Research

Current Project

Travesti Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism

Working at the forefront of Latin American trans studies, my research examines contemporary transgender cultural production and its articulations with histories of state violence across the Américas. As an iteration of this larger research agenda, my monograph in process, tentatively titled “Travesti Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism” examines Argentine travesti and trans politics and aesthetics to bring the study of democracy and its illiberal correlates to the forefront of trans studies. Moving across trans photographic archives of resistance, state intelligence and police archives, trans literary and cultural production, and activist practices that respond to state terror, my monograph establishes a new historical and cultural interpretation of trans politics as a response to illiberal state violence and its forms. At the same time, “Travesti Tide” revises the study of fascism, authoritarianism, and populism by highlighting how sex and gender are central to these forms of governance and power. In doing so, “Travesti Tide” provincializes US-centric histories of state violence, the liberal democratic state form, and modes of identity politics that continue to underwrite the field of trans studies.

Future Work

Hemispheric Transgender Studies: American Transcultural Encounters and Practices

My second project, Hemispheric Transgender Studies: American Transcultural Encounters and Practices, develops a distinct hemispheric orientation within the field of transgender studies by centering south-south exchanges to engage the work of theorists, social agents, and cultural producers working across Latin America and the US Global South. This project theorizes a travesti-trans of color analytic to track the geopolitics of repair and the reparative premises of both trans of color and travesti theory in the wake of multiple forms of state violence.

Editorial Work

Through my editorial work and publications, I am committed to cultivating a trans studies field orientation elaborated through the work of Latin/x American cultural producers, theorists, and activists. As Translation Section Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, I reoriented the editorial direction of the section to reflect these priorities. Now focused on cultural translation, the section highlights the work of trans studies practitioners working in Global South Trans Studies with particular emphasis on the Latin/x Américas. From this commitment to fostering a transnational, south-south orientation for the field with particular emphasis on Latin/x American Trans Studies, I also co-edited the first special issue to date on Latin American trans studies in peer-reviewed journalTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (May 2019). Titled “Trans Studies en las Américas,” this special issue focuses on Latin American, Latinx and Caribbean transgender visual and embodied artist-activist provocations, policy interventions, and cultural production. As part of my editorial work, I sole-authored the introduction “Latin/x American Trans Studies: Toward a Travesti-Trans Analytic” which elaborates a number of the field’s critical imperatives.

OTHER PUBLISHED RESEARCH

In addition to my editorial work and the focus of my current and future book projects, I am broadly interested in Latin American visual and material cultural production, embodied strategies of representation and political resistance, and translation as cultural practice. From my expertise in visual culture studies, I have contributed to exhibition catalogues and other curatorial publications as well as roundtables on topics related to visual studies. A roundtable on the politics of trans visibility appears in Journal of Visual Culture. I similarly authored the introduction to special issue “Nuevas masculinidades” (“New Masculinities”) of contemporary Latin American photography magazine Balam (August 2023) and wrote the catalogue essay “Estéticas de sobrevivencia, arte de reparación” (“Aesthetics of Survival, Art of Repair”) for contemporary Argentine photographer and visual artist Germán Menna’s multimedia exhibition ¿Cómo retratar a una sobreviviente? or How to Photograph a Survivor? (2022) installed in Rosario, Argentina at the Museo de la Memoria (Memory Museum).

My peer-reviewed publications similarly reflect my interdisciplinary expertise and the field formation work I am doing to further establish and consolidate Latin American trans studies. In the peer-reviewed essay “Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” in Journal of Visual Culture special issue “New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies” (August 2020), I analyze a recent exhibition of the Trans Memory Archive. Engaging with Tina Campt’s elaboration of haptic images, I read trans kinship alongside national narratives of kinship and disappearance to argue that the exhibit and its attendant viewing rituals refashion Argentine history by situating transwomen as the proper subjects of national mourning. This article was short-listed for the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture Early Career Researcher Essay Prize. My article ““No State Apparatus Goes to Bed Genocidal then Wakes up Democratic:’ Fascist State Violence and Transgender Politics in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” appears in Radical History Review special issue “Fascisms and Antifascisms Since 1945” (October 2020) and tracks the persistent legacies of fascist state violence and such violence’s deadly imbrications with the politics of sex and gender. Analyzing state archives of terror and contemporary activist visual culture, this article claims that, in democracy, the enduring afterlife of fascism creates conditions of possibility for activists to mobilize shared experiences of fascist violence in the service of contemporary transgender rights claims. My review essay “Hemispheric Translations” appears in GLQ’s 25th anniversary special issue (January 2019) and takes the occasion of recent scholarship to interrogate the purchase of translation as hemispheric method mediating Latin American transgender and queer theory.