Decolonizing travesti space in Buenos Aires: race, sexuality, and sideways relationality

Abstract

Scholars of space usually neglect the history of travesti populations in Latin America. It is misrepresented not only by disciplinary blind spots but also by global narratives concerned with rehabilitating queer subjects within homonormative projects. Analyzing neoliberal narratives that delink conflicts about racialization and sexuality in Argentina, this article makes room to decolonize the study of travesti experience and embodiment in Buenos Aires's red zone. It examines a network of racialized travestis and their spatial practices, including their migration from the Andean northwest to the sex-work circuits of Buenos Aires. Finally, this article introduces the notion of sideways relationality to account for the cultural and spatial labor that racialized travestis perform at the oppositional margins of homonormative reflexivity.

Power and the paywall: A Black feminist reflection on the socio-spatial formations of publishing

“…Another perspective of how to think through the uneven landscapes created by paywalls is to think about how open access publishing can broaden participation in recent disciplinary transformations. Highly regarded epistemological frames, such as Black geographies (Woods 1998;Wilson 2000;McKittrick 2006;McKittrick and Woods 2007), Latinx geographies (Muñoz and Ybarra 2019;Cahuas 2019;Ramirez 2020), and queer and trans geographies (Johnston 2015;Rosenberg and Oswin 2015;Di Pietro 2016;Ellison 2019), have begun to gain traction in mainstream geography after having operated in pockets of the discipline, Black geographies in particular. Here, I want to discuss the importance of Black geographies as an option for understanding how removing paywalls can contribute to justice-oriented concerns.…”

Geography and indigeneity II

“…One key finding of historical work from gender and sexuality scholars is how indigenous sex-gender systems, including same-sex relations, were erased during colonialism (Rifkin et al, 2010). The contemporary resonances of these dynamics are explored by Di Pietro (2016). In Argentina, imaginative geographies of nation-building demarcate (a de-sexualized) indigeneity in the country’s northwest from a ‘gay-friendly’ Buenos Aires.…”

A thousand CEOs

“…In developing theories of relational space geographers have drawn on a variety of sources (Sheppard, 2008: 2608) including actor-network theory (Murdoch, 2006), feminist relational thought (England and Lawson, 2005), and the process-based ontologies of Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, Bergson, Whitehead, and others (Martin and Secor, 2013; Thrift, 2006; Whatmore, 2006; Marston et al, 2005; Massey, 2005). Recently, such thinking has played a significant role in work on care ethics (Cloutier et al, 2015; Ramdas, 2015; England and Henry, 2013), geopolitics (Dittmer, 2014), emotions and affect (Andrews et al, 2013), governance (Pollard and Samers, 2013), economic geography (Georgeson et al, 2014; Ahlqvist, 2013), migration (Collins, 2012; Gielis, 2011; Darling, 2010), urban politics (McGuirk, 2015, 2012; McCann and Ward, 2010), children’s geographies (Kullman, 2015, 2010; Tipper, 2011), anarchist geographies (Springer, 2014), neoliberalism (Peck et al, 2010), borders (Doevenspeck, 2011), the body (Abrahamsson and Simpson, 2011), civil society (Marshall and Staeheli, 2015), sexuality (Di Pietro, 2016), food security (Jarosz, 2014), the nonhuman (Buller, 2015, 2014; Shaw et al, 2013), and topology (Jones, 2014; Martin and Secor, 2013).…”