Alternautas (Web); Helton Levy (London Metropolitan Univ., UK), Flora Rondón (Univ. Del Rosario, Colombia), and Bru Pereira (Federal Univ. of São Paulo, Brazil)
Proposals by: 31.01.2026
Latin America has had a unique importance for recent trans scholarship, from classic ethnographies of travestidades to contemporary analyses of transfeminism, decoloniality, and policy change. Foundational works (e.g., Kulick, 1998; Ochoa, 2020) foreground embodiment, labour, beauty regimes, and national modernities as terrains where visibility is negotiated. Brazilian and Southern Cone scholarship has advanced trans feminist and decolonial critiques that problematize cisnormativity, medicalisation, and epistemic erasure (Bento, 2006; Pelucio, 2005; Vergueiro, 2019; de Jesus, 2019). These debates situate trans visibility within racialised, classed, territorial, and colonial relations – key to any regional account of “development.”
Legal and policy shifts have also reconfigured the landscape of visibility and recognition—most prominently Argentina’s Gender Identity Law (Law 26.743, 2012), Brazil’s 2018 Supreme Court ruling allowing administrative name/sex marker change without medical/surgical requirements, Colombia’s Constitutional Court jurisprudence since 1993 recognizing name-change rights, protection from gender identity–based discrimination, and access to gender-affirming healthcare; complemented by a 2015 executive decree allowing sex marker correction without medical or judicial requirements, Uruguay’s 2018 Comprehensive Trans Law, and Mexico City’s 2024 typification of transfemicide—each producing new archives of rights, bureaucratic traces, and media discourse to be studied critically. At the same time, violence and precarity remain urgent: regional monitoring and recent reports document disproportionate killings of trans people and LGBTQIA+ communities, demanding analyses that connect visibility to neoliberal “development” agendas with gendered/racialized disposability (TGEU, 2024). Read more … (Web)
Alternautas, a journal of multi-disciplinary Latin American studies, invites submissions for a special collection on Trans Political Visibilities: Innovations in/from Latin America. We seek critical, empirically grounded, and theoretically informed work that examines how trans, travesti, and transformista lives are made visible—and rendered (in)visible—across media, law, health, urban space, development policy, labour, activism, and everyday life with varying impacts. (Web)
Source: Qstudy-l Digest

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