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Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary

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Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary By Giancarlo Fernando Cornejo Salinas A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair Professor Judith Butler Professor Shannon Jackson Professor Juana María Rodríguez Spring 2018 Abstract Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary by Giancarlo Fernando Cornejo Salinas Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair My dissertation, Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary, argues that travestismo is a critical tool by which to read the unstable and contested production of gender, sexuality, and race in contemporary Latin America. My project’s point of departure is the definition of travestismo itself. Travestismo is usually depicted as a sort of unidirectional gender migration from male to female embodiments. This is why I argue that “travesti” as a name cannot be easily translated as “transgender.” Travestismo does not share the transgender indifference to the direction of gender migrations. The fact that travestismo presupposes a particular gendered destination has been read by some scholars as a sign of its reactionary tendencies. The femininity that travestismo constructs as a “final destination” feels dated. The desire for (a sort of anachronistic) femininity at the heart of travestismo seems troubling for some queer, trans, and feminist scholars. However, this tension reveals more about a desire of U.S.-based queer studies to sanitize their objects of study than of travestismo per se. My dissertation contributes to several interdisciplinary fields. My project makes the case for a displacement of the category “transgender” within transgender studies. Travestismo, that vernacular trans identity, is not a name “that sits easily with transgender.” Moreover, yet, my dissertation elaborates on the productive tensions of thinking and imagining travestismo and transgender as proximate to each other, and not in antagonistic ways. In contemporary transgender studies, transfeminism is a framework that offers possibilities for thinking and linking the many forms of oppression and violence that cisgender women and transgender subjects share. In this sense, my dissertation is a transfeminist take on the name travestismo and its imaginary. Thanks to this transfeminist perspective, in my project travestismo is not a break with feminism, but an expansion of feminism to its limits. My dissertation also proposes that queer studies and theories have a lot to gain from an engagement with travestismo, but only if these fields allow themselves to be transformed by such an encounter. My project can be read as an invitation for the cultivation of a hemispheric dialogue around the name “queer.” Such a dialogue in order to be fruitful needs to surrender the name “queer” to the possibilities and limits of translation. I argue that “queer” and “travesti” can be thought together because both names share a refusal to signify only one thing and in only one way. My project contributes to the 1 much-needed effort of displacing the U.S.-based mark of birth of queer theory, cultivating trans- disciplinary and trans-national dialogues around the vernacular name travestismo. Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary opens up the term travestismo with a method I call “travesti memory.” Travesti memory meshes the praxis of remembering and imagining, allowing for unpredicted becomings. In the first chapter I question the romance of ethnography and travestismo, a fixation on travestismo as exclusively an object of ethnographic research, and discuss some of its implications. I offer, through an engagement with postcolonial and queer psychoanalytic theories, an account of the losses that ethnography implies in the effort of imagining a different travesti trajectory. In the second chapter, I move to a close reading of Claudia Llosa’s film Loxoro, a film about transgender kinship and starred by transfeminist activist Belissa Andía. This chapter reads the film next to the political trajectory of its leading actress. Here I argue for the possibility of a language for travestismo that brings justice to travesti’s tears. The third chapter examines the work of the philosopher and curator Giuseppe Campuzano, with a particular emphasis on the work that the name hysteria performs in his essay “Reclaiming Travesti Histories.” The resonances between hysteria and history mobilize gender as an analytical tool with the promise without guarantees of unpacking transgender oppression. In my final chapter, I turn to the LGBTQ theater play Desde afuera, to think on the racialized connotations of travestismo. Here I focus on the collective pronoun nosotrxs and its power to repair some of the scars and wounds produced by racist and homo-transphobic national projects. In the concluding part of my dissertation, reading the photographic record of Campuzano’s performance TransformaT, I propose an imaginary in which travesti death is not- so-final. My dissertation takes Peru as a case study, because this nation offers a radical instance of the aliveness of colonial, racist, and sexist normative violence in the southern cone of Latin America. Precisely for that reason, I trace assemblies of movements, memories, energies, bodies, trajectories, and images, which under the name travestismo are doing a lot of much needed critical political work in contemporary Peru. Throughout my dissertation, travestismo works as name that cannot be easily digested nor accepted by neoliberal logics or dynamics. Travestis, unlike many gay men and lesbians, are not sanitized subjects that aspire to be docile consumers. In my dissertation, I argue that travestismo is both a gendered and racialized category. My conclusion makes a case for thinking travestismo as a name that cultivates a bond with racialized indigenous subjectivities. That queer bond offers a promise for destabilizing the dangerous conjunction of racist, sexist and homo-transphobic normativities. I mobilize travestismo as memory work that refuses to forget queer racialized bonds. 2 Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary Table of Contents 1. Acknowledgments: pp. ii 2. Introduction: pp. iii Thinking Travestismo in Latin America: pp. vi The Liminalities of Travestismo and Queer (Theory): pp. xii Thinking Gender: pp. xv Transfeminism Meets Travestismo: pp. xx Rethinking the Nation through Travestismo’s Lenses: pp. xxiii 3. Chapter One: Travesti Dreams and Ethnographic Nightmares: pp. 1 The Becoming Travesti of Sandra: pp. 4 The Dreams of a Dumb Kid: pp. 6 The Queer Art of Lying: pp. 11 4. Chapter Two: Thinking Travesti Tears: pp. 16 The Walk of Travesti Tears: pp. 19 A Language for Tears: pp. 24 A Language of the Wounded Lovers: pp 27 The Tears of a Travesti Feminist Theorist: pp. 31 5. Chapter Three: Reclaiming the Travesti Histories of Giuseppe Campuzano: pp. 35 Translating Travestismo: pp. 35 The Magic of Travestismo: pp. 37 Travestismo and Transgender: pp. 38 Travesti Hysteria: pp. 39 Carla and the Making of a Travesti Body: pp. 40 Rosa and the Travesti Love for Machos: pp. 44 Gata and the Travesti Desire for Family: pp. 45 Jana and the Travesti Claim to Speak Back: pp. 47 Travestismo as the Worst of Both Genders: pp. 49 Travestismo, Feminism, and Transfeminism: pp. 51 Coda: The Afterlives of Travesti Performance: pp. 55 6. Chapter Four: The Urgent Promise of a Travesti Nosotrxs: pp. 58 A Troubling T: Between B and Q?: pp. 60 The Intimacies of Male Homosexuality and Travestismo: pp. 61 The Gender of Travestismo: pp. 66 Who Will Write the History of Scars?: pp. 69 7. Epilogue: pp. 78 8. Bibliography: pp. 85 i Acknowledgements This dissertation has been an act of love and friendship. First of all I have to thank the chair of my dissertation, Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha. Crossing paths with Minh-ha has been a gift to my life. The dialogues with Minh-ha always push my thinking to its limits. I also thank her for allowing me to make peace with the many in-betweens that cross me and that I inhabit. Professor Juana María Rodríguez has been and will continue to be an inspiring light in my academic path. Juana María is a model for the kind of scholar I want to be, and for the kind of queer critical thinking I want to engage. Juana always reminds me that experiencing and imagining pleasure is a modality of queer thought. Even before personally meeting Professor Judith Butler, her work had had a transformative effect on my psychic world. At Berkeley, Judith has always showed me by example that some of the best critical thinking happens when it coincides with generosity. Quiero agradecer a mi familia, al “residuo” de heterosexualidad del que provengo. Mi madre Colomba Salinas siempre me ha rodeado de amor. Colomba me ha mostrado a lo largo de nuestra convivencia que se puede habitar el género de muchas formas. Mi padre Lucio Cornejo me ha demostrado que ser un “hombre heterosexual” no significa carecer de corazón. Mi hermano Pablo Cornejo siempre me recuerda que pensar y reír no son mutuamente excluyentes. This dissertation wouldn’t exist without the key contributions of communities of Peruvian travesti, trans, and transgender activists. In particular, my dissertation establishes conversations with four travesti activists and thinkers. Sandra offered me friendship as a gift. I did my best to reciprocate her generosity, and to try to do justice to her ambiguities and the ambiguities of the worlds she inhabits. Belissa Andía has been for more than a decade a brilliant and kind interlocutor for me and many queers in Peru and the Americas. I try to envision with her (next to her) worlds in which misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia are not the unquestioned norm.
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