Shifting the geopolitics of trans studies, travesti theory is a Latinx American body of work with an extensive transregional history. As a particular body politics, travesti identification is not only a sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized form of relation, but a critical mode and an epistemology. Throughout the Américas, trans and travesti studies take a multiplicity of forms: scholarly work that engages identitarian and anti-identitarian analytical frameworks as well as interventions into state practices, cultural production, and strategic activist actions. These multiple critical approaches—both travesti and trans—are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape the hemisphere, opening up space to explore the productive tensions and expansive possibilities within this body of work.

This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly prompts a conversation between trans and travesti studies scholars working across the Américas to investigate how shifts in cultural practices, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven theories of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment. Contributors to this issue offer a hemispheric perspective on trans and travesti issues to the Anglophone academy, expand transgender studies to engage geopolitical connections, and bring interdisciplinary approaches to topics ranging from policy to cultural production. This issue is an unprecedented English-language collection by Latin American and Latinx scholars on trans and travesti issues.

Francisco J. Galarte is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico where he teaches courses in Chicanx, Latinx and transgender studies. His most recent articles have appeared in publications including Aztlan: Journal of Chicano Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies Journal and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. He has been involved with TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly since the journal’s inception in 2011 and served as the Fashion Editor from 2012-2018 and since 2018 has served as co-general editor of the journal. His first book, Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies (University of Texas Press, 2021), explores how transgender analytics intervene or fail to intervene in the current reading practices that exist in Chicana/o Studies for making sense of processes of racialization, gendered violence, queer sexualities, masculinities and femininities.

Claudia Sofía Garriga-López is an Assistant Professor of Queer and Trans Latinx Studies in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies of California State University, Chico. She is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist, with a PhD in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis of New York University. She is the author of “Transfeminist Crossroads: Reimagining the Ecuadorian State” published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2016). Her scholarly work is grounded in a critical engagement with activism, public policy, and public health, as well as trans, feminist, and queer performance art and cultural production in Latin America, the Caribbean, and within people of color communities in the US.

Cole Rizki is a Latin Americanist and transgender studies scholar whose research examines the entanglements of transgender cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Américas. Rizki’s current book project provincializes US-centric histories of state violence, state formation, and identity politics that continue to underwrite the field of transgender studies. He is the co-editor of "Trans Studies en las Américas," a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) on Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Trans Studies (May 2019) and the Translation Section editor of TSQ. Rizki’s article “Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” was recently short-listed for the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture Early Career Researcher Essay Prize. His work appears in journals such as TSQ, GLQ, Journal of Visual Culture, and Radical History Review.

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. In addition to serving as co-editor of the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas,“ she is the author of two books, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies. She is currently completing a book on visual culture and Latina sexual labor entitled Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, under contract with Duke UP.

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