual aid, the chapter illuminates the NGO’s unique emancipatory social media communication as an important driver of its social change agenda. To understand NGO discourses of trans visibility and political participation, Casa Chama’s messenger communication in Whatsapp groups and Instagram live-streams “Chama na Live” are examined to discuss the NGO’s digital archiving of trans memory and history. In this mediated space—defined as an autonomous zone of trans re-existence—the NGO intertwines artistic expression, direct action, advocacy and outreach. By understanding the underlying values of trans care that influence Casa Chama’s organizational and communicative structures, we understand how transgendering organizations their communication practices pushes beyond normative conceptions of NGO institutional communication to resignify media spaces as liberated zones for social change efforts.
