Towards a travesti subjectivity and system of aesthetics: trasheo travesti, irreverence, and bold visions for a new humanity in argentinean literature and culture

• Emi Frerichs ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Wisconsin–Madison

     University of Wisconsin–Madison

     City of Madison, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, ISSN 0145-8973, Vol. 51, Nº. 1, 2022, págs. 303-323
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In this literary context, queer decolonization is constituted by the narrative subversion of widespread social discrimination, the negation of civil rights, the stigmatization of sex work, and extreme economic precarity. [...]literary depictions of travesti realities in the Southern Cone are far more abundant than one might presume given the absence of these works in the corpus of what is considered canonical literature; whether we are going beyond Donoso's La Manuela in the Chilean El lugar sin límites, Pedro Lemebel's la Loca del Frente in Tengo miedo torero or Molina in Puig's El beso de la mujer araña (yes, I am in fact arguing that Molina is travesti, not a subversivo homosexual),2 the geopolitical and atemporal reality of travesti representation scales back decades in Chile and Argentina (although not limited to these Southern Cone settings) and persists to presentday representations.3 Despite the constant and relentless erasure experienced by travesti-identifying authors and their consequent literary representation, these texts made their way into Northern academia and took a fundamental, yet sluggish role in grappling with haphazard translations of purportedly "Queer and Trans·" identities in the Global South that fell woefully short in signification. When trying to conceive of descriptions that can truly capture the essence and implications of a travesti existence that would construct a framework of aesthetics, the following comes to mind: world-breakers, irreducible, irreverent, bold, untranslatable, resourceful, brazen courage, andfuria.4 The descriptions themselves are devastatingly pertinent to travesti identity for they attempt to encapsulate an existence that rejects the binarism of gender categories, and at the same time, they help us formulate a framework for understanding the fleeting nature of an identity that exists within an ever-expanding genderspectrum. [...]even as early as 2006, in Mauro Cabral and Paula Viturro's expert legal analysis "(Trans)Sexual Citizenship in Contemporary Argentina," in Transgender Rights, the authors problematize the use of the trans· umbrella in their research and recognize its limitations, stating: The term travesti possesses a particular political specificity, in that it unites a generalized condition of social vulnerability, an association with sexual work, the exclusion of basic rights, and the recognition of the same as a political identity.