Abstract
Of the five physical senses, touch is perhaps the most broadly used in metaphorical and analogic meanings. To be “touched,” or for something to be “touching,” can be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on context and shared understanding. In aesthetic criticism, hapticality has been interpreted similarly broadly, particularly as regards photography and film. But much of this work has only hinted at the possibilities for the hapticality of sound. On a parallel disciplinary track, trans studies have produced important work in haptics and the constructedness of bodies and gender, which has also been used in some trans aesthetic philosophy. This paper attempts to join the two in interrogating a trans haptic aesthetics through the work of Venezuelan pop musician Arca, and particularly her five-album KiCk series. Through these albums, I propose a trans haptic aesthetics based on a capacious understanding of texture: through the sonic, thematic, and self-presentational elements of the music. In so doing, I work towards a resistant, liberatory aesthetics that uses texture to reach out and touch communities of listeners, and speculate on the effects of listeners being touched and touching back.
Intro: Sensation and gender-transgressive sound
Transness—dissent, modification, flexibility, and/or reinterpretation of sex-gender assignment before, at, and after birth—can be understood as an expression of a dynamic relationship between proximal and distal senses. Distal senses tend to include vision and audition, and sometimes olfaction, and we hardly need to enumerate the ways in which being seen or heard (or smelled) are gendered and sexed. So much of the cultural-visual, from colors of babies’ clothes and symbols on public restrooms to hair, gait, and countenance, are filtered and categorized through lenses of sex-gender, and when these presumptions are challenged or violated, there tends to be consequences. Similarly, the tone, inflection, range, and use of one’s voice are characteristics that can be measured against sex-gender metrics and assumptions, even at a distance. The primary proximal sense is touch, which seems to mandate a level of closeness, be it physical or affective, erotic or familial. Expressions and embodiments of non-cis genders—that is, other than those assigned at birth and reinforced through public institutions—rely on and recondition both distal and proximal senses. But as Fisher (1997) reminds us in an early, still-influential understanding of haptic aesthetics, “what is compelling about the haptic sense is that despite its categorization as a proximal sense it is implicated in distal perception as well” (5). My inquiry takes the haptic as a cipher for distal senses rendered proximal, where sound and vision become touch and bodily sensation, through which I seek a trans aesthetics of hapticality. Garcia-Mispireta, (2023) notes in his landmark study on haptics in EDM music and club settings: “hearing is, after all, a kind of touch sense” (87). It is my contention that trans haptic aesthetics offer a further means of understanding being touched by sound, and touching back, and how this reciprocity offers novel and flexible ways of expressing sex-gender identity and embodiment.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note that “haptic space” could “be as much visual or auditory as tactile” (655), and I seek to put pressure on this assertion by examining a series of works by the trans pop producer, musician, and singer Alejandra Ghersi, who has since 2012 released music under the name Arca. The particular albums under consideration here comprise her five-album KiCk series, released over an 18-month period from June 2020-December 2021. The KiCk albums are in a number of respects spatial. They cover a massive breadth of music, deploying genre and stylistic variation from Arca’s native Venezuela to North American and European club musics, as well as many other sonic and generic categories. Furthermore, the songs modulate between dialect/slang-driven Spanish to English to compositions that employ no language at all. Arca manipulates volume, rhythm, and lyrical meter and content to push at the boundaries of genre and, as I argue, carves out haptic spaces in her music through references and sonic vibrations, textures of sound and thematics. In so doing, she signals to her various communities, fandoms, and even potential adversaries or critics through the sheer scope of the project, a rarity in any musical genre today, let alone the broad field of pop.
The genre promiscuity and category-defiance of Arca’s music are implicitly and explicitly political, using haptics to “touch on” issues around trans resistance, nonbinary embodiment, and self-determination and bodily autonomy. The hapticality of Arca’s art is sometimes weaponized, other times defensive; at certain intervals beautiful and empathic, at others violent in its embrace or rejection. I gather these affective resonances under a haptic aesthetics of texture, keeping with architectural theorist and critic Crawford’s (2020) conception of “texture as a vector for genderqueer experience.” I use the KiCk series as a means of exploring this vector, considering the textures of Arca’s music, but always bringing them back to the haptic, the touch and reaction to being touched that I propose is endemic to her aesthetic. The promise of textural trans haptic aesthetics is nothing less than a subversion of both sex-gender ascription and aesthetic dictates that marginalize and smooth out the textures of non-cis art and ways of being. The textures of Arca’s magnum opus repurpose and reject this smoothing.
Theoretical background: Haptic aurality and aesthetics of touch
Haptics are concerned with touch: tangibility, sensing temperature, texture, hardness. While music directly implicates aurality, it, too, can display and manipulate temperature, texture, and hardness. In this section, I trace extrapolations of hapticality from touch to the visual and the auditory, in service of discovering the grain and texture of haptic aesthetics. The trans haptic aesthetics I propose pursue grain in terms of content and reference (against minoritization, misogyny, transphobia, and sex-gender essentialism), as well as sound (marking out sonic territory as distinctly communitarian—that is, hailing to communities of affinity). In the subsequent section, I deploy trans studies to analyze haptic aurality and return to Crawford’s sense of texture in moving towards a trans haptic aesthetics.
One common point of origin for extending haptic aurality into the distal senses is Marks’s (2000) The Skin of the Film, wherein the philosopher details “haptic looking” as a means of observation that moves “over the surface of its object […] not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture” (162) 1 . This distinction between form and texture is useful for our sense of auditory texture or grain—characteristics of song that both underscore and transcend generic form. Marks notes the potential for haptic listening, as she notes that “sound too can be haptic,” the auditory is another component “important to many [haptic] works and to the feeling of embodied experience they produce” (xvi). In what follows, I track various visual and sound studies theorists who have taken this bridge in founding and expanding on a sense of haptic aurality. These include Coulthard (2012), who writes of haptic aurality in the films of Michael Haneke that “The haptic foregrounds tactile experience, the skin or body of film and its relation to the sensations of the spectator” (18). Her sense of haptic aurality concerns being touched by sound in film, a focus on how sounds touch us while we watch. Others have extended Marks’s concept into listening practices, including Mallinson Bird, 2020, who theorizes in drag lip-sync performance “the experiences of immersive listening […] as adopting a haptic element, in which the attention to tactility is married with a connectivity that extends across space” (53). Tactility is about communitarian connection through sound, being touched by the texture of what one is hearing as well as the context in which it is heard. For Müller (2022), this listening practice “is not limited to the sense of hearing, but involves other aspects of perception (sensing, feeling) and draws on past experiences” (81). The title of Müller’s book—Hearing Sexism—reflects the embodied and sex-gendered ways in which she understands these past experiences in listening. She continues, “The sonic body thus emerges not only in interaction with sounds, as a kind of exclusive level, but connects with an internalized knowledge of processes and objects that produce sounds” (82). Here, haptic aurality is accounted for as “bodily reactions” that “are related to further social realities and ideologies” (83). Central among these realities and ideologies for Arca’s work are those of sex-gender, race, migrancy, language—the way subjects are understood and apprehended socially.
In writing about club music, Garcia-Mispireta transposes the visual onto sonic touch. He writes, “in a similar fashion” to Marks’s haptic visuality, “the centrality of haptic aurality to electronic dance music” is accomplished through the use of “richly textured, granular, embodied sounds that draw attention to the haptic experience” (87). In his chapter on “Sonic Tactility,” Garcia-Mispireta draws on both production and club experiences to describe the “tactilization of sound in electronic music,” which he describes as “an important sensory-affective bridge between touching, feeling, hearing” (66). This bridge is built through the foregrounding of beats, using timbre to evoke “vibrant and vibrating flesh,” and a focus on grain—or, in my accounting, the textural surfaces of the music 2 . Schaeffer, 1994 is an earlier sound theorist who links the two, suggesting that “grain gives texture” (135) through tremolo or vibrato, which modulate the amplitude and frequency of sounds. He notes ways in which “in grain, a tactile word, we again meet the convergence of the senses of touch and audition as individual impulses pass from their flicker state to smooth contours of pitched sound” (135). Finally, North (2024) accounts for a version of Schaeffer’s convergence in terms of a haptic aurality that “resists linearity and focuses on immediate, sensory experience” (299). It is my contention that for trans artists and communities of listeners, this immediacy arises from the persistence of phobic institutions and their efforts to silence and erase trans subjects. Trans haptic aesthetics use the grain of resistance and subversion to transgress the limits assumed and maintained by these institutions. As I outline in the touches below, these aesthetics use time, collaboration, and specific language/dialect to signal to community members and coconspirators. These aesthetics are trans in the way they convey sex-gender transgression and fungibility, and haptic in how they coax and demand a reciprocity of touch within sound.
We can use sonic, visual, and lyrical cues to discern the ways in which Arca’s music attempts to touch her listeners. At each stage of production, music poses a series of questions around what it should sound like, what it should say, what it should mean, to whom it reaches out. The answers to these questions are the texture of the experience of producing and listening to the music, the texture into which Arca engrains and stiches the embodied experience of transness and non-binarity, straddling sex-genders, languages, genres, and styles. Each time it seems a lyric, a beat, a melody, or a mood dominates an album or a track, there is another to challenge it, creating textures both frictive and smooth for artist and listener alike. As Campt notes, “the haptic is not merely a question of physical touch. It is the link between touching and feeling, as well as the multiple mediations we construct to allow or prevent our access to those affective relations” (99-100). Arca’s music mediates this access in a variety of ways that are designed to stimulate, mimic, and press against the boundaries of hapticality. When Fisher suggests that the haptic, in contradistinction to the visual, “functions by contiguity, contact, and resonance” (2002, 12), I argue that music deploys these same functions. Fisher further stakes out the territory of the haptic: it “renders surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside […] and in external space” through “weight, pressure, balance, temperature, vibration and pressure” (2002, 12). Each of these bodily characteristics are inherent to the grain of a trans haptic aesthetics, which I argue relies on the “the tactile, kinesthetic and proprioceptive senses” (2002, 12) to probe questions of identity and embodiment, but also what is possible with popular art forms. We understand texture through distinction: rough vs smooth, rigid vs malleable, fine vs coarse grain. Trans embodiment and identity can be an expression of distinction in an analogous way: understanding expectation and assignment vs authentic expression and choice. Trans haptic aesthetics use textural distinction to propose new and alternative ways of composing music, and, by extension, being. At their highest potential, as expressed in Arca’s work, trans haptic aesthetics offer entrée into new textures of being-in-(trans) community.
At the physiognomic level, sound feeds into proprioception; it literally helps us determine our place in the world. At the aesthetic level, sound is haptic in a way that vision is not; we feel the vibrations and sense different frequencies in manners to varying degrees audible and discernible in their layers and arrangement (or lack thereof). Tomšič (2025) suggests that “haptic aesthetics would […] include the perception of material traits such as texture, materiality, shape, movement, or temperature, underscoring the proximal embodied encounter with art” (42). To this material, embodied sense, Tomšič adds a kind of bodily reciprocity, noting that “the relational trait of the haptic” contrasts with “unidirectional and static” experience of art, instead prompting “a manifold and reciprocal engagement” (45). Put another way: “one is always touched in the act of touching” (45). Tomšič’s aims for a haptic epistemology that operates from proximity or “aesthesis” (45), and “encompasses the experience of otherness, which is imbued with unpredictability” (46). Embodiment, materiality, and textures at once unpredictable, open, and indeterminate, and at the same time relational and reciprocal—this aesthetics is touch “instilled with the experience of alterity […] representing an inexhaustible and unresolvable epistemic pursuit” (50). For trans haptic aesthetics, this inexhaustibility is non-teleological becoming; trans subjects mediate their contact with the world through self-determination and design. As such, the textures of these aesthetics are those of becoming and fungibility, resisting categorization and definition from outside. In the following section, I consider how trans haptic aesthetics intentionally deploy their own inexhaustible and unresolvable epistemic pursuit, in service of self-expression and self-determination.
Key concepts: Texture and trans haptic aesthetics
Trans haptic aesthetics are built on proximity, embodiment, and relational openness, and touch offers a cipher for thinking beyond identitarian visibility (i.e. “representation”) as an end in itself. This is one of the major political ends of trans haptic aesthetics: to touch and be touched, rather than relying on how subjects are seen and see. Cárdernas (2022) underscores the insufficiency of representation alone: “emerging trans politics must account for more than visibility. They must account for the forms of communication […] including movement, shape-shifting, aurality, tactility, and texture” (88). Arca’s work is steeped in the sensual and relational, but haptics are not simply or strictly reflected as thematics in her music—trans haptic aesthetics also underwrite formal choices in the ways the art touches and hails the listener to touch back. I use the figure of the textural to detail this reciprocal touching, in the ways that texture solicits contact and itself touches the toucher, smoothly or frictionally, gently or abrasively. Texture implies closeness, and objects or sounds appearing smooth from afar or at lesser volume reveal various topographies when participating in what Marinkova (2011) refers to “haptic acts of proximity” (4). Marinkova finds in haptic observation a penetration of the surface that in turn “rejoices in texture and grain” (8). This rejoicing extends to “the exploration of the intimate space of the bodily and the microsocial space of the interpersonal” (4). How can pop music penetrate these spaces?
Trans haptic aesthetics accounts for bodily reactions in ways particularly attuned to the interpersonal realities and ideologies of sex-gender. The first of these ways is in manipulating and defying presumptions of how pop music is constructed, not least the space it affords women, queer artists, and trans and nonbinary performers. Arca touches her listeners through sonic strategies that challenge and undercut misogynist expectations of what (cis) women in her various genre spaces do with pop music. As Müller suggests, “If gender tends to correlate with different and distinguishable relationships to one’s own body that are invoked and perpetuated in popular music, our possibilities for resonating with music are dependent on gender, which is also inscribed in the sonical body” (180). The effects of a trans sonical body on these relationships and possibilities are multiple, and require a capacious sense of how the sonic is implicated in the haptic, and vice versa. I assert that it is through texture that the sonical body registers touch. As one example in queer theory: Sedgwick (2003) suggests that “other senses beyond the visual and haptic are involved in the perception of texture, as when we hear the brush-brush of corduroy trousers” (15), and the ability to digitally manipulate waveforms and rhythmic patterns can create just such roughness and smoothness in song. Bradley (2020) expands on Sedgwick’s haptics as “texxture,” a stand-in for “a question at once animated and omitted by queer theory’s inquiries into touch: how to theorize texxture with regard to a history of bodily wounding occasioned by touch, when it is texxture that is seized upon by the various proxies for touch that willingly or inadvertently redouble racial fantasies of violation?” (2). The violent touch of Arca’s music emerges in menacing pistol-cocks and gunshots, verbiage of being hit, ripped, torn apart; she leaves to the listener what constitutes violation and recoiling, and what should be understood as resistance and reaching out. Furthermore, Arca works within not just gendered, but also racialized musical paradigms, deploying reggaeton, trap, drill, and rave alongside classical composition and dream pop—her racial fantasy is one in which these generic categories collide and threaten to explode at every turn.
The second level at which these aesthetic account for bodily effects is more personal and community-relational. The touches of the KiCk series reflect the artist developing and living out her own sense of transition, a sense that opens on a desire for connection and expansion. In one interview, she suggests that “we’re all in constant flux,” as “we’re all transitioning: from birth to death, it’s inevitable” (Dunn, 2020). She describes her public sex-gender transition as equally inevitable, even as “there’s this transition that is optional, that socially—as imperfect and flawed as it is—allows you to express this thing that is so abstract and physical and primal” (Dunn, 2020). Texture can be abstract, geometric or without apparent pattern, but it can also be primal and physical, like lines, pores, and hair on skin. For Arca, the “optional” transition is “the difference between having that static inside of you and not sharing it, and moving the static outward and into your environment” (Dunn, 2020). This movement is haptic, a touching and a being touched at once, the static a current of desire to which trans haptic aesthetics can give voice and form. And as that personal environment is entered into, it is changed as well. I now want to turn to a few more explicitly trans considerations of haptics and texture before reading the KiCk series as a textural trans haptic work.
The figure of the haptic, of reciprocal touch, unifies sonic and bodily transgression, transition, and becoming—disorder-become-composition. Huitrón (2019) claims as “axiomatic that the haptic requires and, in fact, demands a disordering of the senses” (166). This disordering figure of the haptic is at once mysterious and at the same time highly functional in discerning the grain of trans haptic aesthetics. For Huitrón, tactility “is affective sensing beyond the surface” (167), offering in its mixing of senses the call “to touch sounds” (167). Touch is “relational,” as “at once a medium and an organ, [touch] is always already trans-: a sense that reaches beyond” (bid). None of this is to relegate touch to abstraction or metaphor; instead, hapticality becomes a way of understanding art and living artfully, that is, living self-consciously of self-constructedness and feeling one’s way through their world. As Huitrón suggests, “to transgender touch, then, means to transgress the lines and borders that delineate gendered expectations in the social imaginary, and the fantasy of its overdetermination” (175). Touch as reaching beyond, as transgression, as delimitation—each of these speaks to the use of a trans haptic aesthetics to propose and express different ways of interacting with the world through art. For Arca, this means sonic delimitation as bodily delimitation, and vice versa. Halberstam (2016) echoes this concept of disorder, noting that “the haptic is a way of narrating that doesn’t have an orientation or a goal.” Furthermore, whereas “the visual locks you into a certain regime of knowing […] the haptic doesn’t,” and thus resists the call to master a single mode of expression. Halberstam marries this diffusion back to questions of embodiment, suggesting that “haptic objects ask you to reexamine what your body is by coming close to it” (Halberstam, 2016). How close can music come to the body? What renders it more proximal, or at the very least how can it deploy proximity as a tool for expression? Halberstam wonders, “can we stay with the haptic that’s just a pointing, a touching, a referencing, but not a knowing, claiming, and classifying?” We shall see/feel.
The persistent figure of haptic knowing in my inquiry is texture, and particularly Crawford’s sense of texture as a vector of genderqueer experience. As an architecture scholar, Crawford deploys texture in terms of space and the ways in which spatial metaphors do and do not adequately account for trans experience, embodiment, and self-determination. Crawford’s sense of texture is political in its being “thoroughly imbricated in gender and sexual norms,” to the point where “texture and gender are mutually defining.” Where Huitrón suggests the haptic is a method, Crawford espouses texture as “an activity, not a state of being.” This activity requires relation, is “palpable only in becoming,” and concerns “movement, encounter—and not […] static states of being.” Arca (Pristauz, 2020) refers to the “static” of sex-gender disaffirmation as “a static that was inside me that others didn’t realize was there.” This static is the latent energy of trans becoming, which Arca sees as “the manifestation of an expression,” and even if “it can cause friction between my environment and my identity […] it feels less noisy” to express it “than to keep it in” (Pristauz, 2020). Static has a sound, a visual texture, and a haptic ability to shock—Arca harnesses this static for positive, palliative ends.
Application: The textures of KiCk
Arca’s work has been bubbling under the surface of this consideration of trans haptic aesthetics, of the ways we can feel through sound and express sex-gender transgression and dis/affirmation through electronic, auteur (and outré) 3 music. As I begin to probe the surfaces and depths of KiCk, it is worth remembering that this a rather enormous amount of music, released in a short period of time. Sherburn (2020) notes in a review for Pitchfork: “For all the songs’ evident variety, their repetition of familiar moods and core techniques causes much of the material to blur together.” That blurring, of course, is in the eye, ear, and sensorium of the beholder; as Sherburn immediately follows: “the excess is the point.” But if it is, being excessive is not the entire point. Gill-Peterson (2024) has noted the ways in which trans women are and are expected to be excessive (29), and Arca understands this demand, particularly in her theorizing of the diva (Abramovic 2020: 38), a feminized figure of excess, and thus encounters it directly. The five albums are an expression of abundance, a reaching out that could smother the listener if they took it upon themselves to comprehend the entirety of KiCk, all at once. A trans haptic aesthetic does not require such apprehension; instead, to feel within and between the music and lyrics, melody and rhythm for their transgressions and their confirmations, violence and comfort, might be the actual point. As such, I do not seek a complete catalog of the haptic strategies of the KiCk series. Instead, I will focus on a few moments—touches—that reflect trans hapticality in their textures. These include nonbinary time, the deployment of guest artists, and queer communitarian uses of slang and dialect, each adding to a case for the promiscuity and variability of tactic and focus across this massive work.
Touch 1: Nonbinary Time
Sequencing matters in any durative art form; any attempt to challenge this directly simply serves to reinforce it. In the streaming age, with its algorithmic selection of songs, Arca’s release of multiple albums on vinyl LP is a direct affront to the un-sequencing of popular music. For our purposes, the first touch initiates the entire field of textural possibility, the sounds and lyrics against which the rest of KiCk will branch, blossom, revise, and renege. “Nonbinary” is the first track on the first volume of the cycle; this is a significant pride-of-place regardless of how one wants to think of the works together. The first 12 seconds of KiCk are barely audible bass pads, slightly syncopated into a dark lurch, perceivable more as vibrations in contrast to a mechanical click and short, reversed whirr sample. After a half-second pause, Arca’s staccato voice—clear and articulated without any notable effect or dynamic range—begins with a first-person espousal of self-determination: “I do what I wanna do when I wanna do it,” a fitting way to open a massive, polygeneric project such as this. It is a righteously jarring shift, suggestive of a DJ fading a track in before a drop, but the same bass lurch, lacking any percussive beat, is the only backing track. This is an unfamiliar auditory touch, quite different from the upper-register, open-vowel, almost a cappella introduction to Arca’s previous, self-titled LP (2017). Arca is creating texture within the opening track of KiCk, warning the listener that she is in control, and that the joy of nonbinary existence and persistence includes refusing normativization of volume, dynamics, rhythm, or lyric. At first glance, this touch is almost redundant: of course she is in command on an album that bears her name, on a song that bears part of her identity. Trans haptic aesthetics reads the juxtaposition of atonal menace and threat against the subsequent track’s gentleness as a transgression of genre and gender expectation.
At the half-minute mark of “Nonbinary,” Arca’s voice splits, cuing the listener to the panned, doubled vocals that have been in lockstep until this point, which also introduces the second-person pronoun to whom the lyric is directed: “Do you want a taste?” Into the second verse, the sound of a gun cocking and firing introduces a subtle change in the backing track, more sporadic clicks over an even sparser bass note accompaniment. Arca is creating a texture of unease, a measured potential response to violence. “Go ahead, speak for yourself/cast the first stone,” she intones, still talking rather than working from any sense of vocal melody. Through its verses, “Nonbinary” is only elliptically concerned with sex-gender presentation, instead focused on its narrator’s labor and having been both lucky and unlucky at once. The bridge is introduced with another gun shot, this time the sound of a shell casing ricocheting off a hard floor, Arca repeating, with a pregnant pause before the final word each time, “speak for yourself … states.” The backing is more aggressive but remains rhythmically diffuse, and the vocal matches pitch into the final verse, Arca spitting a list of oppositions she refuses, friendly/fake, sexy/sad, bad/sweet, all working towards the titular subject: “What a treat/it is to be/nonbinary.” But the end of the barely 2 minute opener introduces another texture, a behind-the-beat, arpeggiated synth line playing a strange, diminished scale with a latch at the end that makes the final note sound like a skipping compact disk. The texture here would be whiplash in less careful hands, too many different parts blitzing by in quick succession. Arca uses a limited array of tones and samples to carry the lyric through, refusing typical signposts for meter (kick drum, consistent percussion on beats, etc.) or rhyme scheme, accelerating the speed of the lyric while keeping the overall time consistent. A trans haptic reading of the song finds a multiplicity of very fine textures both horizontally/duratively and vertically/overlayed, none of which play into obvious pop music paradigms—there is not even a chorus or hook to speak of. To entitle a track “Nonbinary,” after having recently publicly come out as such, hails the listener to speculate on how a pop song can resist binaries. This is an example of Halberstam’s haptic: narration without orientation or goal. Binaries are polar, orienting subjects to foreordained goals and the perfectibility of types. Here, there are no gendered pronouns, no prescribed sense of hard/soft or masc/femme; instead there are the more affective binaries of friendly/fake or sexy/sad.
The textures intensify and sharpen into the ensuing track, “Time.” Here the synth chords pluck out a straight eighth note rhythm at 106 BPM (beats per minute), which is actually 10 BPM quicker than “Nonbinary” though the presence of a discernible meter in one and not the other makes it difficult to register the relative pace of the tracks. Thus, the first textural shift is from abstract to regular beat; the second is Arca’s voice, a gentle, bending, wordless vocal pad at the 10 second mark that drops out before the singular block of lyrics—again, KiCk thus far eschewing pop, verse-chorus-verse structure—invokes the first-person in a highly-compressed, reverb-drenched, alien tone: “I know you want it.” KiCk is loaded with personae and blind alleys of identity, the artist both inviting and challenging the listener to attribute biographism to each lyrical conceit. Here, she has created a texture of self-identification, a haptic contact between the singer who “do [es] what I wanna do when I wanna do it” and the one who “know [s] you want it.” Fisher notes the way in which “the perception of relationship and sensorial affect insists on aesthetic experience not as an exclusively transcendent phenomenon, but as one with powerfully immanent dimensions” (11). This couplet of opening tracks displays the immanence in its dissociation between narrative affect and viewpoint. Trans haptic aesthetics prompt us to explore relationality between artist and listener, but also artist and artist—there is no singular Arca in these compositions.
The audial textures of “Time” are cross-hatched and additive, a second synth ringing out a shorter echo under the first, then a third in an upper register, depth-panned back so that in headphones it seems to emerge behind the listener. Arca’s vocals also begin to overlap in their lengthy decay until they create a chord as the instrumentation drops out near the midpoint of the track. After another brief pause (itself a textural element in each of the opening tracks), the shimmering synths carry us through to a different synth pad on the eighth notes, this one most textured of all, sounding like Sedgwick’s two corduroy pant legs being rubbed against one another (15). Arca takes the first steps in spinning out her static through textures unpredictable, uncertain, without obvious end; her nonbinary trans becoming in KiCk will in fact propose a variety of dualisms and apparent dichotomies, just to allow each of them fade into reverb and delay. The grain of this opening is in self-determination and non-teleological becoming. Trans haptic aesthetics track this grain through understanding Arca’s contrasts and distinctions as embodied, a transgression of the expectations of pop music and the presentation of identity therein.
Touch 2: Guests
The KiCk series is an expression of nonbinary trans femme agency and self-determination across a work that is difficult to apprehend in a single sitting. When reviewers note moments of repetition and overlap between songs, they may be missing a key element of trans haptic aesthetics: it is a feedback loop, as cárdenas noted, a hermeneutics of touching and being touched back. In the preceding section, we saw Arca reaching out through time and genre distortion, atonal background details and rhythmic shifts that draw attention to the lyrical interplay between “I” and “you.” The hermeneutic dynamic is finding oneself between the first- and second-person, seeing oneself in the textures of Arca’s transition(s). The apparent repetition is actually iterating different ways of approaching some of the same questions of identity, embodiment, and community. In addition, music has texture, shape, movement, and temperature, accruing to a sense of materiality—a sense of texture and touch. The textures of trans haptic aesthetics decouple this materiality from gender fixity, complicating and ironizing binaries of hard/soft, masc/femme, cool/warm, harsh/gentle, among others. When Arca reaches out to the listener with one side of this pair, she invokes the other as well, and prompts the listener to reach across these binaries. When she invites guests into the spaces of KiCk, it is often to deploy textures that work best or only with multiple voices—not just multiple versions of her own. Relatedly, trans haptic aesthetics demands proximal embodied encounters, hailing to other genderqueers and sex-gender transgressing subjects, communicating in languages of the sonic, visual, and haptic alike. This guests of KiCk stage these encounters with Arca throughout the album, fellow troublers of gender polarity bringing their own textures and generative friction to the album cycle.
Trans haptic aesthetics is also communitarian, and Arca’s deployment of guest artists and collaborators on 10 of the tracks serves to underscore the various aesthetic and identitarian communities to which she belongs. These guest artists also comprise other sorts of reaching out and touching, what Huitrón might refer to as “hypertender,” a “transgendered touch […] neither violent nor fearful,” but instead “the antidote to the prescriptive violence of the law” (167). While Huitrón is referring to photography, her accounting of the centrality of production to trans hapticality can be transposed to Arca’s music production as well. Huitrón sees the haptic as indexing “the multiplicity of elements presented in a fragmented mechanics of production,” which serves both to reveal the conditions and assumptions necessary to produce the work, but at the same to time reveals “its conditions of possibility” (173). The guests of KiCk are a carefully, tenderly curated set of coconspirators in destabilizing cisnormative presumptions of pop music by revealing textures between and across a disparate field of musicians and producers.
KiCk’s guests fall into a few categories. There are the headliner divas (Rosalía, Shirley Manson, Sia, and Björk) with whom Arca goes toe-to-toe, proving her ability to match their gravity and weirdness. Then there are the composers (Oliver Coates and Ryuichi Sakamoto), highly acclaimed arrangers and musicians that reference Arca’s own composition abilities, albeit in very different registers and paradigms than either of them. Finally, there is the hip hop artist (Shygirl), who represents the world of production in which Arca cut her teeth (producing for Kanye West and Lil Uzi Vert) alongside crafting her own music. But I will focus this section on artists with whom there is closest contact for trans haptic aesthetics.
Some of these artists are out as trans, and write about queerness and transness central to their music. Deleuze and Guattari (1985) open the possibility for music to make use of the minor, as they write of “what we call pop—pop music, pop philosophy, pop writing” as a mode of escape, a field of “deterritorialized sounds” or “Worterflucht” (26). This “flucht” could be a cognate of geflucht, or cursing/swearing, or else verflucht, which could be the fluttering of wings. But in a nonbinary spirit, perhaps we should take it as both: the fluttering curse words of utilizing “the polylingualism of one’s own language,” the “minor or intensive use of it” (1985: 26). Collaborators SOPHIE, Planningtorock, and No Bra each identifies as nonbinary and/or trans, and the hapticality of their tracks is expressed in the texture of gender-transgressive hypertenderness—affective reciprocity between subjects and artists who have refused their birth sex-gender assignments and use their creative output to speculate on and world-build around the possibilities this refusal presents. Their Worterflucht flutters through gender transgression and queer joy, love, and self-protection.
In “La Chíqui,” Arca and SOPHIE unleash an industrial storm of clicks and zaps, Arca intoning “menéalo,” or “shake it” repeatedly until a wordless, falsetto bellow reverberates over the top of the mix. This degradation of linguistic referent fits with Leimbacher’s (2017) sense of haptic listening, in which the listener “fastens on to the affective, expressive, and musical qualities of vocalized speech more than to its referents” (293). The loud/soft, abrasive/smooth textural contrasts introduce the imperative to shake it even as the tempo, such as it is, is almost anti-dance in its aggressiveness. The higher voice could be either of the artists, but British-born SOPHIE takes over in the English-language first verse, with the gender-bent, low-intoned, “she is my boyfriend,” to which a highly-treated, sped up Arca responds “soy la chíqui.” This is a texture typical of SOPHIE’s own music, vocals treated to the point of unintelligibility, even when there are accompanying lyrics. Arca’s second verse is in that same, cartoonishly sped up and trebled vocal effect, as she sings of “the schism” and “to sing to rip the slit out loud,” narrating the violent chasm between identity and identification. The production is a complex mix, and Arca imbricates the lyric with references to other KiCk tracks, such as “Rip the Slit” and “Riquiquí.” In under 3 minutes, Arca and SOPHIE forge a collaboration that reflects many of the textures of this trans haptic work: Spanish and English lyrics, each laden with queered slang; vocals treated and manipulated for speed, tone, and position in the mix to disorient and create the feeling of being surrounded by voices; lyrics that swiftly modulate from “the smell of blood” to “flowers of my love.” The confidence of the two femmes crafts an underlying texture of bedrock certitude beneath the pronominal and auditory shifting and layering of the track.
“Queer” from KiCk iii (Arca, 2021) opens with sheer, gated, symphonic stabs over a rumbling bass line, each pushed to the point of distortion, albeit distortion of opposing textures (as opposed to simply overloading a circuit), like auditory Velcro. Guest artist Planningtorock explicitly plays with gender in their own work, such as the lyric “My body all femme, and my face all masc” from “Transome” on their 2018 Powerhouse LP (Planningtorock, 2018). As with the SOPHIE collaboration, the vocal begins with Arca, in Spanish, pleading how she is “taking all the bad away” from a lover in syncopated triplet cadence, the third or fourth different rhythmic counterpoint in the song. Her voice then traces a five-note chord as the glitchy dream-industrial beats ratchet out. The vocals switch from instigating and moving the rhythm to sitting behind the beat up to a twinkling high note. When Planningtorock enters, it is in the upper register, to qualify their tears, “of fire,” “of power,” “like a queer.” The two alternate, Arca again giving way to Planningtorock’s “queer life, queer fire” and finally the promise to “shower you in tears of fire.” The guest vocal is certainly at the front of the mix, but the distortion interlocks its fuzzy texture into the crackle of the polyphonic backing track. Arca presents the haptic experience of being showered by decaying beats and vocal samples, as well as the queer experience of being showered in tears of fire—wet and dry, harsh and beautiful. The two artists offer a counterpoint in non-binarism: of sound, of sex-gender embodiment, of language.
As the final, wordless vocal samples of “Queer” ring out in echo, “Witch” abruptly enters with No Bra’s spoken word mantra: “This witch is so seductive, elective, and protective,” vibrating in phase as if through a distorted CB radio. By the third iteration, an electric piano belts out a lolling melody on (or just after) the first count of each measure (“the one”) and the vocal splits into a vocoder-like harmony, such as Laurie Anderson 4 used years ago, or James Blake 5 might use today, to offer a sense of robotic melancholy. No Bra pushes up into a higher octave, the harmony following. The “witch” section is repeated seven times, the next—“how they make you object, more ludicrous words”—four times, and the following—“fucking machine, merging multiple monsters” stutters through five times. Arca is creating an irregular repetitive texture, making it difficult to predict when the repetition will stop. Furthermore, by this stage in the cycle, each pregnant pause between sections threatens to open into the maw of a bass drop or an industrial ejaculation, neither of which occurs here. “Witch” is transgressive in its beauty, pressing back against even the preconceptions Arca has created. Further, what does it mean for a witch to be “selective,” and does a machine merge monsters? Marinkova suggests a haptic aesthetics is one reliant “on the bodily, the sensual, the material” (4), and here Arca invokes the selectivity of sex-gender, presentation, the prosthetic sexuality of the robot, and a kinship and combination of monsters. The cryptomythology is delivered by a harmonized nonbinary comrade over a shimmering set of piano textures and closes with a final, almost choral arrangement of a reverb-washed, (likely Arca) alien vocal.
Touch 3: Slang and dialect
Communitarian uses of language and signals are a means of subversive communication for minoritized populations, and queer populations have been notably polyglot when it comes to such uses. From hanky code in gay and lesbian bars to British Polari slang or Swardspeak in the Philippines, sexual minorities have always found ways to signal to one another outside of majoritarian lexicons 6 . Crawford notes that “trans and queer people […] have long lived in a multi-layered, multi-textured world in which ciphers, symbols, and winks are powerful modes for getting acquainted and finding kin.” Arca adds another textural field in her use of obscure, specific, or otherwise queered Spanish, offering points of contact which may be felt rather than explicitly understood, at least until clued in by someone with local knowledge. Arca herself refers to pop music as a “shared space” through which she can “create a bridge for those that have different aesthetic sensibilities or different backgrounds” (Herrera, 2021). Furthermore, she sees the “underground club scene or a queer space” as one “that allows for resistance to systems that function on shame,” and “a means to survive” (Salfiti, 2024). In her music, trans haptic aesthetics offer us a way of prosthetically experiencing these textures, and Arca’s use of slang and community-specific dialect is one means of accomplishing this end.
Often, this language is onomatopoetic, a set of percussive syllables that allow the vocalist to use her voice as a rhythmic instrument. The title “Mequetrefe” could refer to a no good, worthless loser—a slander that Arca may have heard on the streets of Caracas or Barcelona, among what she refers to as more “traditional” (Arca, 2020) places she has resided—or a toss-off, insignificant situation. Arca has herself noted the “tenderness” of the song, both in reference to the chord progression (Arca, 2020) and the lyrical content: “Mequetrefe invokes the tenderness behind expressing who you are without shame and the confidence and bravery it requires, because expression of gender-nonconforming self-states in a public space can often result in static within your environment” (Rettig, 2020). The song is built around a clear textural counterpoint, between “mami” who wants and deserves a mequetrefe, and how “she gives it” and “has the personality.” The glitchy high percussion almost invokes drum and bass music, while the beat structuring the bulk of the song is definitely in a reggaeton paradigm. Thus, we have textures between genres, the harshness of the opening rubbing up against the tenderness of the melodic center of the song, and between the meanings of the title. This (hyper)tenderness toward other queer and trans subjects in Arca’s music extends to herself, somewhere between haptic onanism and self-preservation. The mequetrefe turns out to be very serious indeed; in line with Huitrón’s “tactile process of hypertenderness,” which “may enable utopic longings as we touch on the possibilities of creating, or inhabiting, other worlds” (177). It is only natural that this world would have its own language(s), understood in various ways.
The figure of “Machote” could be seen as a counterpoint to that of a mequetrefe, though again, Arca deploys a legible genre (slow, trap-ish R&B) against a wash of strange and highly textured samples (glass-break tinkling and at least three different, wordless vocal samples, as well as giant, distorted tympani booms). On its surface, the tune is one of longing for the macho man, who knows “how to touch me” and “how to love me,” but also how to menear, another version of meneo, which can refer to movement more generally, but here could mean to wiggle, or dance. Arca is shopping through “every passing man” to find this machote, switching to the second person “tu” in the final stanzas. The music conveys friction between Arca’s mid-range and a higher, more compressed voice, trading lines over samples that lurch, slightly behind the beat. Crawford notes the “(tenuous, variable) meanings” that “arise in the textured encounter between a subjectivity (here, trans-inflected)” and a given object. Arca’s object is a macho man who is also “divine” and has regrets, has good feelings but can wiggle, filtered through a mixed version of another meaning of machote—model. Arca creates the texture of an impossible figure—the regretful, divine, macho model—of desire in the rare song on KiCk that seeks after a specific man. The (felt) tenuous, variable signifiers of sex, gender, and desire are the textures of trans haptic aesthetics.
As with each of these slang terms, definitions of “Riquiqui” are multiple and slippery: it could simply be a term of endearment, or a diminutive version of rico which carries all the possible meanings of rich: tasty, dear, wealthy. Arca fires out the lyrics, a frantic stream of qualifiers (in Spanish) as she describes an untouchable “regenerated girl” who prompts “love in the face of fear/fear in the face of God” (the latter rendered in English). Arca notes that in “Riquiqui” she is “not even trying to make it universal” in her use of Venezuelan idiom such as “mango bajito” (2020) as a way to refer to what in English might be called “low-hanging fruit.” We have seen dancing and moving in various forms in these lyrics, and here they are represented as “meneadito,” a little dance/shimmy/wiggle. This texture of movement runs through all of KiCk, a meta-haptic that touches many of tracks in the sequence. But here, the slang is used as a texture of localization, a version of Marks’s (2000) “miniaturism,” the listener “pulled in close” by the specificity of the samples, the language, leading them to perceive “the texture as much as the objects imaged” (163). The objects of these specific usages tend to be types of people, subjects in which listeners can imagine themselves, or imagine themselves imagining. This kind of touch is one of resemblance or aspiration.
“Rakata” is perhaps the most direct invocation of a percussive sound-word, being drawn from a reggaeton anagram of atacar, or attack. Its first widely-heard appearance in reggaeton music was a 2005 song of the same name by Wisin and Yandel, the term a kind of emblem of having a good time dancing and partying. In Arca’s club track—replete with siren synths and murky dembow rhythm—she describes “throwing” a rakata at a potential suitor. Here, the attack’s terrain is clear, her rakata is presented “with this urge to fuck,” though she also uses various rather obscure terms for percussive instruments that may or may not be double entendre. These include the ringing out of the cueros, or leather, to refer to a drum (a similar reference is made in Gloria Estefan’s 1993 “Ayer”), or the furruco, a rubbed membranophone. Both are references to skin, instruments that require playing with a hand both slapping and rubbing a resonant surface. Thus, we have the textures of percussive words, sex, and skin as Arca commands “look at it vibrate,” and “pull it out,” which could refer to the rod in the furruco or something far more sensually on-the-nose. The song fades into what sounds like flames crackling, Arca intoning “mirando”—looking or watching—repeatedly, creating a kind of synesthesia between our listening and her watching in response, a haptic feedback loop without an tactile touch. Crawford suggests “we turn to texture—to sensation, affects, vectors of movement—when more literal or rational vocabulary fails.” Arca turns to the language specific to her communities to reach out, to brush against her bilingual, tricontinental, and trans identities and expressivities.
There are a variety of other slang and idiomatic terms strewn through KiCk, but as a final textural instance, I submit “Tiro,” a reggaeton boast track. Tiro—or “shot,” as from a gun—is not an uncommon term in reggaeton 7 . Here, Arca refers to herself as a Latina bombshell and a “Guajira machine,” which could refer to the Colombian peninsula bending over Venezuela to the north, to a genre of music most famously reflected in the 20th century by Joséito Fernandez’s “Guantanemera,” or to the feminine form of a powerful person. Arca then spins out the names of a number of Venezuelan states, in which she “hits it” or is “hard.” The opening salvo closes with direct reference to textural contrast: “duro, duro, suave, suave”—hard and soft/gentle, and finally another rather complex (at least to the outsider) idiom: “seis dedos de frente,” or six fingers to the forehead, implying a phrenological measure of intelligence beyond the customary expression of “dos dedos.” One imagines Arca with three fingers on each hand at her forehead, asserting her dominance. When she demands “Chúpate esa pepa como mango bajito,” she again invokes the low-hanging mango, this time as a simile for how to suck a pepa, or pill, likely a rather obscure slang for clitoris. The textures here are many, as mango itself appears as innuendo for vagina as a sexual object at least from early Jamaican “slack” reggae music and ska 8 . But here, it lapses into metaphorical idiom and Arca layers pepa as another, more specific term for the object of a sexual act. Tomšič notes that “via touch, we have incessant sensorial (or better, haptic, with all its various facets – tactile, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, vestibular) access to the world, which places the body in a persisting state of openness, bringing about not only perceptual receptivity, but also laying the foundations for vulnerability” (46). In “Tiro,” Arca simultaneously opens Venezuela to the world and at the same time her listener to multiple textures of boast and sexuality, at once asserting gender and queerness to her native land.
Conclusion: Being touched by grain and static
Trans haptic aesthetics is a particular attunement to touch and the necessity of being touched back to understand one’s sensorial, identitarian, and creative world. This attunement searches for the grain of art that expresses both embodied experiences of alterity and, at once, those of minoritized community. In KiCk, we find an artist who is experimenting with genre and form within pop music paradigms, certainly, but trans haptic aesthetics finds in the textures of her music Müller’s bodily reactions to social realities and ideologies. Trans haptic aesthetics seeks out the grain, from the finer uses of individual terms and sounds, opening to the broader levels of trans sociality and queer migrant community. We have explored three of the touches of KiCk, with the hope of making a case for an aesthetics of futurity-in-the-present, an auditory space carved out of known territories of genre, tempo, song structure, and lyrical content. Within each of these, Arca depicts a transgressive and transgender sense of texture and touch, a reaching out and a refusal to be smoothed. At the first touch, we registered a collision of sonic and affective gestures that worked to destabilize various binaries, not least those of sex, gender, and sexuality/desire. Trans haptic aesthetics also favors nonlinear, nonteleological uses of time, reflecting on the ways in which trans lives often work in contradistinction to cisnormative chronologies of progressive growth, maturation, and enrichment. At the second touch, we discern the textures of other gender-transgressive voices, the invocation through community through careful arrangement of reciprocity and dis/harmony in song. These are not simply guest verses on a track to either draw attention to a new artist or piggyback on the fame of a veteran one; they are instead opportunities to emphasize the alterity and subaltern status of trans artists and ways of creating outside of cis/hetero/homonormative understandings of popular music. At the third touch, trans haptic aesthetics feels for new and clandestine uses of language, a refusal to render ideas obvious or even legible to those who do not already know.
It is important to note, this is the singular work of a singular artist, a test case for what is possible when considering trans senses of touch outside of the tactile world alone. Arca herself projects a utopic, tender optimism in her own estimation of her position as artist, noting, “Out of all the stories that we write and we choose to share as world builders, as storytellers, for me, the ones that are most exciting are the ones that point to a recognition of a boundary” (Herrera, 2021). Texture is the recognition of a boundary as well, the moment of simultaneously touching and being touched, recognizing oneself in the other and the other in oneself. What is trans about the haptic is the agency to find, express, and embody oneself against the grain of assignment and categorization, early on or continuously, from without. Arca refers to “mutant faith” as belief in the promise of the marginalized: “a faith for mutants, outcasts, freaks, weirdos, the othered, migrants. An intersectional rallying cry for the spirit” (Herrera: 2021). In her music, this rallying cry wields a full range of pop, reggaeton, industrial, and dance generic materials, and adds additional sonic and lyrical grain, layered and counterposed to create a “mutant,” trans texturality.
To close this inquiry into trans haptics, I want to return to Arca’s own sense of “static” as an embodied, affective reflection of trans haptic aesthetics. The texture of static can be thought of in various ways, though the term originates from its reference to the force of weight 9 . Weight, too, has a texture as well as affective character, from the dull pressure on one’s chest of a great sadness to the sharp stabbing of chronic joint pain or migraine headaches; the gentle clasp of one hand on another or a blanket placed carefully over someone resting, convalescing, or simply cold. But sonic static shows up throughout Arca’s music, at different pitches and frequencies, volumes and densities. And there is lyrical static as well, the narrator of her songs pleading to an absent lover or projecting boasts of self-determination against a field of queer- and transphobia. When Arca refers to her static in interviews, it is generally as an expression of trans potentiality, something internal that threatens to weigh her down. She notes how gender nonconformity can bring static into public spaces, leading to a range of possible reactions and touches, but in her music, she conditions the hapticality of nonbinarism and trans femininity. She cannot know precisely how listeners will be touched, but she can ensure that her static is moved outward through the textures of her composition, collaboration, and lyric. This is her deployment of Garcia-Mispireta’s sonic-affective bridge, the aural become tactile and vice versa. A trans haptic aesthetics gives texture and form to the ec-static performances (be they formal, as in a five-album pop music series, or less so, as in the application of makeup, dress, name change, or simply openness to a different manner of identifying and/or presenting) of trans life and art. Any of us who have been touched by the static of trans and gender nonconforming expression—which is to say, all of us, whether we were receptive to it or not—has had the opportunity to understand the vitality and insistence of the textures of trans haptic aesthetics. Beyond understanding, though, these are aesthetics of tenderness, reaching out, and joy against the violent touch of phobic public institutions are their attempts at silencing and erasure. These are the textures of not just survival, but growing and expanding what it means to have one or a nexus of sexes and genders in this world.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.