Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Trap/Trope: Galarte's Trans-Figurative, Racialized Readings

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10642684-10144491

1527-9375

Christina A. León,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

At a moment when racialized and gendered terms are under considerable pressure, Francisco J. Galarte's Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies asks us to think under and with this pressure through the register of figuration. Galarte's reading of the figurative takes inspiration from Emma Pérez's (1999: 8) provocation, in a revision of Hayden White, that Chicana/o historians have been “captives of tropological interpretation.” This tropological capture reflects and refracts more concertedly when considered with the additional rhetorical strictures facing Chicanx trans folks—narratological pressures that have, historically, policed access to gender affirming treatment and resources. Galarte writes with the ethos of Eva Hayward's (2017) claim that universalist narratives entail “an investment in nameable identity over and against the precarity of subjectivity” (Hayward quoted on 14). The larger task and accomplishment of Brown Trans Figurations is to question the figuration in these namings, which means attending to narratives of loss and relation over the identifiable claims that find solace in comfortable nominalization.Rather than making brown trans folks the ultimate object of study, Galarte's approach looks at larger structures and histories of race, gender, and sexuality in order to resist and complicate progress narratives around the trans tipping point. The first part of the book concentrates on Chicana trans women whose deaths became a symbolic front for LGBT movements that seek legislation against hate crimes as the form of protection against transphobic violence. But Galarte's careful readings of the cases of Gwen Araujo and Angie Zapata, trans women murdered in 2002 and 2008, respectively, tell a more pernicious story about how trans protection can be entangled with anti-migrant/nativist policing such that the trans women become figured, in their afterlives, through tropes of trans panic, deceitful trespasser, and the hateful other. By reading the “dolorous proximity” of race and transsexuality in the Gwen Araujo case, Galarte expands on Talia Bettcher's (2007) readings of trans women figured as always already deceitful by enfolding that discourse into the extant critique of betrayal in Chicana feminism. Galarte shows, through readings of documentary film and news media alike, how such deceptive tropological entrapment becomes underscored by racist attitudes toward Chicana women more broadly—through hypervisibility read as excessive sexuality or through the Malinche trope.Extending this dolorous reading to a trans woman inspired by Araujo, the second chapter looks to the LGBT legal battle cry to convict Angie Zapata's killer, Allen Andrade, as a hate crime. The supposed justice, for LGBT folks, served at his conviction leads Galarte to read how the trial put both Andrade and Zapata under scrutiny and how both bodies endured a maelstrom of tropes likening them to racialized, sexualized others, which ultimately served a white supremacist police state. At no point does Galarte exonerate Andrade, but he brings to the fore the attendant structural and material scaffolding of the case in ways that muddy moral outrage and complicate rights-based discourse. This relational matrix takes trans lives outside of exceptional discourse and shows how they are stitched, like the paño art that appears throughout the text, into figurations of their own making while navigating tropological impositions. Such an entangled reading practice extends devastatingly back into the Zapata family after Angie Zapata's death, as two of her siblings suffered, too, from the “overkill” of racial capitalism—one was killed in a drunk driving accident and another hospitalized in a hit-and-run crash motivated by homophobia. Galarte articulates the larger violence of the specific figurations of hypervisible lives, both trans and brown, that become obscured by regimes of power and rights-based discourse.The second part of the book shifts to consider a different genealogy across the brown trans binary, looking to intramural gender debates in Chicana feminism between butches and FTM Chicano/x men. This necessarily centers what Galarte calls the trans/FTM “border wars” to redouble a commitment to borderlands thinking within one of the foundational thinkers of Chicana feminism, Cherríe Moraga. Rather than quickly dismissing and castigating Moraga's transphobia in “Keeping Queer Queer,” Galarte rereads her attachments and border policing as itself about a feeling of possible loss: loss of a queer and a brown nation. We may ask ourselves, furthered by this trenchant critique, if political alliances need nations at all, given how national borders have been particularly fraught zones for Black and brown trans bodies. But it is also to read the borderlands, and not border logic, back into the project of an expansive Chicana feminism that needn't pathologize Chicano/x trans men as whitened traitors, because “to conceive of the borderlands, as Anzaldúa asks us to, is to embrace the uncertain and the unknown that mark brown transfiguration” (105). Reading figurations of trans embodiment in Carla Trujillo's 2003 novel What Night Brings that do not exactly end in a telos of transition, Galarte considers how transfigurations have been operable, despite gendered borders upheld by Chicana feminists. Galarte achieves this task precisely by “muddying the line,” or border, drawn between FTM, butch, and cis Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x masculinities (105). This muddied line then takes us back to FTM negotiations of Chicanx community, in the fourth chapter, through a masculinity transfigured by the “cut” of trans—reading a sexology case; a documentary on FTM and Butch folks in the Bay Area, Mind if I Call You Sir?; and a photo of FTM and butch Chicanx masculine folks who transfigure Chicanx masculinity.Finally, turning back to the question of gender, language, and Latinx studies, Galarte's coda “reads with the x.” This entails reading the x of Latinx figuratively for what it might do to gender binaries and what it might expose about dualistic logics. Reading with the x stays in this mercurial space, bringing the book to a looping configuration that places portraits of a difficult to name model, Jim/Jaime/Ariana Aguilar, as defiantly poised and untranslatable into a stable binary gender. This insistent indeterminacy functions as a modality of reading for the x beyond the binary. Galarte's hermeneutics and the larger tapestry of the book ask that we read, yet again, the figuration of race, gender, and sexuality in recursive stride.What can be thought together as open ended, multiple, and unfolding in a dual sense of mattering—both embodying/materializing and affectively moving (whether through pain, recognition, or both)—can also harden into a logic of capture, nominalization, and reification. This, it seems, is the charge that brown transfiguration leaves us with: reading that which cannot but be read as a risk of signification and that which requires recursive reading to unfurl border wars, to consider the aftermath of trans death, and to keep reading at the interstice of race and gender, especially now when the conservative, fascistic, right-wing energies turn over whether what is under fire is trans lives or critical race theory. The turn, though, is the move that may trap or may open, and so we are left with the charge of thinking through how tropological movements of race and gender un/settle in the various archives of racialized, gendered difference.