Latin/x American Trans Studies

Travesti activist Lohana Berkins stands in the foreground, her fist raised in struggle and solidarity (fig. 1). Behind a wave of blood red fabric, a swell of protestors chant, lifting pink and blue signs high above their heads demanding justicia for Diana Sacayán. The hand-painted word compañera peeks out from the fabric's folds, curling across the collective's banner in bold, black cursive outlined in soft baby blue. Compañera—a word thick with complicity, friendship, solidarity, and struggle—manifests the crowd's affective commitments. The banner enfolds the march in a loose, sensuous weave as protestors flood the streets of Buenos Aires denouncing Diana's murder.One sign in the upper right-hand corner stands out from the rest: painted in black, Diana Sacayán's portrait overlays the pan-indigenous wiphala flag's checkered pattern, framed by the words trava sudaca originaria. Diana's singular self-identification defies easy translation, and yet the phrase condenses many of the central concerns of “Trans Studies en las Américas”: the geopolitics of travesti and trans representation practices, political alliances, and demands for bodily sovereignty inflected by legal forms, human rights discourses, racial formations, and indigenous territorial claims. These concerns, which exceed sexed and gendered identification, are variously contoured by the lived material precarity that often structures life possibilities in the Global South for trans and travesti subjects.Many of this special issue's contributions speak to uneven proximities to state violence and precarity by centering intimate exchanges among social agents, tactics of care, and resistance that defy state logics. As these articles make clear, multiple forms and practices of compañerismx generate unexpected solidarities and energize struggles against increased state austerity measures, heightened militarization, and expanded social and economic abandonment. Lohana Berkins's and Diana Sacayán's powerful travesti politics, grounded in material reparations and intersectional coalition, mobilize friendship as one such potent and sustained political response.This special issue emerged from a series of four conference panels organized by a de la maza pérez tamayo, Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, Alba Pons Rabasa, and Cole Rizki for the conference Trans Studies*: An International, Transdisciplinary Conference on Gender, Embodiment, and Sexuality held at the University of Arizona in Tucson in September 2016. The panels brought over twenty scholars from the Global South and Global North into conversation across disciplines and methods. From the energy generated at that conference, Garriga-López and I proposed a special issue of TSQ and sought out senior scholars Juana María Rodríguez and Denilson Lopes to help bring this project to fruition. “Trans Studies en las Américas” received seventy-nine submissions written in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, a record number for the journal. Submissions arrived from countries across the hemisphere and addressed a broad range of topics in contemporary cultural production, public policy, education, and religion, through disciplines including anthropology, visual culture studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and sociology. The wide-ranging topical coverage, innovative methodological contributions, and geopolitical distribution of the seventy-nine submissions evince the pressing need for publication opportunities that feature Latin/x American and Caribbean studies scholarship—most especially by scholars situated in the Global South.In this issue, we use the term Latin/x America to mark both Latinx and Latin American contributions and to insist on the entanglements of “US” and “Latin America” as geopolitical categories, underscoring their inherent instabilities. Indeed, many of our authors' institutional locations and geographic movements reflect such incoherence. Some of our authors are currently located in the United States yet were born or grew up in Latin America and are embedded within circular migration patterns or diasporic dispersals that further unsettle area and identity configurations. These complex, often unpredictable, and at times forced border crossings similarly trouble the fixity of geopolitical categories such as “Global North” and “Global South.” Neither can be collapsed along topographic lines, and both should be understood as shifting and imbricated geopolitical formations that speak to the many circuits through which the majority of our authors move (or cannot). We simultaneously recognize the material and academic privilege that institutional location in the Global North affords even as our contributors' irreducible “translocations” call for nuanced readings of geopolitics and local class formations (Alvarez et al. 2014).Throughout the editorial process, a number of issues symptomatic of trans studies' institutional precarity emerged. Academics situated in Latin America, for example, do not currently have access to trans studies faculty or research positions within university settings. Scholarship produced from the Global South on trans and travesti embodiment, subjectivity, cultural production, or activisms has largely been produced by nontrans academics from both the Global North and Global South—a condition that trans and intersex activists such as Mauro Cabral have vocally critiqued. In the north, trans studies positions are only recently starting to emerge. Rarely do these positions emphasize the Global South, and they remain vulnerable to institutional proclivities within an increasingly volatile neoliberal landscape. Scholars migrating to the north to access these increased opportunities are confronted with new challenges, including shifting racial hierarchies, anti-immigrant sentiment, and discrimination based on accent, and are obligated to produce scholarship in English. Academics across the hemisphere and elsewhere are impacted by the global demands of the academic market and its valuation of English-language publication.Discrimination—both institutional and otherwise—has left many trans and non-binary-identified people outside of higher education and formal education more broadly, particularly in the Global South (Andrade 2012; Berkins 2005, 2015; Martínez and Vidal-Ortiz 2018). These conditions of discrimination and exclusion for trans, travesti, and non-binary-identified scholars, compounded by issues of race, immigration, and language, generate significant barriers to both institutional access and publication opportunities (see Cabral in Boellstorff et al. 2014: 423–24). The paucity of trans-identifying Latinx trans studies scholars and the overburdened conditions under which they labor create cumulative layered effects that impact submissions, the availability of peer reviewers, and our own editorial board composition. Our special issue, dominated by graduate students and junior faculty, thus underscores the tenacity of scholars working in a field that remains underresourced and undervalued throughout the hemisphere. Despite these challenges, “Trans Studies en las Américas” offers an exceptional and timely collection of Latin American and Latinx trans and travesti theoretical, (auto)ethnographic, political, and artistic production that speaks to the field's vibrancy.Throughout las Américas, trans studies take multiple forms: scholarly work on identitarian and anti-identitarian analytics, interventions into state practices, aesthetic eruptions of creative energies, and strategic activist mobilizations. These modes of inquiry and critical approaches are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape contemporary trans studies, opening space to explore the productive contradictions and expansive possibilities within this body of work. “Trans Studies en las Américas” highlights the analytic tensions that occur in highly localized sites. Such a move underscores the inherent problems with framing Latin America as a singular geopolitical formation, pointing instead to the ways in which embodied political practices unfold within geographic and temporal particularities. Once situated side by side, however, these articles work to curate critical conversations among trans studies scholars exploring how shifts in cultural epistemologies, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven regional theorizations of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment.“Trans Studies en las Américas” brings existing Latin/x American subjectivities, activist strategies, and theories such as travesti into conversation with US-oriented trans studies to ask what sorts of political coalitions and embodied forms of resistance might be possible. While in English, transgender often needs to be modified in order to respond to local hierarchies of race, class, ability, and other forms of difference, travesti underscores instead the impossibility of such disarticulation in the first place. Nonetheless, travesti is not meant as a corrective to trans, and our authors do not expand the notion of trans to include travesti. Instead, many of the essays in this issue center travesti as an identification, a critical analytic, and an embodied mode of politics.“Travesti,” writes Malú Machuca Rose in their contribution to this issue, “is the refusal to be trans, the refusal to be woman, the refusal to be intelligible.” Travesti theory and identification is a Latin/x American body of work and a body politics with an extensive transregional history (Campuzano 2008; Campuzano et al. 2013; Berkins 2003; Rodríguez 2015; Wayar 2018). The work of this issue's authors, including Machuca Rose, Dora Silva Santana, and Martín De Mauro Rucovsky, demonstrates how travesti identification operates as a politics, a critical mode, and an epistemology. To quote Machuca Rose: Travesti is classed and raced: it means you do not present femininely all of the time because you cannot afford to. It means the use of body technologies to transform one's body does not come from a doctor's office but from resourcefulness in the face of precarización, the act by which the matrix of domination makes our bodies and our lives precarious. ¿Más clarito? It means you get creative, you use your pens for eyeliner, get your hormones and silicones from your friends underground, or use tinta instead of testosterona to transform your body.As a politics of refusal, travesti disavows coherence and is an always already racialized and classed geopolitical identification that gestures toward the inseparability of indigeneity, blackness, material precarity, sex work, HIV status, and uneven relationships to diverse state formations (Guimaraes García 2017). To claim travesti identity is to embrace a form of opacity and fugitivity that resists necropolitical systems that pointedly rely on capture (see Santana's contribution to this issue). Indeed, travesti, writes Santana, is “a negation of an imposed dominant expectation of womanhood that centers on people who are cisgender, heteronormative, able-bodied, elitist, and white.” Travesti identification thus subverts both normative expectations of femininity and trans politics structured around assimilation and respectability. Claiming “travesti,” as our authors make clear, is a way of inhabiting these complex histories of survival and resistance.Travesti is certainly not a universal identification and some of the articles in this issue—those by Sayak Valencia and Cynthia Citlallin Delgado Huitrón, for example—do not engage the term. Neither is the term travesti equally distributed across the southern hemisphere; trans and travesti identifications are constantly shifting and should not be understood as mutually exclusive. The tensions between trans and travesti as identificatory categories are often untranslatable, leading us to ask what sorts of limitations and possibilities are embedded within the terms' distinctions and critical affinities. If trans men, for example, do not identify as travesti—at the time of writing, few would claim this term—what sorts of recourse do trans men have to localized identification if not trans? How can we account for the complex negotiations and appropriations that trans men enact in and through language in order to claim trans identification? The use of both trans and travesti throughout this introduction, and this special issue more broadly, is meant to underscore rather than settle these questions.A turn to trans studies en las Américas further requires situated attention to experiences of state violence, including contemporary dictatorship and genocide, which necessitate theories that can account for the vulnerability of subjects and the urgency of public address. One way that existing trans studies scholarship has responded to such demands to theorize transnational experiences of state violence is through an expanded articulation of necropolitics. Achille Mbembe's foundational work “Necropolitics” (2003) complicates and reshapes Michel Foucault's articulation of biopower to theorize racialized zones of death. For Mbembe, biopower remains “insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (39). Necropower and necropolitics instead signal how power generates “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (39–40). Indeed, “politics,” reminds Mbembe, is “the work of death” (16).Engaging Mbembe's formulation of the necropolitical, C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn's foundational claims in “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife” (2013) offer vital critiques both for and of trans studies. These authors critically examine how activisms simultaneously devalue trans-of-color life while mobilizing trans-of-color death to vitalize homonormative and trans-normative activist projects, asking, “How do the biopolitics and necropolitics of trans death and trans vitality play out on the privileged stages of North America and Europe?” (67). Shifting the geopolitics of Snorton and Haritaworn's argument, this special issue moves the primary site of necropolitical inquiry from the United States and Europe to Latin America. In consequence, the circulation of travesti and trans deaths and, indeed, the very concept of an “afterlife” (66) hold alternate valence given shifts in state formation and contemporary experiences of genocide and dictatorship. In the context of truth commissions like CONADEP in Argentina and resulting publications like Nunca más or the Valech and Rettig reports in Chile that respond to genocide, logics of enumeration and descriptions of death and torture form an integral part in both these processes' and documents' reparative premises, claims to veracity, and epistemological authority even as these reports disregard experiences of trans and travesti death during dictatorship.1In this vein, and making an important intervention into studies of state-sponsored terror, in their contribution to this issue Hillary Hiner and Juan Carlos Garrido describe ethnographic interviews they conducted with trans and travesti informants throughout Chile whose testimonies were excluded from official reports of state violence during dictatorship. Through oral histories, these trans and travesti subjects spoke of experiencing extreme forms of torture and mutilation. Even as we recognize the scholarly necessity of explicitly describing torture and violence as a corrective to archival erasure in dominant historical accounts, we remain cautious about the cumulative effects of discursively reproducing that harm. Several questions arose for us as editors: When is the scholarly reproduction of violence necessary, and when might that reproduction become another instantiation of harm? How might the answer to this question shift in relation to history, geopolitical location, readerly expectations, or subject position? And how are these issues by the transnational circuits of through which of violence are As work by our the of violence and shifts across sustained and increasingly nuanced that can account for violence and in relation to shifting state and racial formations and issue further how trans death is and by and trans situated in the Global The articles by Delgado Huitrón, and Hiner and Garrido all respond to this opening up important of inquiry that underscore social and political as as political practices that generate forms of and has been special issue thus a to existing necropolitical theorizations by on trans and resistance in Latin/x America to technologies of and political that of trans death in the Global South to mobilize and homonormative activist and scholarly to necropolitical many of the to “Trans Studies en las Américas” explore embodied to state These authors an of that out the of already practices of for one to do you do as a living do you do to Delgado and Valencia take up this question in relation to the Delgado with the performance project by performance and activist García Delgado the or to ask how and state Delgado to the as to explore how performance the of particularly as a labor of as a In Valencia a as a critical mode of bodily death. 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These articles a of the powerful work in the and this special issue one among a of forms that Latin/x American trans studies take in the to Neither does this special issue to the complex of representation raised by with and across forms of While all of this special issue's authors and of identification with the and activisms in this issue, we all with the impossibility of for our own or Indeed, as this issue makes clear, such exceed geopolitical location and to HIV status, in sex work, immigration, and to precarity and this collection of articles offers are of and among and academics to more and special issue would like to the at the for a and at the University of for their for this