Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4780-0499-8
Shifting the geopolitics of trans studies, travesti theory is a Latinx American body of work with an extensive transregional history. As a particular body politics, travesti identification is not only a sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized form of relation, but a critical mode and an epistemology. Throughout the Américas, trans and travesti studies take a multiplicity of forms: scholarly work that engages identitarian and anti-identitarian analytical frameworks as well as interventions into state practices, cultural production, and strategic activist actions. These multiple critical approaches—both travesti and trans—are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape the hemisphere, opening up space to explore the productive tensions and expansive possibilities within this body of work.
This special issue of TSQ prompts a conversation between trans and travesti studies scholars working across the Américas to investigate how shifts in cultural practices, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven theories of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment. Contributors to this issue offer a hemispheric perspective on trans and travesti issues to the Anglophone academy, expand transgender studies to engage geopolitical connections, and bring interdisciplinary approaches to topics ranging from policy to cultural production. This issue is an unprecedented English-language collection by Latin American and Latinx scholars on trans and travesti issues.