Neither Humans, Nor Animals, Nor Monsters: Decolonizing Transgender Embodiments [Spanish]

Authors

  • Pedro Javier (PJ) DiPietro Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Syracuse University FLACSO-PRIGEPP (Buenos Aires)

Keywords:

coloniality of transgender, travestis, dekunifying, decolonizing corpo-politics, nagualismo / shapeshifting, Indigenous cosmologies, new materialisms.

Abstract

The voracious lust of the conquest produced Indigenous sodomites in Abya Yala. Native peoples saw their understandings of bodily vitality interrupted. Rape turned anal permeability, which had once communicated various forms of life, into an act of bodily destitution. The permeability of Indigenous flesh, and its transition, was rendered non-human. Coloniality veils this infrahuman condition by mistaking transgender transitions for any nonconforming embodiment. By reading permeable bodies as gender nonconforming, modernity gives rise to monstrous and disabled embodiments. Thus, transgender emerges as the linchpin between ableism and (im)permeability. The legacy of colonialism conflates near-human and infrahuman bodies. Moving away from this conflation, this writing examines the materiality of ancestral, nonwestern, anal practices, burial rites, ceremonial apparitions, and dances. This decolonizing materialism negotiates (im)permeability over the bridge between, on the one hand, Mesoamerican and Andean cosmologies and, on the other, travesti and trans Latinx embodiments. Ultimately, the coloniality of transgender framework that I develop centers ontological pluralism in the current conversations about trans* materialisms.


Author Biography

  • Pedro Javier (PJ) DiPietro, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Syracuse University FLACSO-PRIGEPP (Buenos Aires)

    Pedro DiPietro is assistant professor in the department of women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University and an affiliate of Latino and Latin American Studies, Indigenous and Native American Studies, and LGBT Studies. They work at the intersection of decolonial feminisms, women of color thinking, Latinx studies, and transgender studies. They are one of the co-editors of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones and they are at work on a single-author manuscript under the title Sideways Selves, The Decolonizing Politics of Trans* Matter Across the Américas. They also serve as Coordinator of Graduate Studies at PRIGEPP-FLACSO, the Regional Program in Gender, Society, and Politics at Facultad Latinoamericana de las Ciencias Sociales. They collaborate with multiple organizations and collectives committed to social justice, including the Democratizing Knowledge Collective at Syracuse University, the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), and the travesti collectives Damas de Hierro and Futuro TransGenérico. In addition to other honors, DiPietro has received a Tinker Foundation Scholarship and an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of California (Berkeley).

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Published

2020-10-08

Issue

No. 34 (2020): Special Issue - November

Section

Articles

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