Confronting Structural Transphobia: Trans & Travesti Health, Visibility, and Resistance in Argentina and Brazil

symposium 3

Event Date

Location
Hart Hall 3201 & Zoom
Confronting Structural Transphobia: Trans & Travesti Health, Visibility, and Resistance in Argentina and Brazil, a Winter 2023 Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies symposium
Moderated by GSW Professor Christoph Hanssmann

Featuring:
Carmen Alvaro Jarrin - College of the Holy Cross
Francisco Fernandez Romero - Universidad de Buenos Aires
 

From the Streets to the Workplace: Shifting Scenarios of Trans Visibility and Rights in Argentina

Francisco Fernández Romero

Argentina’s groundbreaking Gender Identity Law from 2012 resulted from the convergence of various strands of travesti, transexual, and trans masculine activism. Since the country’s return to democracy in the 1980s, these movements had aimed to confront several kinds of structural transphobia, such as police brutality and a lack of access to legal gender recognition and transitional healthcare. At the same time, members of these communities had to navigate a complex social landscape where being visibly trans could be simultaneously dangerous, an asset for survival, or culturally impossible.

The Gender Identity Law, alongside other socio-cultural changes, have caused shifts in this scenario. While openly trans lives have become more livable, some individuals can now elude legibility due to a broader, depathologized access to ID changes and transitional healthcare. In this talk we will explore how trans people in Argentina navigate three spatial contexts today. First, while the streets of Buenos Aires have become more welcoming for some trans people, police brutality has intensified towards some trans women and travestis. Second, these streets are also the site of political protests, such as mass demonstrations for reproductive rights, where trans masculine individuals are often discursively mentioned yet physically unwelcome. Third, new laws which establish hiring incentives and quotas for trans employees now allow –but also require– individuals to be legible as such. These scenarios raise questions about how the internally-diverse trans communities in Argentina continue to negotiate conflicting forces that favor, discourage, or demand visibility.

Artivism, Affect and Brazil's Necrotranspoliics: Combatting Structural Transphobia by Celebrating Trans and Travesti Life

Carmen Alvaro Jarrín

Brazil is the country that most kills trans and travesti individuals in the world. As the scholar-activist Bruna Benevides remarks, transphobic murders and trans suicides are simply the most evident example of a more generalized structural transphobia, which she calls a "necrotranspolitics" marked by neglect and exclusion. Brazilian activists and artivists, however, do not focus on mourning but on celebrating trans and travesti life, inverting the violence suffered by gender nonconforming individuals and occupying spaces previously denied to them. The movement aims to depathologize and decriminalize trans and travesti identities, and making demands for more inclusive governmental policies around health, education and state recognition.  The affective power of political and artistic activism lies in the ways it transforms social perceptions about trans and travesti bodies, creating new avenues for hope and true inclusion within the body politic.

Webinar Link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fwFY7HLAToiVRRPCVeQs6w
 
For more information please contact Christoph Hanssmann, chanssmann@ucdavis.edu
Event sponsored by Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies; Science & Technology Studies; and the Feminist Research Institute

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