Luchas Transfeministas y Transgresoras

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

Abstract

This presentation is fundamentally about geopolitical and temporal travel and circulation: it will take us from the transLatina movement that emerged in San Francisco in 1966 and trace its multi-directional reverberations across national borders, to iterations in Mexico City, Tijuana, and Los Angeles, as well as to the de- and multiply-territorialized spaces of luchas transmigrantes and transfeministas. A profoundly situated knowledge, I draw on my personal and professional experience with and within transfeminismo in order to develop a transfeminist optic through which to better understand the processes of criminalization to which those who transgress the gender binary are subjected. Moreover, I explore the ways in which transfeminismo has been deployed in an effort to occupy spaces historically and wrongfully denied to us: juridical spaces, identitarian spaces, expressive spaces. This paper explores Latin American transfeminismo as existing within a transborder imaginary. As such, it includes territorialized Latin American geopolitical spaces, spaces of Latin American embodiment and imagination outside of the area geographically designated as "Latin America", and a myriad contact zones that emerge at the interstices of the Latinx imaginary and a multiplicity of imaginaries not readily read as Latinx but indispensable to its very existence. I am particularly invested in exploring the precarity produced through the dynamic and nuanced relationships between cisheteropariarchal space and transgender women of color.

Author

• Alexandra B Rodriguez, Independent Scholar