Brown Trans Figurations
Brown Trans Figurations
Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies
Honorable Mention for the National Women’s Studies Association's 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize
2021 Finalist Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards
2022 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association
The Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, GL/Q Caucus, Modern Language Association (MLA)
2022 AAHHE Book of the Year Award, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education
Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances “brown trans figuration” as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences.
Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.
[Brown Trans Figurations'] most accessible sections provide thorough and rewarding analyses of popular culture...scholars in the fields of Latinx and gender studies will appreciate this detailed look at an underexplored subject.
A needed contribution to trans Latinx studies. [Brown Trans Figurations] offers a series of compelling close readings of literature, photography, film, and other accounts of Chicanx trans people and representation in the United States.
Brown Trans Figurations is an extremely well-written and groundbreaking book, accessible yet simultaneously quite complex, in Latina/o/x studies. It will be required reading in queer, trans, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and in American studies and ethnic studies classrooms...Brown Trans Figurations is crucial reading for persons interested in the differences between queer and trans Latinx experience, the tensions between Chicana feminism and transgender and transsexual lives, and the racism that infects dominant representations of trans and queer Chicanxs and Latinxs...Galarte’s theorization of brown trans fgurations transforms Latina/o studies in profound ways.
Everyone would benefit from reading this book, and learning about the brown trans community...The book is extremely relevant and important in this current political climate that has villainized both the trans and Latinx community for different reasons. Libraries that have LGBTQ and Latinx collections should consider purchasing this book. If Galarte has shown anything, it is that the issues within those communities intersect and must be addressed simultaneously.
Poised to break new ground and brilliantly reframe debates around gender and sexuality in Chicanx and Latinx contexts, Brown Trans Figurations ultimately shines through as a deeply original, provocative, and innovative work. I am certain that Francisco Galarte’s book will be read and cited for many years to come.
Brown Trans Figurations is unique. It is both unprecedented in specialization and ambitious in scope. Through an investment in intersectional analyses, Francisco Galarte confronts trans erasure, particularly within Chicanx Queer theorizing.
Francisco J. Galarte is an assistant professor of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is a coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and the author of the essay "Transitions: The Dolorous Return of a Chicana/o Trans-Fronterizo," in Claiming Home, Shaping Community: Testimonios de los valles. His work has also appeared in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Chicana/Latina Studies.
Introduction: Thinking Brown and Trans Together
Chapter 1. Dolorous Proximities of Race and Transsexuality: Reading the Gwen Araujo Archive
Chapter 2. Examining Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Valuation: The Death of Angie Zapata and the Incarceration of the Hateful Other
Chapter 3. Fleshing Out the Chicana/x Butch and Chicano/x FTM Borderlands
Chapter 4. The Wound Makes the Man: Trans Figuring Chicano Masculinities
Coda: Reading with the X
Notes
References
Index
Queer Brown Voices
Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism
Edited by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
