This book is a collection of ideas and reflections on the history of trans people in Argentina and South America. It is also a collection of stories about my close friends who inspired my research and who have experienced violence at the hands of the Argentine government, police, and military forces over the last 100 years.
The first section is about the history of trans and travesti activism in Argentina. I included four articles in this section, two of them published in non-academic context where I explored the notion of travesti fury, a term invented by Lohana Berkins that symbolizes the key aspects of travesti political experiences. I also included the translation of an academic article published as part of a book collecting the experiences of trans activism in the 20th century and an essay about the links between travesti activism and sex work, during the 80s and 90s, based on interviews and documents. This section aims to analyze the complexity of travesti activism, sometimes reduced to an imitative experience of queer activism in the global north.The second section is also about trans and travesti activism but more specifically about the connections between these experiences and the activism for human rights in Argentina. Human Rights organizations in Argentina have played a key role in the political narratives of the last two decades, because the memory about the last dictatorship, the struggle for justice, and the seeking of the disappeared people and their children and grandchildren are the core of political life since the return to democracy in 1983. Trans and travesti activism developed a complex relation with the corpus of memories about the last dictatorship, demanded recognition and reparatory policies, and articulated their demands in the same argumentative line of human rights organizations. One of the main results of this link was the numerous trans and travesti archives that emerged during the last decade, mostly oriented to produce evidence and social impact in favor of trans and travesti people who suffered incarceration and repression by the military junta between 1974 to 1983. This section contains four articles with different perspectives about the topic, two of them are focused on the travesti experience and their testimonies about the last dictatorship. These articles are the result of interviews and reports from a journalistic perspective, where the travesti voices are highlighted in order to recognize their struggle for recognition and reparation. I also included two articles written for journals and conferences with a more critical perspective about the topic, regarding the work of colleagues who, like me, propose a more broadly analysis of the violence against trans and queer people independently of the political violence during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.The third section includes articles with a more biographical style, focused mainly on the activism of some travesti sex workers that were forbidden because of their controversial misbehavior, their link with the sexual work, and their disobedient voices. Finally, the fourth section is a short collection of articles about the recent events in Argentina trans and queer context. I especially covered some significant events like the enactment of the trans labor quota act, the debates about the first census that registered non-binary identities, the achievement of legal abortion in Argentina, and some debates on the LGBT political horizons.
