Lesbomasculinidades: An Affective Politics of Home

• In Event: Transfeminista: A Cartography of Transfeminist Praxis across the Americas

Abstract

Trans-exclusionary lesbian feminist imaginaries in Mexico have long been haunted by the specter of trans*: a menacing, phantasmatic presence intent on consummating a silent and silencing lesbicide-by-attrition. Transness, the story goes, weaponizes heterosexuality by raping the lesbian out of ciswomen who engage in erotic partnerships with translesbians and by heteromasculinizing (former) butch cislesbians. Although both of these discursive strategies identify coerced heterosexualization as the primary tool deployed by transness in the war of attrition against lesbians, their affective registers are exceedingly dissimilar. Discursively, the affective and temporal lenses through which tranlesbians tend to be read by trans-exclusionary lesbian feminism are fear and anxiety (both future-oriented affects), whereas the affective optic through which transmasculinities are scrutinized primarily involves grief, mourning, and nostalgia (all of which involve predominantly past-oriented temporalities). Although this inquiry certainly addresses the affective mechanisms that permeate trans-exclusionary lesbian feminism, it focuses its attention on the affective responses, reorientations, and resistances engaged in by the nostalgized subjects-turned-objects of the trans-exclusionary lesbian feminist gaze: transmen and non-binary transmasculine subjects who, at one point or another, inhabit(ed) lesbian feminist spaces. As such, it maps out the transmasculine affective topographies that emerge in response and resistance to being homed, unhomed, and rehomed in/from/by lesbian feminist imaginaries.

Author

• A De La Maza Pérez Tamayo, Universidad de Sonora