Trans sisterhood: Toward a transfeminist ethnography

In this article, I offer close ethnographic attention to the alternative kinship structures of trans women in Cuba and contend with what the ethics of care that are implicit in trans sisterhoods might offer toward an ethnographic research practice. As such, I offer trans sisterhood as one potential way toward a transfeminist ethnography, an urgent and embedded ethnographic method that takes seriously transfeminine epistemologies. Drawing on feminist, trans, and queer anthropology, I ask: What would it mean to reimagine research as a general license to build affective and material commitments of care and solidarity? I demonstrate what this transfeminist ethnographic practice might look like by, first, engaging with the way an interlocutor's methodological suggestion informed my research. I then tell the story of attending a play with an interviewee, describing a moment in which our research‐relationship was depicted on the main stage. I argue that such an ethnographic praxis inevitably breaks our heart when our efforts fail to escape the colonial legacy of knowledge production and the imperialism of the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Ultimately, that heartbreak might be what is necessary to make sense of trans life in this moment and imagine what a transfeminist ethnography might look like.