Brown Trans Figurations
Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Galarte, a professor of gender and women's studies at the University of New Mexico, analyzes contemporary depictions of "brown trans people" in this scholarly debut. Documenting the murders of two Chicana/Latina trans women in 2002 and 2008, Galarte examines the killers' transphobic legal defenses and media depictions of the victims to reveal how "nontrans people understand transgender people, as opposed to how trans folk understand or construct their own narratives." Galarte also examines evidence of "Chicano/Mexican American FTMs" (female to males) in the historical record. The book's most accessible sections provide thorough and rewarding analyses of popular culture, including The Christine Jorgenson Story, a "trashy" film adaptation of trans pioneer Christine Jorgensen's autobiography, and A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, a Lifetime movie about the 2002 murder of a trans woman in California, and a mural depicting "racialized queer pride" in San Francisco's Mission District. Academic jargon clutters the analysis elsewhere, and Galante cites other academics so much he overshadows his own ideas. Still, scholars in the fields of Latinx and gender studies will appreciate this detailed look at an underexplored subject.
