Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.
The neologism translatinas/os is of recent coinage and has been employed to identify transgender, transsexual, and transvestite individuals in Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America and elsewhere.1 The term brings together the prefix trans- and the noun Latina/o, employed as a gender-inflected synonym for Latin American or as an ethnic or racial marker for a person of Latin American descent who lives elsewhere, for example in Australia, Canada, Europe, or the United States. Given that the prefix trans- is used to indicate individuals who might have migrated (or whose family histories might include migration) and who might have transnational connections, it acquires a double valence, referring to geography and physical displacement as much as to gender identity and expression. The expansive use of the root word Latina/o is quite notable, as this term is more associated in recent times with US populations, who use it in contradistinction to Hispanic but also to Latin American (or latinoamericana/o) (see Oboler 1995). The term translatina/o is not coterminous with or representative of the entire Latina/o trans population — a broader and more diverse group, as Marcia Ochoa (2010) has discussed — and can be juxtaposed to vernacular Latin American terms explored by others, such as Don Kulick's (1998) analysis of the word travesti in Brazil and Annick Prieur's (1998) discussion of jota and vestida in Mexico.2 Ochoa actually proposes the terms “Latina/o transpopulations” and “US trans-Latina/os” (with a hyphen), and protests the dominant practice of marginalizing female to male (FTM) transgender Latinos. In his own work on Latina trans performers on Australian television (specifically on the Mexican transsexual Miriam), Vek Lewis (2009) proposes the term “translatinidad” to convey “the idea of a uniform, colossal Latin American type that traverses national borders and celluloid memory, tinged with the connotations of a colonially inscribed, phallic femininity, which [the performer's] transsexuality is positioned to represent” (240). Lewis (in Namaste 2011) also criticizes the use of English-language terms and neologisms and privileges the use of vernacular Spanish and Portuguese-language categories.
“Translatina” has been employed in the Unites States to name community support groups such as El/La para Translatinas, an AIDS-prevention and social support group for Latina trans women located in the Mission District of San Francisco. The name of this group plays with the standard third-person singular female pronoun in the Spanish language, ella (she), and breaks it down into two elements with a slash: the first word, el (the), is the singular male article in Spanish and also references the third person singular male pronoun él (he), while the second word, la (the) is the singular female article. As such, “El/La” can be read in many ways, for example as He/She, S/he, or “He who is intrinsically part of She.” Leading trans figures in El/La have included Alexandra Byerly (now known as Alexandra Rodríguez de Ruiz), who is originally from Mexico.
A variation of “translatina” appears in the name of a national US organization established in 2009, the Coalición TransLatin@ (TransLatin@ Coalition), which uses the at symbol to indicate double gender valence in the Spanish language, following very recent linguistic innovations (other new spellings in Spanish include the use of a/o and o/a to mark female and male). The TransLatin@ Coalition identifies itself as “La voz de inmigrantes TransLatin@s/The voice of TransLatin@ Immigrants.” There appear to be no transmen in positions of leadership in this organization, based on the names included as members of the board of directors on its website.
Translatina is also the title of a feature-length documentary by the Peruvian director Felipe Degregori (2010). This 93-minute film was funded by the Pan American Health Organization (a Regional Office of the World Health Organization), UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS), the United Nations Development Program, RedLacTrans (Red Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Personas Trans [Latin American and Caribbean Network of Trans People]), and ILGA-LAC (the Latin American and Caribbean Region of the International Lesbian and Gay Association), with additional support from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). The documentary focuses mostly on the Peruvian experience, including interviews with trans individuals, government officials, members of the police, LGBT activists, and health professionals. It also includes interviews with a large number of trans women and LGBT leaders from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (fifteen nationalities), including trans rights pioneers such as Marcela Romero, Claudia Baudracco, and María Belén Correa (Argentina), Liza Minnelli (Brazil), Raiza Torriani (Bolivia), Valentina Riasco (Colombia), Bianca Vidal (Chile), Rashell Erazo (Ecuador), Paty Betancourt and Amaranta Gómez (Mexico), Silvia Martínez (Nicaragua), Venus Tejada (Panama), Jana Villayzan (Peru), and Gloria Mariño (Uruguay), most of whom are involved with RedLacTrans. The film also highlights the role of nongovernmental organizations and of trans organizations at the national level, for example the Association of Transgenders, Transsexuals, and Transvestites of Argentina (ATTTA). Topics addressed include police brutality, lack of employment opportunities outside traditional fields such as sex work and beauty salons, educational and family discrimination, health challenges (particularly HIV/AIDS), body modification (particularly through the use of injectable biopolymers), legal challenges (including name change legislation), personal relationships, dreams of migration (particularly to Italy) and of sex-reassignment surgery, testimonials about the difficulties of living abroad, and activism. Many of the interviewees discuss the incipient state of trans activism in the region. The term Latina is not discussed and is offered simply as a synonym for Latin American; there is no mention of Latina women in the United States.
Finally, translatina can be associated with other Spanish-language neologisms such as translocas and transmachas, which have been used by scholars to refer to transnational Latin American feminism (Álvarez 2009; Costa and Álvarez 2009) and to transnational or translocal trans performers and activists, including drag queens, drag kings, and performance artists (La Fountain-Stokes 2011). Sonia Álvarez highlights the usage of the term loca as “madwoman” in Spanish and proposes a resistant reinterpretation for contemporary feminists who explore the transnational dimensions of Latin American women's experience. In my own work, I have also used the term translocas but embraced the alternate, vernacular, and highly stigmatized meaning of loca as effeminate male and seen this epithet (which is widely used among gay men and trans women as a term of endearment) as a potential site for resignification in a translocal and transnational performance framework. I have also been interested in the linguistic gender shifts entailed in the feminized use of the term macha as a variant of macho, already common in epithets such as marimacha (masculine woman, lesbian, butch), following up on queer and feminist theorizations by individuals such as Ana Castillo (1995) to see its connection to contemporary performance artists such as Elizabeth Marrero (particularly her drag king character of Macha in the Bronx, New York City) (La Fountain-Stokes 2009) and Gisela Rosario, best known in Puerto Rico for her punk rock persona of Macha Colón.
1. Roger Lancaster (1998) discusses the wide variety and heterogeneity of trans categories and practices in Latin America.
2. Vek Lewis (2006) offers a critique of Kulick and Prieur, privileging the research of César O. González Pérez (Travestidos al desnudo: Homosexualidad, identidades y luchas territoriales en Colima) and Josefina Fernández (Cuerpos desobedientes: Travestismo e identidad de género). Also see Viviane Namaste 2011.