The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru: Skins of Desire 3031428161, 9783031428166

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The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru Skins of Desire Paola Patiño Rabines

The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru

Paola Patiño Rabines

The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru Skins of Desire

Paola Patiño Rabines Department of Social Sciences Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru Lima, Peru

ISBN 978-3-031-42574-5    ISBN 978-3-031-42816-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42816-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ©Olga Yastremska / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Tayta For showing me the path to freedom

Foreword

In Skins of Desire Paola Patiño explores the aesthetic and political practices of trans women in contemporary Peru. Through in-depth interviews, group conversations, and observations, Patiño shares rich glimpses of the lives, and political insights, of her informants who are trans women living in Lima. Most of these informants’ lives have been shaped by the sex industry, which provides so many trans women with the means of material survival as well as community. The informants also include community workers and prominent activists for trans rights in contemporary Peru. More than an ethnography of a specific community, Skins of Desire is a contribution to political history and philosophy, attempting to witness and bring into view some of the ways in which trans women’s political activism—enfolded as it is into the most intimate and embodied dimensions of existence—transforms the meanings and possibilities of the political. Patiño situates trans women alongside others who, as Franz Fannon and Slyvia Wynter put it, survive, and develop arts of living, beyond the realms of “Man” as designated by the colonial order (Fanon, 1963; Wynter, 2003; McKittrick, 2006). Patiño makes the case for understanding trans women’s aesthetic and political practices as decolonial politics. Amongst the themes in the book that stand out for me is that of hope. Patiño thanks the trans women in her study for enabling something hopeful to emerge in her country. Moreover, through the life stories of her informants, we witness the power of hope as an active principle shaping women’s lives. Hope and desire—for survival, for rights, and above all for recognition—enables trans women to keep on resisting-by-existing in vii

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contravention of the colonial/modern gender order. At the same time, it is this same hope and desire that pulls trans women and trans children into situations and relations of, often quite horrific, abuse and exploitation. In these women’s lives we witness both the irrepressible generativity and the cruelty of hope, as Lauren Berlant amongst others have articulated (Berlant, 2011; Dawney et al., 2017; Meer, 2022). Reflecting this, Patiño does not shy away from the difficult and disturbing dimensions of her informants’ lives, in which resistance and precarity, agency and extreme vulnerability, are aspects of the same reality. Another central theme is the politics of aesthetics. Skins of Desire contributes to a body of scholarship that unfolds the meaning of aesthetic politics as articulated by Jacques Rancière and Michel Foucault in (post) colonial contexts (Rancière, 2013; Foucault, 1980). Patiño characterizes trans women in Peru, since colonization, as a “part that has no part” (as per Rancière’s formulation) whose self-assertion and demand for rights has the power to challenge and transform the established order of the sensible, and thus the meaning of citizenship. The disruption generated through their self-affirmation and demand for recognition far exceeds anything particular or personal. As Engin Isin (Isin, 2002) argues, their demand for recognition is an “act of citizenship” that transforms and opens the political community. Hence the emanation of politics—or rather, of hope. Skins of Desire shows how this politics of dissensus intersects with Foucault’s aesthetics of existence, wherein the production of the self—and the body—as a work of art becomes a profoundly political, public, and dangerous. Drawing on the insights and hopes of her informants, as well as a metaphor of expanding skins articulated by the artist-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Patiño puts forward an original account of aesthetic politics as the work of and upon skins. On the one hand, this reminds the reader of the peculiar intensity of gendered, embodied, life—placing touch, sensuality, osmosis, and hormones at the generative centre of concern. On the other, the metaphor of a body comprised through multiple, expanding, layers of skin—from the first skin of the human body, emergent as skin in relation with others, through expanding skins of clothing, family, society, and out into the world order—helps to explain why trans identity is so contested, and how trans women’s lives are so much shaped by the relentless demands of power: coloniality, capital, and patriarchy. Patiño, or rather her informants, dreams political agency into the most

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intimate and dangerous of spaces, claiming sex work and gender performance as a domain of profound transformation. With this, Patiño reveals the artificiality of philosophers’ false choices, such as the body versus discourse, performance versus self-affirmation, or recognition versus redistribution—as, for her participants, recognition is the condition of material survival. There is nothing straightforward or comfortable in this work. Rather Patiño follows the best aspects of anthropological tradition—welcoming in, rather than theorizing away, the disruption of our own academic distribution of the sensible when these clash with her informants’ own understandings of their lives. Associate Professor of Sociology at Warwick University Coventry, UK September 2023

Claire Blencowe

References Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Dawney, L., Blencowe, C., & Bresnihan, P. (2017). Problems of hope. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Foucault, M. (1980). The history of sexuality. Vintage Books. Isin, E. F. (2002). Being political: Genealogies of citizenship. U of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. U of Minnesota Press. Meer, N. (2022). The cruel optimism of racial justice. Policy Press. Rancière, J. (2013). The politics of aesthetics. Bloomsbury Publishing. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation: An argument, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3: 257–337.

Acknowledgements

I have not produced this book on my own, but I owe my enormous gratitude to a community of people who have helped me, from their place, to spin each of the parts. They have contributed from their experiences, from their knowledge, from emotional support, from intimacy, from trust. Without further ado, from their affections. First of all, I would like to thank each and every one of the trans women who kindly and openly decided to collaborate with this study. Without them, without their stories, without their time, this book would not have been possible. In particular, I want to thank them for their trust in sharing their life stories and their most intimate memories with me. For opening up to tell me about the painful episodes they lived through, more than one of them heartbreaking; but also, for transmitting to me their dreams and desires. Thank you Jana, Leyla, Miluska, Gahela, Yazmin, Jessica, Angelina, Javiera, Belen, Sandy, Kiara, Marisol, Camila, Fabiana, and Fabiola. Thank you for being and for being. Thank you for not giving up. I hope this research lives up to what you have given me. I hope I do not fail you. This book is the product of the research I undertook as part of my doctoral studies in Sociology at Warwick University, UK. In that sense, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors Cath Lambert and Claire Blencowe, who have accompanied me steadily during four years, being very open to my ideas and at the same time giving me substantial contributions to understand the intersection between aesthetics, politics, and gender. Thank you for your patience, dedication, and constant support. I also feel deeply fortunate to have a network of friends who have xi

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accompanied me through the years, with whom I have shared the most important moments of my life and with whom I have been able to establish emotional bonds that have helped me to have confidence and continue walking through this world. Life has always been better for having them close to me. In particular, I would like to highlight my bond with Eloy Neira who, in addition to all of the above, has had a direct impact on the development of this book. I have never met a brighter, kinder, more eclectic, and bigger-hearted person. Being all that and more, you are also the humblest person I have ever met. You are the child and the sage inhabiting one body. Thank you for teaching me to think differently. Thank you for being in my life and letting me be in yours. I would also like to thank my wonderful friend Lucia Bracco, with whom, through shared experiences and multiple reflections over more than 20 years, we have chiselled together an approach to exist in this world. To Nubia Bonopaladino for being one of the best travel partners, for the laughter and also for the tears. To Rudi Cocchella, Gabriel de la Cruz, Ross Iron, and Emci Tristán for all the time shared and for the reflections, always full of humour, about the national events. To Darío Rubio, Pablo Torrejón, Verónica Zela, Natalia Arteta, Mario Lack, the Koechlin twins, la china Mujica, and Alonso Molina for always being close by. I would like to give a special thanks to María Eugenia Vásquez, with whom, despite the fact that we have known each other for a relatively short time, she already occupies a place in my heart. Thank you for teaching me what unconditional friendship is. All this would not have been possible without the unconditional support of my family. To my mother, Melba Rabines, for teaching me to always keep my heart on the right side and that smiling is a choice. To Matías, my partner, for supporting me and for walking the journey of love together. And to my son Nahuel Etsa, who was born during the development of this research, thank you for teaching me without words the mystery of life. And also, to my four-legged loved ones, Panzón, Ninja, Maxi, and Brujito, for teaching me to find the enjoyment of simplicity.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Bibliography  15 2 Trans-Aesthetics  and the Struggle for Recognition Politics Seen from a Decolonial Perspective 17 The Decline of Modern Politics  18 Coloniality in the Contemporary Peruvian Context  25 Gender Issues Seen from a Decolonial Perspective  31 Trans Movement as a New Political Cultural Community  36 Trans-aesthetics and the Struggle for Politics of Recognition  54 Conclusions  62 Bibliography  64 3 Thinking  with and from Skins: Reflections on Methodology and Method in Ethnographic Research from the Encounter and Collaboration with Trans Women in Lima, Peru 69 Research Design  71 Theory of Method: The Metaphor of the Five Skins  72 My Positionality as Researcher: Justification of Methods  76 Self-Reflexivity and the Ambivalent Process of Fieldwork  80 Method and Methodological Tools  90

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Data Analysis and Interpretation  98 Ethics in the Work with a Vulnerable Population  99 Limitations 101 Conclusions 102 Bibliography 104 4 Tracing  the History of the Trans Movement in Lima, Peru109 Colonial and Early Republican Historical Background 110 Contemporary History: Feminism, Gay-Lesbian, and Trans Movement 118 History of the Feminism Movement 118 Gay and Lesbian Movement History 125 The Trans Movement 131 Conclusions 138 Bibliography 141 5 First  and Second Skin: The Body as a Political-Aesthetic Territory145 The First and the Second Skin 147 The Body as a Territory and the Search of Recognition’s Metaphor of the Mirror 155 The Trans Praxis as a Criticism of the Cartesian Subject 162 Conclusions 168 Bibliography 170 6 Third  and Fourth Skins: Sexuality, Identity, and Power Relations173 The Third and Fourth and the Configuration of Sexuality 175 The Third Skin: Home 177 The Fourth Skin: School and Neighbourhood 184 Conclusions 195 Bibliography 197 7 The  Fifth Skin: Capitalism, Modernity/Coloniality and Patriarchy199 The Fifth Skin: Capitalism, Modernity/Coloniality, and Patriarchy 207 Capitalism, Globalization, and the Production of Bodies 207

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Modernity/Coloniality 212 Patriarchy 217 Trans Women as Antagonistic Protagonists of the World-System: The Figure of the “dehero” 220 Conclusions 225 Bibliography 226 8 Conclusions229 Bibliography 238 Index239

About the Author

Paola Patiño Rabines  Is a researcher with over 13 years of experience in research, cultural and social experience in research, cultural and social management, consulting, as well as extensive knowledge in the areas of cultural diversity, social movement, sex and gender studies. During her professional career, she has had the opportunity to combine the excellence in social science research with a broad commitment and public service, which has led her to work for the Ministries of Justice, Culture and Environment, among others. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the Center for Sociological, Economic, Political and Anthropological Research (CISEPA) and is a professor at the Department of Social Science of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book explores the significance of the rise of new ways of doing politics in Lima, Peru’s capital city, through a case study focusing on trans women. As elsewhere in the world, in the past three decades, Peru has seen a decline in the hegemony of a political praxis characterized by Western modernity. In place of primarily logocentric and discursive operations of power, non-discursive ways of doing politics based on embodied performances have become more visible. Amongst other social movements, trans women’s political struggles are exemplary of this prolonged but steady shift, and their embodied aesthetic-political practices in their quest for challenging the current “terms of recognition” (Butler, 2004) heralds a political-cultural transformation. In this sense, this research focuses on an analysis of the new ways of doing politics that, as we will see throughout the book, are actually quite old. It is about observing how in a country of the so-called third world, the modern way of doing politics, a way of doing politics that is logo-­ centred and where the centrality of class and economic interests have been key to its development, collapses. The intention of making Peru a modern country, under the guise of a modern politics, that whenever it is modern is also colonial, collapses since it loses value in different dimensions: it loses discursive value, affective value, and the interpretive capacity of people’s problems. In other words, my intention is to elucidate how politics is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Patiño Rabines, The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42816-6_1

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being understood and how it is being practiced in a southern context, where discursive politics based on logos that aim to build a rational ethic begin to be replaced by non-discursive practices that appeal to other languages, particularly the languages of the body. This politics does not appeal to a logo-centred ethic, but rather to an aesthetic ethic where aesthetics is essential to the constitution of action (Rancière, 1999; Maffesolli, 1990). Although the political use of aesthetics, from power, has been present throughout the five centuries of coloniality in America, both colonial and republican aestheticization has had an instrumental use subordinated to a metadiscourse (to the discourse of Christianity and the Enlightenment, respectively); what I rescue in this research is that there has been a resistance to that aesthetics from another aesthetics and that a decolonial process is taking place in those terms. I understand politics in the broadest, most original, and oldest sense, which has to do with building the good life of a community. At the same time, I see politics as a praxis of domination. In this sense, these two ways of understanding politics are present in my research. The evidence shown presents the power over trans women, that is, the set of practices that have to do with their social abjection. At the same time, however, I have presented the power for trans women. My research shows the tension between the two forms, where in the face of power-domination, trans women develop power-capacity or power-agency. As we know, the logic of modern Western reason that is inscribed through coloniality is rooted in the Cartesian code, which inaugurates the separation of the mental substance (res cogitans) from the material substance or bodily substance (res extensa). This is the starting point of the cogito, of the Cartesian subject as incorporeal subject. From there, a hierarchy was established between different levels of composition of the human. Subsequent political struggles, for example, those of feminism, have attempted to say that this Western subject is not an abstract or universal. It is the emancipatory movements of the twentieth century that will show that this cogito is not an abstraction, but rather a metonymy of a concrete being: a white, heterosexual, bourgeois, Judeo-Christian, non-­ disabled man. Once that affirmation is made, the body suddenly begins to appear. Then, it could be said that the struggle of recognition has had a common thread, namely to give a body to that universal subject. In other words, the struggle of recognition is also a struggle to lead the universal subject to

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recognize that it is not an isolated, self-determining human.1 Rather is a human with multiple dependencies and restraints. Thus, in a way, the decolonial, the queer, the trans, and the feminist struggle can be understood as a part of the process to materialize the domination in the sense that these abstract ideas that are supposedly neutral have a materiality. This research focuses on a contemporary instance of the struggles for recognition, particularly in the struggle of trans women in Lima, Peru. The criticism of modern politics is not that it leaves a hole in the conception of politics, but rather that it is undermined by political actions of a different order, different movements. I decided that for my analysis I would focus on a case study in which the body is the centre. This research represents a contribution to the feminist and decolonial debates on aesthetics and politics, which recognizes that politics is embedded in aesthetics, whether creating new meanings, new places or making possible new imaginaries. These changes lead us also to new sensibilities through “transgression acts” which seek positive recognition of diversity and claim the entitlement to full citizenship. This book also will contribute to the struggles of people who have been, and still are, considered “less than human.” In that sense, this research tries to rescue from politics and aesthetics an ethical project based on the affective world to build community. At the same time, I seek to contribute to the debate of what politics is and what it means to do politics in modern-day Peru, providing new insights that depart from the still predominant colonial/modern view of politics and the political. For the purposes of this research, the trans movement refers to the collective of trans people who, by socially recognizing their condition, struggle for their collective. That is to say, it does not become a movement until there is a self-consciousness of a community that struggles for something (Pleyers, 2018). However, among the many features of the Peruvian trans movement, I have focused on the use of the body as an emancipatory political tool above all. The Peruvian trans movement is not based on formal institutions or organizations, such as political parties or unions. And although organizations exist, in reality, the movement is more decentralized; it does not have exclusive heads. Some leadership is shared and at the same time, in conflict. Nor is there a sole message shared by members of the trans population; there are indeed non-homogeneous views on their 1  Given the nature of my research, we should note that these struggles went hand in hand with representation and participation struggles as well as redistributive struggles.

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own condition. Nonetheless, they are united by a shared experience that leads them into action. They are collective bodies, congregated or not, that present themselves with force in the public space to say, “I exist,” “I am,” “recognize me.” With this research, I hope not only to contribute to the analysis of new ways of doing politics, but also that it will be useful for the trans movement. In this sense, the main objective of this research is to analyse the aesthetic-­political proposal of trans women through actions and creations, through the praxis and poiesis, in the search for positive recognition of diversity and full citizenship in the Peruvian context. And, in connection with this, to make visible what are the strategies of resistance, resilience, and agency of trans women to continue living their identity as subversive and transformative agents for the change of the sensibilities of a modern/colonial society. In order to address these issues, I conducted a five-month ethnographic study with a group of trans women in the city of Lima, Peru. In that period of time, I had in-depth conversations with them and attended workshops organized by trans women’s organizations. Following feminist and decolonial approach, the thematic fields of inquiry were open to new topics addressed by the interlocutors—i.e., I did not have the power to define the discursive field. And, in terms of the features of the group of trans women who participated in this research, we can observe that in economic terms, they are on the poverty line. In terms of society and opportunities, the vast majority have not finished school and therefore do not have university studies. In terms of citizenship recognition, some do not have the National Identity Document (DNI), and those that do have it are identified as males, assigned the sex with which they were born. And finally, in terms of employment, most of my interlocutors are or have been involved in prostitution. In methodological terms, the metaphor of the skins made by the architect and artist Hundertwasser inspired me to analyse the corporal practices of trans women in a cumulative way, paying special attention to the different stages of their lives, to those skins that embody and accompany them from childhood to adulthood. In this way, Hundertwasser’s metaphor of the five skins has served to organize the analytical chapters of the data that begin in Chap. 5. However, the book is divided into eight chapters: Chapter 2 is focused on the conceptual frameworks, theories, and key categories that have helped me to analyse and understand the political project of trans women in Lima, Peru. Being a complex and at the same

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time novel research topic, this chapter covers different horizons of analysis with the aim of developing the theoretical and analytical tools that serve to weave a narrative of my own, where the body and the different skins that make it up are located at the centre of political action for the change of sensibilities. For this, the chapter is divided into three sections in dialogue with and nurturing each other. The first is dedicated to the decline of the traditional way of doing politics, in order to understand that there are issues of emancipation that do not go through formal politics, and that its decline is what has allowed new forms of political action. The second section exposes decolonial thought and theory, and decolonial gender theory with the aim of understanding the trans phenomenon as a new political culture where aesthetics and the body are central. The second section presents decolonial thought and theory as well as decolonial gender theory, dedicating a significant portion to reviewing the main contributions of trans academics and theorists to the formulation and understanding of trans theory. Here, the contributions from an intersectional approach that aim to understand the trans phenomenon as a new political culture in which aesthetics and the body are central stand out, specifically those made by the Black Feminist movement and by trans and non-trans academics from the Global South. And finally, the third section delves into the notion of aesthetics and politics, in order to analyse the actions of trans women in their struggle for recognition. Chapter 3 describes the five months of ethnographic study that I conducted with trans women in the city of Lima, Peru, following feminist and decolonial guidelines. The chapter shows the methodological approach that guided the field work, detailing what tools have been used to access information while reflecting on the role of the researcher in the research process, as well as the place of enunciation and the bond that exists between research participants of this study. In this chapter, in turn, I delve into why I appeal to Hundertwasser’s five skins metaphor from a methodological point of view to organize the investigation. This chapter also dedicates an important section to discussing self-reflection and the theoretical concept of “mestiza consciousness” in the research process in order to put our privileges, the history that precedes us, our agendas and resources, as well as power relations in which we are immersed, on the conscious plane (Anzaldua, 1987). Anzaldua invites us to redefine our subjectivity, not only by being conscious of ourselves in a coherent way, but also by committing ourselves to subjective contradictions and to the various and multiple discourses that inhabit us related to gender axes,

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sexuality, class, ethnicity, body, personality, and spiritual beliefs (Anzaldua & Keating, 2009). In other words, the researcher must be aware of his or her own contradictions and conflicts, of internal psychological processes, and of how these are emotionally affected in the encounter with the participants and with the subject investigated. Therefore, as I am not part of the trans movement, I reflect on the multiple meeting points between the trans women who have been part of this research and myself, the researcher, as well as the inevitable marks that distance me from them, in order to expose their possible consequences in the production of knowledge. Here, field work and the relationships that occur within it suppose an ambivalent process of constant change. Chapter 4 is focused on the context and history that precedes the emergence of the trans movement in Peru. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the historical background of the colonial and early republican periods to account for the development of patriarchal ideologies that frame gender-sex perceptions and practices in Latin America, paying attention to the construction of a heteronormative and homophobic common sense, which still prevails in the region and which also structures coloniality/patriarchy. It then focuses on contemporary history, paying attention to the feminist movement from the 1960s to the present, and to the gay and lesbian movement since the 1970s. Although the LGTBIQ movement is inclusive of trans people, in the Peruvian case, the presence of trans people—in terms of leadership, composition, and political agenda—is still behind the other participants involved. This situation has prompted the emergence of trans people’s organizations within the continent and particularly in Peru. However, the relation with feminist and gay-lesbian movements is more complex. Indeed, during the 70s and 80s, the heteronormative bias of the feminist movement, and the homonormative bias of gay-lesbian movement, put at odds the political relation between this movements and trans people; however, this conflict allows us to reconstruct some aspects of trans people’s political struggles. I would like to add that to construct this historical narrative I have not only been guided by the development of the movements linked to considerations of sex/gender, but I have also paid attention to how certain aesthetic-­political practices marked important milestones and were escalating in the creation of common shared meanings in the last 30 years. This section ends with a presentation of the trans movement, which has been built from primary sources.

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The first and second skins are analysed in Chap. 5. The first skin is the epidermis and represents the first layer closest to the inner world of human beings. It is the skin as the border between the outside world and our interior that surrounds and covers our vital organs. The second skin, on the other hand, is our clothing, skin that covers, shapes, and protects the first skin. This second skin also functions as the first communicating bridge with society that expresses our identity, our desires, and those first identifications formed through the first skin. In this chapter, I expand upon my thesis of the body as an aesthetic territory. Indeed, I argue that trans women construct their identities through the sculpting of their bodies and the choreographing of their gestures, movements, and displacements. Building on this concept, I posit that the body is the raw material, which albeit overwritten with ascribed meanings, is used by artists to give shape to their individual bodies as well as their subjectivities and the way they relate to others. Thus, trans women are involved in a poetic endeavour insofar as they are creating an aesthetic work in the very process of building an identity and struggling for recognition. As such, the first section is dedicated to the configuration of the first and second skin, both skins directly linked to the stage of life that corresponds to the childhood of trans women. This refers to the memory of childhood, its first identifications, the first affinities for objects, roles, and colours, among others. It refers to the roles that imagination and playing have in recreating the world in which they live, and to how the process of configuring the desire to be and appear to be a woman occurs. The second section focuses on the dialogue between self-recognition and the recognition of the other that exists in trans women, one that is in constant conflict. It will be seen how these first self-identifications come into tension with the gaze of those in their closest environments, producing an initial fissure that, as will be seen in the following chapters, will accompany them well into their adult lives. In addition, I introduce the body as a territory where a trans woman sculpts her gender identity. In that aesthetic process, she struggles to be recognized as such in the public sphere, trying to dismantle hegemonic sensibilities and feelings concerning trans women. In this regard, the aesthetic and political endeavours could be said to possess confluent purposes, or even a singular purpose. And finally, in the third section, I revise the main critiques of Cartesian dualism and the existence and permanence of other forms of understanding about bodies from a decolonial horizon with the purpose of acknowledging that there is a tradition of thought that

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has excluded, obliterated, and constructed the body as a place of error or sin. The third and fourth skin are discussed in Chap. 6, in which the third skin corresponds to the house, and the fourth skin is made up of the closest social environment after family and home. This environment is made up of the social groups that shape community life, such as school and neighbourhood. In these places, the first socialization occurs outside the home, and it is temporarily conditioned by the age of the trans girls who attend school, their first friends, and their lives in the neighbourhood. Through the analyses of the third and fourth skins, in this chapter I will address how the experience of sexuality is interwoven with both desire for recognition and power relations. I understand sexuality as a corporeal, affective, and relational experience: three dimensions that are bound together because they are crossed by desire. Desire, then, is the transversal category. Throughout the life trajectories of the trans women with whom I have talked, the experience of sexuality appears at an early age and is the inverse face of the desire to recognize their femininity. In many cases, that desire opens the door to abuse of power and enters into a tense dialogue with the affirmation of her feminine identity. We will see how sexuality is a secret and yet fundamental chord in the construction of the identity of trans women. In other words, while the double play between sexuality and desire opens the door to symbolic violence and abuse, it also opens the door to the satisfaction of being recognized as a woman. This participation or experience of sexuality implies accepting power relations that can range from care, affection, provision, or protection to abuse and violence. The vast majority of the stories of trans women’s sexualities collected for this investigation are intimately related to a self-perceived notion of masculinity as heterosexual. This reveals the desire of trans women themselves and, in turn, a certain aesthetic, which perhaps reveals characteristics of Peruvian masculinity in particular, and is a reflection of a global masculine aesthetic. Finally, Chap. 7 focuses on the fifth skin, which corresponds to the world environment, to the global ecology. It is the last layer that surrounds all previous skins and, in a sense, precedes them. It is the oldest, most historical skin that will shape the place we occupy in the world as social subjects and, therefore, lays the foundations of previous skins. Throughout the analysis chapters, we have seen how the conditions of recognition of gender identity, the experience of sexuality, and the need for material reproduction-production intersect in the different skins. We

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have found these three axes that make up a system throughout this investigation in the presentation of the different skins that are embodied in the trans subject. In the previous chapters, we focused on micro and meso social aspects. However, a thorough understanding of being and the being itself for these women in the world requires addressing the fifth skin, which deals with the global order. In methodological terms, this skin corresponds to their adulthood. Throughout this research, we have observed that sexuality, on the one hand, becomes “exchange currency” for many purposes. Trans women exchange sex for something: sex for food, money, shelter, breasts, assets, affection, recognition. On the other hand, sexuality is a field for gender identity affirmation that often occurs in the midst of relationships that we can categorize as abusive. In childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, trans women appeal to their sexuality to affirm a gender identity that is not granted to them socially because they are considered deviant, a term that combines medical, moral, and political considerations. Likewise, it can be noted that sexuality becomes an activity that allows for the reproduction of these people. The data allow us to observe how capitalism, patriarchy, and coloniality articulate in the trajectories of the lives of trans women, showing that these lives that resist assimilation do not find amicable conditions for existence. However, through the analysis of the chapters, we observe that trans women are both vulnerable and capable of resistance. Moreover, prostitution is the space they find to reproduce their material life when they are adults, and at the same time, to be able to live their gender identity without restrictions. In summary, this book covers the skins of the lives of trans women, from their childhood to adulthood, where, in each one of them, the desire for recognition is positioned at the centre of political action. In this sense, what we will find in each of the chapters is the tension between this desire for recognition and the recognition of the other (family, friends, neighbours, and society in general), which generates adverse situations, and some of them perhaps perverse, in the lives of trans women that lead them to live a precarious life. However, simultaneously, we find resistance, resilience, and agency, which leads them to reproduce their material lives, to live in accordance with their gender identity, and to position themselves, by means of aesthetic micropolitical practices, as subversive and transforming agents for the change of sensibilities of a modern/colonial, heteropatriarchal, and a cold-hearted society towards diversity.

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From my first years in the school of anthropology, I began to feel a sort of discontentment towards the epistemes with which otherness was narrated, which became over time a critical position. I was haunted by the question of why we choose to investigate what we choose to investigate. In other words, I thought about what the research topic chosen says about the researcher. It is a notion that reflects the tortuous path that both our conscious and unconscious selves take, perhaps not clearly, but indeed directly. As time goes on, the researcher begins to chisel away at his or her questions and approach the topic. The subject matter begins to construct (or deconstruct) our own selves. With these questions in mind, I began to dive into my own memories and investigate what threads wove my own biography into the topics I am academically interested in; if such a separation exists. I wrote 20 pages of concatenated memories, following the framework of my own life from 1983 to 2016, when I decided to do a PhD. I described my first years, or what I remember of them, knowing that memory is not an accurate depiction of reality, but instead one that speaks of the emphasis a person puts into the text they refer to as life. It is the narrative one constructs from experience and occurrences. My first years, my provincial life, my first friends, moving to Lima, the internal conflict, school… I want to make a stop at two of these episodes, the first one being my move to Lima, which happens to have coincided with the internal armed conflict; the second one being my experience in school. The former. In 1983, I was “given to light” (in Peru, as well as many other Latin American countries, giving birth is referred to as being given to the light) in a country convulsing from the violence between the Peruvian state and two guerilla groups, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement). Growing up in that decade as well as the following one, two social processes accompanied me: the political violence discourse, and the severe economic crisis we were living in. Tautly spread across both was the presence of corruption along with an inoperative political system. The sentiments that resonated with my parents, as well as my parents’ parents, were those of fear and the inability to conceive that a future was possible. Going to the movies was dangerous, taking a taxi was dangerous, going to the park, and so on. My generation was one unable to enjoy public spaces, be it because of their alleged danger or their inexistence. Everything was destroyed. The gardens were depleted, resembling barren land. The trees were desiccated, the houses covered in soot. There were no colours. Lima had never been

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more grey. My generation grew up amid all of this, without a political project for change in sight, without a myth to save us. No one could have chosen wiser words than the Spanish poet who in 1920 referred to us by exclaiming: “Oh Peru, land of metal and melancholy!” (Federico Garcia Lorca, 2018). The latter. I attended an Opus Dei school, a bastion of ultra-­conservative Catholicism; a militia of morality and good habits.2 There, I learned to fake it. I also learned about the concepts of injustice, racism, and conservatism, where the conservative dimension was associated with the racial/ cultural dimension and the criteria of class and decency. I was taught a moral of discipline that denied the body, sexuality, and desire, or otherwise suppressed these by means of a mechanism that was as efficient as it was perverse: guilt. Everything that the body and desire imply fall into the category of so-called temptations. As such, if they are acted upon, they are automatically labelled as sins. After ten years of putting up with all of this in countless ways, something that has defined me and that I can only recently put into words, has been the ability to peel off those skins I had stoically resisted, but nevertheless continue to discover as a part of myself. In the wake of it, I am forced to recognize that this lightens and darkens the link between myself and the world. It is akin to recognizing that my childhood and adolescence, circumscribed by my experience in school, were governed by denial. Don’t go outside. “Don’t hang out with strange colored children,” as the Ruben Blades song says. Don’t have impure thoughts. Don’t show your body. Don’t have extramarital sex. Don’t masturbate. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. In 2013, another piece of my life story, I went to an exhibition by the Chaclacayo Group, a group of artists whose most prolific era was in the 1980s. However, due to its “offensive” content, their work was censored during that time. It was not until 2013 that one of the country’s most renowned museums commented on their body of work. The intersection of sexuality, dissident bodies, religion, racism, and political violence portrayed in their project stirred up something very intimate and visceral, if not repressed, in me, where the search for freedom appeared with a 2  Opus Dei was founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest Jose María Escriba de Balaguer. From the beginning, it was associated with the Spanish right parties and played an important role in the Franco’s dictatorship. The Opus Dei has been accused, from different sides, of spreading ultra-conservative beliefs, of using coercive methods with its members, of elitism, as well as of being interested in obtaining power and money.

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vengeance. It was a call to action of sorts, to the action of going on a deep internal trip of unfastening myself, without blueprints or guarantees. In a sense, what I saw in the Chaclacayo Group was a reflection. I remember one of the pieces vividly. It was the image of Saint Rose of Lima, the first saint in the Americas to be canonized by the catholic church, who little by little came undone until she transformed into a monster. I felt it inside of me: that monstrous, dark, deformed being. Therein lay the power of aesthetics to change sensibilities. The aesthetic project of the Chaclacayo Group, plagued with homosexuality, promiscuity, and desire, was a call to authenticity, to tell those dark, archaic rules to go to hell. It was a call to action where Rosa Luxemburg’s celebrated phrase, “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains,” resonated loud and clear. This is how my subjectivity, my story, and my phantoms intertwine with my research topic. As Castoriadis retakes Aristotle’s: “The soul never thinks without a phantasm.” (Aristotle’s De Anima in Castoriadis 1998: 152). My academic subject interests are high points where Eros and Thanatos coexist, dialogue, and also come in conflict with one other. There is no separation. Everything is interwoven. In this way, it was through time and over time, through what lived experiences did to my own skins, that I started raising feminist flags. In this process, the interest in the bodies, embodiments, and the search for authenticity and freedom began to take shape. As a result of this, my own aesthetic began to be forged, an aesthetic to be understood as an emancipatory sensitivity that is going to be expressed in my professional life and that finds one of its milestones in the trans movement. In May 31, 2018, I was in the UK about to finish the first year of my PhD in Sociology, and through social networks I learned that Anibal Quijano had died. That year of PhD studies my approach to his thinking had been narrow. Not only narrow. In my undergraduate studies in anthropology I had heard briefly about him. I encountered him a little more in my master’s studies, but it was only when I decided to apply to the PhD programme and to design my application that his thought and his calling had begun to sink in deeply: “It is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted. It is time, finally, to cease being what we are not” (2006: 246). That depth that, through incessant questions that like splinters appear in ordinary moments, only some authors have the gift to shudder and to formulate questions in oneself. Questions that no longer pretend to be objective, but on the contrary, perhaps visceral questions, of skin, of blood

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and soul. Questions that confront us, that make us look at ourselves again and again in the mirror and ask ourselves: who are we? Who am I? Where do I speak? What do I believe? What of my voice is mine? The indigenous movements use the term sentipensar (feelthink), which brings together aesthetics and logos, precisely. So, reading Quijano, despite being somewhat logo-centred, is also an aesthetic experience that made me think and feel at the same time. Since then, these questions go through every step I take, through my interpersonal relationships, my affective relationships, my dreams, my supposedly logical conjectures, my already established desires. New and alternative desires are being created at the same time as the old ones resonate. New possibilities are appearing—many of them incongruous. I was born and raised in a deeply fragmented country. I am fragmented as is the body of the indigenous leader Túpac Amaru in the imagination of all Peruvians (in Quechua túpac amaru means “resplendent serpent”). That body beheaded, severed, and decapitated for revolting against colonial power in the eighteenth century. This historical fact pays tribute to an Andean colonial myth, based in turn on the Judeo-Christian messianism that announces the return of the Inca. According to the Andean Inkarri myth, when the parts of your body come together, the order of the world will change (Flores Galindo, 2005). Although the Inkarri metaphor refers to the reconstitution of a totality, I want to rescue fragmentation as a synonym for diversity. And, then, I want to see it and name it not as a burden, but as a possibility, where the fragments are democratically organized and not hierarchical. For me, in this time-space, I want to speak from there, from absolute fragmentation and my work as an intellectual and a woman from the South is to give an account of that. Quijano’s call for freedom echoes like the incessant sound of a clock. What does it mean to stop being what we are not? How do we fill this statement with content? What does it mean to do intellectual work with this call in mind? What are the implications of Social Sciences in and from the South? I do not know how to answer these questions. Yet—and there is beauty in that—the road is not carved. This concern is isomorphic to the questions of feminist thought, in particular those thinking about difference and the creation of new metaphors. In that sense, I subscribe to the synthesis made by feminists like María Lugones, where coloniality and patriarchy are treated together. And the need, to put it in terms of the Bolivian feminist Maria Galindo, “there is no decolonization without depatriarchalization” (2013).

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The colonial/patriarchal condition to be grounded requires external coercion (the dominator, the boss, the slaveholder) to become an internal coercion. In such a way that it becomes a habitus which always ends up anchored in the body as well as sensoriality and feeling. That is to say, domination finally has a strong consequence in the sphere of affects. In other words, decoloniality and depatriarchy not only require knowledge (to “raise awareness”) but also to work the affective and somatic world. All this means that coloniality/patriarchy are based on an aesthetic. Understanding this term in its etymological origin: “aisthitikos is the Greek Word for that which is ‘perceptive by feeling’. Aisthisis is the sensory experience of perception. This original field of aesthetics is not art but reality—corporeal, material nature” (Buck-Morss, 1992: 4). Here we can also paraphrase Walter Benjamin when he says the logical result of fascism {coloniality} is the introduction of aesthetics into political life (Benjamin in Buck-Morss, 1992: 3) and further aesthetics needs to be transformed, indeed, redeemed {..., it would describe the field in which the antidote to fascism {coloniality} is deployed as a political response (Benjamin in Buck-­ Morss, 1992: 4). What this research highlight is how the coloniality of a way of being, feeling and being in the world, that is, of an aesthetic, is being countered from another aesthetic in political terms. The control of gender-sex referred to by Quijano and developed by Lugones and Anzaldúa, among others, also requires the construction of an habitus and a system of affections, a world of sensitivities that from the side of modern-colonial domination has involved exaltation and the “desire to be” heteronormative and heterosexual, as the only possibility of being in the world. There is a feeling about people that moves away from this norm, and the society will try to discipline these bodies through either the punishment for improper conduct or through therapies once this condition is pathologized. In particular, and this is the subject that interests me here to highlight, transphobia is a habitus anchored in feelings. That is to say, in an aesthetic, and again to stop being what one is not (Quijano 2000), it is necessary to work that universe of feelings and affections to achieve emancipation (see also Benjamin, 1973). Despite my identity as a cis, educated woman from the upper-middle class, factors that, together with the colour of my skin, generate a reading of my identity as white (factors that mark a breadth of inequality when it comes to how the self and life itself are experienced in this world, and particularly in Peru), when it comes to my story and the stories of each one of the trans women who collaborated with this research, I find that

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there are breaking points, there is rebellion, and there is disobedience. There is condemnation and resignation. As such, a profound otherness towards trans women and their struggle has emerged. This investigation likewise deals with thanking the trans collective action for its great contribution to the renewal of politics in Peru and with saying that I do not represent the trans community. Rather, I am studying politics, and I thank trans people, because their political action gives me the option to show something hopeful for the country. I discuss this topic in more detail in the ethics section of Chap. 3. Finally, “Skins of Desire,” the title of this research has been inspired by the metaphor of the skins of the architect and artist Hundertwasser. This metaphor has served to methodologically order the work. The importance that I find in using it as a place for reflection lies in a critique of how knowledge and, therefore, recognition have been conceived. Recognition, in contractual terms, is sustained by an episteme that is based on the visual as a way of knowing the other. The first scene in the identity of a human being is to see if he or she has a vagina or a penis. It is from that visual act of recognizing a being that all the parenting actions and socialization mechanisms for one or the other are triggered. The visual act, finally, pretends to be objective. However, in the history of humanity, there is another way of knowing that it is linked to non-normative physical performance, through touch. That is, instead of an optical recognition, it is a haptic recognition. Through skin-to-skin contact, recognition is not of an object that is alterity, but rather to the extent that it is tactile, the distinction between object and subject is blurred, where parents recognize their child and recognize themselves as parents in the same act. That is another one of the dimensions of the aisthesis to which this research points, which is a recognition of all skins and with the whole body. As such, we find the skins of desire.

Bibliography Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, G., & Keating, A. (2009). The Gloria Anzaldúa reader. Duke University Press. Aristóteles. (1998). De anima III, 7, cit. In C. Castoriadis (Ed.), Los dominios del hombre (p. 152). Gedisa. Benjamin, W. (1973). “La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica”. En Benjamin, Walter: Discursos interrumpidos I.  Reimpresión (Vol. 1982, pp. 15–57). Taurus.

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Buck-Morss, S. (1992). Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered. October Vol.62. The MIT Press. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge. Flores Galindo, A. (2005). Buscando a un inca. Identidad y utopía en los Andes. PUCP. 1987. Galindo, M. (2013). No se puede descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar: teoría y propuesta de la despatriarcalización. Mujeres Creando. La Paz. Garcia Lorca, F. (2018). Sonetos del amor oscuro y otros sonetos. Editorial MAGO. 86 p; 23 cm. Maffesoli, M. (1990). Tiempo de las tribus. Icaria. Pleyers, G. (2018). Movimientos sociales en el siglo XXI: perspectivas y herramientas analíticas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Ainkaa. Revista De Estudiantes De Ciencia Política, 3(6), 83–92. Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 2

Trans-Aesthetics and the Struggle for Recognition Politics Seen from a Decolonial Perspective

The aim of this chapter is to present the key concepts and theoretical perspectives that make up the vital pieces needed to understand the aesthetic-­ political practice of the trans women who have participated in this research in Peru. Being a complex research topic that crosses different horizons of analysis, such as aesthetics, politics, sex/gender, and decoloniality, this chapter represents an attempt to build adequate theoretical and analytical tools that serve as a basis for a more comprehensive understanding that positions the body and the different skins it covers in the centre of political action in order to change sensibilities. In the first part, I will analyse the decline of modern politics in relation to the political context of Peru using the two main critiques of modernity as a resource: postmodernity and decolonial theory. In the same vein, I will draw links between the two to address my research topic in a broader context. The aim of this part is to examine the meltdown of the traditional way of doing politics and how the involvement of subaltern, non-­ hegemonic subjects has contributed to Peru’s history and is shaping the subjective and relational life of Peruvians in embodied terms. This gives rise to the understanding that there are emancipation issues that do not go through formal politics and that the decline of modern politics is what has ultimately enabled new ways of doing politics. This is relevant for my

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Patiño Rabines, The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42816-6_2

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research topic because I understand the trans movement as a case study of a new approach to politics, specifically through corporeal actions. The purpose of the second section is to address the trans movement through a decolonial theoretical framework in order to understand the transgender phenomena as a new political culture where aesthesis and body actions are central. This section, initially, delves into decolonial theory, paying attention to the contribution made by decolonial feminists, such as Maria Lugones, who adds the notion of coloniality of gender. Within this framework, this section continues with a brief account of the emergence of the trans movement on a global scale, bringing it into dialogue with more local interpretations of the movement. The aim of the third part is to frame my research topic around Jacques Rancière’s categories of aesthetics and politics, linking both concepts with the presence of trans people in Peru. Specifically, I will outline the main theoretical frameworks in the category of aesthetics and how this is central to the understanding of various actions trans women take in their attempts to gain recognition. This is important because my main question deals with the changes that have taken place in the political culture of a postcolonial society. In this regard, this chapter establishes the theoretical and interpretative frameworks necessary for an understanding of the progressive aestheticization of politics through a case study on the life of trans women in Lima, Peru.

The Decline of Modern Politics The extraordinary elections to the Peruvian congress in January 2020 exposed the deep political fragmentation that exists in the country. There were ten political groups that have distributed parliamentary representation. The biggest surprise was that after 38 years, there was a return of the Popular Agricultural Front (Frente Popular Agrícola, FREPAP), the second most voted sui generis party with religious and theocratic inspirations that combines Abrahamic myths with Andean messianic myths. As illustrated by the Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo in his book In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes (1986), where he maintains that Andean utopias are responses to colonial domination and to the social fragmentation that Andean societies faced since the Spanish conquest. Another of the sui generis parties from a more militarized, hierarchical, and explicitly macho position is the Union for Peru (UPP),

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which, in addition to going in the same direction as the messianism expressed in Flores Galindo’s book, also represents the narcissistic wound seen among the male urban population militarized by the defeat in the Pacific War against Chile in the nineteenth century (Mc Evoy, 2016; Portocarrero, 2015).1 In the middle, we find parties that in previous governments had been in charge of covering the interests from drug trafficking to the private use of state assets (Fujimorismo, Acción Popular, among others). Even pragmatic parties who hide in Peruvian politics because they address problems that the population considers urgent, such as the case with citizen security, again form a militarized perspective (Podemos). This, which we call political parties, strictly speaking, represents, on the one hand, the failure of the principle of an ideal representation of modernity and, on the other, expresses diversity that does not find a way to build full citizenship together with positive recognition of diversity. However, at the same time, there are silenced voices in the country that begin to express themselves with speeches that reflect visions of the country that have no common basis. And, in turn, it shows that Peruvian politics and the politics of much of Latin America cannot be understood with clear and different concepts. This fragmentation indicates how Peru—and much of Latin America— has not resolved the issue of living in community. In other words, it highlights the lack of a shared common sense, where we are naming not only common understandings about the present and the future but also the few sensibilities shared by a community. We observe this in a deeply divided society where the problem is not fragmentation per se, but instead the relationship between the parts and the hierarchical ordering of the fragments. In other words, there is a communication gap that impedes the development of a sense of community. Furthermore, the absence of a relationship is nourished and justified in the public consciousness through the different positions that these fragments occupy. In fact, they are not horizontal nor on the same plane, but rather they occupy different strata that carry ethical, moral, and racial implications, to name a few. The analysis of the social body of the traditional Peruvian parties—which were never modern—can be understood as a symptom of what has been the construction of modern politics in Peru. 1  This party led by Antauro Humala, leader of the ethnocacerist movement, vindicates the “copper race” and nationalism and takes Andrés Avelino Cáceres, who led the resistance against the Chilean invasion, as its symbol and hero.

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In Peruvian historiography, the 1980s are known as the decade of “Internal Armed Conflict.” The Truth and Reconciliation Committee (CVR) estimates that the toll during these two decades of war amounted to 70,000 people either dead or missing. This conflict has characteristics similar to genocide: 70% of those perished were Quechua people. The end of the armed conflict in 2000 is closely linked to the fall of dictator Alberto Fujimori and his government (CVR, 2003). The key players in this war were the Maoist group, Shining Path, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas, and the Peruvian government. As I detail in Chap. 4, it was not only an ethnocidal project but also one ridden with sexual violence and hate crimes against homosexuals and, especially, trans women (CVR, 2003). In terms of Peru’s social history, the end of the internal conflict meant the mutual destruction of two “colonial/modern” projects. On the one hand, it implied, on a rational level, the end of the leftist revolution and with it the demise of the Marxist metadiscourse. On the other, it implied the end of the nation-state ideal, which intended to “solve” the country’s lack of homogeneity in terms of racial, ethnic, and culture terms—a situation deemed a burden by Peruvian intellectuals of the nineteenth century.2 The crisis that we witnessed in the Peruvian process, which peaked during the 1980s, was a crisis of the nation-state model as it has been imported from Europe. According to Max Weber, a theorist of the European state model, law is rational when it is unique and part of a coherent whole. Therefore, the state has to maintain an unbending unity to guarantee order through legitimized violence. In legal terms, the notion of the modern state excludes the idea of legal pluralism, for instance. According to Armando Guevara, a prominent Peruvian lawyer: as copies of the idealized European models […], the Latin American Nation-­ States ought to carry out an ‘impossible mission’: to create national, integrated, and homogenous societies drawing on pluricultural, multiethnic, and highly differentiated human landscapes. […] To that end, the new Nation-States embarked on ethnocidal, and sometimes blatantly genocidal, 2  Nation-building is a theme that has been present throughout Peru’s history, given its colonial origins and its inability to integrate its diverse population. Various intellectuals and scholars have written about the nation’s ideal and that which unifies diversity. It’s important to note that the end of modern paradigms is contemporary but does not depend on the rise of postmodern proposals in global sense-producing centres. For more information on this subject, please refer to Portocarrero (2015).

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projects aimed to modernize, assimilate, and incorporate their bodies to the body of the criollo nation. (2009: 29 my translation)

Many scholars attribute the beginning of modernity to different historical moments. The most direct precedent may be the Wars of Religion era during the Renaissance, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment (Aufklärung) was one of the phenomena that characterizes modernity. It was a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the eighteenth century. The main figures of the Enlightenment might argue that human reason can fight ignorance, tyranny, superstition, and the beliefs of faith implanted by the Church. From an intra-modernity standpoint, modernity was born in response to the philosophy that all could be explained through religion, myths, or tradition. In order to explain reality, everything had to be verifiable by reason and measured by science. Max Weber in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for instance, claims that the spirit of capitalism was born under a religious form that considered success a mark of divine selection by God. However, it then gradually split off from that religious motivation and underwent a steady process of secularization. Weber defines the spirit of capitalism as the habits and ideas that work in favour of a rational behaviour to achieve economic success. This success is achieved through a maximization of performance and a minimization of all unnecessary spending. For Weber, the protestant ethic is the motor that generates the modern subject of capitalism. Nonetheless, the entire narrative for the modern European process, which encompasses the great massification of education, the increasing level of population consumption, the great urbanization process, and so on, made invisible its hegemonic role of the centre of production of these effects. Breny Mendoza in her article “Can the subaltern save us?” (2018) highlights the main academic theories focused on the criticism of modernity (postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, decolonial theory, and the ontological turn in anthropology). The backbone of her thesis is that in the face of the crisis of modernity and the multiple negative effects that the development of the West has had governed by instrumental rationality, various modern scholars return to non-modern or indigenous ontologies to imagine another future possible for themselves (decolonial theory and the ontological turn in anthropology). Other times, these ontologies are part of the main theoretical body but tacitly as if it were a

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new development of thought (posthumanism). And, in others, as is the case of postmodernism, to act as redeemers of the subordinates because, as Mendoza maintains, “they intuit in these a revelation so powerful that it would avoid the definitive destruction of the world, or at least exempt the moderns from the sins of their ancestors” (2018: 110). The author takes up the heart of the old anguish of postcolonial theorists synthesized in “Can the subaltern speak?” by Spivak (1988) but paraphrases it in light of our times where instead of rescuing the subaltern, it seems that it is the subaltern who rescue themselves. For the purposes of this research, I will expand on two of the main critiques. One of them is what we globally refer to as postmodernism (sometimes known as poststructuralism), which, among other things, criticized the construction of great metadiscourses to give an account of everything. In other words, it questioned the broad, unifying theory (Mendoza, 2018). Before modernity, as Weber claims, all was explained by means of religious terms organized in “rational” discourses such as theology.3 Modernity transformed this into universal human and basically Cartesian reason, which posits the cogito that separates from the body and then separates from society to determine itself. The modern narrative has created a fantasy that is, on the one hand, the inception of the “I alone,” and, on the other, the inception of “the nation alone,” both as internal processes. Thus, senses for the entire world are created, and a Eurocentric mirror for the Third World is built (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2000, 2003, 2007; Dussell, 2000). Postmodern thought focuses mainly on the implausibility of these meta-narratives that become part of the construction of biopower (Foucault, 1978).4 The other main criticism is centred on the domination of nature, which is fundamental to modernity (Escobar, 2000; Federicci, 2004). Since 3  As a matter of fact, this theocratic world vision organized the colonial perception of the “new world” and founded the hierarchical construction among people announcing the racialization of the people and the creation of a global political system. 4  In this sense, the work of Zygmunt Bauman represents a critique of the limits of the construction process of modernity, a process that has made evident its contradictory nature, when deciphered from its self-referential rationality. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Bauman argues that the holocaust was not an isolated or particular event, but rather was a symptom and problem of the characteristics of the rational society of modernity. Thus, Bauman argues that without modern civilization and its essential and fundamental achievements, the Holocaust would not have been possible, locating this historical fact in the most essential roots of modernity, in the Enlightenment project and in the very structure of Western society, rational and bureaucratic.

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2000, the term “Anthropocene” or “Age of Humans” has become popular within the scientific community to refer to a new geological era in which the impact of human activity has modified terrestrial ecosystems. It is argued that the most direct consequence of human activity on the environment is anthropogenic global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, desertification, acidification of the oceans, and chemical weapons, among others. Therefore, in light of all that we know about climate change, European modernity crumbles. From that point on (and with the multitude of evidence on Western cultural practices gestated in modernity), many people started to pay attention to the way the postmodern (or at least, no longer modern) European subject relates to the environment. The same has also occurred in the fields of gender and race, among others. As we shall see once I introduce the category of decoloniality, it will be possible to read Western processes as “inner decolonial ones.” One of the first decolonial examples may be the Feminist movement and its struggle against the logo-­ centred power since the eighteenth century. Currently, eclecticism as a main feature of what is referred to as the “New Age” effect could be seen as a decolonial process as well. New Age is an expression used to describe a wide range of spiritual beliefs as well as practices, particularly older esoteric traditions and those that developed from the occult in the eighteenth century. This “movement,” as many scholars call it, developed in Western nations during the 1970s. Postmodernity, among other things, could be read as a process that discovers that there are more narratives inside Europe, and beyond Europe, in all the world, including conflicting narratives. For some groups, it seems to be a step towards liberation, usually for minorities or subaltern groups: women, LGBTIQ, persons with disabilities, and migrants, among others. These groups need a different narrative, one outside of modernity, because modernity has always excluded them. That is to say, those groups come out of this fantasy of universality, oneness, and canon. They celebrate this as a great internal discovery. Postcolonial studies, from where European modernity is criticized, have an important influence of European poststructuralism, where authors such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan are found, whose theoretical statements will be used by the intellectuals of the former British colonies in Asia and Africa (Castro-Gómez & Grosfoguel, 2007). The contributions of poststructuralism to the development of postcolonial theory lie in the

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fact that poststructuralist thinkers question the essentialist character of Western thought and its imposition on other cultures.5 Chakrabarty, one of the most prominent theorists of postcolonial studies, claims that modernity operates from a historicist matrix that follows the statement: “First in Europe, then in other places” (2000: 34). The problem with this lineal and “evolutionist” vision is that “other places” will always produce a fake copy of the European process. Therefore, Europe will always be the future, and others will be seen as the past of Europe. Europe became the universal telos. It is through modernity that western history was created as the world’s history. For instance, in Peruvian schools, we have two different history courses: Universal History (Western history) and Peruvian History. The historical process that we called modernity establishes, among other things, the imposition of European particularisms as fake universalisms. That is to say, it is within this process that we could trace the history of the eurocentrist point of view. It was the beginning of the universal Eurocentrism as a new epistemology, implying a set of beliefs about what we can know and how it can be known (Wallerstein, 2011; Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2000, 2003, 2007). It denotes a universal truth and one way of knowing the world. In some ways, modernity is located in a specific temporality and definite space: Europe. However, through a technique of dissemination, the idea of Modernity can be understood not only as having been produced in Europe, but essentially, also as a European product spread all over the world. In addition, it has established European values as universal. Thus, as Wallerstein (2011) points out, modernity was not merely a moral good but a historical necessity as well. Some authors identify the beginning of 5  For example, Derrida with the “deconstruction” of language, and Foucault, for being one of the first authors to raise the close relationship between knowledge and power (Gigena, 2011). However, there is current debate about the influence of postcolonial thinking and anti-colonial struggle and resistance, which are the direct predecessors of decolonial theory, among various poststructuralist authors. For example, in his book White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Robert Young contends that the historical vision of Marxist theorists before being a universal vision only takes into account history from the West, from a Eurocentric point of view. In turn, he argues that poststructuralism involved an anti-colonial critique of Western philosophy, pointing out the role played by the experience of the Algerian War of Independence in the lives of many of these authors, including Derrida, Lyotard, Althusser, and Bourdieu. Along the same lines, there is the work of Kathryn Medien (2019), where she argues that Foucault’s work, linked to the development of the theory of power, was deeply motivated by his encounter with neocolonial operatives of power that he witnessed during her stay in Tunisia.

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modernity with the Cartesian cogito (I think, therefore I am) which, among other things, split culture from nature. Modern people, thus, do not confuse reality (nature) with the representation of reality (culture). As such, it follows that only moderns can give an account of what reality is. In the Latin American case, the decolonial project is also a criticism of Western modernity. Quijano’s classic article, “Coloniality of Power” (2000), is a critique of Cartesianism and, at the same time, a celebration of the idea of freedom. Therefore, when Quijano criticizes modernity, he is saying that it is not an internal autonomous process of a Protestant label, as Weber among other authors claims, but that it is the counterpart of coloniality. That is to say, there is no modernity without coloniality. Hence, the relationship between modernity and coloniality is one of co-­ constitution: one cannot exist without the other. From a decolonial point of view, modernity does not arise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the processes mentioned above (such as the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the French Revolution), but it must instead be thought to have its origins much further back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in relation to the establishment of the modern world system. From this perspective, the criticism of Eurocentrism recognizes that all knowledge is always historically, bodily, and geopolitically located. Decolonial thought fundamentally questions the Eurocentric fantasy of knowledge without a subject, without history, without power relations— knowledge from nowhere that is profoundly decorporealized and delocalized. We cannot confuse colonialism with coloniality. Colonialism refers to a historical process of political and administrative domination through a set of institutions. Coloniality, on the other hand, refers to a deeper pattern of global power. Therefore, when the colonization process concluded, coloniality remains in force as a scheme of thought and a framework for action that legitimizes the differences between societies, subjects, and knowledge (Quijano, 2000). In other words, colonialism has been one of the historical facts that was both an important piece and a base of coloniality. Nonetheless, coloniality is not restricted to colonialism but contains many other experiences and articulations that operate even in the present. Coloniality in the Contemporary Peruvian Context What do postmodern and decolonial critics imply? On the one hand, they imply that diversity has always existed, but in conditions of power. This

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diversity sometimes is categorized as invisible or in a lower class or as abnormality or even as perversity. In other words, modernity, in its construction of great theories and narratives, also ends up obliterating, exoticizing, or making other ways of being and thinking as abject. For instance, there is a criticism within the discipline of anthropology related to the recognition of other narratives but not as “fully valid” narratives. That is, narratives that are not scientific or objective. In the anthropological point of view, they are appreciated for other reasons. Therefore, a debate arises within the discipline: what is anthropological knowledge? What is the status of ways of seeing the world based on allegories, myths, metaphors, movement, and kinaesthesia, among others? I mean to say that the way of knowledge does not pass through words but passes through the body. And, on the other hand, decolonial critics posit that the great narrative never took and colonized everything. In the Latin American case, Christianity, for instance, never completely took hold. We have parallel systems of beliefs.6 Some are juxtaposed, while others are hidden. In some cases, they are perhaps syncretized. However, the condition of multiplicities of discourse among us has been a mark of the colonial internal hierarchy in America. In that sense, my main theoretical contribution is not only to an enhanced understanding of trans issues in the context of Lima, Peru, but also to the new ways of doing politics, which are nevertheless very old. I analyse how in the Peruvian case study, the modern way of doing politics has collapsed. In particular, the collapse of modern politics in Peru can be seen in the debacle of the Marxism praxis (Marxist-Leninist, Marxist-­ Maoist parties) and its one-dimensional reading of structure and classes, which never takes into account gender issues and much less issues of sexuality, culture, race, and environment.7 6  One of the hidden decolonial practices that we can mention, for instance, which is not yet visible, has to do with the performative and artistic expressions of the peoples of Peru and their peregrinations and carnivals. In all those spaces, to use the ideas of Bakhtin, they are similar to more liminal situations. One can consider the pilgrimage in the Andes as a carnival because it is transgressing a status quo: you pray with the body, for example, something that is not part of the orthodox Christian liturgy. 7  In addition, we find that Marxist discourse privileges masculinity through the image of the revolutionary who knows everything. Abimael Guzmán, the head of the Shining Path guerrilla, would be one of the epitomes of this. But there are other variants of this depiction of masculine leaders, such as the leftist leader, Javier Diez Canseco, Frijolito, or Gustavo Gutierrez.

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The aim of this section, therefore, is to elucidate how politics is understood and how it is being practised in a country of a southern context like Peru. It is a specific context where discursive politics based on logos and focused on building a rational ethic (algorithms, principles) is replaced by non-discursive practices that appeal to other languages. In particular, these practices appeal to the body, but mainly they are non-discursive practices. In that vein, Rancière maintains, as we will see in section “Trans-aesthetics and the struggle for politics of recognition” of this chapter, that politics arises when the logic of the domination finds itself challenged by a different logic. Moreover, this kind of politics does not appeal to a logocentric ethic but to an aesthetic ethic (see section “Trans-aesthetics and the struggle for politics of recognition”) as Maffesolli would say, an aesthetics that is primordial to the constitution of action. This aesthetic refers in effect to works of art, to the artistic and the performative, but above all, it refers to sensitivity, to the aisthesis, to the etymological origin of the aesthetic word. What is being worked on from the politics and performance of this action is not cognitive. It is not the development of a new theory or logos; it is a practice of sensibility. And this process occurs through different paths and channels. Colonialism, as a totalitarian project that revolved around evangelization, trying to homogenize the spirits with the belief in a single God, appealed to the arts on a massive scale.8 One of the clear expressions of the use of aesthetics to seek hegemony was the creation of places, such as the design of towns, church buildings, and government centres. The most paradigmatic case is the Hispanic architecture that is mounted on Inca architecture.9 Along with that art that has to do with place, with reconstructing or resignifying place, because we are talking about places that already existed, there is all the plastic art, both pictorial and sculptural, 8  Many of the nation-building processes in Europe went through aesthetic processes. In the book Nation and Classical Music: From Händel to Copland of Riley, M. and Smith, A.  D. (2018), we can find many examples of these configurations, such as in the case of Chopin’s music, which was taken as the Polish nationalist music and Wagner’s for the German case. These are music that are trying to speak about the spirit of a people and to singularize it. It is about liberal thought that is creating political communities based on the construction of common senses based on the nation-state. We also find the use of aesthetics in fascism, with Hitler; and all the Bolshevik aesthetics, in the case of the Soviet Union. 9  In general, the churches of colonial baroque art have been built on sacred places. There is also the introduction of a new music that will reach its maximum expression in the Jesuit missions with choral singing. Not to mention food, which has to do with introducing a new taste.

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focused on transmitting the whole ideology of Christianity. It was through this that the sensibilities—the aisthesis—of the colonized were worked. In other words, the aesthetics per se is not that it is pure, beautiful, or better. What I would like to emphasize is that there has been a resistance to that aesthetics from another aesthetics, where the aestheticization of politics can also be of resistance or emancipatory struggle. Likewise, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries what the Peruvian elites were doing was the construction of the nation through the construction of a modern/colonial, logocentric politics, and in this process, the political aesthetic went to the background or, rather, was subordinated to the metadiscourse of the creation of the nation. I call this process decolonial because they are historical practices that were made invisible for five centuries and now are beginning to emerge in the world of the twenty-first century when we are witnessing a complex process of reconfiguration of the so-called world order. Another case of the aesthetics of resistance in the Peruvian case, where we can see this political process through, is Chicha music. Chicha music is well known because of the relationship it represents between Andean migrants and the capital city, Lima. Since 1960, this genre has combined Colombian Cumbia, traditional highland Huayno, and rock music, especially surf rock. When this genre emerged, it was rejected by the middle and high classes in the capital, because they considered it the music of cholos. The word cholo appeared in Lima as a new category to describe Andean migrant people, called serranos when they were from the Highlands, and cholos when they were people from the Andes who moved to Lima. It is used with discriminatory and racist connotations (in some contexts, Peruvian people use it affectionately for family members and friends). However, over time, Chicha began to enter and penetrate spaces which were previously prohibited. Nowadays, in many of the bars and pubs located in middle and high-class neighbourhoods, people listen to, dance to, and enjoy the music of bands that use sounds inspired by Huayno and Chicha music. Probably, when asked if they like traditional Huayno music, these people would say no. Nonetheless, traditional Cumbia, Afro, Huayno, and some Chicha songs have been remade by many Lima bands, and the people of the capital enjoy it as if it were a new genre. That is an example of how the body incorporates a sonority and a kinaesthesia from a proposal that has been given in the city without realizing it. Therefore, a sound and a kinaesthesia that transform sensitivities rather than transform cognition have been emerging in public spaces. That performative fact,

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that public fact, is seeking recognition and that is why it is a political-­ aesthetic fact. Returning to my case study, why am I choosing the trans movement to explain this process? The trans movement is entering the public arena with force, and there are specific actors who are doing politics on trans issues. A trans way of doing politics oversteps cognitive perception. For instance, sometimes when we see a trans woman in a public space, we face an action which apparently does not transmit any political messages but nevertheless transforms the place. By transforming the space of public coexistence, I mean that this action re-educates sensibilities, habitus, and the preconceived expectations with which people judge, decide, and make decisions. It is a transgressive action that seeks recognition: this is the way I am, so I want you to accept me. Actually, the aesthetic-political practice, although it has not been widely developed as a field of study within political theory, is older than commonly thought. It has only not been seen precisely because of the epistemological racism of not seeing, of invisibilizing, of exoticizing and obliterating the practices of others as a practice that occurs throughout the whole of the colony. In colonial times, Spaniards used art for its colonizing process: churches, paintings, music, and theatre. They used these more visual art forms, among others, because they could not appeal to the colonized through writing, at least not significantly at the beginning. Therefore, they trained artists, painters, and sculptors to repeat the images of European prints and art in general. In art, the first examples of resistance can be seen, specifically in the triangular form artists gave to the Virgin and how apus, divinities, and sacred beings were hidden in works of art. Also, we find resistance in the local interpretation of Christian myths and in how Christian myths were transformed. For instance, a study by Thomas Muller (1980) in the Q’eros community shows that biblical dates and data are very different from the Christian genesis. Thus, we find a juxtaposition of symbols where there is a part that is resisting and hiding itself, and ultimately trying not to die behind the images validated by the elite. These processes of resistance that we find during Colonial times continue into the era of the Republic.10 Therefore, through dance, pilgrimage, and 10  On a Latin American scale, we find the struggle of Afro people to preserve their dances and music as an identifying factor. In Brazil (samba, capoeira), Cuba (salsa), and some parts of the United States (jazz) we find the use of artistic traditions as forms of expression, occupation of space, and a search for recognition.

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performance as spaces of self-affirmation, they maintain rituals and are at the same time resignifying spaces. As mentioned above, this way of doing politics that seems new is in fact very old from other points of view. There are people who have dedicated themselves to sustaining and maintaining a system of beliefs and, therefore, sensitivities, secretly, in order to communicate this system in some way. Hence, my research topic is a recognition of obliterated alternative ways of doing politics that have always been present. A good friend of mine told me this story. It is the story of a peasant leader from Puno, a city located in southern Peru. This leader was politically active in left-wing parties and worked for different NGOs to train himself as head of the Peasant Federation of Puno (Federación Campesina de Puno). In time, he became a leader and split with the left-wing parties. After that, he ran for office as an independent and became the first Runa mayor of the district of Santa Rosa in the province of Melgar, Puno. During that time, my friend met him. It was 1998, and he had recently been elected mayor. He was very proud because he was the first Runa mayor of his town. The mistis, private landholders, had always won. When my friend asked him about the failure of the left, he responded by saying, “What happened with the left is that we passed from the master lord of the land, the gamonales, to a political master lord.” He referred to the figure of Javier Diez Canseco, a leftist leader, and the primacy of Lima, the capital, telling them what to do. Lima politicians did not take certain mores that are important to indigenous people, such as the traditional reading of coca leaves to know whether it is a good day for an invasion or to take any political action, into account. Indigenous people would make decisions based on these mores, but Lima decided based on anything else. There was also a contradiction in calendars and times, moments, and opportunities. It is particularly interesting how, deep down, Lima politicians still behave as bosses. Then, my friend asked him what the greatest success of the Fujimori government was, and he responded, “Their greatest success was destroying the party system.” “And the worst mistake?” he asked. “To have become the same,” he answered.11

11  This story was part of an investigation carried out by Ruiz Bravo, Velasquez, Cárdenas, and Neira in 1998 as part of the unpublished report, “Representations and practices of gender” (1998), prepared for Reprosalud.

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Gender Issues Seen from a Decolonial Perspective The history of decolonial thought has important influences that could be separated from a diachronic standpoint as well as a synchronic one. In the first, the diachronic would be the anti-colonial thinkers of Martinique, a French colony since the seventeenth century: Aimé Césaire, a poet and politician; and Frantz Fanon, with training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Both thinkers are associated with the Negritude movement, a literary movement of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that began among French-­ speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris and writers living in Martinique, including Suzanne Cesaire, Aimé’s wife; as a protest against French colonial rule and the policy of assimilation, whose main thesis is the claim of identity. And in Latin America, we find dependency theory, liberation theology, liberation philosophy, liberation ecology, and education for freedom, which all share the concern for liberation. With questions like the one Augusto Salazar Bondy (1925–1974) asks himself in his text, “Is there a philosophy in our America?” (2004), the philosopher maintains that Latin American philosophical thought lacks originality as it is only an echo of European thinkers. These are Quijano’s forerunners and thinkers. In synchronic terms, we find a similar sensibility at the time in the production of postcolonial authors, from Spivak, Bhabha, and Appadurai to Chakravarty, who speak from the colonial troubles of India. Likewise, there is the Chicano movement, with Gloria Anzaldúa, who highlights that the mark coloniality leaves on subjectivity is translatable into the imprint of patriarchy. And there is also the African perspective of Achille Mbembe, who writes a collection of texts entitled “On the Postcolony” (2001), where he criticizes the negative interpretation of Africa and how it is constructed as a metaphor for the West. All of these authors and currents of thought are direct influences on Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist who is credited with the development of Latin American decolonial thought. Anibal Quijano was the first scholar who introduced the theory of coloniality and the concept “coloniality of power/coloniality of knowledge” (2000). His book La Americanidad como concepto, o América en el moderno sistema mundial/ Americanism as a Concept, or America in the Modern World System is the starting point for decolonial theorizing on Latin America. “Decoloniality” is not only a theoretical approach but also a political project. In recent years, other decolonial scholars have contributed to decolonial thought, such as Edgardo Lander, Walter Mignolo, and

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Arturo Escobar, as well Maria Lugones and Julieta Paredes, among others, from a decolonial feminist perspective. Quijano points out that America was constituted as the first space/time of a new pattern of power and the first entity of modernity. Two historical processes have occurred in order to configure that space/time. On the one hand, the biological structures of the conquerors and the conquered were posited to be biologically different, placing the latter in an inferior position. On the other hand, colonial power reoriented all historical forms of control of work, resources, and products to the generation of capital and the world market. In Quijano’s words: The formation of social relationships based on this idea, produced in America social identities that were historically new: Indians, blacks and mestizos, and redefined others. Terms like Spanish and Portuguese, later European, which until then indicated only geographical provenance or country of origin, since then they also charged, in reference to the new identities, a racial connotation. And to the extent that the social relationships that were configuring themselves were relations of domination, such identities were associated with the hierarchies, places, and corresponding social roles, as constitutive of them and, in consequence, to the pattern of colonial domination that was imposed. In other terms, race and racial identity were established as instruments for the basic social classification of the population. (2000: 122)

New identities articulated based on the idea of race were associated with roles and places in the new global structure of work. That is to say, a systematic racial division of work around the world was imposed on America with its conquest at the hands of the Spanish. This feature is the basis of what came to be known as capitalism. In this sense, a new “system-­ world” was introduced, where Europe not only had control of the world market but also imposed a colonial domination over every region and population of the planet. It is from Europe that new geopolitical identities were created. For instance, the “East” was configured as the “Other.” This economic hegemony combined with the incorporation of new, diverse, and heterogeneous identities and cultures to a singular and unique world dominated by Europe gave rise to a new cultural and intellectual intersubjectivity. In Quijano’s words: “In other words, as part of the new world power pattern, Europe also concentrated the control of all the forms of control of subjectivity, culture, and especially of knowledge, of the knowledge production, under its hegemony” (2000: 126).

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Coloniality is not simply the institutionalized extraction of surpluses that makes capitalism possible. It is not only an economic-political project of production. It is, above all else, a cultural project. The colonial project (the authoritarian project) can be characterized as forcing the conquered to learn the culture of the dominators in everything that was useful for the reproduction of domination, be it in the fields of material activity, technology, subjectivity, and—especially potent—religion. First, the colonial power used evangelization to dominate the populace. Thus, in this process of domination, ways of controlling subjectivity and the production of meaning needed to be enforced, and it is in this practice that certain meanings started to be punished or, in the best case, hidden.12 But, at the same time, the extirpation of idolatry produced many changes in the social structure of indigenous people: some ways of feeling, living, and perceiving the world passed into the private sphere, while some forms of knowledge were destroyed (including forms of organization, patterns of sense production). Everything changed: their universe of symbolisms, their patterns of expression, and their objectification of subjectivity (Quijano, 2000). Later, forms of covering the body or of discovering the body also arose, as any process of domination will always extend its reach to the body and sexuality. When considering society in colonial times before Cartesianism and before heteronormativity was exposed by Foucault with his construction of sexuality, we find a religious discourse with a clear opposition to sodomite practices that were radically subaltern and criminalized. As we will see in Chap. 5, this is evident in the case of Las Joyas (the Spanish name for third-gender people), who were exterminated by the Spaniards. Deborah A.  Miranda called this action a gendercide: “what the local indigenous peoples had been taught was gendercide, the killing of a particular gender because of their gender” (2013: 259). I do not mean to imply that before the arrival of conquerors, postcolonial societies lived in harmony and beauty. However, in pre-colonial times, people enjoyed diversity in what are now referred to as sexual and gender categories (Miranda, 2013; Gunn

12  As we know, all instances of domination produce streams of resistance. In the case of the Andes, for example, indigenous people camouflaged their belief in divinities through the triangular forms of the Catholic Virgins and other saints, as well as by building churches in places where their main apus were located, among other cultural resistance strategies.

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Allen, 1992; Oyewùmi, 1997).13 The colonial world needed a process of domination to constitute the political economic order, and the Spanish colonists found this process in their totalitarian project of acculturation through evangelization in an attempt to “cleanse” certain behaviours based on the morality of the dominator. From that perspective, intersubjectivity and cultural relationships between Western Europe and the rest of the world were coded into a whole set of new categories: East-West, primitive-civilized, magical-­ scientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern, and so on. Racism is structural to the construction of this relationship with all its discourses: what is superior, what is inferior, what is pure, what is impure, what is mixed. Therefore, historically North and South are not two disjoint sets that are related. There is a circuit from North to South, from South to North between thoughts and bodies (Quijano, 2000; Alvarado, 2014; Lugones, 2008a, b). We are talking about power and, therefore, about a relationship. As such, what happens on one side and on the other goes hand in hand. The great artifice of the West has been to construct its wonderful narrative of modernity as an endogenous European process and coloniality as another European process that has nothing to do with modernity. As Quijano (2000) and Mignolo (2000) claim, without currency extracted from American lands and cheap or free labour from indigenous and African slaves brought to America, capitalist development would have been impossible in Europe. The Latin American decolonial thought questions this fantasy and affirms that colonialism and modernity are two sides of the same coin. Without colonialism, Europe would not have had the achievements of its modernity. I use the term “achievements” tenuously, because that modernity costs, and that cost, that energy, was paid from outside. It is not a self-made modernity. It is a modernity that has had to parasitize the rest of the world and create chaos outside the centre of power to achieve its own 13  We can also find this diversity through the value and rituality of the Mochica’s handcraft of sexual practice considered to be abject by the Europeans. The Mochica culture was a civilization that developed in what is now the Peruvian north coast, between the second and eighth centuries after Christ. This culture captured ritual scenes in its ceramics, where sexuality and eroticism were considered a vital principle. The pottery shows a number of sexual poses, where the link between sexuality and the fertility of the earth is evident. However, they also abound with sexual scenes that are not related to this theme, such as oral sex, masturbation, sex between men, and even sex with the dead.

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internal order. This is a framework that, in addition to political economy, creates subjectivity and hierarchies between subjectivities. This resonates with Quijano’s claim that: In effect, all of the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global cultural order revolving around European or Western hegemony [… which] concentrated […] all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge. (2000: 240)

Maria Lugones (2008) goes further, adding to the category of coloniality of power the category of coloniality of gender. Using the approaches of feminists of colour in the United States as well as feminisms of the Third World, she incorporates Quijano’s perspective of decoloniality, taking into account that gender, race, sexuality, and work are threads of the same skein and that they are always intertwined. That is the basis of the category of intersectionality. The contribution of this category is the “unmasking” of the alliance between modernity and coloniality, and at same time, it demonstrates the diversity within the category of “women.” White woman is an inseparable social creation that is born from the fusion between the West, colony, race, capital, and heteronormativity, as a constituent component of the system implanted in the sixteenth century with the conquest of America. Lugones takes into consideration the contribution of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who claims that in the intersection between women, black is completely absent. Because in the category of “women” there is only place for one kind: white, bourgeois, and heterosexual. That “woman” who is narrated in universal terms (as the modern subject) has been the interpretation of modern feminism illustrated by white western women. And, on the other hand, the concept of “black” refers only to black men. Therefore, “black women” have no place. Women who are not white are on the periphery, on the sidelines. Women who are not heterosexual are likewise relegated to the fringe. Women lacking in economic capital are on the outside. They only have a presence in the intersectionality of race/ gender.14 14  Postcolonial feminist thought has also been very interested in analysing the differences between the various experiences of being a woman, depending on the context. One of the main postcolonial voices, in that sense, is that of Gayatri Spivak, who calls on contemporary feminism to seriously consider the voices, stories, and lives of Third World women, challenging the universal pretensions of feminist thought that speak of a single subject of feminism.

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In this sense, Gloria Anzaldúa with her book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) was a pioneer in speaking from the crossroads between race and gender with a deeply singular narrative outside of the hegemonic canons. Anzaldúa writes from and for the border, both physically and conceptually, enunciating her voice as a queer Chicana in order to shed the colonial wound and develop a different knowledge from there. She chooses to name herself as queer as an exercise in disengaging from the man/woman binomial imposed by the dominant culture, always positioning her on the edge of all determination. In her book, she makes it clear how coloniality operates in the social domains of gender and sexuality for the reproduction of colonial power while contending that, like race, it creates a fear of rejection that leads people to conform to the norms in order to avoid being segregated. For decolonial feminists, the challenge consists in making implicit the modern, hetero patriarchy and demonstrating that it can only be broken with anti-racist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist perspectives and actions. The process consists in undertaking an “epistemological reconstruction on deconstruction of the modern Western tradition of knowledge construction” (Alvarado, 2016: 28). Or, in the words of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), a prominent Portuguese scholar, “an epistemology from the South” is needed. Trans Movement as a New Political Cultural Community The life stories of trans women that underpin my research are temporally circumscribed to the decades in which the trans movement has come to the fore due to the phenomenon of discursive globalization. What triggered this, bringing up the current context that we are living with Covid-19, was the pandemic of the HIV/AIDS virus in the 1980s. From then on, trans became a State issue for many countries in the world. To say it using Foucault’s terminology (1977), it becomes a problem of control and discipline, of medical research, and specific public health policies. Before that, as we well know, there were already struggles to make the theme visible. However, on a Latin American scale, and more specifically in Peru, there was no massive awareness and debates around of the trans people. It was not spoken of in newspapers or academic magazines. Although there was a presence in the media, it was overwhelmed by the trans female population represented as an object of humour, mockery, and satire. Basically, it was a caricature.

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The description of the trans population, as well as the definition and subsequent categorizations, at least in the West, has to do with more or less recent processes and has always been constructed in tension between the hegemonic discourses and the never homogeneous voices of its own trans population, as well as assimilation and/or reaction between global and local discourses. It is not my intention in this section to reconstruct this history but to account for certain important milestones that contribute to the place of enunciation from which I am starting in this investigation. As we know, there is a great diversity within the trans population itself. Talia Mae Bettcher (2014), a philosophy professor at California State University, Los Angeles, maintains that within the trans population in the United States, in fact, there are those who identify as women or men. There are those who identify as trans women or trans men. There are those who have undergone gender reassignment surgeries and those who have not and do not want to. There are those who have altered their physical appearance with different surgeries and those who have not. There are those who have taken hormones and those who have not. There are people who have applied silicone and also those who have not. However, in most cases, it is believed that genital configurations do not determine who they really are. In addition, there are those who identify as neither female nor male and who label themselves as beyond the binary. The truth is, as Bettcher states, “Our self-identifications are generally complex and hard to pin down. Indeed, the very meanings of gender terms are not stable. They’re both variable and contested” (2014: 389). Before the 1990s, the literary genre that some of the different individuals and groups identifying as trans had found to talk about their own life experience had been autobiography.15 It was not until 1991, with the publication of “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” by Sandy Stone, a transsexual woman (In Stryker, 2006), that the trans movement itself began to theorize its own condition and life experience. This publication laid the groundwork for the emergence of transgender studies; that is, it marks the arrival of (some) trans people’s academic voice against a history of academic objectification. This article is considered a milestone in the history of the transgender community because it was the first time 15  Some of these are Canary Conn’s, The Story of a Transsexual (1977), Mario Mario’s Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (1977), and Jan Morris’ Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism (1986).

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that transsexuals were seen as an “oppressed minority.” Stone proposed that transgender people “currently occupy a position which is nowhere, which is outside the binary oppositions of gendered discourse” (1991: 295). This manifesto was an answer to the criticisms of feminist discourse as well as medical discourse.16 Mae Bettcher begins her text, “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance” (2014), telling us that her transition began in the mid-1990s and maintains how important it was for her to find a story that would help her understand the process she was going through at that time. In that decade, she says, there were basically two stories—today there are still two theories available—that explain the trans condition. One is the theory of the “wrong body” model, developed in the fields of medicine, sexology, and psychiatry, where the trans condition is explained as a misalignment between gender identity and the sexed body. Basically, under the lens of this theory, trans people would be people who would have been born with the wrong body. And, a second, “beyond the binary,” which began to circulate in the mid-1990s after the founding text of the trans theory of Stone (2006), and those of Leslie Feinberg (1992, 1993, 1996, 1998) and Kate Bornstein (1994). The “beyond the binary” theory holds that trans people do not fit fully into the biological dichotomous view of male and female but rather are being forced to fit into one of them. Mae Bettcher claims that from the beginning, she was reluctant to accept the theory of the wrong body due to its pathologizing character. However, she does not find echoes within the “beyond the binary” theory either. In her case, she maintains, “what made me feel well was being recognized as a woman” (2014: 384). The feeling of ambivalence regarding both theories that explain the trans condition makes the author maintain that she only finds an affinity with trans activists from the subcultures of Los Angeles, since they have found alternative ways of living the gender that are safer and healthier. She writes with the intention of giving an account of her own experience alongside that of her closest community.

16  This manifesto was a response to the medical vision proposed in Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon to the Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979), by Janice Raymond, where the author maintained that all transsexuals violate the woman’s body by reducing it to a mere artefact. As we know, the relationship between feminism and trans theory, from its beginnings, was riddled with tension and hostility, as well as deep synergy.

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It is precisely this last statement that I want to bring to the fore. The author maintains that there is a significant gap between theory and practice and that it is this divorce that makes her distance herself from the great theories that try to account for everything. Mae Bettcher, rather, emphasizes that what she writes is simply a story that tells her life experience and that of her closest community. Therefore, it does not claim to be the only story, and much less a universal one. Her enunciation is different. What she is looking for is local interpretation. Following this argumentative line, the findings that I have found in Peru are part of one of those understandings. For example, in a Chilean documentary that touches on the condition of childhood in transgender girls, it is interesting to highlight the approach of one of the mothers of a transgender girl, who claims that what we must do as a society is understand that biology does not define gender and that we must get used to the fact that there are men with vaginas and women with penises.17 This understanding is the one most shared among trans women I have spoken with throughout this research. From my point of view, the most important take on this is that understandings are being built that do not have to be homogeneous. The influence of southern academic thinking on trans theory is also interesting. In Mae Bettcher’s case, she evokes María Lugones’ concept of “multiple worlds of sense” (Lugones, 2003: 21) to maintain that the reality of any life experience is inhabited by multiple layers of meanings as well as meanings that coexist simultaneously. In the words of Lugones: All worlds are inhabited and they organize the social as heterogeneous, multiple. I think of the social as intersubjectively constructed in a variety of tense ways, forces at odds, impinging differently in the construction of any world. All words have tension, not just tense inner turmoil, but also tense acknowledged or unacknowledged contestation with other worlds. I think that there are many worlds that are not autonomous, but intertwined semantically and materially, with a logic that is sufficiently self-coherent and sufficiently in contradiction with others to constitute an alternative construction of the social. Whether or not a particular world ceases to be is a matter of political contestation. No world is either atomic or autonomous. Many worlds stand in relation to the powers of other worlds, which include a second order of meaning. (Lugones, 2003: 21) 17  The documentary is called “Niños rosados y Niñas azules” (“Pink Boys and Blue Girls”), which collects the testimonies of trans children and adolescents and their families in Chile. It was made and released in 2015 with the support of Fundación Transitar. This is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfBuMoSJsTo&feature=emb_logo

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Mae Bettcher argues that this multiplicity of meanings can make a trans woman fully live her femininity in certain contexts. She can have friends as a woman, be loved by her partner as a woman, be treated as a woman by the subculture to which she belongs, and, perhaps, can also suffer sexual abuse and violence as a woman. However, simultaneously, in the dominant culture, she is perceived as a man. In that culture, for example, if she were incarcerated, she would be in a men’s jail along with other men. However, as we will see in Chap. 7, despite the obliteration of their femininity by the legal system, trans women find multiple forms of resistance to continue living their femininity in a context of confinement. On the other hand, we also find the influence of another thinker from the South in the founding text of trans theory, the Stone Manifesto, previously indicated. One of the principal theoretical frameworks that Stone’s manifesto adopted was the Theory of Mestiza (Anzaldua,  1987) of Gloria Anzaldúa, where the idea of mixture is central to speak against purity. Anzaldúa, a chicana feminist, was the first to coin the term “borderlands,” as we saw previously. She thinks of herself as someone who inhabits the border, one split between the tensions of cultural social codes in conflict. Anzaldua maintains that the experience of living cultural multiplicity leads to the fragmentation of oneself and gives rise to the possibility of a “double” or “mestizo” consciousness, where it is possible to be inhabited and inhabit all the fragments simultaneously and in a mobile way. The body (her situated body) is the point where she starts, through poetic resources, to think of the place on the border from which the complex tensions of identity are configured. That body is pure in terms of neither race nor language nor gender. In this last dimension, that of gender, the author positions herself in a frontier place between the man-woman binomial, which leads her to name herself “one of the others.” She is indefinite. As someone “half and half,” she identifies a place for resistance in that state. Anzaldua writes: There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. (1987, 41)

One of the great contributions to trans theory regarding intersectionality is the work of Emi Koyama (2003) with the “transfeminist” approach, which is born from the relationship between transphobic forms of

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oppression towards trans women in particular, as well as racial oppression and sexist oppression. Koyama reflects on multiple intersecting forms of oppression, positioning trans women analogously to women of colour to frame her argument. According to Koyama, the notion of transfeminism was born from the reflections and work of women of colour who pointed out that there is no universal experience of being a woman, but rather multiple ways of being one and of living and experiencing oppression (Koyama, 2006). In this way, Koyama proposes that trans women should be part of the feminist revolution and broaden the scope of the movement. Koyama’s analysis is important for this research because it focuses its attention on the multiplicities of domination, power, and subjection. As has been well studied, racist ideologies establish regimes of normality. Strictly speaking, these refer to the normality of the white subject, positioning otherness as deviant, the subject deviated from the norm. This racist development and practice, in turn, is related not only to the first and most apparent skin, the phenotypic, but also to dress code. Additionally, symbolic products begin to become racialized: ways of speaking, movements, and dance forms, among others. Finally, the critique of racism is a critique of the construction of modernity coloniality based on races, which in turn is heteronormative. Koyama’s contribution is to start thinking in terms of how the intersectionality of oppressions operates. For example, in the case of trans women of colour, we are facing double oppression because they have to fight against both racism and transphobia. In recent years, following the line drawn by Koyama, the contributions to trans theory from Black Feminism have stood out in that they make us think about intersectionalities, which have emerged as responses to racial marginalization in the treatment of sexism and gender marginalization in the treatment of racism (James Ford III, 2015; Tourmaline 2016; Toshio, M & Miss Major Griffin, G, 2023). Along these lines is Riley Snorton’s book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), which uses historical accounts, literature, newspapers, and movies as a method of analysis, identifying multiple meeting points between blackness and transsexuality from the mid-nineteenth century to current legislation and violence against black and trans people. Snorton’s goal is to analyse how race and gender emerged as invented categories and, in turn, reflect on how race and gender shape ways of being black. Snorton uses as one of her key theoretical frameworks the work of the black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers (1987), who used the term “ungendering,” a concept that depicts gender violence against black women, where the ideals of femininity

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exclude women of colour. Snorton’s book draws attention to the disciplinary boundaries within the academy that have made homosexuality and transsexualism absent topics in the black history narrative. Another important contribution is Marquis Bey’s recent book, Black Trans Feminism, (2022), which proposes new insights into the racialized world and non-normative gender. The author theorizes black trans feminism from the vantage points of abolition and gender radicalism, proposing the abolition of gender and race as becoming the total abolition of the modern system: the abolition of coloniality, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and cisnormativity. Bey understands Black Feminism as an epistemological method that fragments the hegemonic ways in which identities, racialized bodies, and normative gender have been addressed. Bey bases his analysis and proposal on essays, interviews, and poems, with a proposal that goes beyond identity categories and bodies, proposing black trans feminism as a disruptive and questioning agent, with the ultimate goal of thinking of a new conception of the world that distances itself from the rhetoric that has historically positioned the materiality of bodies on the margin and exclusion, towards a new form in which the destruction of the modern world we know, something similar to tabula rasa, returns infinite possibilities of being and being in another possible world. Bey’s central thesis is based on the idea that colonial modernity creates the subjects it is analysing and that it is therefore necessary to abolish the categories. For example, the category “woman” is an invention, and as long as we maintain the dualism of man-woman, there will always be inequality because by definition, women are subordinate. So, the only way to stop being subservient is to make both the “woman” and “man” categories disappear. That is why we are facing an epistemological problem, as the author rightly maintains. In the Peruvian context in general, those who advocate abolitionist positions maintain that in the particular case of transphobia, it would not be a problem that is solved by educating people to be kinder, more sensitive, or more empathetic. This is because the system that generates these social relationships is still in force, and what said system does is assimilate those struggles and internalize them as fashion. The other option is to recognize that the daily practice of these women’s lives puts them in a position where individual agency and reform are present. My research refers to this case, through which there is a recognition of micropolitical acts, in which the act of wearing grandmother’s panties under a pair of boy’s pants can be considered a revolutionary act.

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The trans movement, unlike the feminist movement, the indigenous movement, or the environmental movement, has remained on the margins of academic work, both in Peru and in Latin America in general, with the exception of the health situation resulting from HIV. However, there are some qualitative studies that are important to mention. Among them, Brazil stands out, a country that has had important referents and trans activists who, through political activism, have fought to make the position of exclusion and marginalization that the movement experiences visible. Given its ethnic-racial composition and in connection to the international movements for Black Power in the 1970s (now Black Lives Matters), an important political movement called the Black Movement of Brazil has been forged. Academically speaking, it has a rich exchange with the Black Feminist movement. One of its greatest representatives is Beatriz Nascimento (1942–1995), who dedicated part of her theoretical proposal to analysing the complexity of the black experience and the lack of attention to Afro-Latin women in transnational feminism. The theoretical contribution of Nascimento on the quilombos is of particular interest for the present investigation. Historically, quilombos were spaces for black resistance, in which escaped and formerly enslaved Africans created autonomous societies. Currently, they are physical spaces where the descendants of these communities still reside. Beatriz Nascimento theorizes the quilombo as a fundamental political practice and as a resistance and survival strategy for Brazilian blacks, both in the seventh century and in the self-­ organized cultures of the twentieth-century Brazilian favelas. There, the notion that the body is the materialisation of suffering is inverted, instead representing the space of freedom through which the subject of the black diaspora experiences the ancestral ties with Africa and America. The findings of this research discuss the contributions of this author, positing that the aesthetic-political practice of trans women places the body at the centre of their struggles as the space territory where the political orders of modernity/coloniality are challenged. And, in that sense, it coincides with her argument that the body is always a political territory. In the line of Brazilian academic production are the book Brazilian Travesti Migrations: Gender, Sexualities and Embodiment Experiences (2018) and the article “Beauty That Matters: Brazilian Travesti Sex Workers Feeling Beautiful” (2021), both by Julia Vartabedian. In the first, the author shows us how the migratory flows of Brazilian transvestites engaged in prostitution work, tracing a network that starts from migratory flows within Brazil by way of Rio de Janeiro, to then migrate to the

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European continent. In the book, the author recounts historical migratory flows of transvestites in the 1970s. She shows the different bodily logics that place trans women in different prostitution zones in various European cities. This also symbolizes the European promise of a better life compared to life in one’s land of origin. One of her main contributions is to demonstrate how the construction of a transvestite femininity associated with beauty is closely linked to the social, economic, and political context where the women are located and how the body appears as a vehicle of distinction and social mobility, despite being within a society of limited social mobility. In other words, Vartabedian shows us how beauty works as a social capital that seeks to promote distinction through the construction of a (morally) beautiful woman and a (morally) beautiful female body. On the other hand, in her article (2021), Vartabedian takes up the central theme of her previous book and analyses in a more limited way how beauty works as a space of recognition and power that gives travestis the possibility of self-affirmation and the fostering of self-esteem, despite the fact that living conditions are precarious. Although the author works with a group of sex workers, she does not delve into the characteristics of sex work. Rather, she pays full attention to the beautification strategies that are used by the group of trans women with whom she works to construct their transvestite identities. Vartabedian maintains: “feeling beautiful is not a banal and hedonistic aim; on the contrary, it is through the body and ideas about beauty that travestis ‘produce’ themselves as subjects situated within a hierarchical scale of success or failure. Beauty also allows travestis sex workers to feel confident and desired, given that they believe they will attract more clients if they are constantly ‘retouched’ aesthetically” (2021: 83). In this sense, the author maintains that beautification practices among travestis who engage in sex work should not be seen as an imitation of normative femininity, but rather as a way of embodying patriarchal oppression. Among the recent Brazilian academic output on the subject, we find a brief article by Dora Silva Santana, “¡Mais Viva!: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism” (2019), which analyses the Portuguese term used in Brazil “mais viva” (more alive, alert, intelligent) as a type of embodied knowledge and resistance on behalf of the black Brazilian trans community. The author conceives the use and meaning of this concept as a way in which the Afro-trans community in Brazil resignifies self-love and builds community and bonds of love. It is a liminal space that arises so as not to forget the relationship between oppressive forms of power and

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agency, between experiences of violence, racist, and sexist dialogue and, at the same time, the ways in which the trans community finds resilience, recognition, and support. The author foregrounds conversations with black Brazilian travesti activist Selen Ravache as a way of acknowledging that black people have always theorized through oral history, positioning black trans experiences in the southern hemisphere in relation to transnational debates on gender, race, class, and sexuality. In Colombia we find the book Tacones, siliconas, hormonas. Etnografía, teoría feminista y experiencias trans (High Heels, Silicone, Hormones: Ethnography, Feminist Theory, and Trans Experiences) (2018) by Andrea Garcia Becerra, an ethnography carried out based on fieldwork with trans women in the city of Bogota. The book shows the great diversity and complexity of what makes up trans identities. The author points out that for some trans women, the visibility they have is the heart of their identity difference. Therefore, it is one of the main motives for their political activity. For many others, visibility is the first challenge to overcome; they want to be included within the canons of femininity, to be seen as just another woman. In other words, while some struggle to highlight this difference, others opt for similarity, among other things, as a way of guaranteeing their own existence in scenarios of extreme violence and hostility. In this sense, the title of this book represents the central argumentative line, where high heels, silicone, and hormones, despite reproducing the traditional stereotypes of what is considered hegemonically feminine, can at the same time become objects of rebellion, transgression, and liberation. And, in this way, Garcia Becerra, appealing to postcolonial feminisms, reminds us that not all forms of oppression and exclusion, nor the ways in which feminine identity experiences are lived, are the same. Thus, not all feminist struggles are created equal, a concept that dialogues very well with the approach to micropolitical aesthetic practices in this book. The book Mema’s House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (1998), written by the Norwegian sociologist Annick Prieur, is also a contribution on the subject in the Latin American region. The book talks about a house, located in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Mexico City, where trans women live, some dedicated to sex work and others to hairdressing, along with their young male partners. The house belongs to Mema, a middle-aged man, former sex worker and AIDS activist, who offers his home as a shelter for trans people. The author analyses the cultural practices, meaning, and struggles of these young people, as well as the nuance and flexibility that exist between the supposedly

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stable categories of masculine and feminine. Prieur finds that for the majority of transvestites who live in the Mema house, physical pleasure and body conformation are as important as survival and that transvestites will use different means to achieve the ideal of femininity, such as hormones, implants, clothing, and makeup, among others. However, nothing comes close to sex change surgery. The author finally concludes that, in general, the practices among the transvestites of the Mema house replicate conventional gender norms while simultaneously transgressing, defying said norms. On the other hand, in Argentina, a country where there has been significant progress in normative matters on gender and sexual diversities, we find an important and recent publication by Marlene Wayar Travesti, una teoría lo suficientemente buena (Travesti, a Good Enough Theory) (2019). Wayar is a trans human rights activist, and in her book she analyses the oppressive regime of the State on the existence of unrecognized identities where the conditions of being sudaca,18 marica (fag), travesti, plural, and multicolour are interwoven in a complex way. The author maintains that the theory she exposes in her book is a theory that is still under construction and that does not claim to be universal. She focuses her criticism on the failures and contradictions of the Argentine State, where the modes of production, proposed life models, public policies, and the structures and institutions of the State have failed. One of the axes of the book is exposed through the term “nostredad,” in which the author invites us to think about a different way of inhabiting the world. She uses the concept of “nostredad” to name a new type of subjectivity where mutual empathy is at the core. The author maintains that, in order to reach this form of consciousness and social coexistence, a key and essential stage is childhood when identity explorations cease to be pathologized from a heteronormative regime. The other axis of the book that Wayar reflects on is the structural poverty into which trans women are subsumed, the constant murders, state repression, and precarious housing conditions. In this sense, the author maintains that the life conditions to which trans people are subjected should be read as a form of contemporary genocide carried out by society. 18  Popular derogatory usage that appeared in Spain between the 1980s and 1990s to refer to a person from Latin America, especially South America. It is an abbreviation of “South American.” Years later the term has been appropriated by some Latin American activist movements as a form of political self-affirmation.

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In light of the arguments that Wayar expresses in her book, I can maintain that there is a common horizon between the types of States, both Argentine and Peruvian. The empirical evidence from my research shows the same thing but with a different emphasis. The criticisms voiced by the trans women who have participated in my investigation are not of the State itself, which, of course, does not mean that they do not take the State into account. Rather, the aesthetic-political practice of the trans movement is more concerned with creating new common senses, new sensibilities. In this regard, it is closely related to the contribution that Wayar makes to the category of “nostredad.” That is to say, to create a “we” that prioritizes the shared feelings that unite instead of separate us. In the Peruvian case, qualitative academic studies on the trans movement are scarce. However, it is important to mention the impact on the visibility of the movement provided by the artwork of Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013) and El Museo Travesti del Peru, who from various artistic platforms break and fracture the normative models of understanding the body and gender, proposing a critical review of the history of Peru, in which the transgender, travestis, transsexual, intersexual, and androgynous positions become nuclear political subjects of Peruvian history, a narrative that goes against the current of official history. Through this mobile and itinerant piece, Campusano questions the fictitious nature of historical narratives, putting a critical emphasis on the privileged place occupied by heteronormativity. Campusano’s intention is to bring the travesti, who has always occupied a marginal place, to the centre of history without trying to define the travesti identity, but rather by exposing the circumstances of his life, such as the exercise of sexual work to the rituals of the patron saint festivities, to make their historical tradition visible and, in this way, rethink Peruvian history (Campusano, 2007, 2008). This work is still in force, and given its itinerant nature, it has been participating in different exhibitions at a global level and has given rise to various articles of reflection in the artistic field. It is recent that the academy, and its new generations, is paying attention to Campusano’s prolific work, as is the case of Malú Machuca’s recent article “Giuseppe Campuzano’s Afterlife: Toward a Travesti Methodology for Critique, Care, and Radical Resistance” (2019), which reflects on Campusano’s legacy and goes towards the importance of building supportive care networks from and in the Global South, in order to create other possible futures for the dissident community. In the words of Machuca, “Giuseppe’s legacy is not only in the brilliance and excellence in her scholarship, in the

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rigor in her research, or in her creativity and self-expression. It is also in her vulnerability, in her needing her friends, in the structures that feed into the narcissistic self that allows so many scholars to speak from the I but that for us, for the legacy we are claiming, is a constant turn to the collective” (2019: 249). The recent and diverse production on the trans movement in Latin America suggests some meeting points that are shared in these latitudes. In the first place, we find the extended use between Brazil, Argentina, and Peru of the word “travesti.” Don Kulick, a Brazilian author, in his book Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (1998), maintains that the word “travesti” comes from “travesty,” that is, appropriating the clothing of the other sex. And among the various characteristics mentioned, it includes taking a feminine name, changing the style of clothing (from masculine to feminine), growing long hair, using cosmetics, playing grammatically with pronouns when referring to themselves, ingesting hormones, injecting silicone to modify their bodies, especially the bust, lips, and butt, but not removing the penis. However, the Brazilian trans movement has criticized Kulick’s definition, especially when he argues that the word travesti is a denial of themselves as women. Despite the fact that for many years it was used in a derogatory way, the trans movement appropriated the concept, redefining it as an emblem of collective struggle, and although the term has different connotations that vary according to the temporal, cultural, and regional context, something common in it is that it contains a political position of resistance of trans bodies, mostly racialized in the Global South. And, secondly, another common characteristic at the regional level is the exclusion and marginalization experienced by the trans community by the Latin American States, which leads them to live precarious lives, where one of the main economic activities of subsistence is sex work, putting them in a position of extreme vulnerability to situations of violence and greater exposure to HIV, aspects that are obscenely depicted in the statistical data that trans people have an average lifespan of 35  years in Latin America. Despite this unfavourable context, the different publications highlight the agency and resistance of the group. The processes of coloniality/modernity, Cartesianism and rationalism, and the exploitation of the means of production, slavery, and racism, as well as heteronormativity, experienced in Latin American countries, all incorporate a discourse on LGTB identities and on the trans identity in

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particular. That is to say, there also exists an attempt to control and hegemonize the heteronormative discourse, the white discourse, the non-­ mixing discourse, and the anti-miscegenation discourse. Everything that was not pure and was not in accordance with the moral ideal of modernity was abject, impure, or idolatrous. In the more benign, republican versions, all that was deviant would come to be all that was “pre”: the pre-­ juridical, pre-political, pre-scientific, pre-religious. This exoticizing, tutelary, and pastoral perception of the “pre” society is likewise a form of the same exclusion. This phenomenon in the case of trans people in Peru leads to the repression of any possibility of diversity, or even to the attempt to eliminate them physically and materially. The coloniality project, as mentioned above, is not only an economic project; it is the project of installing a kingdom, the kingdom of one God.19 The evangelical project is an imperial project that seeks to subsequently control all forms of production of meaning. The control of all forms of sense creation and of defining the “good life” for all. As soon as rationalism takes hold, this imperial project is perpetuated in another way. Peru, and Latin America in general, has lived this dualism and the inertia of coloniality from the time of the republic until today. Coloniality has not disappeared; as Quijano says, it persists. Unfortunately, Quijano focuses on race-culture issues alone without considering sex-gender issues. The colonial project, as Maria Lugones says, is a sexed project. It is not only a racial-cultural project but also one crossed by sexuality and the body. Similarly, it is interesting to mention some differences typical of the sociocultural compositions of the countries of the Latin American region that are reflected in the different accents that are placed in academic works. For example, in the case of Brazil, the importance that is given to gender studies and racial studies, especially those from Black Feminists, is evident. This is due to the significant percentage of the population that self-­ identifies as Afro-descendant, which is 49.6% according to the last official census in the country. In the Peruvian case, the last census of 2017 indicates that only 3% of the population perceives itself as Afro-descendant, 19  In her essay, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality and the Caribbean Rethinking of Modernity” (1995), Sylvia Winter describes how she designed a legal document in the Spanish colony that granted her the land of the Indians by divine right. This was done so that they would be evangelized in the one and only true faith, thus justifying that their lands be expropriated and they be forced into slavery.

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while 60.2% identifies as mestizo, returning to the concept of mestizaje as a key category to understand the social, cultural, and racial processes of Peru. Because of Eloy Neira, a prestigious Peruvian scholar, I considered the trans condition to be closely linked to the topic of mestizaje. The category of mestizaje has been used at different times with different meanings, which leads me to argue that it is a polysemic category.20 Historically, there are many criticisms of the category of mestizaje that are related to the construction of Latin American nation-states that want to build themselves in the European manner, and one of the problems that is detected is that of ethno-cultural diversity: what to do with diversity? In such a diverse landscape, how to promote unity. There are two paradigmatic figures in this sense, one is José Vasconcelos, Mexican politician and philosopher (1882–1959); and Paulo Freire, Brazilian pedagogue and philosopher (1921–1997), who postulated the idea of a mestizo unity to think about the respective nation-states. Criticisms are abounding and are all over Latin America, precisely because it is a way to obliterate diversity and start talking about forced unity, where all assimilationist plans had that character. It has been a category used for homogenizing purposes that, in turn, hide the bloody origins of the Spanish conquest of Latin American territories. However, it was in the 1980s that the category appeared again with force in theoretical terms with the Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), who reinscribed the category “mestizaje” including other dimensions of “mixture” that work together and simultaneously, such as sex-gender, disability, age, geographic origin, among others. It is from the reconciliation of these fragments that a new mestizo consciousness emerges. For Anzaldúa,

20  A first use is related to the crossing of races, and in particular, during the colony, it was referred to the crossing of Spanish and indigenous. A second use of the word mestizaje has to do with geographical determinism, linked to not being in one’s own place, because purity “of blood” is associated with places, and to the extent that the Quechua Indians live in communities, their purity of blood has to do with the place. If they migrate, they become mestizos. A third use of mestizaje, which occurs in the Amazonia, is when there is crossbreeding between ethnicities. For example, the child of a Shipibo man and a Cocama woman will be a mestizo. A fourth use is also found in the Amazonia with the use of the category “mestizo ribereño,” linked to the diasporas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where mestizaje is the word used to say that ethnic adscription has been lost. It has nothing to do with biology.

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identity is contextual, relational, and historical, questioning the validity of this category and stating the “fluid” character of personal descriptions. The contributions of this feminist theorist and activist have been fundamental in various fields such as cultural theory, decolonial theory, feminist theory, and Chicano studies. Above all, her contribution to a new conception of mestizaje stands out. Anzaldua’s approach to this category moves away from the process of synthesis of difference and instead towards a cultural process in which, simultaneously, hegemonic impositions both coexist and resist one another. However, it has received some criticism for its theoretical approach to the category of mestizaje and its methodology. In particular, one of the main criticisms lies in the lack of recognition of the presence of other cultural groups in the southwestern United States, such as communities of African and Asian origin, other groups from Latin America, and groups from the Middle East. As such, other processes of cultural mixtures in the development of her theory become invisible (Medina, 2009). From this argument, another criticism of her work emerges, which is that although her theoretical contribution aims to break with the centre-periphery models, in which the dominant and hegemonic culture continues to perpetuate its position of power and privilege, the approach about the culture of the border and the appearance of the new conscience of the mestiza ends up being elaborated on binary oppositions between Chicanos and Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, other cultural exchanges that take place between Chicanos and non-hegemonic groups are set aside, letting the great potential to further decentre the hegemonic culture of the United States pass. Finally, another of the criticisms that have appeared in regard to Anzaldúa’s work in recent years is that it does not reveal a critical reflection on the idea and existence of races. Therefore, in light of all that has been mentioned, there lie significant gaps in her theory on miscegenation (Medina, 2009). However, there is much agreement as to the great epistemological contribution of Gloria Anzaldua for her reformulation of the idea of mestizaje, moving away and freeing the category from its stable, fixed, and one-dimensional dimensions and rather taking a leap towards its understanding. This understanding is one of constant construction, an unfinished process in constant formation and contact with others, where all the fragments and borders of the body, sexualities, races, and genders coexist. Along the same lines, we find Bolivian Silvia Rivera, who uses the word “aymara” to speak of a mixture that is very close together but at the same time diverse. From Peru there is Marisol de la Cadena, with her

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publication “Indígenas mestizos: raza y cultura en el Cusco,” where she is addressing the same topic. And, more recently, there is Laura E.  Pérez (2007), also Chicana, who is talking about what it is to live in diversity, from mixed and hybrid interpretative frameworks. This research takes these latter approaches to the category of mestizaje, through which the category is analysed more for its possibilities than for its limitations. In social terms, mixture gives meaning to coexistence; and also, the idea of mixture is working in subjective terms and shaping the mestizo-self, where the problem of the mestizo is that he does not recognize his own diversity and does not celebrate his own fragmentation. For instance, this is another use, when a person from Cusco affirms “I am mestizo,” he or she may be saying (a) I am not indigenous, which is the use that is normally given to mestizaje with a desire for social ascent; and (b) I am mestizo because I am also indigenous. It is the second use that is graphing my argument. In that sense, I find a profound relationship between the category of mestizaje and trans condition, because both cannot be worked in terms of consistency. Because what is mestizo after all? What and who represents mestizo? It could be argued that being mestizo is a double negation: on the one hand, not being a white Westerner; and on the other, not being a Western white (called indigenous). Or, being mestizo means to be both what is A and at the same time the denial of A. That is an inconsistency. Therefore, the question of the mestizaje identity has always been part of the Aristotelian logic and modern ideals of seeking clear definitions. In this sense, trans culture is functional to address this liminal topic of being a “confused” reality. Indeed, through this research we can talk about living conditions that are diffused rather than confused. They allow us to address new identity configurations with no definite borders or unclear outlines. This represents a different ontology, which is more malleable and more dynamic in the sense that it has a temporality and is not fixed. Although the decolonial has been understood from the perspective of race/culture since Quijano and has been problematized from a gender perspective by Lugones, the decolonial, for the purposes of my research, refers to all political actions and discourses that accompany these versions to emancipate themselves from the “panopticon” of modernity. Many of the theoretical postulates that are set forth in this section can be reinterpreted from the decolonial point of view because the mere fact that they speak of many possibilities of understanding or, in other words, that they

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are not looking for a universal theory is already a decolonial attitude. For instance, Mae Bettcher (2014) maintains that there is a significant gap between theory and practice and that it is this divorce that makes her distance herself from the great theories that try to account for everything; rather, she emphasizes that what she writes is simply a story that tells her life experience and that of her closest community. Therefore, it does not claim to be the only story and much less a universal one. Her enunciation is different. What she is looking for is local interpretation. Following this argumentative line, the findings that I have found in Peru are part of one of those understandings. For example, in a Chilean documentary that touches on the condition of childhood in transgender girls, it is interesting to highlight the approach of one of the mothers of a transgender girl, who claims that what we must do as a society is to understand that biology does not define gender and that we must get used to the fact that there are men with vaginas and women with penises.21 This understanding is the one most shared among trans women I have spoken with throughout this research. From my point of view, the most important take on this is that understandings are being built that do not have to be homogeneous. In the same vein, Sandy Stone, as well as Anzaldua, Bey, Wayar, Silva Santana, Campuzano, among others, under my reading, enters in decolonial thought, where the colonial is alluding to domination, to any type of domination, because domination will always include the hegemony of a way of thinking about gender, culture, and sexuality.22 One of the important contributions of my research is related not only to trans issues but also to the discovery of a new political culture or the project of political culture where the political and the aesthetic intersect within the trans context. As we see in the next section, I understand the aesthetic as Rancière (2004) and Maffesolli (2007) do, as an artistic fact, but also particularly in the sense of the Greek aiesthesis that deals with  The documentary is called “Niños rosados y Niñas azules” (“Pink Boys and Blue Girls”), which collects the testimonies of trans children and adolescents and their families in Chile. It was made and released in 2015 with the support of Fundación Transitar. This is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfBuMoSJsTo&feature=emb_logo 22  I am taking the decolonial category further, as it is such a powerful category that I can speak of internal decoloniality in Europe. An example of European internal decoloniality could be read in the figure of Simone de Beauvoir in terms of adding to the criticism of modernity/coloniality, denouncing it as patriarchal, logocentric, phallocentric, etc. Let us also bear in mind the influence that Frantz Fanon had on the development of his thought. 21

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sensibility. In the same vein, these are anti-modern processes in a sense because they are not discursive nor logocentric. Or if they are discursive, it is a discourse of the body.

Trans-aesthetics and the Struggle for Politics of Recognition The first time I became aware of the word “recognition” was in the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, 2000), and it was from that moment on that I discovered that it is a category with a lot of historical weight and conceptual density. However, it caught my attention that this report spoke of “positive” recognition of diversity, which tacitly infers that there are forms of recognition that are not positive, which highlights that there are forms of recognition that are inherent to domination. In other words, in every process of domination forms of recognition are implied, whether to subordinate, to subalternize, or even to kill (such as Nazism). Let us briefly trace its history. Within the field of philosophy, we can trace the category of “struggle for recognition” (kampf um anerkennung) to Hegel, who was one of the first to formulate the concept as a fundamental category in the individual’s determination of self-identity and—more importantly—the defining of the quality of their existence. According to Hegel, the sense of the self and the understanding of it as a free individual are closely determined by the recognition of another. In his words, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-­ consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or “recognized” ” (1807: 229). Therefore, I exist because the other accounts for my presence. This Hegelian understanding of self-consciousness is an intersubjective ontology of social subjects defined by and dependent upon mutual recognition. Self-consciousness is a dialogical process, in which the individual needs the presence and existence of the Other. Sartre, whom Hegel deeply influenced, astutely claims that “the path of interiority passes through the Other” (1943: 237). In The Elements of the Philosophy of Law (1821), Hegel further develops the idea of recognition as an essential aspect of ethical life. He concludes that any ethical and political subject within a particular community depends on the reception of appropriate forms of recognition. According to Hegel, recognition is fundamental for the construction of citizenship,

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because it is from mutual recognition that an individual is validated as a socially viable subject. That is, no one is constituted alone. Self-poiesis is not possible; only di-poiesis functions in reality.23 The category of “recognition” in the construction of western modernity has been fundamental for the construction of concepts such as citizenship and the commonwealth of society. We find, then, that the concepts of recognition, citizenship, and respect are linked. And, in turn, despite not being theoretically overdeveloped, the category of recognition links a cognitive fact with an affective fact. Recognition amalgamates a community. In twentieth century we find the exemplary case of Frantz Fanon, who brings the famous Hegelian dialectic between master and slave to the colonial situation and argues that in colonial contexts this dialectic would only produce empty forms of recognition and, in turn, create new forms of subalternity for the slaves/colonized. For Hegel, on the other hand, this dialectic would finally produce reciprocity in the recognition of the two self-consciousnesses, which need each other to exist. The slave, in Hegel, gains consciousness when he recognizes the other as a master and recognizes himself as a slave. The slave ends up preferring servitude over death. The master, in turn, ends up depending on the slave for his own survival. For Fanon, on the other hand, the slave must not seek the recognition of the master, but rather his political annihilation, and must do so by accepting the risk of death, accepting all indeterminacy (1967). Thus, for Fanon, the dialectic between master and slave would be the basis of modern discourse that would be under the imprint of a structural contradiction between recognition and freedom, with racism and colonialism as constitutive of them. It can be argued then that what Fanon does is a profound criticism of modern citizenship, where the recognition of the other is not possible. For Fanon, the change depends on the struggles of the excluded. In Rancière’s words, the infinite realization of citizenship depends on the part of those who have no part. Years later the category of recognition was taken up again by Charles Taylor in Quebec, Canada, in an area of Franco-indigenous miscegenation. Taylor argues that class struggles, which Nancy Fraser will later refer 23  Within the field of Sociology, the theory of “symbolic interactionism” claims that an individual is socially formed when he or she achieves self-reflective thought. This happens through communication, because through communication, the individual assumes the position of interlocutor, allowing him or her to look at his or herself. The interlocutor is like a mirror in which individuals can see themselves as an object.

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to as redistributive struggles, do not explain the social movements of the time. He said that what the social movements are claiming are rights and not redistribution. It is this conception of recognition that re-enters the arena, taking Hegel again. Then, other thinkers come in, such as Axel Honneth (1997), who are going to begin to develop this category in depth. Sooner or later, recognition, despite having a lexical origin that seemingly refers to a cognitive fact, is actually referring to the world of aiesthesis. Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser also take this concept and offer new insights, informed by a feminist approach. Fraser (2003) focuses on the concept of justice. She explains that there are two kinds of justice: distributive justice, which deals with the equitable distribution of resources, and the justice of recognition, which is concerned with the equal recognition of different identities within a society on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. In addition, she points out that both forms of injustice (maldistribution and misrecognition) are strictly linked, and both necessarily exist in tandem. That is to say, the emancipation of women cannot be achieved without a change in the overarching capitalist structure, even if women achieve cultural recognition. On the other hand, Judith Butler shows the same Hegelian concern about the circumstances in which a social subject is constituted. In her book Undoing Gender (2004), she discusses the desire for recognition and points out how this desire itself is necessary to be constituted as “socially viable beings” while maintaining that social viability is by definition a relational state. Butler, however, mentions that while this statement is true, an important issue is lost: The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer ‘humanness’ in some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less than human … Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. (2004: 2)

Following Butler, we can address the issues faced by trans people within what she calls the desire for recognition. What recognition do trans women in Peru seek? To be recognized as a part of the feminine world. This is fundamental to their identity and subjectivity, as well as their general well-­ being. In order to gain recognition, trans women work with their bodies;

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they sculpt them. They curate their gestures and movements. In other words, trans women shape their identities through kinaesthesia. Makeup, wardrobe, and fashion accessories are all central in the construction of their identities. In some cases, they use hormones to attain their desired image, and some use surgery to reshape their bodies to reflect their identity. All this can be read as a desire for recognition in both a subjective and social sense. At the same time, we are facing an act of embodiment of recognition, which leads us to understand it as an aesthetic fact of reconstituting a body. Trans women seek recognition through the use of their bodies. Recognition is thus embodied in the performance, appearance, and reshaping of trans bodies. That being said, Hegel’s approach to the category of recognition, which both Butler and Fraser adopt, is nevertheless closely related to the concept of knowledge as cognitive fact, which underlies the concept of a liberal contractual relationship of Rousseau’s and the Enlightenment’s category of the social contract. In contrast, currently, from the new-­ materialist feminist perspective, with Elizabeth Grosz (1994) as one of its exponents, there appears a radical criticism of the dualisms that operate under the logics of distinction between body-mind and object-subject, as well as the identity categories of the human that have been naturalized, hiding the sociocultural processes that make them up. In this way, Grosz speaks of a new configuration of nature from a monistic and materialistic perspective that aims to break with the dualisms in which identities have been trapped. Thus, from this point of view, the human being is situated in a continuum of nature, no longer as something separate. This reinterpretation, which reconnects us with our own body, proposes embodied ways of doing politics that are thought no longer in terms of agencies seeking recognition but rather in terms of forces, energies, and affection. In the light of this research, I understand that recognition is given in both positive and negative terms. That is, all domination or hierarchization requires recognition. Just as all hegemony needs to recognize the subordinate. And when the project is totalitarian, the subordinate recognizes the master. In this sense, the use of the definition of recognition for my research is close to Butler’s conceptual treatment of recognition, where not only recognition matters but its terms, where, in effect, recognition can make someone’s life unliveable. And, in turn, this aligns with Grosz when she claims that it is closer to the affective world. However, Grosz criticizes the politics of recognition for being essentialist and reductionist. In this sense, my position distances from Grosz’s reflection because the

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findings of this research highlight that, in order to confront domination, from a subaltern position, there must be a collective spirit and a sense of belonging to the group that is in a disadvantaged position. In other words, without the politics of recognition, the subaltern populations that struggle for rights would be deprived of the possibility of collective action. Nevertheless, I take up again the criticisms that have been made by indigenous movements of recognition politics, where attention must be paid to the place from which recognition is produced, since it often ends up reducing identity to a single regime of knowledge and sensibility, which ends up positioning itself as universal. The thesis of this book, in short, opts for recognition from the affective world, from and towards the different aisthesis. Always in the plural. In this sense, this research highlights that the struggles for recognition start from a materiality and that we cannot live without recognition. There is no way to think of existence without coexistence within a community, where all skins are inhabited. The other key category of this research is that of aesthetics, of which I am aware, as I mentioned before, of the uses it has had historically and in different latitudes, in the service of power and domination. In other words, aesthetics was constitutive of the politics of domination that expanded as geopolitics of feeling, as a coloniality of being. However, throughout the history of Peru, aesthetics has also been used from the standpoint of resistance and the search for emancipation. It is within this framework that the struggles of the trans movement are circumscribed. Therefore, I understand the category of aesthetics as the use that the Greeks gave to the word aiesthesis in its double meaning. Both as a work of art and as a sensibility. In this sense, this concept has been worked by Rancière, who, although he develops his entire theoretical project reading intra-European modernity (he does not contemplate coloniality as the reverse of modernity), it is very relevant in light of the present research.24 For Rancière, aesthetics is closely linked to reality. That is to say, aesthetics builds a bridge between sensible forms and existence itself, which finds its greatest expression in the political and social spheres. This vision of the French philosopher is very close to that of Susan Buck-Morss, who insists not only that aesthetics contemplates the sphere of art as an important 24  Different authors have worked linking Rancière’s theoretical contributions with the processes of coloniality as is the case of Marisol de la Cadena in her article “Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond politics” (2010), and Elizabeth Povinelli in her book “Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism” (2019).

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part of the sensible but also that the sensible extends to the sphere of the social and, therefore, of the political (1992). Herein lies the crux of my argument. Aside from situations of coercion, lack of recognition of identity and distribution, and the lack of regulation against gender violence, the essential issue I focus on in this research deals with the change of sensibilities. This transformation, somehow, should lead us to question a power structure that causes so many people to suffer. My research will utilize the concept of aesthetics and politics that Rancière developed in the last years of his academic work, interpreted, however, from a decolonial horizon. The guiding thread of his theoretical framework is the struggle for emancipation and equality of human beings. According to Rancière, the idea of equality is not an ideal to reach, but rather the starting point. Put simply, any social relationship should start with the principle of equality. With this initial understanding of equality, Rancière then introduces the distinction between police and politics. In his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1995), he argues that police have deprived us of the practice of equality. Police are the primary drivers in ordering and maintaining functional inequality and spaces of the bodies. On the other hand, politics, which for Rancière is equivalent to democracy, is based on disagreement, through which some individuals and groups struggle to pull themselves from the place in society that police have assigned them. In other words, Rancière categorizes political life into two orders, a heterogeneous political community in front of a homogeneous community established by the police. Each one has a different distribution of the sensible. Police identify, assign, and discriminate the visible and invisible. Police likewise distribute and order bodies in space, time, and forms. The police order is hierarchical. That’s to say, it is based upon the presupposition that some are fit to govern and some are not and distinguishes between those who have a part and those who do not. Politics, instead, arises when someone develops feelings and perceptions different from those assigned by the police. Rancière’s concept of aesthetics, therefore, determines the configuration of the social mindset in terms of the perception of the body. It is through these functions of aesthetics that art is allowed to enter the field of politics. Rancière defines politics neither in terms of the exercise of power or the struggle for it nor as the norms, laws, or institutions of a society. Politics emerges when actions or activities

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reconfigure the established mindset. Therefore, in light of this research, one can read the police order as the order of coloniality/modernity and politics as a decolonial process. Rancière, therefore, claims that politics is characterized by a state in which no identity is determined, in which all positions are delegitimized and in which time and space change its structures and regulations. Rancière defines politics in such a state as the aesthetic regime of democracy. That is to say, the aesthetics of politics consist of a breakdown in all consensus surrounding sensibilities and perceptions. The aesthetic regime of democracy, therefore, sets the construction of new options, new creations, new possibilities, and capabilities for equality as its goals. As such, the aesthetic regime focuses on building new relationships between the visible and its significance. aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (2004:8)

One of the examples he uses to explain the regime of aesthetics politics can be found in his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1999), where he mentions the actions of Rosa Parks, an African American woman who in the context of the civil rights movement for African Americans in the United States, turned a private act into a public one. The social norms and customs of the time (what Rancière calls police) had established that a white person had priority over a black person. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, this act reconfigured what had been established. Rosa Parks challenged her identification as “black” when she behaved as a “white” person. Hence, politics undo divisions. Politics and art can make people see a particular scene in another way, as they both constitute unique events that produce a break in the agreed order of society. In this sense, I would like to bring up the article by Marisol de la Cadena “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond Politics” (2010) not only because of its relevance to the present

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research due to the socio-geographic space to which it is dedicated, Latin America and Peru in particular, but because it intersects several of the themes exposed in this section, such as the critique of modernity and Cartesian dualisms with the ways of doing politics, locating itself on a decolonial horizon. De la Cadena argues that current indigenous movements propose a different and plural political practice. However, it is plural not because it does so from organisms marked by gender, race, ethnicity, and/or sexuality, but rather because it invokes non-human elements as political actors. These non-human actors, who are called “earth-beings” by the author (mountains, rivers, lagoons, and rocks, among others), appear in the political arena as “contentious objects,” Rancière (1999) would say. De la Cadena starts from the premise that both science and politics are Western inventions. She uses the history of science to trace the history of politics and, in this way, propose that the mere presence of earth-beings in politics disapproves of the split between “nature” and “humanity” to which Western political theory subscribes. The central problem it raises is that with modernity the pluriverse disappeared and, with it, the multiple worlds that were crucial for the possibility of the political (Schmitt, 1996 in De la Cadena, 2010). In contrast, there appeared a single world inhabited by many cultures or peoples and a single way of relating to nature, where non-scientific relationships with non-­ human beings were reduced to beliefs. With this, politics as the relationship of disagreement between worlds or the “meeting of the heterogeneous,” as Rancière (1999) would say, was forgotten. De la Cadena, then, bringing up these cases, sees a possibility of change in the way of interpreting the conflict, where, instead of reading it as a cultural one between universal progress and the local worldview, it is a political conflict of adverse, conflicts between worlds, where one of them claims the symmetry of disagreement. I would like to add that at the base of the political practices of the indigenous movements that De la Cadena speaks of is aesthetics, that is, a sensitivity. Said sensitivity perceives earth-beings as people, who, therefore, have character and must be respected. Under this type of sensitivity, earth-­ beings are not separate from humans, but instead coexist in equal importance. It is not a subject-object relationship, but rather a subject-subject relationship. Therefore, when the author argues that when entering the field of politics she is looking for symmetry between the worlds, from my point of view, it can be read as the call that one of the parties makes to the

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positive recognition of a sensitivity that it knows and feels in a different way than modernity. In this plural form of doing politics, one would rather be creating meanings from the transformation or from the transposition of sensibilities. This brings me to the uniqueness of trans politics that is directly linked to the body. The body is no longer perceived as res extensa, but a lived body, a body as a political fact, a body as a transgression. The political-aesthetic act of the body consists of modifying it, operating it, decorating it, putting makeup on it, giving it a new kinaesthetic. Therefore, it is not that aesthetics go one way and politics go the other. Rather, politics is embodied in the aesthetic act.

Conclusions In this chapter, my intention has been to show the key concepts and thinkers that make up the backbone of my research, such as the categories of aesthetics, politics, recognition, and sex/gender, seen from a decolonial perspective. Indeed, when I mention key concepts, I am referring to what is commonly called the theoretical framework. However, I prefer to call them as such because they are the categories, each one with a dense historical and conceptual development, which I have chosen with the intention of stringing together my own discourse that supports the proposed research topic and articulates the categories of recognition, aisthesis, politics, decoloniality, and sex/gender. I do this in order to elucidate, on the one hand, how politics is being understood and how it is being practised in a context of the South, of a country of the so-called Third World. Here, discursive politics is based on a logos that aims to build rational ethics, one based on algorithms and principles, which is replaced by non-discursive practices that appeal to other languages, particularly the body. These are above all practices and not discourses (in terms of words). And, on the other hand, this politics does not appeal to a logo-centred ethic but to an aesthetic ethic as primordial to the constitution of action. This chapter started from the critique of modernity to show how, through a case study that is Peru, the modern way of doing politics collapses; that is to say, the discursive, logocentric, and dualistic form, based on the hegemony of a discourse that tries to obscure and make invisible the multiplicity of other voices, where the centrality of class and economic interests has been fundamental. This desire to make Peru a modern country, through a modern policy (whenever it is said that it is modern, it is colonial), based on parties of the right and the left, collapses. It collapses

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in several ways: it loses value as a discourse, loses affective value, and loses the capacity to interpret the social, cultural, and economic reality of its own people. In this sense, the study of the trans movement represents the recognition of alternative and obliterated forms of doing politics that have always been present in a postcolonial country like Peru. Secondly, this research enters into dialogue with the contributions of trans theory that expose the many possibilities of understanding. These contributions do not seek a universal theory but rather situated and local interpretations and knowledge, moving away from homogenizing analysis and instead rescuing the singularity of daily praxis. In this sense, what this research has tried to make visible and name is that for trans women, the act of putting on grandmother’s panties is in itself a transgressive and reformist act. Ultimately, the struggle of these women is above all at the level of the change of sensibilities. For this reason, I maintain that their political praxis is anti-modern and decolonial. In this sense, the political-aesthetic practices of trans women can be interpreted as revolutionary acts in of themselves because they maintain that we are not facing a problem of cognitions, but one of feelings and emotions. Third, I have built upon the category of recognition to introduce not only the social and subjective dimensions of recognition but also the dimension of embodiment. This analytical framework leads me to explore trans experience as an aesthetic and political subject. I understand the trans experience as aesthetic because of the performative act in the way trans people shape their bodies, work their movements, and kinaesthesia. Trans people can be considered artists who scrupulously study every aspect of performed gender (ways of walking, postures, gestures, makeup, hand motions, facial expressions, and so on) either to perform femininity or to hide masculinity and vice versa. While this process can be considered a more intense version of what it is for anyone’s socialization process, in the case of trans women we find a greater self-awareness of this performativity by being attentive to the signs of recognition. Therefore, trans people first of all demonstrate an aesthetic practice using their bodies as a medium. In addition, they are faced with the struggle for recognition and its intimate link to the aesthetic-political practice of the reconstitution of corporality and its simultaneous subjectivity (in other words, the soma). From a political vantage point, once a trans women performs femininity, it immediately incites transphobia and a host of other phobias of heteronormativity and modernity/coloniality. Likewise, to the extent that recognition is sought where there is no recognition or where recognition is precarious

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or is negative, a political fact can be observed. In the same vein, the political struggles of trans people centre on the acquisition of their citizenship, both from the state and from the recognition of other citizens. Therefore, we can understand trans aesthetic as a political weapon of recognition of materiality—a recognition in terms of lifestyle, sociality, colours, shapes, and topics. And, at the same time, this search for recognition seeks to question and transgress the phallocentric order and dual logo. Thus, trans expression of identity can be characterized as an aesthetic-­political social movement that uses embodied practices in the struggle for positive recognition. Finally, this chapter has shown how the aesthetic-political practice of the trans movement is inscribed in a horizon of decolonial practices because it makes visible the emergence of practices and memories that have been forgotten, erased, and dismantled by the single universal history of modernity, giving way to practices that function as alternatives to traditional politics and the dominant aesthetics. The key concepts presented in this chapter will allow the reader to understand the processes that trans women go through in their own life stories, ranging from childhood and the formation of their first skins to adulthood, where the political struggles for positive recognition take place in aesthetic terms.

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CHAPTER 3

Thinking with and from Skins: Reflections on Methodology and Method in Ethnographic Research from the Encounter and Collaboration with Trans Women in Lima, Peru

To contextualize my ethnographic experience with a group of trans women in Lima, Peru, in this chapter I will first provide an overview of my methodological approach and how it has influenced my practical decisions. Second, I will detail my discovery of the theory of the skins and how this plays out in terms of my methodological strategy. Third, I will discuss the deployment of ethnographic methods, attending to ethical issues. And, finally, I will reflect on issues of power and politics in the research process, paying attention to how this has shaped every aspect of my research design, from the initial question to the analysis and writing process. I did my first year of doctoral studies in the UK. It was a year, academically speaking, of swimming in different theoretical frameworks through multiple readings. Simultaneously, I spent the year designing my methodology, which essentially makes operational all that theoretical ocean that supports an initial idea. During those months, I fantasized many times about meeting the trans women who are the subjects of this study. What would my bond with them be like? Could we build a bond of trust? What kind of shared knowledge would come out of those encounters? I was

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nervous, yes. Although in previous years I had had a connection to the LGTBIQ community, I knew that this community was not homogeneous. Furthermore, my identity as a cis gender woman, in particular, in addition to the other variables that contextualize my place of enunciation (my skin colour, literate, upper-middle class) could pose a barrier in our meeting. I also knew that fieldwork (that is to say, the encounter with that other) could modify part or all of the previous work based on desk work. My professional background as an anthropologist leads me to always take into account that the act of imagining is different from that of “being there.” That always, sooner or later, issues that you did not foresee appear; new floodgates open, while others close. And sometimes it happens what in anthropology we call serendipity: discover findings accidentally and without anticipating it. Imagination has its limits; reality always ends up exceeding it. Navigating through the life stories, the different skins of my interlocutors, has inevitably made me sift through my own skins as well. It is useful at this point to think about the structure of an artichoke, where over time, you peel off skin to skin until you find your heart. Each of these stories and each of these interactions took shape in my body and in my own subjectivity, in my approach to the world. Always, on a subjective level, I had sought reference points that are considered to be true. I looked for “the truth,” trying to say how things are, how reality works, how society works, even how I function. I had tried to speak from a safe place of enunciation without much room for uncertainty, emptiness, or contradiction. Furthermore, Quijano’s call to stop being what one is not (which in effect can become an unfathomable call) is likewise a call to expand our interpretive horizons, giving way to a coexistence of the multiple and putting aside categorical rigidity. My research is inscribed in a decolonial horizon, which has led me to be very careful with the usual theoretical dichotomies of social science disciplines, particularly anthropology. One of them is the one referred to by the emic/etic reviewer. In this sense, to the extent that the findings of my research are not the product of a positive observation between research subject and researched object, but rather of a constructed relationship, my book’s horizon of enunciation departs from this duality. Therefore, it has been an epistemic choice not to use this distinction because it is basically a dichotomy that stems from a modern colonial and androcentric epistemic approach. In this sense, and in line with the contributions of feminist social epistemology, I underline the relationality of knowledge

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production, where the emic/etic distinction, subject to know and object known, is precisely what I seek to overcome. Therefore, my option was to produce knowledge which privileges contact, both bodily and emotional, through dynamic and interactive encounters and conversations, following a decolonial and feminist methodology. Producing knowledge according to these guidelines entailed placing my researcher-self within the data production process, which means recognizing myself as a woman with certain physical characteristics and social particularities and, in turn, with an ethical-epistemic position towards research. Therefore, this research lit on this epistemological stance.

Research Design As we saw in the previous chapter, as has been the case elsewhere in the world, Peru has seen a decline in the hegemony of politics characterized by Western modernity in the past three decades. In place of a primarily logocentric and discursive operation of power, non-discursive ways of doing politics based on embodied performances have become more visible. Among other social movements, trans persons’ political struggles are exemplary of this prolonged but steady shift, and their embodied aesthetic-­ political practices in their quest for challenging the current “terms of recognition” herald a political-culture transformation (Butler, 2004). In this regard, my research focuses on the significance of the rise of new ways of doing politics in Peru’s capital of Lima through a case study focused on trans women. My research focuses on the transformations taking place in the political culture of a postcolonial society, in which the decline of modern-Western politics runs in parallel to the progressive aestheticization of politics. Specifically, it focuses on how trans women—a marginalized and excluded group—are struggling for a political space in non-traditional terms and the ways in which they are gaining ground. The project is thus a contribution to the political history of the “less-than-human” excluded subject (Butler, 1990). I analyse how the involvement of subaltern, non-­ hegemonic subjects have contributed to Peru’s political culture, and how these are shaping, in embodied terms, the subjective and relational life of Peruvians. This that leads us to understand that there are practices of emancipatory social action that are not captured in the forms of modern politics, and that the decline of modern politics has ultimately enabled new ways of doing politics.

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Therefore, the main objectives of this research are to analyse the aesthetic-­political proposal of trans women through actions and creations, through the praxis and poiesis, in the search for positive recognition of diversity and full citizenship in the Peruvian context. And, in connection with this, to make visible what are the strategies of resistance, resilience, and agency of trans women to continue living their identity as subversive and transformative agents for the change of the sensibilities of a modern/colonial society. In methodological terms, the intention of this research has been to analyse the embodied practices of trans women in a cumulative way, paying attention to the different stages of their lives, to the different skins from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. I seek to explore stadiums through which we observe the dispute for power: trans women repeatedly and on a daily basis carry out micro-aesthetic-political actions and practices in order to live their desire and identity. These actions are carried out in different spaces: in their own bodies, at home, through their sexuality, in the closest social environment, and in the broader social environment. In this sense, starting from the most intimate space, the aesthetic act of transforming the body of trans women is a practice that transgresses and questions Western political practices in the sense that they are embodied practices. Not being discursive, they are transgressors of the expected “norm.” Then, we observe a progressive advance in the search for recognition and, simultaneously, transgression, rebellion. In the next section, I will explain how and why the metaphor of the five skins works as a methodological guideline to enter that description in more detail. I want to emphasize that following this line of thought, all things I narrate regarding different skins are already aesthetic-political acts, in the sense of what is already explained about aesthetics. And, as such, they are alien to a logo-centred discursive practice, which is how the traditional elite considers that politics should be done. Theory of Method: The Metaphor of the Five Skins The title of my investigation, “The skins of desire,” was inspired by the work of the Viennese artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, specifically his manifesto of the five skins, in which he uses a spiral to express his vision of the world and its relation to reality. Hundertwasser proposes five skins that make us human. These five skins inhabit and surround us and, in turn, make us part of society and the world. For this artist, the relationship that

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exists between these different concentrically superimposed layers is developed by osmosis. That is, each of these layers is porous and semi-­permeable and, therefore, there is communication, diffusion, influence, and union between them. The first skin is the epidermis; the second is the clothes; the third is the house; the fourth he names “identity,” which refers to primary socialization spaces such as the neighbourhood; and the fifth, the world environment.

The five skins of Hundertwasser. (Source: https://hundertwasser.com/en/ applied-­art/apa382_mens_five_skins_1975)

Hundertwasser did not produce any conceptual elaboration on the metaphor of five skins. It could be argued that, given his work’s belonging to the world of art, he did not intend to create an analytical methodology, but rather, it was an aesthetic intuition that led him to produce the allegory of the five skins. Why do I appeal to this metaphor that is not a “proper theory”? In the first place, a quick analysis of this metaphor reveals a construction of the self-distanced from modern/colonial narratives, which focus only on the subject and its future. A great part of modern psychology is centred on the individual and not on the determinations of the third, fourth, and fifth skins, to speak in terms of the metaphor. These streams of psychology are

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in essence theories of adaptation, where the therapeutic process seeks to adapt the subject to the society in which the subject lives. On the contrary, the metaphor of the skins recognizes, both in decolonial and postmodern terms, that the construction of the subject, of the self, occurs from the outside or, rather, in communication with multiple phenomena that exceed and, in some cases, precede them. The most direct antecedent of this tradition is found in the field of anthropology with the theories of George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism, which claim that the subject deduces “I am the other” and, thus, incorporates the exterior and the mandates from outside. Likewise, I find correspondence in one of the antecedents of decolonial theory—the psychology of liberation by Ignacio Martín Baró. He speaks of the importance of the environment in the construction of the self: […]. But we want to emphasise how enlightening it is to change the optics and see health or mental disorder not from the inside outside, but from the outside inside; not as the emanation of an internal individual functioning, but as the materialization in a person or group of the humanizing or alienating character of a framework of historical relationships […]. (Martin-Baro, 1984: 503–514)

Likewise, feminist studies have produced research that uses ecological approaches as a method to establish links between personal experience and the broader forms in which power is manifested. This is the case of Cristina Alcalde (2010) who takes the ecological perspective of Heise (1998) to study violence against women in Peru. Through this approach, the author starts from the premise that each person is immersed in multiple relational levels where dynamics of violence can be produced or reproduced (personal history, microsystem, exosystem, and macrosystem). The “personal history” refers to life experiences, both the psychic structure of the person and the relationship with their closest environment (for instance, witnessing family violence in childhood). The “microsystem” refers to the immediate context in which the abuse takes place, such as relationships within the family and relationships with peers. The “exosystem” refers to the structures, formal and informal, that occur within the community, which have an impact on a person’s capacity to respond to violence. The exosystem includes neighbourhood resources and social networks. And finally, the “macrosystem” which is the broadest level and represents social, historical, and cultural norms and policies.

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As we can see, the metaphor of skins dialogues with other more solidly constituted approaches within the Social Sciences and Human Sciences in their analysis of the different ecological niches (the epidermis-personal history, the house-microsystem, the neighbourhood and the school-­ exosystem; and the global context-macrosystem). However, the centrality of the body in the metaphor of skins fundamentally distinguishes it from other discourses. This metaphor best operationalizes my research, as this study is not only focused on the social construction of the subjectivity of trans women but also, and above all, on their embodied political struggle. Moreover, identity, as well as subjectivity, cannot be separated from the particular forms in which they are embodied (Bordo, 2013). Likewise, my research starts from an intersectional view that involves the sex-gender and race-culture systems, where a view from and with skins makes these dimensions explicit. Following Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey in the introduction of Thinking through the skin (2001): “The skin is the place where one touches and is touched by others; it is both the most intimate of experiences and the most public marker of raced, sexed and national history” (2001: i). These are the main reasons for choosing a gaze so thought out in terms of bodies, in terms of skins. Hundertwasser’s five skins metaphor, in effect, gives me levels of analysis; however, it does not tell me how to carry out the analysis. It is through the connection of these dimensions, the theoretical concepts that I have presented in the previous chapter, and the findings of my fieldwork that I have chosen to reorder the levels of analysis, which in turn is reflected in the order of the analytical chapters, as I presented in the Introduction, where the backbone of Chap. 5 is composed of the analysis of the first skin, the skin closest to the human being and the boundary between our inner and outer world; and the second skin, represented by clothing, is the skin that covers us, shapes and protects the first skin, and functions as a communication channel of our identity. Chapter 6 is focused on the analysis of the third and fourth skin, where the third skin refers to the house (home), the place where we carry out our first socialization; and the fourth skin refers to the closest social groups after the family, such as the school and neighbourhood. And finally, Chap. 7 is devoted to the fifth skin, which represents the last of the skins and encompasses all the previous ones and corresponds to the global environment. The choice of this metaphor has to do with a preliminary intuition of knowing that the body (bodies) occupy a central place in my research and this metaphor immediately refers to the body since, although it sounds

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paradoxical, this metaphor has something “literal” about it; that is, it is speaking of the body from its own reference. This is not just a poetic or rhetorical twist, but I chose to work with it because it is such a bodily category. At the same time, from an epistemic point of view, in my opinion, it is a richer category than talking only about “subjectivity” or “habitus,” for example, because the underlying theme of this research is that subjectivity and corporeality are not separated.

My Positionality as Researcher: Justification of Methods Epistemological positions have a direct influence on our role as a researcher, and the position we occupy towards the subject, the context, and the participants will be coloured by our ethical-political practice. This results in interpretation and the production of knowledge. In that sense, ethnography can follow different epistemological traditions. In this section I will develop how ethnography carried out with trans women emerges from two perspectives in particular, and how following these guidelines has been central to my fieldwork. This reveals not only my academic position, but also my ethical-political position regarding the investigated topic. My epistemological approach to the new ways of doing politics through the embodiment practices of trans women follows a feminist and decolonial perspective. In particular, there are two important theoretical approaches that are relevant for my research. The first is the theoretical knowledge produced by the Latin American Program of Modernity/ Coloniality and Decolonial (MCD) thought, the main focus of which is the undermining of the epistemological and political asymmetries that come from the colonial difference between the modern and the non-­ modern (Blaser, 2010; Escobar, 2003; Lander, 2000; Lastra, 2008; Mignolo, 2000a, 2007; Walsh, 2002; Shiwy & Castro-Gómez, 2002). The second theoretical approach is that of Feminist theory, in particular their contribution to defining the hierarchical relations between the moderns and their “other” humans (Haraway, 1991, 1997, 2003, 2007; Plumwood, 1993, 2002). Although Arturo Escobar (2003), an important decolonial scholar, mentions and recognizes the split between nature and culture as a way of colonial difference, MCD has not published deeper reflections on this topic. In that vein, the importance of the contributions of Haraway and Plumwood, who pay particular attention to the pitfalls to which critiques

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of the colonial difference would be susceptible if focused only on the human (i.e., humanism), cannot be understated. In this regard, Haraway said, “the discursive bond between the colonised, the enslaved, the noncitizen and the animal - all reduced to type, all the Others of the rational man and essential to his luminous constitution - is at the heart of racism and it blooms, lethally, in the bowels of humanism” (2007: 18). Somehow, both approaches function, as Blaser (2010) claims, to liberate spaces for the deployment of the pluriverse (non uni-verse) and the recognition of the need for “worlds and knowledge in other ways” (Arturo Escobar, 2003). “Pluriverse,” as a concept as articulated by Walter Mignolo, works to refer to “border forms of thinking and re-inscribing languages and cosmologies, knowledge and philosophies, subjectivities and languages that were and continue to be demonised (that is, racialised), from the hegemonic and dominant position of modern epistemology” (Mignolo, 2008: 36–37). In that sense, having done this research is for me, as Quijano (2000) argues, an exercise of my own freedom to smell, read, see, and feel the world—indeed other worlds—in another way. This, as Blaser (2010) mentions, does not mean that I end up situated where my interlocutors are; on the contrary, it means that it is through dialogue with your interlocutors that one comes to dislocate oneself from the modern enunciative position. Therefore, my research is not objectivist, because in the research process, the subject of study is being modified. While the act of research occurred, at the same time my interlocutors were gaining citizenship and command. In this regard, it was important to bring the feminist contribution of self-­ reflexivity to my research, which enables a critical approach to my own knowledge production in terms of my own subjectivity, the process of intersubjectivity with participants, and the methods and epistemology that I worked with in the different stages of the research process (Harding, 1987; Finlay & Gough, 2003). As an anthropologist, it was additionally important to incorporate some of the contributions of the field, particularly in regard to the large tradition of the anthropology of the body and anthropology’s study of objects. Anthropology, since its inception, has fundamentally studied societies with non-written codes. In this regard, besides the use of oral discourse, it has paid attention to both the embodied actions and the social life of objects (Mauss, 1971; Turner, 1980; Douglas, 1988; Le Breton, 1990; Appadurai, 1988). In this sense, it has prioritized the study of symbolic representations fixed in objects or instituted in bodies themselves. It is through the

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representations collected during fieldwork that we are able to give an account of the symbolic world of a particular culture. However, anthropology since its beginning privileged the audio-visual senses over other senses. It was important for my methodological approach to bring the feminist contributions of the tactile metaphor to gain access to knowledge. Modernity/coloniality has tried to systematize knowledge over the years. The epitome of this systematized knowledge is modern science, which privileges the “superior senses” (sight and hearing), as Kant called them, because they prioritize distance and, therefore “objectivity” (Foucault, 1978; Le Breton, 1990). The other senses (tact, smell, and taste) are seen as inferior. Indeed, Darwin’s and, then Freud’s, conceptualization of vision has become the sense of civilization. In other words, sight and then hearing are the central senses in the construction of modern epistemology. However, feminist approaches would beg to differ. Evelyn Fox Keller points out in the article “The Mind’s Eye” (1996) that the archaeology of this idea began with the famous myth of the cave of Plato, which says that in order to access knowledge, one must follow the light. By mentioning this metaphor or allegory of knowledge, she says that in Greece there existed another possibility of conceiving knowledge not in the metaphor of vision but in the metaphor of contact, of touch. This metaphor prevents us from thinking about the radical separation between the knowing subject and the object to be known. Therefore, categories such as “objectivity” disappear. What I can report in terms of reality is contact and relationship, because every time I touch, I am—at the same time—being touched. Thus, relationality is what matters. In the same way, Haraway (1988) argues for a new comprehension of objectivity founded on a feminist understanding of situated knowledges. She said, “Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (1988: 581). The feminist objective is then “about limited location and situated knowledge”; it allows us to “elaborate specificity and difference, and loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view” (1988: 583). In this sense, the metaphor of touch nourishes the metaphor of skins, where we are first of all before a type of knowledge that goes beyond the cognitive and the rational, to give way to knowledge that is in the order of the sensory, of the relational and, therefore, that belong to the order of the affective.

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Anthropological studies have focused on the relational character of identity in order to make possible both endoculturation and a sense of belonging. This relationality may take hierarchical, discriminating, exclusionary forms, harkening of the subject of power relations. Although embodied practices could be functional to the establishment of hierarchical relations, it is through these very aesthetic practices that one can dispute power. The colonial fact was based on the distinction of bodies and on a new form of disciplining these bodies which, as we saw in the previous chapter, used aesthetics in a double sense; that is, seeking to change sensibilities and at the same time using arts. The use of aesthetics, together with coercion and persecution, served to establish a system of beliefs, a series of values and conceptions of the body. The colonial project sought to turn this external coercion into internal coercion. In this process, patterns of movement, patterns of posture, patterns of action considered “normal” were generated. At the same time, however, there was resistance. This dynamic has been evidenced in Peruvian history since the sixteenth century, when dance and music were present in political practices of the already subaltern people (“Taki Onccoy” Millones, 1990) and indeed prohibited and penalized. In a similar vein, the social movement I study has as one of its central characteristics the production of embodied practices conceived as aesthetic ones (in the double meaning already mentioned in Chap. 2). Such practices are understood as discursive forms that represent both a search for identity and a struggle for recognition. In this sense, the founders of the LGTBIQ movement have produced intentionally contentious objects to reverse the “terms of recognition” (Butler, 2004) to promote their rights and, in the process, to destabilize the epistemic and symbolic order that is at the base of abjection. These activists are working not only on cognitive, discursive aspects; their aim goes further, to the realm of aesthesis, that is, sensitivity, sensibility, and feelings. LGTBIQ artistic representations during Peru’s twentieth-century history have tended to be considered abject (through film, television, cartoons, etc.), as pointed out by the activist leader, theatre director, actor, and founder of the LGTBIQ movement No tengo miedo Gabriel de la Cruz: The representation of LGBTIQ people in Peruvian culture has been marked by prejudice and discrimination. The media has portrayed us from the point of view of a heterosexual man and with comic purposes, using the image of the effeminate man as an object of derision. How do we deal with these

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humiliating forms of representation? —by seizing these cultural manifestations, self-presenting ourselves, managing our own spaces of artistic creation and research. (Personal interview)

On the other hand, this quote highlights the dilemmas of representation that I will mention in the ethics section. The representation of the “objects of study” is actually a philosophical problem that has to do with the production of truth and the philosophical theory of adequacy, which claims that an enunciation must reflect the truth of things, the truth of the world. This idea, which is the ideal of modern science of Galileo, was operative at the birth of social sciences: the ideal to represent the social world and, in some way, represent the subjectivity of people. The representation of the object of study goes hand in hand with the modern, colonial, and Cartesian paradigm. The criticisms of Eurocentrism, phallocentrism, and logocentrism are indeed very similar and, from the point of view of the method or the anti-method, have many coincidences.1 The decolonial perspective and feminist approach agree with the idea of subjectivity and life in general. Both always escape, exceed, subvert, overflow, undermine, or ignore all efforts to impose fixed categories (Quijano, 2000; Levine, 1997, 2004; Haraway, 1988; Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990; Law, 2004; Anzaldua, 1987). Thus, it will privilege the relationality, the situationality, and the historicity of any cognitive knowledge. Self-Reflexivity and the Ambivalent Process of Fieldwork In Peru, and Latin America in general, we have been witnessing a deterioration of modern politics that has led to an imaginarium of chaos and a lack of meaning when it comes to coexisting. In this sense, my research is optimistic in that it tries to show that there is a new way of doing politics in Peru. Given my experience as a feminist activist, as well as an advisor to an LGTBIQ collective, I have discovered that one of those hopeful spaces 1  One of the first criticisms to the scientific method came from within the same field of science in regard to its privilege of observation and experimentation. See Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962) and Paul Feyerabend, “Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge” (1975). The Latin American contribution comes from Newton da Costa, a Brazilian mathematician and logician, and his “theory of paraconsistent logic” (1958). He discovered inconsistent mathematics, that is, the one that does not satisfy the principle of non-contradiction. His theory postulates that is possible to work with contradictory situations and opinions in the field of science.

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is the trans movement. In this regard, I can affirm that the topic addressed in this book has to do with my personal experience. Throughout my trajectory as an anthropology student I have become aware of a gap in my preparation, as the dimensions of gender and sexual diversity were only marginally present. It is through my non-academic training, which has to do with my everyday life, with my friends and university peers, with my connection to groups, that I became concerned with the LGTBIQ struggles and hopes. Within that activism, I have come to realize that the most excluded, the most unknown, is trans. In this sense, there is an ethical and affective option to make visible what in Peru is radically denied or perceived as deviant. The trans movement, unlike the feminist movement or the indigenous movement, does not have as much visibility. It is still on the margins of Peruvian and Latin American academic work, except for research on the health situation due to HIV, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Due to my central research concern has to do with creating visible alternatives of doing politics in contemporary Peru, I find that the political-­ aesthetic practice of the trans movement is a contribution to the search for a path towards the common good, for social coexistence. In this sense, my research topic is not foreign to myself as a researcher, because we are talking about my country and about a political concern inherent to my own subjectivity. Secondly, there is a landscape I have in common with the trans population, as it is part of the society in which I also live and participate in. In this sense, my inner investigator is not outside, but rather is like Moelius’ band: the lives of these women cannot be understood without patriarchy, without transphobia, without capitalism, without everything that constitutes us as a society. As we will see in depth in Chap. 7, exclusion, domination, segregation, and marginalization are relational facts. There is no individual separate from the rest. That being said, despite these meeting points and the deep affinity I have with the causes behind the trans movement, I am not part of the trans movement. This means that I cannot fully grasp, through my own skin, what it means to experience the world as a trans woman in Lima, Peru. In social research, being an “outsider” member of a social group could be interpreted as a disadvantage for understanding social phenomena relevant within and to that group (Pearce, 2018). Therefore, the results of this research and what I can report are based on the voices of trans women who participated and my own voice (Letherby, 2003). It is the border between their world and mine, where the knowledge produced

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is a continuum between the researcher and the researchee. There, fieldwork and the relationships that occur within it suppose an ambivalent process of constant change. Having done this research is for me, as Quijano (2000) argues, an exercise of my own freedom to smell, read, see, and feel the world—indeed other worlds—in another way. This, as Blaser (2010) mentions, does not mean that I end up situated where my interlocutors are; on the contrary, it means that it is through dialogue with your interlocutors that one comes to dislocate oneself from the modern enunciative position. Therefore, my research is not objectivist, because in the research process, the subject of study is being modified. While the act of research occurred, at the same time my interlocutors were gaining citizenship and command, as I will explain below. Nevertheless, the initial relationship, even the imaginary one that occurs in the methodological design itself before going to the field, was a relationship in which distrust, anxiety, and fear occupy an important place, as I maintain at the beginning of this chapter. These affections were somewhat of a barrier in the research process, and it was only in the course of the interaction that trust was built. This implied modifying the original relationship of fear and distrust that characterizes a hierarchical class order in Peru towards a more horizontal relationship. The bond among Peruvians is generally characterized by negative affections. As stated in conclusion 158 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, 2003): The TRC is aware that the internal armed conflict amplified fear and mistrust to unbearable levels, which in turn contributed to fragmenting and atomizing society. In these conditions, extreme suffering has caused resentment and colored social coexistence and interpersonal relationships with suspicion and violence.

In this sense, to achieve horizontality in the course of communication is to build citizenship. We are used to understanding the category of “citizenship” from political theory, in which one is a citizen before the State, and it is the State that recognizes you through public policies. However, citizenship also has a community and societal component that has to do with how we are connected on a day-to-day basis, in small communicative acts. In the Peruvian case, we either endorse the establishment or go against it. It is in this process that citizenship becomes a relational predicate. There is another component of citizenship that is self-citizenship,

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which has to do with the conviction of not feeling that you are too much or not enough. Of course, the latter type of citizenship is not independent of the former one. And, to the extent that the communicative act itself transforms the imaginary class relationship into a horizontal relationship, both parties empower themselves. Thus, citizenship is built. Saying that, it was important to bring the feminist contribution of self-­ reflexivity to my research, which enables a critical approach to my own knowledge production in terms of my own subjectivity, the process of intersubjectivity with participants, and the methods and epistemology that I worked with in the different stages of the research process (Harding, 1987; Finlay & Gough, 2003). In this sense, it is helpful to bring up the theoretical concept of “mestiza consciousness” in the research process in order to put our privileges, the history that precedes us, our agendas and resources, as well as power relations in which we are immersed on the conscious plane (Anzaldua, 1987). In that sense, “mestiza consciousness” is a theoretical contribution by which Gloria Anzaldua invites us to think about our subjectivity, and how this subjectivity is comprised of combinations of apparently contradictory discourses. Anzaldua, then, invites us to redefine our subjectivity not only by being conscious of ourselves in a coherent way, but rather to commit ourselves to subjective contradictions and to the various and multiple discourses that inhabit us that have to do with gender axes, sexuality, class, ethnicity, body, personality, and spiritual beliefs (Keating, 2009). In other words, the researcher must be aware of their own contradictions and conflicts, of internal psychological processes, and of how these are emotionally affected in the encounter with the participants, the research process in general, but also the knowledge that is produced. In this sense, it is important to reflect on the multiple meeting points between the trans women who have been part of this research and myself, the researcher, as well as the inevitable marks that distance me from them, in order to expose the possible consequences in the production of knowledge. The researcher, being an instrument of his or her own research, highlights that the findings of any investigation are intimately related to subjectivity, life history, the dimensions of corporality, and symbolic and cultural dimensions, such as class, gender, sexual orientation, race, and the age of the researcher. Therefore, objectively speaking, the same findings would never be produced on the same subject (Pearce, 2018). In this regard, exposing in the introduction of this book the way in which the research topic is interwoven with my life story has been fundamental in

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terms of exposing my own position as a researcher. As Frankenberg points out, it is not simply a matter of accounting for one’s “perception capacity,” “I am this, therefore I think that” (2004: 106). But rather, it requires one to account for the impossibility of a true, objective, and omniscient self, which raises ethical and epistemological questions regarding the production of knowledge and supposes methodological problems related to the investigation of groups that represent the “other” for the researcher. Writing from a reflective point of view requires vulnerability and exposure, especially when writing about a group that is in a marginal position (Berry & Clair, 2011). In this sense, I think that one of the examples that best illustrates how my identity as a cis woman has influenced the production of knowledge has been how difficult it has been for me not to classify the sexual relations of trans women in childhood with older men as abusive, as we will see in depth in Chap. 6. Throughout the fieldwork and at the time of analysis, confronting the testimonies of sexual experiences in childhood challenged and moved me. It has been very difficult for me to comprehend and deconstruct my own moral judgements about the sexual acts in their childhood that trans women do not perceive as violence but rather as pleasurable memories. In other words, I had to accept how what from an ethical, moral, and legal position can be considered as abuse and a lack of respect for fundamental rights is at the same time a struggle that expresses the agency of trans women since childhood. In this sense, sexuality plays a central role because it is used for recognition, but it occurs in the midst of a structure plagued with patriarchal, sexist, and transphobic abuse. This is perhaps what has been most difficult for me to write, because I was grappling with how to endorse something that in itself is despicable, and at the same time, how to recognize in it the agency of women who fight to survive and not give up their identity. In this sense, I think that the case presented very much illustrates how my cisgenderism and my class consciousness go through the interpretations of the research findings. On the other hand, of course, I had to make methodological cuts. It is a work with a predetermined sector of trans women in a capital city. Despite the fact that the majority of publicly recognized trans people in Peru belong to the middle class and are mostly professionals, it was a political choice to work with a group who live in poverty and would be considered lower class because they transgress the public space in a way that middle-class trans women do not. In other words, they are more visible on a daily basis, in everyday practice, because they have to show

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themselves, be it through their sex work or their work in hairdressing salons. They belong to a population that from a northern perspective would be considered “brown,” but from a local perspective in the Peruvian context, would be considered mestizo.2 In Peru I am perceived as white. However, in the 2017 census, when prompted to fill in my race, I answered, as in all other censuses, that I am mestizo because I recognize my indigenous parts and my Afro parts. Refusing this recognition is a political problem in Peru, where race has always been acculturated and culture has always been racialized (De la Cadena, 2000). In my view, one of the great problems in Latin American theory is not recognizing that “otherness” is “me.” It is in everyone’s subjectivity: what we eat, the music we listen to, how we move, the sensibilities that define us. However, it is important to mention that power is embedded in every research relationship because there is a subject, the researcher, whose role is to define both a discursive field and a field of observation. Based on this reality, the researcher can choose to be “careful.” For example, in my case, I did this by deciding not to do closed interviews, but rather to flow into conversations where my interlocutors were given more agency in terms of defining the discursive field. Nevertheless, from the beginning, I knew that for Peruvian purposes, regardless of my raciality (I could be perceived as afro or indigenous), the fact that I had university studies, and even more so, that I was carrying out a doctoral thesis and had been living in Europe, among other symbolic elements, positioned me in a privileged zone of whiteness. I wonder what my fieldwork and findings would have been like if I had been part of the trans movement. The results would certainly have been different. I remember Jana’s initial reticence the first time we met. The first thing she told me was that we had to keep it short because she didn’t have a lot of time. After talking for an hour and a half, she told me that she generally distrusted the people who wanted to interview her and would usually limit these interactions to 15 minutes, if she were to agree in the first place. However, she mentioned that she liked the topic of my research, that it was something totally different from the academic approaches that are used with the trans population in our country. This first meeting was 2  Let us remember that the last official census of 2017 showed that 25.8% of the Peruvians surveyed identify as indigenous, 3% as Afro-descendant, 5.89% as white, and 63% as mestizo. Within this last category, it ought not be thought of only in terms of white-indigenous crossing, but also between black-indigenous, white-black, etc.

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key to the development of my fieldwork, since Jana put me in contact with many other trans women. Thanks to the bond I forged with her, and to Jana being a leader representative of the movement, having her endorsement made it much easier for me to connect with the others. In spite of this, it was not easy to arrange the meetings and I often had to write or call them on more than one occasion. Perhaps due to the very fact of not belonging to the trans movement, of being perceived as white, and all the symbolic and tangible elements that distance me from them, only one of the women who were part of my research opened the doors of her house to me. No one else did. There were also awkward moments, where I felt the distance of not belonging, of not being part. I remember two of these moments in particular. The first one was at my house. It was the first time I met Fabiola and Fabiana, two young trans women who engage in sex work. Being the first meeting, I wanted them to feel comfortable. I briefly told them the central objective of my research and they quickly began to tell me about themselves, about their lives, and about their work. At one point, I felt lost in the stories they told, because more than telling them to me, they told them to each other. They reminisced, made fun of each other, and used a language typical of the trans community and the field of sex work, which I clearly did not understand. There were a couple of times when I had to interrupt the narrative cadence to ask what something meant (such as “white party,” which I was told was when they had clients they would do coke with). And of course, on those occasions, I felt like an outsider. But not only that, I felt my “whiteness.” In my social context, there is a commonly used phrase that we use as a form of mockery when a naïve position of privilege makes a comment that reveals a lack of understanding of the complex social and cultural processes privy to those who live in different social groups that find themselves in marginal positions3: “Don’t be white,” we say. The other moment that has to do with the same feeling of not belonging mixed with distressing feelings was when I ventured into the centre of Lima to see a house/brothel that several trans women engaged in sex work rented. I discuss this experience in greater detail in Chap. 7.

3  In my work as an anthropologist in Peru, I have repeatedly experienced this feeling. For example, when I have had to work with indigenous populations or peasant communities, which at a given moment use their mother tongue to speak to each other while I am present, showing that there is a cultural universe to which I do not have full access.

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They called me the “chu” (diminutive of chucha, which is a slang term for vagina in Spanish). In other words, I am a biological woman, which at many times was a barrier when it came to establishing bonds of trust. I am not a trans woman. I was not kicked out of my house when I was a child or adolescent. I do not engage in prostitution. I was not denied the right to my identity. My life expectancy is not 35 years old. I do not encounter violence almost every time I go out on the street. The list goes on. All of this clearly leads to my being perceived as “other,” and the group that trans women represent, in turn, is “other” for me too. Various authors maintain that emotions are a structural and inevitable part of fieldwork (Kleinman, 1993; Young & Lee, 1996). These experiences emphasize the ambivalence of the relationships that occur in any research process. As such, the examples I present show a relationship of confrontation rather than collaboration. This suggests that power is not unidirectional, but instead mobile and fluctuating. In this sense, all of the research has been about learning how to build trust and transition to collaboration. Power and emotions are interwoven within the methodology, something that in itself has nothing to do with cognitions, but with how to manage the affectivity of the relationship. Therein lies the power. My research does not seek to forgo the power conditions that are imprinted in my class, race, and gender because it is an impossible task. However, I have been able to participate in communicative spaces in which said conditions are somehow diluted. Clearly, in some cases, I succeed more than in others. The communicative act is often not included in the teaching of methodology (design, techniques, and tools). In other words, the role of emotions and affectivity in the communicative act itself is not taught. However, in a research process, the research relationship is not fixed, as I mention before. Instead, the people who participated in the research is transformed by the relationship. This is a back and forth, because in the same act, the researcher is also transformed (Law, 2004). It is in this mutual process that what we can say we know emerges. In this sense, along with the dissonant experiences, where the distance was clearly felt and the fact of not belonging to the investigated group was highlighted, there were many other experiences where the distance generated by class, gender, and race were blurred. In that sense, the dialogic methodological approach allowed for the development of greater trust and emotional exchange. I find myself with trans women in some fragments, but not in all. The vision of fragmented identity often been seen from the West as something negative. However, with Anzaldúa, it must be seen as a virtue

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and a possibility. Therefore, what I can report is a process of constant relationship. Indeed, the spaces of connection and disconnection, which occur at a certain moment in the fieldwork process, have chiselled the results of this research. And that is what I can report. Finally, I want to conclude this section with a reflection on the embodiment of knowledge, which illustrates, in turn, how politics is embodied. Knowledge based on bodily experience contemplates the uncertainty, ambiguity, and disorder of life itself. This way of understanding the world criticizes the Cartesian mind-body division that is present from the Enlightenment philosophy onwards. Fieldwork, the conversations that take place within it, and the process of analysis, interpretation, and writing imply embodied practices that are carried out by researchers who have great importance in the formation of knowledge. On October 24, 2018, I travelled to the city of Arequipa, located in southern Peru, to a macro-­ regional meeting of trans women organized by the Trans Peru Network. Jana, coordinator of the Network, called me a few days before to invite me. That same day I bought my ticket without hesitation. For me it was a valuable opportunity in methodological terms, because I was going to have the opportunity to have a conversation with many of them in a single space during the three days of the workshop. But this opportunity was unique in terms of diversity. Although the vast majority of trans women with whom I had the opportunity to talk in Lima are in many cases migrants or belong to the second or third generation of migrants, trans women who attended the workshop live as such in the southern Andean area of the Peru. I was excited to know how a trans woman lived in the Andean cities of my country, what her problems are, if there were gaps in the life experience between being a trans woman in Lima and a trans woman in Puno, for example. About 15 trans women and 3 trans men attended. The workshop was primarily focused on empowering trans people. On the second day of the workshop, I remember experiencing a feeling of total disorientation. It lasted a few seconds, but it was powerful enough to remember it. I have no memory of whether something in particular triggered it, but suddenly a knowledge that I was handling at a theoretical level or, better said at a cognitive level, became anchored in my skin and a little deeper. But suddenly, as I was sitting with everyone in the room, I was struck by the certainty that all the women in the room had a penis and all the men in there

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had a vagina.4 That is to say, that data that I had previously known materialized in my body. I felt disoriented. A kind of dizziness invaded my senses for a moment. Enough time has passed for me to generate a reflection from this fact so material, so corporeal—indeed, affective. The subject of habitus has appeared—that is, the social structures that we internalize. Those beliefs that solidify like magma when it emerges to the earth’s surface and turns into stone, but which in turn allow us to travel in the world and believe that we do so safely, even if later we discover that many of them are pernicious. One must move many layers of beliefs, and not neutral beliefs but loaded with valuation where the human and the less than human are defined in their own interactions (Butler, 1990). At this point it is important as researchers, and in methodological terms, not to reproduce colonial or patriarchal practices, as John Law states: (…) to broaden method, to subvert it, but also to remake it. [...] To do this we will need to unmake many of our methodological habits, including: the desire for certainty; the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are; the belief that as social scientists we have special insights that allow us to see further than others into certain parts of social reality; and the expectations of generality that are wrapped up in what is often called ‘universalism’. But, first of all, we need to unmake our desire and expectation for security. (Law, 2004; p. 9)

In the introduction I made a brief allusion to how the topic that one chooses to investigate enunciates deep features about the researcher and also how the topic and the process of delving into it modifies deep aspects in oneself. This process of doing research built from the metaphor of skins also applies to myself. While I was delving into each of the skins of trans women, in parallel I was going through my own dermis. The story of the workshop and the feeling it evoked in me made me understand, in turn, how a rational change in my vision of the world does not keep pace with the change in my own sensitivity. In short, I faced an aesthetic change. What disoriented me, the sense of estrangement, is aesthetics. It was not an ethical judgement in the sense of what is right and what is wrong. It 4  In the case of trans men, I knew this because I had interviewed the only trans man in Peru who has had a phalloplasty. And in the case of trans women, because they all talked about having a penis. It is not very common among the population of trans women to go through the sex change intervention and those who do are well known among the group.

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was a feeling of something that I already knew but had not experienced, had not gone through. Sharing this story in the methodological chapter introduces the issue of emotions and the place where they settle: the body, which produces one type of knowledge is produced. The modern/colonial tradition has precisely separated society, subjectivity, and the body. The study of the trans problem precisely prevents Cartesian axes and rather requires a constant dialogue between apparently contradictory poles, such as being a woman and having a penis, being a man and having a vagina, as well as that of the body and subjectivity, or vulnerability and agency, to give a few examples. Through the case of trans women, there are some facts that are “a” and “not a” and yet are not trivial. Triviality in logic and mathematics is the concept that in a set of statements in certain theory, there cannot be both “p” and “-p” as they cancel each other out. However, this is only a mathematical scheme and does not constitute truth. Consistency can always be reached by throwing away or discarding everything that opposes your hypothesis. This principle allows for inconsistency. Trans people in many respects can be understood as such, like the triumph of inconsistency in a system of dualism.

Method and Methodological Tools The information presented in this book is the product of the ethnographic study that I conducted for five months with trans women in the city of Lima, Peru. Ethnography, as an open and flexible approach and method, aims to situationally capture the plurality of perspectives of social actors in a given context (Guber, 2011). Nonetheless, traditional ethnography operates under the fantasy that the ethnographer may remain outside versus, more plausibly, inside a given situation. The distance between the researcher and the researched was intended to lay the foundations of an objective methodology and considered the investigated subjects as objects of studies that produce key data for the development of the research. In other words, classical ethnography has always been positivist. On the contrary, my methodological approach starts from the recognition of the other as a subject of knowledge, which in turn changes the other from the status of object to the one of subject. As we know, colonialism is the conception that sees the other as an object, not as a subject. In contrast, my methodology was designed with the assumption that the other can be known only if they are knowledge creators.

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Blaser (2010) discusses the idea of a symmetric anthropology, which locates modernity at the same level as other kinds of ontologies. One of the greatest challenges to my research was to design my methodological tools, conduct fieldwork, and analyse the results without repeating the point of view of modernity. It has been a daily exercise in questioning my own beliefs, my guesswork, and all my assumptions that quickly appear without my realizing it. Throughout the investigation, reflective exercise has remained a constant, bringing awareness to the surface when I am exercising and reproducing what so many times “they” (school, family, state, university, and others) told us that it “must be.” Indeed, I start from the premise that doing ethnographic exercises involves the creation of personal relationships where the subjectivities of each of us who are involved meet and dialogue. In this context, the ethnographer must try to record faithfully and honestly their interlocutors’ own words, the ways of interpreting, and the imaginations of how the world of the people who collaborate with the research is organized. To achieve this, the ethnographer must be open and flexible in the face of the unexpected, in order to capture the encounters, testimonies, and circumstances that are impossible to predict. In this sense, Ferrel (2018) describes the flexibility and open attitude that the ethnographer must have as a synchrony between technical ability, intuition, and improvisation. Good ethnography remains grounded in the expertise of the ethnographer and the particulars of the situation; but it also remains ungrounded and adrift, an unfolding process of informed improvisation. In this it is once again distinct from more positivistic methods and once again less a technical procedure than a way of knowing and living in the world. (Ferrel, 2018: 160)

The ethnographic exercise that I carried out in Lima, Peru, with trans women lasted from September 2018 to March 2019. Having finished the first year of my doctorate, the population with which I would work was yet unclear to me. In other words, I did know that I would work with the trans population, but I had not yet defined whether I would also work with trans men. I knew that the best way to make a methodological decision was to do a field exploration. In my first month of fieldwork, I had extensive conversations with academic leaders such as Ximena Salazar, PhD in Anthropology, and senior research of The Health, Sexuality, and Human Development Unity (USSDH) of the Cayetano Heredia University; Alfonso Silva Santiestevan,

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health doctor and researcher on Human Rights and violence against trans people of the Cayetano Heredia University; and Eloy Neira, Sociologist and specialist in diversity and gender issues, among others. I also had conversations with leaders of different LG collectives, such as Gabriel de la Cruz, activist, actor, performer, theatre director, and founder of PRESENTE NGO; and Rudi Cocchella, anthropologist, activist, and coordinator of the No Tengo Miedo NGO.  These conversations really helped me to define a starting point for the situation of trans people in Lima-Peru, in terms of the main problems that afflict them, and in terms of their organization and demands. In addition, I had conversations with two trans men and one non-­ binary gender person. This exploration helped me to become aware that although trans men, non-binary gender persons, and trans women share nodal points in their identity searches, they also show extreme particularities that for the sake of highlighting the details and depth that each human group deserves a separate investigation. In this sense, I made the methodological decision to narrow and go deeper, instead of opening and dispersing. However, I have used the information collected to build the more open context in general and to understand the complexity of the trans movement in particular, which is reflected in Chap. 4. During my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to have conversations with 17 trans women. Although each of my interlocutors shared a unique and particular experience with me, the group has certain characteristics in common. The vast majority are between the ages of 24 to 35, with a couple of exceptions. In terms of identity classification, the situation is more complex to define. There is an easy way to classify; I could simply be guided by skin colour and certain cultural traits, and establish independent variables. However, in my ethnographic practice, I recognize that this analyticity is not possible given the history of Peru, where race, class, and gender are not independent. Since colonial times, the construction of the country in terms of a political economy based on race has always indicated a cultural condition and vice versa, where not only bodies are being distinguished but also spirit. The separation of the races that are successful in the North are not successful in the Spanish colonies because of great miscegenation. The bodies cannot be separated; there are multiple mixtures and, at the same time, the spirits cannot be evangelized, which is the objective of coloniality (to return to the entire orthodox Christian world). In practice, what is observed is a hierarchical system where the bodies

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never stopped mixing and the spirits were never standardized. So, before talking about limited versions of races, we have to talk about races-cultures (De la Cadena, 1992). In that sense, the trans women I have worked with belong to those mixed groups as I mention before. Their race is going to intersect with the class criteria. Strictly speaking, the Peruvian identity cannot be analysed from clear and distinct variables. Class defines race membership and, in turn, race defines class membership. That is why in Peru there are phrases like “money whitens” and “education whitens,” which obviously does not mean that skin colour has changed, but that status has. What we can say about the group of interlocutors in this research is that the intersection of their race, class, and gender places them in a precarious situation, where it can be observed that in economic terms, they are on the poverty line. In terms of society and opportunities, the vast majority have not finished school and therefore do not have university studies. In terms of citizenship recognition, some do not have the National Identity Document (DNI) and those that do have it are identified as males, assigned the sex with which they were born. And finally, in terms of employment, most of my interlocutors are or have been involved in prostitution. Workshops I had also attended two workshops organized by different groups led by trans women. The first encounter is the one I have described in the previous section that draws attention to the method, the body, and affection. This meeting took place in the city of Arequipa located in southern Peru, and lasted three days. It was organized by the Trans del Peru Network, which is known on a national scale, led by Jana Villaysan. Around 15 trans women from the departments of Ica, Arequipa, Puno, and Cusco, which are part of the southern region of the country, attended. The main objective of the workshop, as Jana pointed out, was to contribute to the empowerment of trans women. Various topics were touched upon: cases of murdered trans women, differences between cis women and trans women, sex work, quotas and mafias, HIV, body diversity, surgeries, hormones, and generational change, among other topics. All of these issues are part of their most direct daily life, of the reality they face as trans women. In this sense, the greatest takeaway from the meeting was the creation of affective ties and the strengthening of the group through the story of shared memories and experiences. Many of these memories were painful

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ones, yet were always narrated in an atmosphere of resilience, as this quote illustrates: “Many of us were raped by a relative or by someone close to us” (comment from the workshop) but, at the same time, highlighting their experience in a particular and unique way: “I am a trans woman with a penis and that makes me see life differently” (comment from the workshop). In turn, attending this workshop and living with this group of trans women for three days gave me the opportunity to observe the interactions, the power dynamics, and understand that they are not a homogeneous group. For example, there was a clear rivalry between the one woman with higher education and the rest, and between the one woman who did not engage in prostitution and all the others who did. Sharing days with them also gave me the opportunity to observe “the disputes over femininity”: every day of the workshop all of the trans women were quite done up, some in gala dresses, with heavy make-up, their hair and nails done, in high heels. It was a parade of sorts. Spending time with them also gave me the opportunity to observe “disputes about femininity.” During every day of the workshop, all of the trans women were very dressed up. Some were in ball gowns, and most were heavily made up, with their hair and nails done, and high heels on. It was a parade of sorts. This ethnographic fact is collected in Julia Vartabedian’s article, “Beauty that Matters: Brazilian Travesti Sex Workers Feeling Beautiful,” in which she argues that it is through beauty that trans women recognize themselves as subjects who give a positive meaning to their individual and social experiences (2016). And, of course, they received compliments and praise. Most trans women alternated attending the workshop with sex work. At the end of the day, they went to their rooms and changed their clothes. Some of them would hit the streets while others already had contacts in the city. The second meeting I participated in was part of the weekly meetings organized by the Féminas organization led by Leyla Huerta. It consisted of trans women who aim to create a space where they can receive support from their own peers and, in that way, strengthen the collective. This meeting took place in the centre of Lima, on the premises of Nuevo Peru, a left-wing political party recognized as such in 2017. Every Tuesday, New Peru hosts this space for Féminas to meet, talk, plan activities, etc. Seven trans women attended, four of them being quite young, between twenty and twenty-five years old, while the other three were in their 40 s, including Leyla.

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The pace and themes of this meeting were marked by the presence of Alexandra, a trans woman about 45  years old, who had been living in Europe for 17 years, and had returned to Peru for a few days due to her mother’s death. Alexandra was a stunning woman, at least six feet tall with long, straightened hair, wearing little makeup, a short skirt, designer sneakers, and a bag held at the elbow, which denoted a certain elegance. Her movements were smooth and leisurely. She sat with her back straight and her legs crossed. She moved her hands delicately, while still imposing her presence. As soon as she arrived, all eyes were on her. After receiving condolences for her mother’s death, Alexandra began to talk about how much she loved the deceased and about the conflictive relationship with the rest of the family, saying: “In any family where there is a crossdresser, there will be hatred, whoever it may be from.” As she spoke, you could see the respect and admiration that the other attendees felt towards her. Alexandra represented the epitome of success and accomplishment for many trans girls. First, her body had all the surgeries that many trans women want to have (nose, forehead, mouth, bust, hips, among others). Second, she came from Europe, that geographic space in the imagination of many people, and in this particular case, of many trans women, represents the point they all want to reach. In their imaginary, it represents the geographic space where a trans woman can enjoy full citizenship. In addition, she mentioned that she was legally married to a cis man, something unthinkable for these latitudes. And third, Alexandra represented the model of economic improvement. This was made clear when she stated that she had been in charge of her mother’s support for years and that she had bought the house where her mother lived before her death with her own money. Among the interviews that I have conducted, money always occupies a central role in the mindset of trans women. It is the closest thing to freedom and symbolizes many things, among them: the possibility of a return ticket to the family nucleus. If they can support their family financially, many of the women are once again accepted by their mothers, fathers, and extended family. It also opens the possibility of undertaking surgery to shape their body in the image and likeness of what they want it to reflect. It allows them to get out of prostitution, not depending on husbands, but instead pechear (supporting) the men with whom they associate. The money is directly linked to prostitution. As in the first workshop I attended, one of the most recurrent topics that were touched on was prostitution.

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The comment that synthesized this was said by Alexandra: “We are all whores. There is no one in the trans world who doesn’t turn tricks” (comment from the workshop). Both workshops helped me understand that the themes present in them were common to trans women’s experiences. The information that I gathered in each one of them, together with the individual conversations that I had, allowed me to identify common denominators in the world of trans women, as well as their particularities and nuances. I wrote down the information that appeared in these meetings in my field diary and after each encounter, I wrote down the details in a narrative form and analysed the themes that emerged in each of them. Conversations Following the epistemic approach that I propose, the interviews should be understood as conversations where, although I proposed thematic fields of inquiry, it was open to the presence of new topics proposed by the interlocutors. That is, I did not have all the power to define the discursive field, insisting on coherence with the political-epistemic proposal of the study. Although, in the field of Social Sciences, for a matter of methodological trade and for communicative comfort, we continue to name them as interviews; strictly speaking, the interview is a power mechanism where there is a subject who defines the discursive field ex ante. The subject of study, then, ends up occupying a passive place where the subject has to be circumscribed to the discursive field delimited by the ethnographer. On the other hand, naming it as conversation and reflecting on this technique as an open and flexible instrument contemplates that, although the ethnographer goes to meet the subject of study with a clear intention, the conversation lets the discursive field be a shared and collaborative construction. This allows knowledge to arise from collaboration rather than from the “enlightened” ethnographer who finds the truth from an informant who produces data. Most of the encounters I had with trans women who have collaborated with this research were at my home or in a cafe or restaurant of their choosing. Throughout the fieldwork, I did not have access to one of the most intimate materialities, their houses. Most of them told me that since they did not live alone, it was not comfortable to receive me; others mentioned that they were embarrassed; for others, it was simply not an option

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without any explanation. With most of them, I had to agree to meet repeatedly, and several days in advance because when the day of the meeting came, they cancelled it. I called on the phone many of them more than three times, always trying to find the right point between showing interest while not pestering. What helped me was having thought of a snowball methodology; that is to say, each interlocutor with whom I spoke gave me the information of two or three friends. Thus, I was not considered as a total stranger. Being open conversations, on many occasions the result, in methodological terms, ended intertwining biographical with ethnography. Bringing from feminist theory the claim that the “the personal is political” or “the private is political,” I was interested in the first place to pay attention to the domestic world of trans people and I access this through talking about domestic spaces, recognizing this space as the first space where trans people do politics (Hemmings, 2011). Hundertwasser’s metaphor of the skins served as an ethnographic guide. Using this as a conductive thread, I was focused on the political-aesthetic practices of the transition from a moment of subjectivity to a public moment. In all “skins” we can see aesthetic practices. That first public space implies a political struggle that passes through the body itself (in form and kinesthesia). Then, the struggle is observed in how they dress it and all the strategies that indicate a desire to be recognized in that domestic space and in the outside for what she feels that is. The conversations are part of a more daily flow with less structure. This allows a more horizontal and less rigid encounter, which opens the door for the emergence of new possibilities. Naming as conversations to the technique that I have used to approach to this study, allows, in turn, to contemplate other forms of language that exceed words, such as body, movement, kinesthesia, and body language, that make up angular pieces in my research. In that sense, I want to bring up one of the encounters I had with Jana and Yazmin, which I detail with more extension in Chap. 6, intended for the third and fourth skin. I bring it to the fore this time to reflect on the learnings of the ethnographic method. Two weeks before the day I met Yazmin she had just had surgical breast implants. Her operation and the postoperative period had prevented us from meeting each other earlier. With that information in mind, when she came to my house, I asked her how she felt, if she was happy with her new breasts, and I also asked her about the size. She, very “loose of bones” (which means carefree), as is said in these latitudes, answered me that she

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was elated, although in pain, and immediately afterwards she raised the shirt and showed them to me. I told her they were beautiful. Jana, for her part, also wanted to show me hers. And she did. But she added that hers had taken on shape and size from the hormones they were taking and that she was quite happy with them. She added that it was an option to surgically enhance them at a later stage of her transition. This fact, which could be described as anecdotal, is extremely relevant for two points in particular. In the first place, there is an issue that has to do with the first skin, with the idea of poiesis, because the aesthetic act of symbolically sculpting a body requires the gaze of another in search of recognition or a sense of belonging. In this case, the recognition of a cis female, and, in turn, the reiteration that the three of us belong to the realm of the feminine. And, secondly, here the relevance on methodological reflection highlights the ethnographic fact where the body is patent and is not absent. It is a communication that accompanies the verbal, which has to do with the construction of the body, with its materiality and not only with subjectivity. Data Analysis and Interpretation In the entire research process, a key element was my field journal. Field notes are a crucial piece in ethnography, since it is where the researcher’s observations collected in the field are directly recorded, but it is also the mirror of the questions, reflections and analyses that arise during the research process. Although, I had the opportunity to audio record each of the conversations I had, my diary allowed me to record non-verbal aspects, such as material data dealing with the body, movement, and kinesthesia, as well as the physical characteristics of my interlocutors. In my field diary, in addition, I wrote my first impressions of the problem investigated, I highlighted the main themes that had come up after each of the meetings, those that most caught my attention, the problems that were repeated, and so on. And finally, in that notebook I wrote what each of the interactions made me feel. It was an ethnographic notebook where the affective theme was always present to understand from the heart what was happening in reality. This notebook served as my agenda. I kept a record of the people with whom I had spoken, the dates agreed upon, and those that were yet to be made. About once a month, I would review my notes and jot down the topics that were repeated the most, thus building preliminary thematic indexes. At the same time, in this notebook, I wrote down the main topics that came out in each of the workshops, the interactions

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that caught my attention, and several of the quotes that were said according to the topic addressed. This was part of the entire investigation process. Somehow it was the instrument by which I articulated my method of research. Something that says that I am not outside, but I am inside. Therefore, I was not dealing with data construction and objective discourse, but I was dealing with corporeal sensations and affective feelings. This implies recognizing that the act of knowing is not only a logical act of objectivity, but it is above all an affective and sensitive act. At the same time, the entire research process, which focused directly on the visibility of the trans problem, has accompanied my own process of building my body, my sexuality, my political options in different order, and my aesthetic preferences, among others. This field diary, then, symbolizes the beginning of my data analysis, which allowed me to realize the main issues that were emerging and to think about a narrative to put the universe of my research into perspective. For transcribing the recordings, I hired a young anthropologist, an LGBTIQ activist, who, in addition to doing the important work of transcribing the conversations I had with each of the trans women, was a great interlocutor to think about the issues that arose. Once I had all the interviews transcribed and I realized that I had enough information, I began to read them repeatedly, to process the information, to detect more rigorously the topics that were emerging. Identifying the big themes, I began to process the transcripts, and I identified quotes that accounted for each of those big themes. With that finished, I proceeded to write short essays, initially merely descriptive. Then those essays took on an analytical form and were the germ of the chapters that I present here. It was almost at the end of Chap. 6 that I noticed that the metaphor of skins, which had served as a thematic field guide for the conversations, was in turn useful to order all my book. Ethics in the Work with a Vulnerable Population The design of the present investigation was approved by the University of Warwick (see Appendix A). This means that, before starting the field work, I was already contemplating ethical issues that involve recognizing trans women as a vulnerable population but at the same time autonomous. There were two main ethical issues to consider in my research: (a) the dilemmas of representation, and (b) a trans person’s past and sensitive themes as central to data collection.

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Regarding the dilemmas of representation, currently, the debates around representation, that is, around who can speak for whom, are booming in the production of knowledge in the academy both in the North and in the South (Alcoff, 1991).5 It is a debate that is born within the anthropological discipline transcending it to all Social Sciences and that has to do with a critique of the Cartesian epistemology of seeing the “other” as an object instead of a subject, which implies a positivist affirmation where a “universal” truth can be reached. This, in turn, is related to a desire for dominance and self-privilege to be the knower of the truth of the other. This practice has often ended up perpetuating relations of power and promoting the reinscription of sexual, racial and national hierarchies, among others. In that sense, as I mention before, it would be remiss to ignore that I am not a trans person or a member or insider of the groups or grassroots organizations that I worked with. However, at the same time, I am an activist who belongs to the LGTBIQ movement. That puts me in a liminal position, something that questions the epistemological possibility to talk in terms of subject-object in my research. In this regard, I understand that it is not a question of finding an objective, positivist truth that concerns the trans community; rather, my purpose is to give an account of the relationship between the me and the people who are part of this study. Insofar as all interpretation is relational, contextual, and historical, it is part of my method to make explicit my own subjectivity, the history of my relationship with this movement, as well as my political commitment to its causes. In this sense, it is central to understand the qualitative method not only as the use of specific “neutral” techniques, but also to develop an awareness concerning the power relations that may be enacted during the very field research actions. Moreover, my research deals with thanking the trans collective action for its great contribution to the renewal of politics in Peru and with saying that I do not represent the trans community. Rather, I am studying politics. Furthermore, I thank the trans women who participated in this research, because it gives me the option to show something hopeful for 5  On the dilemmas of representation, Linda Alcoff in her article “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (1991) makes an interesting and profound reflection on the different aspects of speaking for others in the academy. However, I would like to stay here with one of her final reflections where she argues that a discursive practice that has its origin in suspicious motives or in privileged social locations should not be enough to repudiate it. Instead, it is of utmost importance to ask ourselves what are the effects of speaking for others, and that the central question to be asked then is: will it enable the empowerment of oppressed peoples? (1991: 29).

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the country. As I explained in the Introduction, I grew up in a context where there was no hopeful myth for my country. The fall of modern politics allows us to recognize that the ways of doing politics in Peru are changing and bringing to the forefront forms of political action that are considered subaltern or premodern. In that sense, this way of doing politics, which historically reconnects actions and practices of doing politics that have been made invisible by the single history, is somehow a way of healing the colonial wound and the politics of oblivion. In that sense, this research is not one of representation, but rather that there is a communality between trans people and myself because of a political concern that exceeds the terms of sexuality, gender, race/culture, among others. In terms of the second area, my project explores details around trans women’s life stories. However, as these were conversations and not interviews, the discursive field was never defined. Although I had topics to work on, I did not interfere with the trans women’s desire not to talk about certain topics and also to talk about other things, where unexpected topics came up that were not foreseen in my guide. In this way, when trans women elaborated on a pain, a pleasure or a future longing, I played the role of listening, but also of containment. In other words, all the conversations I had were governed by the search for an empathic listening, without hiding my emotions, which implied physical contact, closeness, there were even conversations where I cried with them, others where I was the object of mockery. In all of them, my stance was to improvise in the context of the interaction without pretending to be on the outside, which is the ideology that has guided the social sciences for decades. In this way, a collaborative discourse was constructed.

Limitations The study’s first limitation lies in the fieldwork. Due to time, my research objectives, and characteristics of the population with which I worked, it was not possible to have a greater coexistence in time and space with my interlocutors. This would have helped, in terms of confidence, to have had access to their homes and their most intimate materiality. Without a doubt, this would have enriched my approach to their lives in terms of the first and second skin, and the experience of being a trans woman in these latitudes. The second limitation is represented by the challenges of a researcher from the South who works on southern issues conducting a study for a

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university in the North. Specifically, it was a challenge to translate from Spanish to English. This was a challenge on two levels. First of all, it is difficult to convey the fullness of the quotes and the voice of my interlocutors in translation. As we know, language represents culture, and in this case, it symbolizes a region in particular, Latin America; a country within it, Peru; a city, Lima; and a subculture, that of trans women. This subculture, in addition, has created its own linguistic codes full of its own semantic resources where someone outside of it can quickly become lost. Therefore, although I broadly identified with the language used, which is common to Peruvian culture in general and Lima in particular, there are expressions, as well as neologisms and nuances typical of the trans subculture with which I was not entirely privy. In that sense, I have tried to make a translation as faithful as possible, trying to reflect the meaning that the trans community gives to words, always in context. Also, in many cases I have kept some words that contain important symbolic meanings in the speech of my interlocutors. Although, as Tyulenev (2014) argues, making a translation makes it possible to reach more and different readers, as well as inserting the contributions of different geopolitical places in the global culture debate, it does not imply, however, that this act is not problematic. I believe that in any act of translation there is something that is lost and this should be made explicit as a challenge for future research. Thirdly, in the same way that I have done the translation for the quotations of my interlocutors, I have carried it out for my own ideas, feelings, analyses, and interpretations. As English is not my mother tongue, I have always felt that I am not very funny, shrewd, or even intelligent in this language. However, it is an issue that runs through us, I believe, to all researchers from the South, recognizing the importance of going through this process with a view to developing a policy of the visible and the sensitive for the issues that concern us and commit.

Conclusions In this chapter I have presented the methodological approach to the research topic, where one of the central elements in the conception of the design of the qualitative methodology and the fieldwork has started from conceiving the people who have participated in the research as subjects of study; moving away from positivist ethnography that considers the “other” as the object of study, with the pretension of finding universal truths.

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The findings of this research represent an exploratory analysis of life experiences and a way of doing politics through the body in a group of trans women. My intention, then, has nothing to do with searching for universal truths or great metadiscourses. Rather my political-epistemic position is to deconstruct local theories; theories that do not reproduce again the coloniality of knowledge. In that sense, the purpose of this research is to contribute to the academy debates around politics, aesthetics, and gender from an analysis in dialogue with the feminist and decolonial approaches. I have appealed to the Hundertwasser metaphor of the five skins, which, on the one hand, served as a guide for the topics of conversation I held with the trans women; and, on the other hand, I have also used it to report the encounter through the analytical chapters. In this way, the metaphor of the skins occupies a central place, not only in methodological terms, but also at a conceptual level since, from its own reference, it refers directly to the body as a place of knowledge, where there is no division between the subjective and the corporeal, between the outside and the inside, between the macro and micro dimensions. Rather, all borders, all skins, are porous and communicated by osmosis. In methodological terms, one the contribution of this research is that the process of interpretation is not a moment that can be isolated from the entire research process; but rather, responds to the place of enunciation that the researcher occupies. In other words, the researcher participates in the investigated topic actively and the product of this process is always one of co-authored. In this sense, this book represents a call for the construction of relational knowledge, where knowledge is produced in the encounter between the researcher and the researched, and in this process the embodied emotional affects play a predominant role. This fact also calls for a reflection on the challenges that are imbricated in the encounter with respect to power relations during the research and to be aware of not reproducing colonized and patriarchal practices of domination. Research, the very production of knowledge designed by coloniality and modernity, is established to dominate. The origin of the Social Sciences, and of the entire Western academy to this day, is a knowledge system that is basically an act of domination, of control, of power, so to say. But there’s more to it. As previously mentioned, at the core of this is the idea of producing a supposedly universal non-situated knowledge that hides what we could call an epistemic narcissism. In this sense, the present investigation has focused on collecting praxis, action as a place of

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knowledge production, which is a way of breaking away from that epistemic horizon of objectivity, purity, and universality. In short, it is about recognizing that in the action itself, in the praxis, there is a knowledge that we must acquire in order to see outside the knowledge associated with the discursive language. It is here that knowledge is built. It is a know-how, where the aesthetic-political struggle of these women must be understood as an option to transform beliefs. The definition of “beliefs” must be understood pragmatically as habits of action. That is, “I want you to see me on the street without killing me,” “Don’t violate me,” “I want you to see me as the same and different.” This research, then, is inscribed in this still utopia of producing knowledge without domination because the orthodox design of a research is an act of domination, per se. It is power over another. However, following the precepts feminist research, not everything is power “over.” Power can be “for.” For example, it can create capacities for the exercise of freedom, as Amartya Sen would say. It is in this horizon that this research is inscribed, because by making visible the practical knowledge of these women and their reality, I am alerting and summoning, while at the same time communing with the desire to contribute to the possibilities of a better life and a society. The following chapter is the opening chapter in the sequence of analytical chapters of this research. In it, I delve into the history of the emergence of the trans movement in Lima, Peru, which has been elaborated using first-hand data and secondary source.

Bibliography Alcalde, M. C., & ProQuest (Firm). (2010). The woman in the violence: Gender, poverty, and resistance in Peru. Vanderbilt University Press. Alcoff, L. (1991). The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique, 20, 5–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354221 Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Appadurai, A. (1988). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press. Berry, K., & Clair, P. (2011). Reflecting on the call to ethnographic reflexivity: A collage of responses to questions of contestation. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 11(2), 199–209. Blaser, M. (2010). Storytelling globalization from the Chaco and beyond. Duke University Press. Bordo, S. (2013). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. Univ. of California Press.

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Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR, TRC). (2003). Informe final. CVR. De la Cadena, M. (1992). Las mujeres son más indias: Etnicidad y género en una comunidad del Cuzco. Revista Isis Internacional, Ediciones de las Mujeres No. 16. Santiago de Chile. De la Cadena, M. (2000). Indigenous Mestizos: The politics of race and culture in Cuzco, Peru 1919–1991. Duke University Press. Douglas, M. (1988). Símbolos naturales. Alianza Editorial. Escobar, A. (2003). ‘Worlds and knowledges otherwise’: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research program. Cuadernos del CEDLA, 16, 31–67. Ferrel, J. (2018). Criminological ethnography: Living and knowing. In S. Rice & M. Maltz (Eds.), Doing ethnography in criminology. Discovery through fieldwork (pp. 147–162). Springer. Finlay & Gough. (2003). Reflexivity: A practical guide for researchers in health and social sciences. Fox Keller, E., & Ghontkowky. (1996). Mind’s eye. In Fox Keller, Evelyn y Longino, Helen (Ed.), Feminis and Science. Oxford University Press. Frankenberg, R. (2004). On unsteady ground: Crafting and engaging in the critical study of whiteness. In M. Bulmer & J. Solomos (Eds.), Researching race and racism. Routledge. Guber, R. (2011). La etnografía. Método, campo y reflexividad. Siglo XXI. Harding, S. (1987). The method question. Hypatia. A Journal Feminist Philosophy. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women. The reinvention of nature. Routledge. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ MeetsOncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Journal of the History of Biology, 30, 494–497. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004349615837 Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2007). When species meet. Universidad de Minnesota. 978-0-8166-5045-3, 0-8166-5045-4. Heise, L.  L. (1998). Violence against women: An integrated, ecological framework. Violence Against Women, 4(3), 262–290. Hemmings, C. (2011). Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Duke University Press. Keating, A. (Ed.) (2009). Entre Mundos/among Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan. Kleinman, S. (1993). Emotions and fieldwork (Qualitative Research Methods).

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Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press. Lander, E. (2000). Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos. En Lander, E. (Comp.). La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Lastra, A. (2008). Walter Mignolo y la idea de América Latina. Un intercambio de opiniones. Tabula Rasa, núm. 9, julio-diciembre, pp. 285–310. Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca. Bogotá, Colombia. Law, J. (2004). After method. Mess in social science research. Routledge. Le Breton, A. (1990). Antropología del cuerpo y modernidad. Ediciones Nueva Visión Buenos Aires. Letherby, G. (2003). Feminist research in theory and practice. Open University Press. (See Chapter 5 which I have attached as a pdf. Ebook in library). Levine, P., & Frederick, A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Levine, P., & MacNaughton, I. (2004). “Breath and consciousness: Reconsidering the viabllity of breathwork in psychological and spiritual lnterventions in human development”. En I. MacNaughton (Ed.), Body, breath, and consciousness: A somatics anthology (pp. 267–293). Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Martin-Baro, M. (1984). Hacia una psicología de la liberación. Hacia una psicología de la liberación. MARTÍN-BARÓ-7 – ©Psicología sin Fronteras. Revista Electrónica de Intervención Psicosocial y Psicología Comunitaria, 1(2), 7–14. 2006. Mauss, M. (1971). Sociología y Antropología. TECNOS, MADRID. Mignolo, W. (2000a). La colonialidad a lo largo y a lo ancho: el hemisferio occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad. En Lander, E. (Comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Mignolo, W. (2007). La idea de América Latina. La herida colonial y la opción decolonial. Edición Gedisa. Pearce, R. (2018). Understanding trans health: Discourse, power and possibility. Polity Press. Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge. Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental culture. The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge. Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Shiwy & Castro-Gómez. (2002). Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales. Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder: perspectivas desde lo andino. Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar / Abya-Yala

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Turner, T. (1980). The social skin. In J. Cherfas (Ed.), Not work alone: A cross–cultural view of activities superfluous to survial (pp. 112–140). Temple Smith. Tyulenev, S. (2014). Translation and society: An introduction. Vartabedian, J. (2016). Beauty that matters: Brazilian Travesti sex workers feeling beautiful. Sociologus, 66(1), 73–96. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin Beauty that Matters. Walsh, C. (2002). “(De)Construir la interculturalidad. Consideraciones críticas desde la política, la colonialidad y los movimientos indígenas y negros en el Ecuador,” en Interculturalidad y política. Lima: Red de apoyo de las ciencias sociales, en prensa. Young, E. H., & Lee, R. M. (1996). Fieldworker feelings as data : ‘emotion work’ and ‘feeling rules’ in first person accounts of sociological fieldwork.

CHAPTER 4

Tracing the History of the Trans Movement in Lima, Peru

With this complex political context that we have, I do not think that the State will not recognise us as citizens. I think that the big change is going to be in the mentality of the people, which is gradual and slow—like a turtle’s pace—but it is going to happen. (Jana)

This chapter opens the three subsequent chapters, which give an account of the five skins that illustrate my empirical findings and concretize the theoretical arguments of the research. In this chapter I pay attention on the local context which allows my interlocutors to be located in time and space within the emergence of the trans movement in Lima, Peru. Lima, the capital of Peru, is a city that brings together a third of the national population, and having received in different decades massive migrations from the interior of the country, it is a space where we find greater diversity in cultural terms. At the same time, being the capital, there are a greater number of organizations and people who struggle for the visibility of the trans movement and, at the same time, the LGBT movement is articulated from there. Although there is a growing scholarship concerning the LGTBIQ movement in Peru, in this region the literature addressing specifically trans people’s problems, struggles, and activism—the focus of my research—is still incipient. Indeed, in the Peruvian case, trans persons (particularly

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MTF) became visible only after the HIV/AIDS pandemic, as subjects of both government policies and media broadcasts; however, scholarship about Peruvian trans people is still belated, and in the case of FTM trans persons, it is almost non-existent. Nonetheless, it is possible to trace trans people’s earliest movements first and organized activism later, following the paths of feminist, gay and lesbian, and later LGTBIQ movements in Peru. Although the LGTBIQ movement is inclusive of trans people, in the Peruvian case, as we shall see, the presence of trans people—in terms of leadership, composition, and political agenda—is still behind the other participants involved. This situation has prompted the emergence of trans people’s organizations within the continent and particularly in Peru. However, the relation with feminist and gay-lesbian movements is more complex. Indeed, during the 1970s and 1980s, the heteronormative bias of the feminist movement, and the homonormative bias of gay-lesbian movement, put at odds the political relation between these movements and trans people (see below); however, this conflict allows us to reconstruct some aspects of trans people’s political struggles. I would like to add that to construct this historical narrative I have not only been guided by the development of the movements linked to considerations of sex/gender, but I have also paid attention to how certain aesthetic-political practices marked important milestones and were escalating in the creation of common shared meanings in the last 30 years. In what follows, I will briefly sketch the historical background of colonial and early republican periods to give an account about the development of patriarchal ideologies which frame gender-sex perceptions and practices in Latin America, paying attention to the building of a heteronormative and homophobic common sense, which still prevails in the region and which also structures coloniality/patriarchy. Then I will focus on contemporary history, paying attention to the feminist movement from the 1960s to the present day, and to the Gay and Lesbian movement since the 1970s. This section will end with a presentation of the trans movement.

Colonial and Early Republican Historical Background Before the arrival of Christopher Columbus to America, archaeological evidence—particularly paintings in ceramics—and ethnohistoric research based on chronicles and other colonial written sources, archaeologists,

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anthropologists, and historians reveal the presence of homosexual practices within different cultures in the territory of today’s Latin America, such as Mochicas and Incas in Peru or the Aztecs in Mexico, among others. Although literature on this topic is scarce, there is a growing consensus within Latin American academia about how, after the arrival of the Europeans, the hetero-normative, patriarchal model was established in this region, and how it structured a new social order that was a reflection of the one already configured in Spain in the fifteenth century (Segato, 2013; Lugones, 2008a, b; Horswell, 2013). It is well known that since the conquest of America, all people who lived in this territory were classified in terms of race (Quijano, 2000). The biggest distinction between the Spanish and the indigenous people was the well-known binomials savage/civilized, rational/irrational, primitive/ civilized, traditional/modern. In other words, the inhabitants of this part of the world were considered mentally, emotionally, and spiritually less-­ than-­human, equating them to animals. With the expansion of colonialism around the world, the notion of “race” emerged, which determined and structured power domination relationships based on the belief that there were superior and inferior human beings. In racial terms, the elemental process was the separation between white and non-white, where the “non-­ white” category included people of African and indigenous descent, among others. This same division is applied to gender: male-non-male, where in the category of “non-male” is comprised of women and diverse sexualities. The very structuring of modern/colonial thought tends to establish the binary system as a way of being and thinking about society.1 However, this system is in trouble when confronted with that which does not fit into the dual system of classification. For instance, this happened with the notion of “mestizo” and “caste” in the colony. When the word mestizaje was coined (which is nothing more than “stained blood”), it described the mixing of Spanish and indigenous, more precisely of a Spanish male and indigenous woman. The other mestizos are not called mestizos, but castes. There were at least nine terms for each of these castes: mulato (Spanish with black), sambo (indigenous with black), tercerón (mulatto with Spanish), etc. (Cangas 1923). This series of categories is not 1  In turn, two republics were founded in the colony: The Republic of Indians and the Republic of Spaniards, where each one had its respective legislations. Both were related in a hierarchical manner, making it clear that race was an organization of the economy, of who produced value and who lived off the income.

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named within the category “mestizo.” While these denominations are mixtures too, they go beyond the white-non-white binary. All these combinations are part of the “non-white” category and are betray a rigid hierarchy and the hegemony and superiority of whiteness that persists until today. Indeed, almost 90% of the country’s population self-identifies as mestizo and indigenous, while only 5% identifies as white. The intention of the colony was twofold, an idea of separation of bodies in terms of even prohibiting their mixing, since the political economy of the colony was based on that distinction of bodies from the construction of the ideology of race. On the other hand, this differentiating proposal went hand in hand with a homogenized proposal to annul spiritual differences, which today we would call cultural. In practice, bodies were mixed and souls were not fully homogenized. And what emerged was a hierarchy that in the colony was called races. Since the conquest of America, Christianization, while trying to homogenize the spirits, at the same time assumed this racial distinction. In other words, the construction of the idea of race has been at the heart of the Christian religion, through which those considered white have been racially ascribed to non-whites (Medovoi, 2012). This social classification brought with colonialism penetrated all social life and gave rise to new geocultural and social identities (Quijano, 2000). Since then, “it has permeated each and every area of social existence, constituting the most effective form of social domination both material and intersubjective” (Lugones, 2008a, b: 79). Therefore, it is important to take into consideration what changes colonization brought in order to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and within global and Eurocenteric capitalism (Lugones, 2008a, b; Quijano, 2000). Latin American feminist scholars identify this moment as the outset of the patriarchal system in this territory. (Lugones, 2008a, b; Segato, 2013; Rivera, 2010) According to them, the Spanish conquerors brought with them the idea that women are less than humans, passive subjects, lacking in rational thinking, requiring protection like a child. However, in the same vein, women represented danger and temptation as well. Within this tradition, the work of Paula Gunn Allen (1992) focuses on Native American tribes. According to Allen, many of the native communities had a matriarchal organization, and they recognized in positive terms homosexuality as well as a third gender. She also points out the importance of the role of spirituality in a gynecocratic society, something very far from the production of knowledge in the West. Many indigenous tribes

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believed that the primary force of the universe was feminine. Therefore, replacing the role of feminine spiritual plurality with a male supreme being was crucial to establish colonial dominium. Following the same line of argument albeit in a different sense, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017) details how, through the colony’s imposed hetero-patriarchal violence, heteronormativity, and transphobia, the ontology of its people was modified. Before the colony and the imposition of Christianity, as in many other indigenous communities, there was an open, flexible, and varied vision of the genders. Similarly, the spiritual world and the approach to its gods were not gendered. The colony imposed the gender binary as a control mechanism for indigenous bodies, imposing the masculine as a more important space than the feminine and erasing all diversity. Likewise, Gloria Anzaldúa in her book Borderlands (2007) tells of a young woman who lived near her house and was described by the people of her town as a woman half the year with a vagina that bled once a month and as a man the other half of the year with a penis and urinated standing up. They called it “half and half” (mita’ and mita’). Anzaldua in this regard maintains: “…there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift” (2007: 41). In other words, the conquest not only interrupted proper forms of social organization of production but also disturbed, and even supplanted, gender systems, including the very classification of gender roles. For many colonized societies, the previous structuring was based on gender and, relatedly, the kinship system, which is another form of constitution of law and coexistence. If external actors intervene in them and create different systems of organizing work, social life and understanding the cosmos, the reproduction system itself is damaged. Much of the authors who study LGTB issues point out that, upon landing in the New World, Europeans found a wide diversity of people, cultures, and civilizations, whose sexual practices differed greatly from the Judeo-Christian cultural matrix, and much of their practice were diametrically opposed—attitudes towards nudity, virginity, incest, polygamy, homosexuality, transsexuality, and transvestism (Mott, 2000). For instance, this topic surfaces in “Gay Indians in Brazil: Untold Stories of the Colonization of Indigenous Sexualities” (Fernandes & Arisi, 2017), which

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analyses the ways the colonization of the Brazilian country shaped the sexuality of its indigenous population. The authors claim that all the efforts of government and religious institutions to impose the traditional model of family, considered as “normal,” did not avoid the resistance of the natives. The book is also interesting, because it analyses and establishes strong connections between these dissenting practices and the development of indigenous movements, interethnic relations, as well as indigenous policies in Brazil.2 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the period of the greatest intolerance and persecution of people who practiced sodomy in the colonial space (Mott, 2000). This “sin” was considered as a crime compared to treason or regicide, and the Inquisition had the right to put to death those who practiced it. There are many references during this period that describe persecutions, vexations, and murders of people with homoerotic practices. One of the most well-known historical events occurred in Mexico in 1658, when 123 people were denounced, 19 of them arrested, and 14 burned at the stake (Mott, 2000). In the same vein, the article “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California” explores the methods employed by the Spaniards to dispel the Joyas (“jewels” in English, the Spanish name for third-gender people), and contemplates the wounds and scars present in California Indian cultures as a consequence of this (dis)encounter. Moreover, the author examines the continuity of this third gender—first named joyas and then jotos, a blend of the Spanish for homosexual, or faggot. The quote below is an extract of the memoir of a soldier named Pedro Fages written in 1775, which shows the general view and the deepest hate of the Spanish soldiers and the priests for “what they viewed as homosexual relationships.” I have substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing, and character of women— there being two or three such in each village—pass as sodomites by profession (it being confirmed that all these Indians are much addicted to this abominable vice) and permit the heathen to practice the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies. They are called joyas, and are held in great esteem. Let 2  In that vein we find Rahul Rao Rao’s Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality for the case of Uganda and India, which is at the intersection of queer theory and postcolonial studies. In this book the author examines and theorizes homocapitalism as a category of analysis, as well as the ways in which queer functions as a metonymy for race, imperialism, modernity, among others.

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this mention suffice for a matter which could not be omitted, —on account of the bearing it may have on the discussion of the reduction of these natives— with a promise to revert in another place to an excess so criminal that it seems even forbidden to speak its name. . . But we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor ignorants. (Pedro Fages, 1937 in A. Miranda, 2013: 257)

There is also the book Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture (2005) of Michael J. Horswell. In it, the author studies the presence and devotion to Chuqui Chinchay (the apu of the otorongos), a mountain deity of the jaguars who was the patron of dual-gendered indigenous peoples.3 He claims that the existence of what he calls “third gender” does not necessarily denote the existence of three genders, but it is rather a way to surpass the bipolarity of sex and gender. He mentions that “their transvested attire served as a visible sign of a third space that negotiated between the masculine and the feminine, the present and the past, the living and the dead. Their shamanic presence invoked the androgynous creative force often represented in Andean mythology” (2005: 2). He argues that the third gender’s body functioned as a sign within a semiotic language which put in the centre the corporeal plane through representation and communication rather than with the written system. This is reminiscent of Anzaldua’s story about the person who was called “half and half” (mitá and mitá) in their town, a story through which she realizes that the feminine and the masculine coexist. In the epistemic horizons of Andean cultures, for example, the feminine and the masculine are categories that structure and give meaning to the cosmos, as already mentioned previously for the indigenous communities mentioned by Betasamosake. The masculine and the feminine not only structure man and woman, but the world and the cosmos in a general sense. In this regard, the masculine and the feminine would not be perceived in a dyadic way, since there are various possible mixtures and degrees of mixing. Therefore, it could be argued that Anzaldúa, through the story of the “half and half,” is actually thinking of queer as mestizo; that is, as a mixture of different proportions of the masculine and the 3  The Apu (spirit of the mountain) are the tectonic deities that are part of the Andean spirituality, similar to the Japanese Shinto.

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feminine. There is not a third category per se, but the third category is derived from mixing. I argue that Anzaldúa does not build more genres; rather, this half-and-half woman would be an expression of just that: part male and part female. This is particularly relevant for Latin America where, as mentioned in Chap. 2, the understanding and reality of the trans world is to think of a woman with a penis and a man with a vagina. On the other hand, while it is true that the practice of abjection was inherent to colonialism, it was renewed throughout the Republican Era (1821–onwards) via institutions such as the state apparatus, schools, academic production, and, most notably, the Catholic Church, among others. As we know, the foundation of nations in this part of the world followed the European model of the nation of the time. Around the onset of the Republican era, I have found limited information on the situation of LGTB people. Nevertheless, in the book The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights (2014) edited by Javier Corrales and Mario Pecheny, the article “Cuban CondemNation of Queer Bodies” by Emilio Bejel focuses on the second half of the nineteenth century. The author claims that the modern concept of nationhood is an invention that sustains itself determining what is not part of the nation, that is, as a relational category. Nevertheless, Bejel points out that the process of building the idea of nation among citizens is, at the same time, a process based on mechanisms of identification or “shared memories.” The purpose of his essay is to study the ways in which homosexuality has influenced and shaped nationalism in Cuba, particularly during the birth of modern Cuban society. He claims, “As Doris Sommer has shown, in relation to Latin America in general, the modernist project of bringing coherence to the ‘imagined community’ used the image of the heterosexual bourgeois family, symbolically employing the erotic attraction between the lovers (with its corresponding elements of jealousy and loyalty) to allegorise the building of the modern Latin American nation” (2014: 47). In the same book, we find another article entitled “Male Same-Sex Sexuality and the Argentine State, 1880–1930” (2014). The author, Pablo Ben, claims that repression was a central practice to understand the relationship between the state and sexuality during this period in Argentina. One principally argues that, though the French Revolution and its liberal approaches had a profound effect on laws of sexuality in Latin America,

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this could not prevent the policing of sexuality. However, while sexual activity between men in other parts of the world was criminalized, the lack of a legal ground for repression afforded them more freedom of action (at least in legal terms) to perform in the public sphere. The author points out that state officials used the category of “sexual inversion” when representing same-sex sexuality as an obstacle to nation-building, but it was not depicted in laws at that time. In fact, the police did not enforce any particular regulation against sex between men until the 1930s. Ben concludes that, though the penalization of homosexuality was erased from the penal code, it continued to exist in practice. Another article in the same book focuses on Mexico during the same time period. The author, Stephen O. Murray, adds that the decriminalization of sodomy and a vagueness in the interpretation by the police force allowed individual police officers to decide which practices were deviant or opposed to public morality. However, this absence of regulations against sodomy and the growth of Mexico City during the 1930s resulted in a significant number of bars and baths. During World War II, more than ten gay bars operated in Mexico City until 1959, when authorities closed them under the pretext of “cleaning up vice.” Therefore, “the perceived failures of masculinity of maricones made (and makes) them ‘fair game’ to be robbed, beaten, and used as sexual receptacles by males upholding conventional ‘macho’ notions of masculinity, particularly policemen” (2014: 63). Despite these aggressions, there were no groups or organizations that denounced these oppressions and abuses at least since the early 1970s. To sum up this section, the guiding thread of this historical narrative is the construction of modern-colonial patriarchy supported by the idea of heteronormativity as well as by the definition of abjection as a social necessity, in particular for the construction of modern nation-states. On the one hand, as Maria Lugones (2008a, b) argues, trying to understand how gender was conceptualized in pre-Columbian societies allows us to recognize the nature of the changes in the social matrix of those societies after the arrival of the Western conquerors, and to question the use of “gender” as a part of social organization. These changes were introduced through heterogeneous processes that finally put women and anyone outside the gender dichotomy model in a lower position. Therefore, the conclusions of these important studies lend to the argument that the idea of gender, as well as the concept of race, is a fiction; nonetheless, it has a very powerful

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concreteness in people’s lives.4 Indeed, gender has remained a powerful fiction and hegemony for a long time; however, to the extent that these historical cases reveal the constructed nature of gender, they likewise destabilize the concept of gender. In addition, those cases provide the historical background to the society I study. On the other hand, nineteenth-­ century independence processes were different for each Latin American country. In some cases, countries adopted the French liberal approach, while in others they continued to be governed by colonial codes. However, for those countries that adopted the French liberal approach, this did not necessarily lead to greater freedom concerning the rights of people who practiced sodomy.

Contemporary History: Feminism, Gay-Lesbian, and Trans Movement History of the Feminism Movement In Peru’s twenty centuries of history, we did have women struggling for their rights in terms of seeking improvements for women’s conditions, highlighting their struggles for access to education, suffrage, divorce, among others. It is important to point out that women were active in the first half of the twentieth century in terms of struggles for rights as women, without questioning the system of power relations or having a gendered reading of their problems. It is during the late 1970s that the women’s movement and then the gender movement arose. This was perhaps seen as the very first crisis in modern leftists. As elsewhere in the world, the first crisis of modern leftists was the fact that middle-class feminists could not find in the traditional leftists a platform to raise their concerns. During the 1980s, the gay and lesbian movement followed a similar path. However, during this decade the younger social actors at that time first began political activism through underground expressive arts, and in this regard, they

4  Naming gender as a fiction can be an ambiguous statement since, although both gender and the idea of race have been constructed notions, it does not mean that it has a concreteness and a meaning for the lives and socialization of people for good and/or for worse. They are categories with great power, as well as hegemony, and they dictate the forms of socialization in society. That is something very real—so real that it can become traumatic and require enormous work to modify it.

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communicated both criticism to lesbian and gay organization and fostered new insights about gender, sexuality, the body, and desire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a women’s movement emerged with iconic figures, such as the writer Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852–1909), who struggled for a divorce law and for women’s university admittance. Another important figure was that of Flora Tristan (1803–1844), a historical figure who drew attention to the condition of women. In these years, it can be said that there was a concentration of initiatives, practices, and female figures within the context of the worldwide emergence of the feminist movement. This concentration is evident in literature from the novels written by women and the themes of these novels. Similarly, this emergent feminist movement is observed in the appearance of modern dance in Peru, thanks to the influence of the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), as well as in the change in women’s participation in sports, among other areas. At this same time, in turn, the proletariat was active in organizing strikes. There is a famous strike during the era of President Leguía (1919–1930) by Zapatista proletarians in Huaraz, located in the central highlands of Peru. The women’s movement, perhaps not yet called feminist, has its origins in the nineteenth century. However, we can find iconic women in colonial history, where the most salient cases are that of Micaela Bastidas (1744–1781) and that of Tomasa Tito Condemayta (1740–1781), who participated in the Tupacamarista rebellion not only as support but as conductors of Tupac Amaru’s war against the colonial power. It is important to mention that in what follows, the historical narrative about the feminist movement and LG to later reach the trans movement is limited to the city of Lima, given the objective of my research. Because Peru is a diverse country, it has diverse regional histories as well. The second wave feminist movement in Lima first emerged in the 1970s. Although in the 1950s and 1960s there were initiatives around the issue of women, the milestones marking the emergence of the feminist movement were associated with the first protests against the objectification of the female body in beauty contests and the media. At the end of that decade, the organizations Manuela Ramos, Women in Struggle (Mujeres en Lucha), Social Women’s Front (Frente Socialista de Mujeres), and the Centre for the Peruvian Woman Flora Tristan appeared on the public scene. This emergence was closely related to the partisan motivations of the left in Peru. They exercised, then, a double militancy. In this first decade, according to Virginia Vargas (2004), feminist and co-founder of the organization

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Flora Tristan, the idea to consider the country within the paradigm of “class struggle” prevented them for a long time from rethinking on their own terms and from the specificity of the movement in the country. Since then, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, a plurality and diversity of feminisms in the country have been developing in a sustained way. With different emphases as well as strategies, with knots and cracks, and with moments of visibility and others of isolation. Second wave feminism was a movement of elite Peruvian creole women of the middle classes. Only in the twenty-first century did intersectional feminisms begin to emerge, which struggle for cultural, racial, and gender rights. The government of Juan Velasco Alvarado, known as the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (1968–1975), carried out one of the most powerful reforms in republican history, transforming the social, cultural, and subjective face of the country. Farms were converted into cooperatives, which in practice reproduced the patronal system of the farm but also gave space, especially in the Andes, to the growing peasant movement to return to community production and smallholders. During the 1960s, struggles for land, particularly in the Andes, diminished the power of the feudal lords, which led the military government to accept the reform. After the development of the Agrarian Reform, new political subjects emerged with duties and rights that were no longer part of serfdom. This government had many opponents, among whom was a new left, atomised, and caudillist, which expanded its mosaic of leadership throughout Peru and with different ascriptions.5 This range of leftists nevertheless shared a common language despite their differences and internal struggles. Phrases like “armed struggle,” “revolution around the corner,” and “from the countryside to the city” were among the most prominent (Gonzales, 2011: 28). This was the breeding ground for the beginning of the armed struggle against the Peruvian state, culminating in a declaration on May 17, 1980, of the Peruvian Communist Party Shining Path (Partido Comunista Peruano—Sendero Luminoso PCP-SL).

5  Some factions were pro-Soviet (Stalinist), other pro-Chinese (Maoist), or Trotskyist, there are factions who followed Fidel Castro, national left or Cholo-communism, also those who followed Jose Carlos Mariátegui, among others. Each tendency imputed to the other not being sufficiently revolutionary.

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Many women joined the cadres of this group. Some others, as I mentioned above, exercised their double militancy in other less radical leftist parties. The so-called second wave of feminism in Peru is characterized by the movement’s rupture with the Peruvian left. In the midst of one of the bloodiest conflicts in Peruvian republican history, feminists began to realize how little representation they had within their own parties and the blindness with which these parties interpreted the multiple subordinations in the country—especially that of women. They clearly saw the sexism and male chauvinism of the left, symbolized in its maximum expression through its great leaders, who allowed only a single type of revolutionary subject that conceived of both women and the people in a tutelary manner. In the words of Virginia Vargas: (...) the party experience showed us over time not only that the parties reproduced the division of sexual roles within them, but also showed the limitations of the party structure, as it was conceived at the time, had for a radical change in the ways of living. We felt too suffocating the permanent tendency to homogenise opinions, to disregard the subjects of their vital decisions, and to coerce their freedom and creativity. (2008: 122)

Before the split of the feminist movement from the left, women activists were mobilized by their solidarity with the working class and teachers, and they attracted thousands of women in their public demonstrations. When feminism divided with the left and began to construct its own agenda, such as the day they pronounced themselves in favour of abortion, they were only 50 women. Although the rupture with the left was massive and without return, little by little, in the mid-1980s, they began to interact with the leftist parties with their own thoughts, and in 1985 two feminists launched themselves as independent candidates of the United Left (Izquierda Unida). However, the party and its tutelary structure and ideology were reproduced within the feminist movement in the early years, with greater zeal towards women from the popular and rural sectors. In this first stage, this feminism expressed the sensitivity of a middle class that in turn culturally identified as Creole and Western. In addition to having a heteronormative bias, it did not pay attention to

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considerations of cultural diversity. And, although it seems paradoxical, it constitutes one more factor in the reproduction of coloniality. For instance, at the People’s Summit (La Cumbre de los Pueblos) in 2008, which brought together movements and social organizations from Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean, to discuss alternative proposals to the neoliberal economic model and trade agreements, women belonging to indigenous Latin American peoples met separately from feminist organizations. That is to say, indigenous women, as indigenous people, needed a gynecentric space that took distance from the patriarchal approach of their male peers without renouncing its cultural tradition. In any case, they struggled to recreate it. Also, as indigenous people they separated themselves from the middle-class feminists. (Personal communication with Eloy Neyra, who was present at the meeting.) This, however, eventually changed over the years. While in the 1990s the institutional dimension gained more weight, in the 2000s to the present we find a proliferation of approaches and positions that are divergent by generational level, thematic of struggle, and theoretical-practical approaches. However, transphobia prevails within the movement.6 In 2014, during the 13th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting (EFLAC) that took place in the city of Lima, two trans male activists, one from Ecuador and the other from the Peruvian movement, reported having been expelled from the event by the organization because of their gender identity.7 The eurocentric modern-colonial policy of the 1980s both at the level of the political regime, which had hegemonized the political discourse of the left and right in the construction of parties, and at the level of the grassroots organization in unions, entered into crisis. This crisis affected both the political regime and the organization with a clear patriarchal hegemony and with an androcentric institutionality. Although this crisis is due to the rise of the neoliberal ideology on a global scale—led in Peru by the Nobel Laureate in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa and the economist 6  This had already happened in the United States, as Emi Koyama (2003) states in the Transfeminist Manifesto (2003), where she referred to the article of Diana Courvant “Spiking of Privilege” (2002) to argue that not all feminists accept trans people. 7  For more information on the incident, see the following note https://redaccion.lamula. pe/2014/11/25/feminismo-exclusivo/ginnopaulmelgar/.

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Hernando de Soto—and the growing conservatism of the Catholic Church during the pontificate of John Paul II, the Peruvian case is sui generis because of the Internal Armed conflict, which will be discussed later. All this led to a reading of Peru as depoliticized (particularly critical of the youth of that time), given that the modern-colonial episteme and the prevailing eurocentric theories did not allow the community to perceive that politics had actually changed locus. It changed place. A paradigmatic example of this process is the trajectory of the artist Maria T-TA. While this was brewing as part of the development of nascent feminisms in Peru, Maria T-TA brought this change to stage far away from the traditional politics. Maria T-Ta, the artistic name of Patricia Roncal, joined the Peruvian punk movement between 1985 and 1988, becoming one of the first female voices to invade a space predominantly masculine at that time.8 Through satirical lyrics, she questioned traditional “decency” (Cf De la Cadena, 1997), Marian femininity, and macho culture. She vindicated women’s sexual freedom. As a punk artist, she resorted to a provocative, crass language, as one can hear in her recordings. It is important to emphasize that her foray into a strongly masculinized space resulted in her own peers criticizing her. Nevertheless, little by little, her figure became iconic for the following generations of rockers and for the punk movement itself. Together with Lili Kronis, of Delirios Krónicos, they invaded an already transgressive space while also transgressing the very Peruvian male punk canon. Along with the lyrics and her voice, it is interesting to note the characteristics of her performances: gestures, body postures, and even the clothes she wore on stage. She was also a fanzine producer, where she published texts, drawings, collages, etc. In Peru, as in other places of the world, the political ideology of the punk movement focused on class; however, Maria T-TA introduced topics

8  In 1988, Patricia Roncal left Peru, and very few people knew about her. Only in 2014 did news arrive in Peru of her death two years before in Germany, the country where she settled since that time. She died of pancreatic cancer. The bands that led and formed Patricia Roncal were El Empujón Brutal and La Mancha de la Teta. The band known as La Koncha Acústika was formed by Maria T-TA, pseudonym of Patricia Roncal; Sexylia, drummer and pseudonym of Cecilia Gómez; And Mery-Trix, pseudonym of Mary (her last name is not known).

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in sex-gender.9 The most important thing to highlight about this punk female icon is that she is not only denouncing class issues, the historical theme of the punk scene from its origins; it is also fighting for the sexual freedom of women. Maria T-TA is the artist who is doing politics from the work of art but with the purpose of changing common meanings, as the following quote from an interview she gave in 1987 shows: The woman has nothing to lose, what she has to lose are values imposed. Virginity is a tax imposed and is a disposable value, once you lose it you cannot recover it... so you have nothing to lose. The girls that we have nothing to lose we have to go ahead (...) and make rock. (Interview in video recorded and realised by Julio César Montero Solis 25 Aug. 1987)10

Although she is not part of what we call the LGTBIQ movement (she is rather a feminist icon) the LGTBIQ movement claims her as a model, particularly her transgressive aesthetic against the “correct” codes of behaviour and artistic production. Her feminist critique is not centred on rights, as was usual in the feminist movement of her time, but in women’s sexual desire and enjoyment. Mainstream feminism of that time tended to assume the idea of a universal woman who was in fact a white, Western 9  It is important to mention that the punk movement in Lima were spaces where the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) was present doing political proselytizing. This fact is striking because the punk movement came from the northern hemisphere. In the 1960s if someone listened to the Beatles, for example, they were classified as people who consumed escapist music, by the left. In 1971, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces under the command of General Juan Velasco Alvarado prevented the Carlos Santana concert at the San Marcos stadium because it was an activity that went against the revolution. Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), contrary to the practices of the left, rather has a policy to enter to the punk scene. Another singular fact of this group was the role of women in the party. Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path, wrote a specific text about women and the revolution. It is not on purpose, then, the weight that women had in the leadership of Shining Path. Likewise, women were in charge of doing the executions, they were in charge of making the coup de grace. Those two facts were a difference with the rest of the left. All this is happening when Maria T-TA is in force and when the tombstone of the left is being created for the actions of this group with consequences until today: being on the left for several generations in Peru is synonymous with the Shining Path. In other words, being on the left is synonymous of being a terrorist. 10  To access the interview, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SoIG_E1tLA. See also Maria T-TA and El Empujón Brutal, “La Pituchafa” at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AgK-Kb_m1fA and MARÍA T-TA and El Empujón Brutal “Do not make avocado / Your aunt Sarita got my culonia” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9cVvmgP4XI.

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woman and adopted positions from northern feminism that, in turn, could be considered puritanical, in particular by the imprint of Protestant ideology. Maria T-TA symbolizes the crossover of the aesthetics and politics where, as we saw in Chap. 2, aesthetics is understood in its double meaning: as the modern conception relative to a work of art and as in its etymological conception of sensibility-feeling. And, in turn, the crossover of the aesthetics and politics, as Rancière (1999) would say, consist of a breakdown in the consensus surrounding sensibilities and perceptions. Gay and Lesbian Movement History In early 1980, the Homosexual Movement of Lima (MHOL) was created, becoming the first such organization in the country and in Latin America. It was created by a group of educated, middle-class gay men in the capital who decided to join together and discuss the homosexual problematic in the Peruvian context. From the late 1980s with the increase of cases of HIV/AIDS, they decided to voice their demands in a public way. Today the LGBT movement has expanded in number as well as in positions. Within the movement, there are sectors that argue that the gay identity and the term “gay” has been distorted to include even pro-capitalist connotations of class and race. Many activists related to anticolonial and anti-­ capitalist tendencies claim the use of the term “marica” or “maricón” (a pejorative term for gay in Spanish), allowing for more situated interpretations of the LGBT and class experience. This, in turn, allowed for the way to politicization, self-appropriation, and subversion of the signifiers with which historically they have been oppressed. Three years later of the MHOL foundation, the Feminist Lesbian Self-­ Consciousness Group (GALF) was created. Its place was on the second floor of the MHOL.  Like the founding members of the MHOL, the founding lesbian women of the GALF were educated women from the middle class of the capital. However, it was not until the 2000s that the political presence and visibility of the LGBT community was represented almost exclusively by the “G,” perpetuating power relations between the different identities within the movement itself. The homosexual movement of Lima has been in conflict with trans identities since its emergence. At first the MHOL despised the MTF trans movement for not assuming a gender awareness and sexual orientation. The criticism is similar to what some feminist groups do to transgender

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people, who are regarded as being co-opted by patriarchy wanting to gain access to masculine power. For many trans activists, gay organizations exploited trans identities in search of international funds in the fight against HIV.  According to Ximena Salazar, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Sexuality, AIDS and Society of the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia: In 2000, we had a very big project on HIV prevention. We had to work with the populations that, at that time it was called, of greater risk. At least that was the vision that public health had at that time and specifically the public health of the USA. Then, in those populations were what public health calls “MSM” or men who have sex with other men. And there they included the travesties (…) they were not differentiated from gays. In fact, I think that the trans population was a support for the political advocacy of the gay population, because if you joined them the HIV prevalence raised them greatly. Gays alone had low prevalence. The highest prevalence in HIV is trans women (29% to 30%). So, many gays resisted that split in the population. And besides nobody studied this phenomenon. Nobody cared, it was like a kind of folkloric thing in Lima, these women at night standing in the corners. Men dressed as women because that was finally the idea they had. (Personal interview)

The transphobia present in the feminist movement and in the LG movement had a temporal coincidence with the transphobia present in the left-wing political movements, which had a bloody expression in the politics developed by the subversive groups in the 1980s when they carried out “executions” or murders of trans people during the Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000), the largest in the history of Peru since its founding as an independent republic, as I detailed in the previous chapter. One of the most emblematic cases was the massacre of eight members of the LGBT community at the hands of the MRTA, on May 31, 1989, in the bar “Las Gardenias,” located in the city of Tarapoto, in the Peruvian Amazon. A week later, his weekly newspaper “Cambio” vindicates the crime against “social scourges.” This is considered one of the biggest hate

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crimes in Peruvian history.11 Three months earlier, in the same city, the body of a young homosexual man was found with a sign that read: “this is how faggots die,” signed by the MRTA (Montalvo, 2017; CVR Final Report). This stage of extreme violence has a component that has not been sufficiently studied: the systematic extermination of transgender women and homosexuals by the leftist groups that took up arms, which was termed as “social cleansing.” This type of violence was mostly concentrated in the north-eastern zone of Peru was and produced a diaspora of a transgender people in the lower Peruvian Amazon region in search of protection. The armed groups subsequently searched for trans people in this region. However, despite the evidence, little information exists about these murders in official documents. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) did not include it as a research guideline. At the conclusion of the investigation, the CVR received some stories that were included in just one page of the entire report. Further frustrating the murders’ proper documentation, many times the relatives of the victims preferred not to report and to this day they still do not tell the truth of these killings (Infante, 2013). The torture and execution of transgender and gay people during these decades symbolized a mechanism of legitimization of the absolute contempt of the bodies, subjectivities, and memories of the LGBT population. According to the report, a sector of the settlers accepted these executions as timely; moreover, some population centres came to demand the presence of the subversives to carry out clean-up campaigns. (CVR Final Report). However, homophobia and transphobia were not exclusive to subversive groups, but also on the part of the State. In Huanta, Ayacucho, on August 11, 1984, a group of marines kidnapped a young man, who was recognized in the locality as a homosexual and who 11  In addition to this, the crimes for homophobia and transphobia during the Internal Armed Conflict reported in the CVR Final Report were the following: 6/8/86 Sendero Luminoso murders ten homosexuals and prostitutes in Aucayacu with the approval of the settlers. 12/9/88 Sendero Luminoso puts in line and machine guns eight drug addicts, prostitutes, and homosexuals in La Hoyada, Pucallpa. In late 1989, Sendero Luminoso tried to impose its laws “no polygamy, no robbery, no homosexuals” in the Shipibo-Conibo communities that rejected them. 12/17/89 Sendero Luminoso kidnaps 12 homosexual young men in Pirayacu, Huánuco, and assassinates 2 with headshots. 5–6 / 90 MRTA murders 3 transvestites. 1991 Woman kidnapped by Sendero Luminoso sees her homosexual men cut off their penis before killing them. 1992 MRTA threatens the Homosexual Movement of Peru (MHOL) by telephone.

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sometimes wore women’s clothing. He was disappeared along with 56 other people. Some LGBTIQ organizations estimate that there could be up to 500 people murdered or disappeared for this period (López, 2016). Therefore, we are facing a community of sensibilities that mobilized norms around gender and sexuality. During the same decade, at the same time that these massacres were carried out unbeknownst to the majority of the country, social movements emerged in the city of Lima that, through representation, began to put in crisis the traditional models of understanding the body, desire, gender, sexuality, and identity. Among these movements, groups of artists with political motivations appeared with more force who used their works to denounce the exclusion of the populations considered as “deviant.” These are productions that are at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. They denounce the conditions of exclusion and discrimination in which these populations lived and, at the same time, propose new sensitivities in the face of a hegemonic patriarchal and heteronormative narrative. Like Maria T-TA, the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics is evident in the artistic production of the Chaclacayo Group. The artistic proposal of the Chaclacayo Group (1982–1994) was an initiative led by the plastic artists Sergio Zevallos, Raul Avellaneda, and the German artist Helmut Psotta. It was an artistic group that pioneered performance in Peruvian art and one of the most active during the 1980s in the country. This group of artists moved to an area far from Lima to produce an aesthetic proposal, which at that time was strongly denigrated. However, in 2014 the group’s artistic production was the main exhibit of the Museum of Art of Lima (MALI), the most important of the country.12 We can see through their productions that this collective not only developed visceral and provocative work that used art to respond to the outrageous violence that was occurring in the country due to the internal armed conflict, but also focused on denouncing machismo and compulsory heteronormativity. In addition, this movement is a milestone in the questioning of the same Peruvian homosexual movement of the 1980s, which endorsed what has been termed homonormativity and proscribed 12  The Chaclacayo Group has attained international attention. Their artistic work is commented on in the book The Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions (2015). In 2014 the book A Wandering body. Sergio Zevallos in the Grupo Chaclacayo (1982–1994), edited by the curator Miguel López; and Sergio Zevallos. Obscene Death. Drawings 1982–1987 (2015), edited by the AMIL Project.

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sexual and gender options of bisexual and trans people or those sexualities not classifiable under a dualistic model, something offbeat at that time, giving way to the more “queer” understandings of sex and gender. In order to define its aesthetics, they had to resort to a period of seclusion and settled in a district far from the capital called Chaclacayo, which gave the group its name. Using isolation as a metaphor of self-punishment, they reversed and transgressed the Catholic symbols of martyrdom. The activism of Chaclacayo Group focused on questioning the institutionalization of homophobic and conservative positions in the country. One of its great aesthetic strategies of transgression subverts traditional Catholic iconography. For example, using the image of Santa Rosa de Lima, a Peruvian religious icon, to advocate the practices of the BDSM (Bondage Domination Sadism Masochism) sexual subcultures.13 This group is characterized by the simultaneous use of multiple aesthetic disciplines, such as performance, photography, and video and for intertwining visual landscapes with sound landscapes. In a similar vein, during the 1990s, the Transvestite Museum of Peru was created. The museum was born from the need to narrate a history of Peruvian sexuality in another way. This space created by the artist, philosopher, and performer Giussepe Campusano was considered abject at the time. Now the museum has a growing recognition in the country and currently is on an international tour.14 Its proposal, while forming part of the LGTBIQ movement, transcends it in order to give a new story about Peruvian society while placing the “trans phenomenon” at its narrative axis. Indeed, it is a proposal that seeks to rewrite history (transhistory) and, in turn, it is an epistemic questioning, because it brings back the body as a subject of knowledge, not only as an object-thing that characterizes the modern episteme. As Giuseppe Campusano rightly maintained: (...) the trans museum arises from the need for a history of its own—a history of unwritten Peru—rehearsing an archaeology of makeup and a philosophy of bodies, to propose a more productive elaboration of metaphors than any exclusive cataloguing. “False Museum”—as the appellation of “false woman” with which this Manichaean language names us. A sketched museum, whose masks-crafts, photocopying, gigantography, banners, those  See www.80m2galeria.com/pdf/pdf_1399590203_1.pdf.  Véase www.micromuseo.org.pe/rutas/habanaalteridades/travesti.html.

13 14

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mass production systems do not hide, but, on the contrary, show. They do not camouflage, but travesties.

This museum highlights something that is fundamental in LGTBIQ aesthetics as an act of transgression: the transformation of the palette of colours from the pastel and blackened tonalities typical of traditional Peruvian elites to the bright, vivid tonalities.15 In terms of Peru’s social history, the 1980s also witnessed the mutual destruction of two “colonial/modern” projects. On the one hand, it overtly implied the end of the leftist revolution and with it, the decline of the Marxist metadiscourse. On the other, it implied the end of the nation-­ state ideal, designed by Peruvian elites to “solve” the country’s lack of homogeneity in terms of race, ethnicity, and culture—a situation deemed a burden by Peruvian intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twenty centuries (see Chap. 2).16 The new representations fostered by “deviant artists” during the 1980s and more recently by trans people have begun to take over and transgress the national narrative commonly associated with a state symbolically deemed Western, Judeo-Christian, white, heterosexual, patriarchal, bourgeois, etc. Indeed, it may say that Peru, at least in the past 35 years, has been going through a long rite of passage, of liminality (Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960), where orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Bourdieu, 1977) coexist and are in constant tension. According to several gay and trans activists, the LGBT community and history have forgotten that the first march in Peru, during the process of the Constituent Assembly, was led by trans people in 1978. This march was led by Francis Day, Damonett and Giselle, three travestis who had a cabaret show at the Pallete Concert in Miraflores, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the capital. The lawsuits took aim at the constitution 15  To see more about the Transvestite Museum of Peru, see the report they made at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8hjIMTQ21Q, part of their presentation at the Cultural Centre of Spain at https://www.youtube.com / watch? V = jBWrPhOyk-Q and a review at http://tupac.org.pe/la-huella-que-deja-el-artista-drag-giuseppe-campuzano/ #jp-carousel-1453. 16  Nation-building concerns have been present throughout Peru’s history given its colonial origins and its inability to integrate its diverse population. Various intellectuals and scholars have written about the nation’s ideal as that which unifies diversity. It is important to note that the end of modern paradigms is contemporary but does not depend on the rise of postmodern proposals in global sense producing centres. For more information on this subject, see Guevara (2010) and Portocarrero (2015).

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and demanded the freedom of sexual orientation and sexual expression, as they called it at that time. While the demonstration at the time was mocked for being comprised of transvestites, today the LGBT community claims it as the first political aesthetic act of struggle for their rights that was led by travestis. One year after of this march, they made a parody in the Pallete Concert in Miraflores with a show that called “Travesti prostitution scene,” alluding to the work of the congressmen in the constituent assembly of 1978. The Trans Movement In 2002, the first trans organization was founded in Peru at the initiative of Jana Villayzan and Gaby Mariño, both trans women and activists. Until that date, the organizations had been mixed (LGT) and basically led by gay men who invited trans and lesbians to participate in their meetings and to organize rallies, among other things. According to Jana Villayzan, it was from an event in 2002 that she had the opportunity to meet, in her words, an icon of the Latin American trans movement when she began to forge a discourse of her own on the trans question (personal communication, September 2017). Lohana Berkin was this icon, an activist and transvestite from Argentina, who died in 2016. She promoted the gender identity law in Argentina, which was approved in 2012. For Jana, getting to know her and listening to her reflections on the trans question spurred a change in the way she approached her own life and her struggles. Even before that meeting, she had not realized that the trans experience was centred on identity rather than sexual orientation, something that made them unique within the movement itself. Inspired by her conversations with Berkin, she returned to Lima and founded the first trans organization in Peru: Ángel Azul (Blue Angel). (...) I do not know if gays knew what gender identity is, but we were the most visible of the movement and the only ones that were in a situation, and we are still experiencing deep exclusion and poverty. The majority are sex workers or prostitutes on the street. How many gays do you see on the street in that situation? (...) But also their access to work is different. It is very complicated to be trans, do you understand me? Many years we were submerged in those abbreviations that make everyone invisible and nobody does anything for any reason. And it was also a question of power, of the misogynist gay man, transphobic, macho, because the gay movement in this

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country is like that, as is the machismo that exists against women and the machismo of some feminist women with whom it is given that you are woman because you have a vagina and you have a feminine primary socialization. (Jana Villayzan. Personal communication, September 2017)

Trans women, since then, have struggled considerably to consolidate their own space, to separate from the G, to be distinguished as a group, and to understand that one thing is orientation and another thing is identity. Over time, and because of a difference in visions of activism, Jana opened and founded the Trans Network of Peru (Red Trans del Perú), with the aim of expanding beyond the borders of the capital and becoming a nationwide movement that to this day continues to train regional leaders. In Lima, new leaderships have appeared, such as Miluska Luzquiño, from Casa Zuleymi; and that of Leyla Huertas, of the Féminas Association. Both leaders began to organize and do activism with Jana, but, because of conflicts between them, each activist formed their own organization and struggle for their own funds. Jana’s work is more focused on the national dimension, in addition to working as a researcher at the Cayetano Heredia University; Miluska works in the documentation of trans women and in the realization of HIV screening; and Leyla Huertas, through Féminas, distributed free hormones to trans women in the very beginning, thanks to external funding. However, this funding ended, but they continue to meet once a week to talk, share information, and generate commonality spaces. There are many disputes within the emerging trans movement. Many disagreements, disputes, and conflicting views. This conflict prohibits each group from entering into dialogue and finding the points that unite them, leaving aside those that separate them and join efforts. Among them, they accuse each other of stealing funds, instrumentalizing the trans population, and each group claims ownership over the future of the trans community, among other things. In words of Ximena Salazar, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Sexuality, AIDS and Society of the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, who assisted the emergence of the trans movement and supported the movement with funds for its development: I believe that it is mainly due to a political weakness of the movements and the way of doing politics in this country. Not for any reason we are as we are right now. If you see the political reality of the country, you can figure it out.

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The ways of doing politics in the country permeates every social movement. Of the lack of dialogue, of the lack of transparency, corruption, isn’t it? So, I think it is that situation and also the precariousness and exclusion that makes any little thing that a trans organisation can achieve to be looked at with suspicion by other activists or groups. Then, in 2011, when they were not fighting and when everything was the Red Trans but each one also had their own small organisation, things worked well. But as soon as money enters, conflicts begin, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the big NGOs fertilise a lot. We have also fertilised a lot to the conflict from our side and to the confrontation. I do not see too much future right now. (Personal communication, September 2017)

The quote from Ximena Salazar highlights what has been and continues to be a political arena based on an atomization of positions, highlighting a major problem in Peru—namely, the difficulty for collective action and the lack of democratic culture in the country. Therefore, this problem should not be understood as exclusive to the trans movement. Strictly speaking, it is part, on the one hand, of the colonial heritage that has not allowed for community in a strong sense, because social relations are largely coloured by feelings of fear and distrust. This inhibits collective action. On the other hand, there is no democratic tradition in the Peruvian Republic. We are in the best of cases under a representative (electoral) regime, based on caudillistic anti-democratic organizations (the parties of left and right), which is also reproduced in the trade associations. The three trans organizations mentioned above, nowadays the most active in the capital, receive funds to work on HIV issues—mainly carrying out rapid tests, providing condoms, and organizing awareness workshops that focus on medical issues—due to the trans community has the highest percentage of prevalence of any population, numbering at 30 of 100 according to data from the Ministry of Health of Peru (Report 175, Defensoría del Pueblo, 2016), a central issue of its struggle is the formulation and approval of the Gender Identity Law, the regularization of prostitution, the control of their bodies by pimps, the violence that they receive by the police, and everything that involves transition, among other issues. As trans women leaders argue, interest in traditional politics is quite low among trans women for many reasons, primarily because of their concern to survive day by day. And although they find in these spaces a communal and affective bond of great relevance, as well as information on their main

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topics of interest, the move to activism, the formation of cadres, and the dedication of time and mental effort is for many nonsensical. Since 2010, organizations of transgender men or trans masculine people have emerged and therefore have become visible in the public scene. The development of the movement follows the paths of the trans women’s movement regarding the internal quarrels, break-ups, and the appearance of new organizations that demarcate with those already existing. According to some trans men interviewed for this research, until ten years ago the only information for trans men that you can find on the Internet was a blog called “Man Transsexual of Peru,” from Mishell Romani, in which information was provided about the transition process through the use of hormones. However, for many of them, Romani was only interested in profiting through anabolics, and showed a vision of masculinity associated with strength, aggression, machismo, and misogyny. In contrast, two trans men founded the Trans FTM Society, which was coordinated by Jessy Videla and is active to date. However, some of the original members split and founded Trans Male Diversities, arguing that Trans Society’s vision continues reproducing a heterosexual idea of the world and, moreover, verticality in terms of structure. Marco Guillermo, artist, activist and trans male, says: What happens is that inside the movement people started to question why operations have such a fundamental role when identifying you as a man, because within the trans male population there is a lot of machismo and many times the same machismo and the same competition like in cis men. The one who is more man is more valued and those who are not, inferior, feminised, violated. The more trans you are, the more operations you have, and the more authentically you are man, and the more valid you are and this idea began to be questioned. Why would one have to have surgery? (...) I think the themes of feminism gained influence, to value you, take care of your body (tu cuerpo), take care of your body (in feminine: tu cuerpa). Talk about body (in feminine: tu cuerpa), no longer body (in masculine). And a part of that, it has also made many people feel that they should not do these things to be trans. I can be trans without having done any type of operation and my transition process does not have to be this, it is not schematised. (Marco Guillermo, trans male. Personal communication, October 201717)

17  Marco Guillermo is the first trans man to undergo a phalloplasty in Peru. It began in 2014 and after two unsuccessful attempts, only on the third attempt was the operation successful. Before 2014, Marco Guillermo had already had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy. In total, Marco Guillermo has had 23 surgeries.

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The approach of feminist theory and gender theory has entered in many LGBT spaces with great force in recent times. Access to more information on the Internet, readily available texts, and ideas circulating within groups have led trans women and men to question previously held ideas of their bodies themselves and has led them to deconstruct the model of trans man, like the model of trans woman. This will be addressed more broadly in the chapter addressed to the body in the case of trans women. However, broadly speaking in the case of trans men, this questioning goes further to deconstruct the idea that more surgeries are equivalent to being more of a trans man. This has given space for new possibilities to perform masculinity without undergoing surgery, and in turn, it has opened space to question the actions within the movement of trans men where they reproduce patterns of the cis male’s aesthetic: machismo, misogyny, and violence, among others. However, to avoid generalizing and homogenizing, there are a series of differences between being a trans woman and a trans man in Lima, Peru. These differences that are rooted in one’s life experience, access to services, and affective maps that mark different trajectories for both populations and that perhaps tell us something about how gender is perceived and treated in the Latin American context, specifically in Peru. According to data of this research, trans women are often thrown out of their homes at an early age, which entails a chain effect and marks their life trajectories: very few finishes secondary school, even primary school. Therefore, there are few cases of trans women with access to university studies. As a way of subsistence, as evidenced by the findings of this research and other research (Salazar, 2015a; Cocchella & Machuca, 2014), the great majority engage in prostitution, and it is a common matter to rob customers to increase their income. According to different researchers in the field and the trans men with whom I had conversations, the life trajectory of trans men differs greatly, since it is not common for them to be thrown out of their families, at least not during their adolescence. This allows them to complete their school studies and, at least in urban areas, access higher education. This differentiated treatment they receive from their relatives perhaps, and this is my hypothesis, demonstrates a general perception regarding women and men. One of the reasons why trans men are not thrown out of their homes in their youth may be attributed to the risk of being raped. While the act of throwing trans women out could be understood as a sort of disciplinary correction, or punishment. If these trans women cannot be corrected at

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home, they are expected to learn on the street. Why would they renounce the privilege of masculinity to adopt the feminine? As such, they deserve rape and mistreatment on the street so they can learn what it is to be a woman. This is compounded with the family’s shame that their son is a faggot and, more so, that he wants to be a woman. In 2017, there was an effort by the Trans Peru Network (Red Trans del Perú) to design the Gender Identity Law proposal, which to date remains in the Congress of the Republic without being presented for debate. For many activists of the LGBT community, the project does not represent the community’s full diversity, in terms of identity and orientation for the trans population. In the words of Marco Guillermo: “it does not recognise and does not identify at all the needs of trans people that are not heterosexual and that do not have a firmly patriarchal gender expression. That is, non-binary trans people are not considered and not even mentioned” (Personal communication. September 2017). Before the presentation of the project, many groups spoke and began to have roundtables in the offices of the RENIEC (National Registry of Identification and Civil Status), and confronted these ideas without reaching any agreement. The fragility and contradictions within the movement itself are evident. For organizations of trans women, non-binary transgender identities are academic identities that do not exist in reality and that nobody understands. Therefore, they have no place in a gender identity law. For them, those identities are basically “undefined” ones, and what they do is threaten the identities of trans women. They depict a scorn of their feminine identities due to having a gender expression that, although within the category of “trans woman,” they can elect a more masculine gender expression, like having a beard or leaving hair on the leg. Jana Villayzan claims about people who call themselves trans people of non-binary gender: I very much respect that people have the ability, each person has the autonomy to self-name: “I am from Mars.” And if someone says they are non-­ binary that neither the masculine nor the feminine fills her and that one day it is feminine-masculine, perfect. But that is your self-perception. Reality is something different. You walk with a social vehicle that is the gender, understand me? And if you are a woman of birth or cis, and tell me that you do not feel binary but people read you as a woman and you have the privilege, despite all the inequity of being a woman in a third world society, you have privileges that I as a trans woman do not have. And do not talk to me about you being discriminated against like me with a DNI [National Identification Document] that says Alejandro Villayzan. That it takes a lot for me to get a

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job, and what does it take you… But it takes more for me. It takes a lot for me a lot to earn money as you earn it (...) A person of non-binary gender who had access to university education, first, to have access to gender theory, queer theory, and then analyse themselves and realise that he or she does not identify with the masculine or with the feminine. The thing is that the majority of trans binary, trans women do not have it. And we shit with violence, shit in the corner doing prostitution, because we did not have gender theory. It was one thing that I felt like a woman, I wanted to be a woman, I see myself as a woman even though I have a penis and it cost me to be there. Because the patriarchal system closed the doors and put me there. Because as they say, we are traitors of this gender, of the masculine. We were educated to be the dominant male. I think that if non-binary people would have to live all the shit that trans woman experience, they would fit immediately. Women or men. Or they will stay gay, because most of them are fucking gays. Oh, he/she paints their eyes, his/her nails and that makes them non-binary gender. Or they paint their hair with a certain colour. For me it is a great pendejada (bullshit) to hang on to the trans topic when we have so many necessities. It is not a matter of, as I said, cosmetic, of vanity, it is a theme of your life. (Personal communication. September 2017)

In this last quotation, Jana presents an interpretation of the situation of trans women in terms of class, gender, and sexuality. Likewise, implicitly present is an epistemic option of how to know or how to speak with a sense of one’s identity. And, finally, when she said: “A person of non-­ binary gender who had access to university education, first, to have access to gender theory, queer theory, and then analyse themselves and realise that he or she does not identify with the masculine or with the feminine,” she offers a critique of an ontology that she recognizes as coming from the outside and not of her. In that quote, her explicit criticism of patriarchy is also accompanied by an implicit criticism of the coloniality of knowledge. The first issue has to do with class, access to education, and the possibility of professional training. Class is clearly inter-related in Jana’s discourse with the categories of gender and sexual orientation that lead to the precarious situation of the lives of trans women. In her speech, when she said: “We were educated to be the dominant male. I think that if non-binary people would have to live all the shit that trans woman experience, they would fit immediately. Women or men. Or they will stay gay, because most of them are fucking gays,” we can also see the difference between gay denominations and non-binary gender versus trans identity. As previously mentioned, the trans movement has a specificity, because it is partly

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constructed in opposition and in controversy with the feminist movement and the gay movement. As we have seen throughout this chapter, the feminist and gay movements first, and the lesbian movement afterwards, are products of an educated middle class in the country. They are Westernized middle classes. On the other hand, the trans movement in Peru emerged in what we can call grassroots, which marks the relationship between “universal” discourses on social problems and the option that follows a pragmatic epistemology from the lived experience of their own praxis, rather than theory. This pragmatic epistemology is based on everyday life. In turn it is based on an aesthetic: “I feel like a woman,” and it is in function of that aesthetic that its political action and its subjective world are organized and defined of its own ontology.

Conclusions The historical milestones discussed in this chapter are not intended to establish a sociogenesis of the contemporary trans movement in Peru. Rather, they have the function of highlighting the presence of issues of gender identity and sexual diversity intersected with those of class, which gives context to the emergence of the trans women’s movement in Peru. As we have seen, the context is polidiscursive, which is valid even for the trans movement itself. The historical narrative that I present in this chapter starts from the colonial time, showing a continuity between the Colony and the Republic in terms of the treatment of diversity. In this sense, it is pertinent to bring up the category coined by the Mexican thinkers Gonzales Casanova (1963) and Rodolf Stavenhagen (1977, 1981), and more recently by the Bolivian thinker Rivera Cusicanqui (1992, 1993, 2012) about the fact that the Republic can be defined as the period of internal colonialism. In other words, of modernity/coloniality without political coloniality, where although the metropolises are no longer ruling, the elites continue to function as cultural colonizers and are guided by exported models trying to homogenize such a diverse social landscape. On the other hand, if we make a quick review of history throughout the twentieth century, we can see that the parties that wanted to be modern are organized around a supposedly universal model but that model in reality is androcentric and eurocentric. When I say political parties that want to be modern, I mean organized parties, mass parties with ideology, through which certain axes are privileged as the structural causes of the

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situation in which a society lives and, therefore, to what should be attend it.18 Through a universal diagnosis of social problems in Peru, it is assumed that some of the struggles, such as the feminist struggle, are superstructural problems that are either resolved with revolution or petty bourgeois deviations (a left jargon in that moment). Along the way, what is left out are other demands, such as indigenous peoples, women, Afro-descendants, LG population first, and environmental demands, among others. What we observe through this historical narrative is a rise in the political struggle where little by little the depletion of the modern-colonial project, including that of the left, takes place. In the context of Peruvian politics, the aestheticization of politics signals the decline of Peruvian politics, which wanted to emulate European politics (as we saw in Chap. 2, we do not have political parties as such, except for interest groups, and the trade union movement is very precarious at present). In other words, political praxis has undergone a major shift due to an exhausted vision of modernity, a way of doing politics has emerged that no longer finds expression in the parties and unions, but is animated through social movements. These movements will somehow assume this aesthetic change and make it visible. They are not antithetical. The aestheticization of politics does not imply a lack of organization, but it is an organization of tribes, as Mafesolli (1990) would say, it is an organization of movements, where the movements are not looking for a general theory, a universal episteme. But rather they are working sensibilities. Likewise, what we observe in the life trajectories of trans women is that the emphasis is on struggles for recognition. However, this struggle is intimately intertwined with the struggles for redistribution, since trans women need to be recognized as women, but at the same time their situation, their precariousness for not being recognized generates more poverty. The fact of prostitution is a struggle against poverty or a consequence of it. Therefore, the “redistribution” is taking place via this path. And, in turn, it is in recent times that their struggle is also for representation, for the growth of organizations, interest groups, and support groups. Some 18  We observe this in the parties of the 1920s, such as the Socialist Party, later the Communist Party of Jose Carlos Mariategui; and the APRA party, which turn the way of doing politics into a logo-centred and patriarchal politics, where the dimension of class and race will be the substantive ones to define the struggle for change. Since the 1950s, the same political tradition can be observed in the Popular Action party, as well as the Christian Popular Party, and towards the end of 1960 the entire group of New Left parties.

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women are coming into the public sphere not under the stereotypes of the media but as professionals advocating for their rights. The aestheticization of politics can be read as a decolonial process in the sense that it no longer believes in parties or unions because the emphasis of its struggle is for recognition, something that was despised and made invisible by modern-colonial logic. We then observe that part of the struggle of the indigenous movement is focused on making their pilgrimages, their sacred places, and their dances visible. The movement is articulated from symbols that are uniting, that are creating community. That is, it is a sensibility. They are dedicating their efforts towards an affection, and other social movements operate in a similar fashion. The environmental movement is asking for another way of relating to the environment; the trans movement, for the entry of abject bodies into the public sphere. The emergence and future of the trans movement represent the highest moment in this history of struggles. It is the last fight that has taken place in temporary terms and its strength also lies in the fact that it has had to fight against the “movements” most related to its cause, such as the feminist movement and the LG movement. The trans movement would be an expression from the body, from the performance, where they have always done politics both to make themselves visible and to transgress. In the twentieth century there is an upward curve in rational colonial policy. However, at the same time, what we could call the visibility of the country’s traditional aesthetic-political practices is taking place. In other words, it is not that these kinds of practices were invented by the trans movement, but rather they have always been present throughout the history of Peru, although underground.19 As orthodox politics, especially after 1980, is losing prestige, a way of doing politics is becoming visible that begins to appeal more to the affections. The following chapter is devoted to the analysis of the first and second skins, where the first serves as a metaphor for the analysis of childhood, a 19  An example of this is the religious procession of the Lord of Miracles (El Señor de los Milagros), through which an aesthetic practice is observed where the struggle of the Afrodescendant population occurs from colonial times to today, both in terms of its visibility and regarding the maintenance of their cultural traditions. The same happens with the pilgrimages to Qoyllur Rity and Señor de Huanca. We also observe it in traditional dances, where the culture is being affirmed, history is being taught and at the same time power is questioned. Therefore, it must be recognized that aesthetic-political practices are not a postmodern invention for us, but rather a way that has always been on the menu of ways of doing politics.

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stage in which the first identifications with ourselves and the environment take place, where tastes and preferences are chiselled, giving way to the creation of a structure of feelings. While the analysis of the second skin is related to clothing, with that skin that covers the first dermis, and that functions as a bridge for the transmission of identity, desires, and the first identifications.

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CHAPTER 5

First and Second Skin: The Body as a Political-Aesthetic Territory

Some feminists are relatively liberal and open-minded, but when you claim the use of the body as a political and sexual tool, they become scandalized. The body is not for wearing cute clothes; it is for enjoyment. Jana Villayzan The body is not to be compared to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. Maurice Merleau-Ponty To live consists of continually reducing the world to the body, through the symbolic that embodies itself. Le Breton

In this chapter, I expand upon my thesis of the body as an aesthetic territory. Indeed, I argue that trans women construct their identities through the sculpting of their bodies and the choreographing of their gestures, movements, and displacement. Building on this concept, I posit that the body is the raw material—although overwritten with ascribed meanings—where artists use to give shape not only to their individual bodies, but also to their subjectivities and the way they relate to others. Thus, trans women are

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Patiño Rabines, The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42816-6_5

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involved in a poietical endeavour insofar as they are creating an aesthetic work in the very process of building an identity and struggling for recognition. In order to do so, the first section is dedicated to the configuration of the first and second skin, both skins directly linked to the stage of life that corresponds to the childhood of trans women. This refers to the memory of childhood, its first identifications, the first affinities for objects, roles, colours, among others. It refers to the role imagination and playing have in recreating the world in which they live, and to how the process of configuring the desire to be and appear to be a woman occurs. The second section focuses on the dialogue between self-recognition and the recognition of the other, one that is in constant conflict. It will be seen how these first self-identifications come into tension with the gaze of those in their closest environments, producing an initial fissure that, as will be seen in the following chapters, will accompany them well into their adult lives. In addition, I will introduce the body as a territory where a trans woman sculpts her gender identity. In that aesthetic process, she struggles to be recognized as such in the public sphere, trying to dismantle hegemonic sensibilities and feelings concerning trans women. In this regard, the aesthetic and political endeavours could be said to possess confluent purposes—or even as a singular purpose. And finally, in the third section, I will revise the main critiques of Cartesian dualism, and the existence and permanence of other forms of understandings about bodies will be shown from a decolonial horizon, with the purpose of acknowledging that there is a tradition of thought that has excluded, obliterated, and constructed body as a place of error or sin. My critiques orbit around the central concept that the trans movement cannot be understood from the perspective of Cartesian dualism, because trans experiences testify to the centrality of the body. Opposing the Cartesian dualistic of splitting the body and the mind (which inherently prevents thinking about trans issues in their integrity), body and spirit are seen as a unit, whose notion is closer to the concept proposed by Merlau-Ponty of soma or lived body. In that sense, I consider that it is critical for a study of trans experiences to pay close attention to the use and experience of soma, as it is precisely through bodies that one can understand the particularity of the lived experiences of trans persons, their desires, their enjoyment, and the pain of both their contextualized resistance and specific existences. In turn, the study of the bodies in the trans women population is in itself a transgressive act, as it turns its attention towards what for many years has been foreclosed. The study of the bodies returns temporality, thickness, and

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materiality to one’s experience in the world, paying special attention to what part of this materiality of corporeal experience imprints itself on the subjectivities of trans women.

The First and the Second Skin The first skin is that which is closest to our interior, to our organs, muscles, viscera, and bone structure. As such, it is the skin closest to our subjective world. It is the one that gives us the first outline as human beings. It is in that first layer that the body acquires shape and content. It is the skin where our first identifications with the outside world are defined, through which the primordial sensations and perceptions that will define our tastes and preferences are created. It is the first dermis that the being inhabits and where the unconscious materializes. It is the contour that generates limits with the outside, but that at the same time serves as a communicating vessel with it. The first skin is therefore the childhood skin, where those first sensations, perceptions, and tastes will be transformed into memories over time. As the New York poet Louise Glück maintains: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” (Excerpts from the poem “Nostos”). Meanwhile, the second skin serves as an extension to the first. Through it, the first identifications of the being materialize. It is the one that covers the first dermis and refers to clothing, accessories, and colour preferences, among others. It is the skin that helps us to configure our identity in relation to ourselves and others. It is the membrane of presentation to the world of socialization. Taking into consideration the metaphor of the five skins of Austrian artist and architect Hundertwasser, trans women use the first and second skin to perform femininity. As evidenced in the quotations below, in general, the performative process of identification with femininity through the first skin starts in early ages and in private spaces. Trans women also perform their femininity through the use of objects replete with symbolism, and through their performance of roles in games associated with the feminine connected with the second skin. In words of Angelina and Jessica: I identified a lot with all the roles that are imposed on the female woman. I fit in with that, but they [parents] never let me live it. But beyond that, it was weird because I saw a boy, I did not feel that we had the same energy, and when I saw a girl, I felt the same and not only because of the physical aspect but because of the essence itself. And at that moment, I didn’t know

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how to explain it, you know? I was focused on doing what my parents told me to do without questioning it … Sometimes you can’t control the way you are because when you’re very happy and very spontaneous … it’s something natural, because of your naturalness. (Angelina) I remember my tendencies as a little girl; my orientation has always been feminine. I remember that as a child when I played with my sister as I got dressed, I would fight with her for her dolls because I remember that I would be given old, green soldiers … but I liked playing with my sister’s dolls, with the frying pans. At the store, we played at being comadres, and I had to be the comadre or the mother or else I would get angry. I saw them as having “something” different from me and I did not understand why until I realized what a man was and what a woman was, but I said that I did not want to be like that. I wanted to be like them; I wanted to be a woman. I put my mom’s bras on, and my grandmother’s. (Jessica)

Through Angelina’s quote, we can observe a marked identification with the roles attributed to the female space from an early age. Another important fact that emerges from the quote is that this identification, in the first instance, happens to feel that she is different when she sees a boy at school, while feeling that she is the same when sees a girl. She even speaks of a “feminine essence”, a shared “energy”. She uses very strong words that transcend the materiality of the body to refer to that very early sensation. As we saw in Chaps. 2 and 3, identity configuration is a dynamic and relational process. Human beings and both group and individual identities are moulded through a process of identification that passes, in the first instance, through the differentiation and distinction of what we are not. It can be argued, then, that identities are articulated as border spaces, where the first skin would serve as that border, albeit a porous one, where that skin not only separates some, but also unites others. In the second quote, which comes from Jessica, a script quite similar to Angelina’s appears about the primary identification with the feminine. The rejection of what is culturally associated with the male world is observed more clearly, represented in this case through the figure of the lead soldier. This toy is irreducibly associated with war and violence. Through this game, the positions of winner/vanquished and dominator/ dominated are reproduced, alluding to the defence of homeland and heritage and, therefore, symbolically to the paternal legacy, where one would essentially be taking distance from the mother and the feminine. The maternal legacy would be that space embodied by vulnerability,

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dependence, and affection being left aside. Jessica not only shows a rejection of this, but a direct preference for devices associated with the feminine that, in her case, are represented by evoking being a mother and caring for children through games. Another role-play she mentions is that of the “comadres”, a term widely used by these latitudes on a daily basis to mention a friend and/or neighbour with whom one has a relationship of trust and camaraderie, with whom they generally shop at the market, share the domestic space, and take care of the children, among other things. Therefore, what we observe through these quotes is that in a natural and immediate way, the identification with the feminine and with all the devices associated with it arises, until, as we see in the quote, Jessica realizes that women have “something” that she doesn’t have. It is there that the desire to “be a woman” appears. The quote ends with Jessica mentioning that she begins to wear her mother’s bra and that of her grandmother, making the desire materialize, albeit in the private sphere. As we know, gender configurations attribute meanings constructed by roles, discourses, practices, and representations of the masculine and feminine (Young, 1980). It is through these devices that both the imaginary and bodily mechanics of genders operate. The representations of gender, following this order, are installed as subjective instances, in charge of forging bodies in the imaginary and materiality. For its part, the second skin not only encompasses clothing, but also the preference for certain colours, the use of certain tones of voice and sounds that give shape, materiality, and expression to the first skin. In this sense, I want to bring up the case of Javiera. I remember the first time I saw her. It was at the beginning of 2017 in the parking lot of the Faculty of Performing Arts of the Catholic University. I was late for a dance class, so after parking I was going at a brisk pace. Even so, it was inevitable that when I passed her, I noticed her presence. I remember thinking “what a beautiful woman”. She had a very particular beauty for these latitudes: tall (well above average), dark, slim, with curly hair. She looked like a runway model. A few months later, at a gathering of university friends, someone would mention that Javiera was a trans woman who studied at the same university. After the physical description was given, it was not difficult to find it in the drawers of my memory. Javiera is not representative of the group of trans women who have collaborated with this study. Javiera, unlike the vast majority of my interlocutors, finished high school, studies theatre at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and lives with parents who accept her identity

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as a trans woman. She did not suffer sexual abuse in her childhood nor has she practiced prostitution. Javiera alternates between university studies and modelling. In fact, in 2018, when I interviewed her as part of the fieldwork of this research, she participated as the first trans model in Lima Fashion Week. As I mentioned in Chap. 3 on methodology, the conversations I had with most of my interlocutors took place in restaurants or coffee shops, or often the meetings were at my home.1 The only one whose home I had the opportunity to see was Javiera. In fact, the conversation we had, which lasted a little over two hours, was in her bedroom. Javiera laid on her bed and I sat in her desk chair. As we went through the map of her life, it was inevitable that my attention be placed on the tonalities of the objects that inhabited her space. All, or the vast majority, of it was in shades of pink: cushions, bedding, picture frames, and her cell phone case, among other things. Therefore, I made a parenthesis in the narration and asked about it. Since I was little, I always liked pink but I couldn’t say it. I would not be able to say it; I wouldn’t know how to say it. In fact, I just said I liked the sky-blue colour. My cousin told me that I shouldn’t like sky blue, but blue. So, there was no way I could say I like pink. I would wear orange because it looked like pink. When I was little and I loved playing with dolls, I would make them if I did not have them … I would use bags and add something to look like a little head and would move the bag down and open it to look like Cinderella and I played like that. I made all sorts of things, but when I felt that another person was watching me, then Cinderella would turn into a flying rocket (laughs) and I would make rocket sounds. (Javiera)

In the quote, we can observe the preference for a colour palette that is traditionally and socially associated with the feminine. However, we can also already observe how this desire is coming into tension with the social norms assigned to bodies and genders, based on a system of prohibitions. Javiera cannot openly say that her favourite colour is pink; she has to claim and use a colour that is allowed, one that is consistent with the sex she was born into. Through the quote we are able to see all of the creative and playful mechanisms through which a child is able to create desired realities. In this specific case, Javiera plays at being Cinderella and uses everyday objects and resources at hand, such as a bag, to symbolize her 1  In Chap. 3 I also reflect on the possible reasons behind trans women’s reluctance to go to their homes.

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wish. However, the same creativity and playful resources that allow her to symbolize Cinderella are also what she uses to hide her and transform her into a flying rocket, with the help of kinesthetic sounds. Thus, she hides what she perceives or knows will be the object of disapproval or punishment from her parents and others in her closest environment. In particular, it serves the purposes of my research to remember that recognition from “the other” is not part of a blank page. Thus, for example, when a baby is born and has male genitalia (penis, testicles), a type of recognition is immediately activated that is already enrolled in a system of interpretation and knowledge in a given episteme and, therefore, in a system of power. When the baby is born, the father, the mother, and family members will begin to engage in habits recognizing the baby’s gender: through colour selection for garments (generically speaking: blue for boys, pink for girls), hair length (biological male: short hair, biological female: long hair). As the motor system gains independence, parents will start to give certain objects/toys. If the child is a boy, he will start playing with cars, balls, soldiers, and, in general, he will participate in activities that involve more movement. If the child is a girl, there will be a whole set of objects and bodily practices that will be transmitted so that her gender expresses the biological sex with which she was born. This transmission occurs via the world and via objects, that is, through the shaping of the body in terms of dress, hair, and hairstyle, among others. Recognition from the other is an acknowledgment that is made from an interpretive horizon that is activating a determined belief system, which, in turn, is part of an epistemic system based on a power structure (Marion Young 1980). That power, in this case, is associated with a compulsive heteronormativity that develops homophobic and transphobic aesthetics. As we saw in Chap. 2, the terms of recognition are socially prefigured in certain environments composed of aesthetics. Parents do not think about what they are doing; they simply do it lovingly when it comes to building this gender and recognizing their babies with a certain gender identity. Nonetheless, many times this “simply doing it lovingly’ obscures the violence with which gendered conformity can be imposed and policed in families. We are facing a type of recognition that is normative. I recognize you as being, but at the same time I give you a standard where we find two lines of action that happen simultaneously. First, there is a policing of norms. Secondly, a capacity building occurs, because they are preparing a new being to acquire a social life, guided by an ideology of course, but with the intention to take care of the child and prepare the child for that

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social life. The problem occurs when this small being, who is a biological male in the case of trans women, begins to identify with what is more feminine in society: the colours he chooses, his desire to wear a dress or have long hair, his identification with the female characters in stories and movies, and so on. In all things, he associates with the behaviours and aesthetics of the feminine, as the memories of the trans women who participated in this research illustrate. We observe, through the experience of trans women, how the recognition of parents comes into tension with self-recognition or the self-perception of feeling female. And, as we will see in the quote below, this tension can lead to episodes of physical violence. From the age of 8, I already dreamed of long hair. I remember that I grabbed a piece of twine and pretended it was my hair. And I danced and danced and several times they fished (caught) me with twine on my head at the farm (…) I was always hanging around at the farm tucked into the bushes with the twine on my head and I dreamed… At that time, the band “Agua Bella, Bella, Bella” (Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful Water) was popular, and I could only see it on television and for me the most beautiful member was Mari Carmen Marín. Long hair, big breasts, I thought she was the sexiest. The most beautiful woman… I dreamed of having hair like that and I wanted to be like her. I was little, and I already knew (…) I remember that once I put on a white christening dress and was dancing inside a friend’s house and there was a very strong tremor and the houses started to shake and it didn’t stop, it didn’t stop, and I had to go outside with my dress on and everyone was outside screaming in the street. When they saw me at home wearing a (short) dress they beat the shit out of me, fucking hell. (Yasmín)

Through Yasmin’s quote, as in the case of Javiera, we see how identification with the feminine is manifested through playing. The child uses her imagination to try to understand what she perceives and wants, as well as to interpret, recreate, and transform the world around her. Playtime is where everything is possible; it represents a space of permissiveness, where personal realizations of the infant’s world that transcend the stigmas of any generic rite are constituted. The playful space would thus represent an unconscious strategy for the exercise of the child’s freedom. Nonetheless, what is clear is that the vision in which the child is self-recognizing her subjectivity and performing it comes into tension with the mirror of the parents about herself. Thus, the first conflict between the established order that establishes a type of recognition (I stress that this recognition is

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normative, it is not any type of recognition) and the self-perception that the child has over his or herself begins. I understand the trans experience as aesthetic because of the performative act in the way trans people shape their bodies, work their movement, work their kinesthesia. My theory on the trans experience as aesthetic concurs with Bourdieu’s idea of habitus (1984). It is something that is established through imitation and repetition. This repetition produces an innovation: a new creation is born. Before my fieldwork, I believed that a new habitus could be observed in the restructuring of their pattern of movement from a masculine to a feminine pattern. However, I observed through the testimonies of most trans women that at some point, which almost always occurred in early childhood and youth, both masculine and feminine modalities coexist simultaneously. Moreover, the identification with a female role model appears at the first stage of their life, when they do not know that feminine movements are undesirable for a masculine aesthetic by her family and others. This moment marks the beginning of repression, corrections, and violence by their closest relations, like parents, siblings, teachers and school administrators, neighbours, and so on. They realize that certain movements of their hands or their hips or some tones of voice are prohibited. At this point, they start to perform a masculine aesthetic and hide the feminine one, as we shall see in the next quotation. I had to represent masculinity, yes, of course. I have lived a long-time performing masculinity very strongly. I mean, it’s also part of me, right? For me it’s like taking these kinds of things roughly, talking in a general way all the time and not in particular, that it doesn’t involve what you feel and … not having certain movements, everything is straighter. And besides talking fast, you can’t take a long time to say things, that is, you have to do it quickly. But it even affects how I blink. I tend to blink a lot and I remember that a theatre teacher once told me that … he said “It’s okay, but there’s something …there’s a problem that … I mean, I think you have to work on it, because there is a certain delicateness to your performance,” he told me. And I tried hard and that’s one of the reasons why I said, “I think I’m trans,” because there’s something here I’m not controlling. (Javiera)

Through the quote, we observe a kinesthetic portrait of male aesthetics, where Javiera describes male performance through the cadence of movements, the way objects are grasped, and the form and rhythm of speaking, among other things. Nonetheless, while control and norms play a fundamental role in the acts of recognition of trans women, at the same

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time we see how this rule is transgressed through a struggle that highlights and wants to bring out self-recognition. In the performative acts of masculinity, it is observed that although there is a knowledge of masculine aesthetics on how to move, speak, handle, or perform in a certain cadence, there is something in trans people that exceeds, that goes out and cannot be hidden for a long time. Unlike lesbian, gay, and bisexual sexual orientations where gender identity is not at stake insofar as the body does not change, the imposed rule of being a man or being a woman can be carried out until the time someone decides to try alternatives (or come out). With the trans people who have participated in this research, there is something that comes into play very early and deals directly with corporality in terms of its form and in terms of its action, its kinesthetic, its movement. Then, the forms of domination that precede the lived-body end up affecting them, end up becoming corporeal. At this point, an aesthetic struggle begins in conforming how one feels that one is to the corporal, to how I see myself through a manner of glances, kinesthesia, and gestuality, among others. Reality reminds us that the heteronormative system fails to impose itself in its maximum expression. On the contrary, it produces cracks, fissures, resistances. This fact in itself is a political act that destabilizes gender norms. That is, the mere presence of people with diverse sex-­ gender identities bring the limits of the heteronormative gender system to the forefront (Butler, 1993, 2004). The childhood of trans women, directly correlated with the first and second skin, is determined by a dialogue that is always in conflict, one between perceptual valuation and the expectations society has about it and its own self-recognition. The latter, in the first stage of trans women’s lives, refers to the desire to want to have sex with someone, a desire that is not yet of a sexual nature. Instead, it is the desire to be and appear to be a woman that comes into direct conflict with the expectations that society has about a certain human being, through which certain behaviours, certain movements, particular voice modalities, a certain way of dressing and adorning the body come to be expected, among other things. These constructions will be based on a system of prizes and sanctions. It is at this moment that desire and power are linked; to the extent that desire is implied in social norms, it is linked with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as a recognizable human and who does not.

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The Body as a Territory and the Search of Recognition’s Metaphor of the Mirror The life expectancy for a trans woman in Peru, and in general for all of Latin America, is 35 years (according to figures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, CIDH 2015), either because they are killed or because they die as a result of HIV. Moreover, they live each day with overwhelming, exclusion and discrimination, the violation of their rights, the loss of family networks, physical and psychological abuse, among other things. In that sense, my first approach to the trans Peruvian reality was always accompanied by the following question: How, despite the adverse context of being and living as trans in the country, trans women still choose it (if it is an option)? Anibal Quijano said: “It is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted … It is time, in short, to stop being what we are not,” (2006: 246) in a context of a decolonial political project that has the considerations of race and culture at the centre. However, we can reframe Quijano’s statement by exchanging the Eurocentric mirror for the heteronormative mirror.2 This phrase answers, then, in large part to my question. It is an act of courage, a search for freedom, authenticity, and self-knowledge that makes them stop in front of the world and say, “This is me”. Here, it is not about dying, but about living as someone who is not pretending to be what others expect him or her to be. In the following quotes, we observe that search and that determination: Before I had spoken with a trans friend, and I was to alter my body because I have thyroid issues and thought that something could happen to me. My friend told me to analyse myself, to sit in front of the mirror and close my eyes and look inside myself and that if I felt that I was a woman, I am a woman, and it didn’t matter how I looked… That can be worked on, but in the end, it’s what I am. And one day I thought back to when I was a child alone in the car, how sometimes a pothole would stir up something in my brain and I would see a woman inside and feel happy. And then when I came back to reality, I would become depressed because I had to keep being a boy. (Angelina)

2  However, as we saw in the previous chapter, historical studies on sexuality in the precolonial period suggest that what we may call the trans condition was not stigmatized and in many cases was highly valued as characteristics of a condition of sacredness.

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I was born a biological male, I was raised as a man but that did not identify with me, I did not identify with that and I tried to identify as gay or as lesbian, but that did not convince me either. There was another thing. In the mirror, my body had to look as I felt inside. As Agrado said in the movie “All About my Mother” (“Todo sobre mi madre”), one is more authentic when she more closely resembles what she dreamed for herself. You know what I mean? That’s it. And in that process, there’s a constant struggle. A huge and strong struggle to be who you are. (Jana)

“She told me to analyse myself, to sit in front of the mirror and close my eyes and look inside myself and that if I felt that I was a woman, I am a woman, and it didn’t matter how I looked” (Angelina). In this sentence, we see that the sight, the act of seeing the reflection in the mirror, ceases to be important.3 We see, rather, that knowing who one is happens through feeling, in breathing, in the proprioception of each one of the organs, in the act of imagining/thinking through the senses that exclude sight. In this meditative act, one becomes what one feels, it is said. Sight only confuses. From now on, when that feeling of a woman appears in the foreground, the trajectory passes through what Jana explains: “In the mirror, my body had to look as I felt inside. As Agrado said in Almodóvar’s 1999 movie All About my Mother, one is more authentic when she more closely resembles what she dreamed for herself.” For Jana then, authenticity has to do with working the bodily territory until it resembles what one dreams for oneself. Jana is a trans woman, today a committed activist, and was a founder of the start of the trans movement in Peru during the 2000s. Jana is also involved with academia and the production of knowledge.4 I mention this because in contrast to 3  Jacques Lacan formulated the concept of the mirror stage as part of his Theory of Self, through which he maintains that an infant undergoes his first process of imaginary identification of the ego when seeing his image in the mirror, one that brings a series of psychic consequences in the development of the self. Although the metaphor of the mirror is a dense metaphor in postmodern discourses that has been worked on from Lacan onwards, the use of the mirror metaphor in this chapter has to do with the same expression collected in the field and not with psychoanalytic theory. I am using the metaphor of the mirror here as a contribution from one of my interlocutors, which is better understood from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism, where it is affirmed that “the self is the other.” 4  In 2004 Jana started a master’s in Gender, Sexuality and Reproductive health at the Cayetano Heredia University. She obtains a scholarship by the Ford Foundation program. Since then, she is part of the research group of The Interdisciplinary Research Center on Sexuality, AIDS and Society at the same university.

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other trans women, she has dedicated many years to reflect on the conditions, the presence, and the challenges of being a trans woman in Peru. Today Jana is 51 years old, and she has lived as a trans woman for more than 20 years. As we will see, her narrative conveys her political discourse, which is built upon reflections concerning her own life but also her acquaintance with major global theoretical and political trans’ inputs. At the same time, I will put her definitions in dialogue with other perspectives that approach the body as territory, place, space, in particular in relation to the power that constitutes the body and the power that emancipates it. During our conversation, the body appears as the heart of the stage, and it is named as a political territory. Jana mentioned: The only thing that unifies trans people is gender identity. That is, we have a feminine identity with a territory that is the male body, and we have to work hard, we have to build it, we have to make it a female territory (…) That’s what I think, that this trans woman’s political body, without us wanting it, without us planning it, without us even having the slightest idea of ​​ what we were doing, is emerging. We are changing the mentality of sexuality in this society, that it is not only sexuality but also a way of living. It is a way of being happy, feeling fulfilled.

As we can see, for Jana to conceive the body as a territory is to conceive it as something dynamic, a locus where politics is carried out.5 The transformation of this territory is presented not only as a struggle for the recognition and liberation of trans identity, but also as a struggle directed to transform the sensibilities of a society. In this sense, for Jana, sexuality is also a “way of living” and “being happy”. This statement of the “body as a territory,” apparently colloquial, is deeply philosophical and political because it alludes to the territory as a place of sovereignty, identity, and property. On the other hand, Jana makes it clear that the body is also built relationally either to abject it or to release it. Being a cultural construction,

5  Other political struggles that combine gender, territorial sovereignty, and care for the environment with the relationship between territorial guard and their care are approved with the defence of women’s rights and the promotion of an ethic of caring for their bodies, and at the same time with a defence of epistemic and ontological constructs that carry gender considerations. See, for example, Vandana Shiva, Bolivian feminists, Mapuche feminists. Likewise, this relationship between body, culture, environment, and gender has been developed from somatic studies (see Hartley, 1995).

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it is territory, because it is inhabited by someone and, therefore, it is not a neutral territory. Rather, it is a place with life. Jana’s quote also bears the two senses of aeisthesis that I have been using in this investigation. On the one hand, it represents aesthetics as creation/ construction, as a poietic action (Levine, P., & MacNaughton, I., 2004) that involves sculpture and performance. And, at the same time, aesthetics is used as sensibility first of her to herself, as well as of otherness towards her. In this sense, the territory is linked to recognition not only as a cognitive act, but also as an affective act, because it is connected to feelings/ sensitivities. That said, recognition is always a desire for recognition, as Butler maintains in her reading of Hegel. It is not a single cognitive issue, but also a carnal one if we assume that desire does not exist without a body. Judith Butler in Undoing Gender (2004) argues that the desire for recognition is fundamental to constitute us as human beings, from the subjective side, even though it is by definition a relational fact. What recognition does a trans woman seek? To be recognized for what she feels she is. It is fundamental for her identity, for her subjectivity, for her general well-being. And to do that, she must work the body, sculpt it; she must work her gestures, makeup, kinesthesia, the way to adorn her body and to dress it.6 Finally, she shapes her body through hormones and through surgery. All of this can be read as a desire for recognition in a subjective sense, but because it is a social fact, recognition is necessarily relational. From the moment in which parents carry their baby, this first recognition is given by contact, friction, and caress. There, the other being is recognized as different, in union and through touch and not in separation, as psychoanalysis would say. In the construction of subjectivity, according to the classical Freudian theory of the self, the baby feels a unity with the mother, that they form a whole without splits. It is in the process of subjectivation, thanks to the interdiction that the father will impose, that the child has to separate from the mother to become a subject. That is, the logical operation, according to Freud’s theory, is a disjunctive, dissociative operation in which the self separates and recognizes the mother as “other.” That is, in the act that the self becomes an individual, the other appears. 6  In Peru there is an extended practice among the population of trans women of the use of “chabucas”. These consist of cutting pieces of foam padding and shape them to fill or shape hips, legs and buttocks to resemble the curves of a woman. They are glued with packing tape and then two or three tights are put on so that they do not move and the reliefs are not noticed.

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Otherness occurs. This theory establishes that the narrative of the twentieth century, the century of the self as we know it, is not consistent with other narratives of how the self is constituted in other cultures. In the Andes, for instance, as in other parts of the world, in the interaction of the mother and the baby, which is first and foremost an act of body, skin, rubbing and caresses, the baby is recognized as a subject but not by disjunction, rather by union. I recognize myself as “I” at the same moment that I recognize what “we” means. It is a subjectivation by copulation, by “and” not by “or”. And, therefore, it is a construction where the sense of belonging (the communal or the social) is present in the subject itself, in the constitution of itself as a person. As we can see, for Jana, the body is at the centre, and it is a living body or soma, coinciding in this sense with ideas advanced by Merleau-Ponty (1993) and Iris Marion Young (1980).7 However, as we have already suggested in the previous chapter related to the context, Jana is questioning the episteme of a whole patriarchal tradition—but no longer discursively. She does not discuss it with words; she discusses it with performance. For instance, she criticizes some branches of feminism that do not question the division of the mental and the material. In fact, the construction of a gender category operates inside of this scheme: gender is to culture as sex is to nature. Jana said: For many years we were submerged in those abbreviations that make everyone invisible and nobody does anything for anybody. And it was also a question of power, of the misogynist gay man, transphobic, macho. Because the gay movement in this country is like that, as is the male chauvinism, machismo, that exists against women and the machismo of some feminist women that say that you are a woman because you have a vagina and a primary female socialization.

7  In Jana’s elaborations, one can see encounters with other theoretical horizons that address gender and sexuality issues with the body at the centre of their contributions. In addition to the aforementioned Iris Marion Young, we find contributions in the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who makes the same claim about the centrality of the body and its indivisibility, among other authors located within the new materialist feminist. On the other hand, the centrality of the body is also present in more intersecting theories, particularly those that take into account considerations of race and culture. This is the case of the Chicano thinkers Chela Sandoval and Gloria Anzaldúa, and Bolivian community feminists such as Silvia Rivera, and Maria Galindo, among others.

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Jana is advocating the radical critique to the patriarchal episteme, both the heteronormative and the homonormative. She questions both. The political act of trans women is an aesthetic act. The body is political because it is aesthetic; it is not an ethical policy that says, “Do not discriminate against me.” Rather, it is a political fact of showing the body, of performing and, from there, transgressing the social order. Jana told me: (…) I don’t know if you’ve ever questioned whether you like penis or you like vagina. That’s your problem. But I believe that all heterosexual human beings question themselves at some point. But your social vehicle, your feminine or masculine gender, how you transit through social life, gives you certain guarantees, because you do not transgress that. One thing is the erotic, the attraction at a certain moment. But you do not have a political militancy. Your body is not revolutionary.

She mentions the body of the trans woman as revolutionary, as a body that erodes social practices and sensibilities, as a militant matter that does politics with its presence. The use of the word “transgress” in her speech appears with two purposes. On the one hand, the trans body transgresses in the sense of “disturb.” But, on the other hand, it could be read as a demand for validation from the other, to be recognized by sight and action from the other. This other could be her lover, or people in the street, or even in her work. The fact that people call her “madam” on public transportation, or that someone touches her in certain way and that they let themselves be touched in a certain way, in her erotic-affective world, means that they recognize her as a woman despite her biology. Political action as performed by trans bodies has two edges. The first edge leads to the soma, to subjectivity. In other words, there is a construction of “this I am” and “this I want to be.” The other edge is part of the social dimension: “I want to be recognized as such.” Therefore, this shift needs social recognition. The interlocutor is a mirror in which the person himself is observed: “I need to be recognized for my otherness.” It is interesting that for Jana, the recognition of the Peruvian State appears secondary. For her, that is not fundamental. What is important, according to her, is recognition from the general public and from civil society. With the complicated political context that we have, and Congress, and law proposals for us to be recognized as citizens of the state, I don’t think we will get it. I think the big change is going to be in the mentality of people

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who are excruciatingly slow, like turtles, but it’s going to happen. What has helped here? Having a trans councillor, Luisa Revilla, for the first time in history. Second, what has helped? It’s the show, this world of Chollywood. Dayana Valenzuela, as we knew her, wanted to participate in Miss Peru but she did not have the papers even though she had already gotten the surgery. It is well known that all football players have a fabulous attraction to trans women. That interaction in daily life, in the mentality of people, of popular characters, helps a lot. I think that the political initiatives have a long way to go, but that in the mentality of the common people and even more of people with a little more education and information, things are changing. (Jana)

To the extent that recognition is sought where there is no recognition, where there is a precarious recognition, recognition then is a political reality. From the aesthetic point of view, the construction of the body is an aesthetic reality in the sense of creating a work as an expression of a sensibility (see Chap. 2). Therefore, aesthetics and politics are already in that desire for recognition and in the work that is done to win the other’s recognition. The use of the body as a political and sexual tool is not a modern instrument, but rather an aesthetic one. It is with this concept (the body as matter) that politics and aesthetics find each other. Jana talks, on the one hand, about the body as an aesthetic construction and, on the other, as a sensibility. Because of that, she mentions that changes at a state level are important, but the most important things that the trans movement achieves are attained through their performance. They are creating new common senses, which are new sensibilities and simultaneously a new aesthetic (Ranciere, 2006; Maffesolli, 2007). Power, the search for recognition, the right to identity, relational acts, and at the same time self-referential acts, go through the live body. Trans women need to express themselves. The circle of identity closes in contact and in the sight of the other. This fact is also aesthetic in the double sense already mentioned, because there is a sensitivity that trans women are requesting, and at the same time, they sculpt themselves to resemble the image that they have of themselves. So, it follows that there is a need for them to see themselves; that is where the metaphor of the mirror comes in. And, at the same time, there is a need to see oneself through the gaze of the other, which is the part of socialization where that mirror distorts, paraphrasing Quijano’s quote, due to the fact the gaze that my parents, my peers, and society as a whole give me end up being an act of domination because what they feel is not reflected.

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In both cases there is a tension between the affirmative search for what I feel I am and at the same time there is a subjection to certain stereotypes or gender codes that are at hand: the kind of beauty that privileges masculinity, for instance. There is a generational change in the model of femininity that trans women seek. The older generations looked for the most robust body, the bedette type (big breasts, big buttocks) that was very fashionable in the 1980s and 1990s. For the year 2000, new figures appear in the media that still reproduce the image of the “Latin woman”, they are bodies less exaggerated. The imaginary of how I become a woman is already tinged with a process of domination to establish bodily standards, canons of beauty, characteristics with which the feminine associates (colours, clothes, shoes, makeup, hair, etc.). And this is the paradox: on the one hand, there is an emancipation against heteronormative patriarchy, but on the other hand, there is some kind of subjection to constructions of femininity that reproduce power, even if not heteronormative.

The Trans Praxis as a Criticism of the Cartesian Subject The Cartesian code of Descartes inaugurated the modern split between mental substance and matter, or the “corporeal substance” (Manzo, 2013), that is, the res cogitans from the res extensa, where the “I”, the cogito (the thinking being), is separated from the body and from nature in general. It was at that time that the “nature” category was coined, which today has been replaced by the “environment” category, giving rise to a greater understanding that transcends the biologist’s gaze to an interdisciplinary one that emphasizes society-nature interaction as a result of the current ecological crisis. The Cartesian self, on the other hand, is an extramundane self as it is incorporeal; it is outside the world and nature. This is the point of departure for the Cartesian subject, or cogito (an incorporeal subject), that simultaneously splits him from the community. The Cartesian subject is the one who is self-determining: “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum). That is, I do not depend on any materiality to talk about myself, and I do not depend on a community to find my identity. In this world of the one-self, of the self-referenced subject, the only recognition that matters is self-recognition. Therefore, there is no place for alterity nor materiality.

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That hyper narcissism translated from a logic that follows the formula “I, therefore, I” ends up returning to the corpse body. From then on, the body no longer determines anything. This is the founding milestone of modernity. The division suffered by the modern subject is the product of different conceptual niches both prior and subsequent to Descartes’s cogito. However, Descartes is responsible for ingraining the ontology of modernity, where the cosmos and matter remain outside of the subject (Plumwood, 1993; Dussel, 1995, 1998; Albanese, 1996). It is an ontology based on a dual system of thought where reality is established by creating opposing pairs such as culture-nature, mind-body, reality-­ representation, and so on. Historically, the critique of Cartesianism comes from different sources of enunciation. One of the main criticisms of Cartesianism can be understood as the rescue of the lived body or soma. Various authors have argued that the Cartesian ego, deeply self-referential, has no body because it is rhetorically split from all materiality. However, in practice, of course it has a body. In fact, it does not just have a body but a certain class, a sexuality, educational level, a place of origin. And at the same time, in the exercise of becoming an ontology, it is configured as a synecdoche where this subject, also described as non-corporal, represents us all. Western critical thought, both in the areas of Philosophy and Social Sciences, questioned Cartesian dualism, returning to an integrated image of the living being, as a lived body or as a soma, announcing what in initial terms we can call European postmodern thought (Shuterman, 2012).8 For around 40 years we have experienced an increase in literature that focuses on the body theme and that responds to the growth in the relationship between bodies, technology, and society, among other things (Turner, 2012). Richard Shuterman in his book Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (2012) defines soma as: “a living, feeling, sentient body rather than a mere physical body potentially devoid of life 8  It is also important to note that in the West, even before the contributions of Philosophy, this dichotomy was already being questioned from the praxis, that is, from disciplines designed to promote the well-being of people and communities, such as Émile Jaques Dalcroze and Francois Delsarte did in the nineteenth century, considered the pioneers of what is now called Somatic Education. This discipline is based on the methods of Feldenkrais, Body Mind Centering, Alexander Technique, and Rolfing, among other schools. We can say something similar with respect to the history of modern and contemporary dance where the pioneering figures of Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman stand out.

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and sensation,” while the aesthetic in somaesthetics has the dual role of emphasizing the soma’s perceptual role (whose embodied intentionality contradicts the body/mind dichotomy) and its aesthetic uses both in stylizing one’s self and in appreciating the aesthetic qualities of other selves and things.”(2012: 1) His contributions, based on the work of six authors, aim to offer an understanding of the pragmatist, lived body inspired by the work of John Dewey. The authors are Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and two pragmatist philosophers: William James and John Dewey. They each question the Cartesian distinction that splits the mind from both the body (nature) and the community from different philosophical perspectives. Likewise, not only mainstream Western thinkers, but also authors from “the margins of the West,” so to speak, began to question the absence of the body in philosophical and social studies. The best-known case is that of Frantz Fanon and his teacher Aimé Cesaire, who theorize around the impossibility of thinking about domination without its embodiment in terms of race and colour, returning the centrality to the body and the fact that it is about a social construction directly affected by corporeality. From the studies of sex/gender, thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Gail Rubin, Eve Kosofky Segwig, Judith Butler, and Luce Irigaray, among others, have developed their theoretical contributions in dialogue with this critical wave of the modern subject. In addition to recognizing the patriarchal character of this modern self, the decolonial Latin American studies that point to the self as being a modern/colonial self are critical to my study. Indeed, Anibal Quijano maintains that: Without this “objectification” of the “body” as “nature,” of its expulsion from the realm of the “spirit,” it would hardly have been possible to attempt the “scientific” theorization of the problem of race (…) From that Eurocentric perspective, certain races are condemned as “inferior” for not being “rational” subjects. They are objects of study, “body” in consequence, closer to “nature” (…) This new and radical dualism affected not only the racial relations of domination, but also the older ones, the sexual relations of domination. Henceforth, the place of women, especially that of women of the inferior races, was stereotyped along with the rest of the bodies. Indeed, the more inferior their races were, the closer to nature or, as in the case of black female slaves, directly within nature they were, the more it was exacerbated. (2000: 217 in Lander, 2000)

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For Le Breton, the conception of the modern body “implies the rupture of the subject with the others (a social structure of the individualistic type), with the cosmos (the raw materials that make up the body do not find any correspondence elsewhere), with itself (possessing a body rather than being a body)” (1990: 8). The Cartesian ergo cogito is a being split off from its body, from society, and from the world. In the process of individuation of the modern subject, the body is one more attribute, a possession that no longer determines identity. The construction of the concept of the modern person as an effect of distancing from popular traditions thus establishes a border between individuals and an excessive attention of the subject towards himself. The subject therefore becomes self-referential by excellence and only he can account for his own existence. This approach to the world, this metaphysics of being and the way of seeing things, differs greatly from the ontology of other peoples. All registered peoples in the world formulate a particular knowledge about the body and its functions within the conception they have of their own environment, as well as its relationship with the world. For example, in the late 1970s, Brazilian anthropology critiqued the representation of indigenous populations under the paradigm of European theories, highlighting the importance of taking indigenous peoples’ own perceptions of the centrality the body occupies in social life into account. As part of this criticism, Viveiros de Castro stated: “If the Yawalapiti say that seclusion is to change the body, this statement cannot be taken as a metaphor. It must be understood literally insofar as it is understood that the body for the Yawalapiti is something different from what we call this” (1979: 45). Similarly, in the Peruvian context, Luisa Elvira Belaunde argues that in Amazonian indigenous cosmologies there are several realities which people can access through dreams, the ingestion of psychoactive plants, or the smell of spilled blood, especially. This transit between worlds occurs through a change of body that allows them to see and experience the world as other beings see it. Under this conception, the status of “people” is not exclusive to living human beings, but rather to various beings of the cosmos including plants, animals, spirits, the dead, and so on. And, it is the body that can be changed, the place of perspectives (Belaunde, 2018). Likewise, through rhetoric one can come to understand the perspective and centrality that the body has in the social matrix of indigenous peoples. Latour (1993) argued that the great subject-object division that rendered modern people incapable of being aware of networks or fabrics in turn made “traditional societies” into the only ones who could see those

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networks. In this way, first, ethnographers, and later, anthropologists, described how these societies (“trapped in their beliefs”) continued to mix what for the moderns were separate entities. In this sense, Velázquez (1998) in his studies in the Peruvian Amazon, when applying a projective psychological test, found that the drawing did not conform to the Western mental health guideline. In psychology, there is a test that asks the patient to draw a person with the purpose of delving into the projections of the subject and his or her approach towards the world that goes beyond words. This projective test conceives the drawing of the human figure as a deep expression of the personality of the subject who draws. Proof of mental health is that the drawing done of the human body is closed and without discontinuities. However, when that same test is given to a person from the Amazon, he or she makes the same figure, but draws the line not as continuous, but instead dotted, with spaces, and a porous body. This is because the closed body is a diseased body where nothing enters and nothing comes out. The porous body is that which interacts with its social and internal environment. A closed body cannot give and receive; nothing enters or leaves and there is no interrelation with anything other than itself. The boundaries that delimit it cut everything off. In contrast, the porous body is not insulated and therefore has flow. It is a body, therefore, that you have to take more care of, paying attention to what goes in and what comes out.9 All of these theories and political praxis can be conceived as criticisms of Cartesian dualism and as ways of assigning a “body” to the modern self. It is possible to read the history of the social struggles of the twentieth century as criticisms of this incorporeal “neutral” self, to show the patriarchal and colonial character of its construction. As criticisms of the modern Cartesian subject emerge, what is actually appearing is its embodiment. 9  In the Andes and in the Amazon, the conception of the plant and animal world is based on a dualistic ontology divided into masculine and feminine. Under this conception, each plant has a specific use and energy. Moreover, there are warm and fresh plants as well as sweet and salty plants. Depending on the type of discomfort, one will be used and not the other, taking into account this conception. When the delegations of the Ministry of Health of Peru come to a community to carry out sexual and reproductive health controls, it is common for women to be reluctant to vaginal obscuration because under their conception, it is incomprehensible that something cold could be introduced into something warm. The same rejection occurs among the Awajún population with the use of condoms. These contradict the philosophy of good living because they are made of rubber. All the dualisms of an ontology that have to do with the male and the female can be observed, and by making the comparison with modern ontology, we can see that the problem is not diversity or dualism, but hierarchy.

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One way of understanding the experience of trans women is by arguing that with their praxis they are affirming a way of conceiving life and corporeality that, deep down, is a critique of the coloniality of knowledge. In other words, we are facing a decolonial practice. The coloniality of knowledge is, among other things, the imposition of this modern subject on other ways of being and existing in the world. As we have seen, there has been resistance to succumb to the idea of a single, universal knowledge and reason from the subaltern populations. Thanks to this, alternative ontologies and epistemologies that were labelled as pre-modern at one point in history have prevailed. The prefix “pre” is not prior in the temporal sense because they are contemporary practices, but rather the “pre” as something that is unfinished. In that sense, the prehistoric subject is spoken of not in the sense that it belongs to prehistory as a chronology, but rather as lacking in history because it has no writing. The pre-religious subject is spoken of because animism is considered a minor form of spirituality compared to Judeo-Christian theology. The pre political subject is spoken of because it is not articulated through Marxist theory or parties. They speak of the prescientific because their knowledge system does not follow the scientific method. So, the “pre” is a marker, specifically of colonial relations. What this research is putting on the table is precisely the existence of nuclei of resistance to the subjugation of an episteme and a modern-colonial ontology. It is what in reality the conquest of America supposes, not only vassals in the sense of subjects of the king and the crown, but also in terms of submitting ourselves to a way of seeing the world and being in it. It is something that was first given through evangelization, then school, the State, and all the modern devices that support it. To the extent that this research is part of a decolonial horizon, the objective of showing the empirical evidence of native peoples is to show that the premodern is not so pre and, in turn, to highlight several of the communicating, albeit not identical, vessels with the western postmodern. In this sense, the work carried out by trans women with the body in the first and second skin must be understood as a critique per se, from action and praxis, to the modern Cartesian subject. And that body needs recognition. And that recognition, by definition, is relational. So, through what is analysed in this chapter, we can argue that the search for recognition of trans women is the way to challenge the modern patriarchal, logocentric, and heteronormative mandate. Likewise, the evidence I am presenting has sought to highlight the fact that the lived body is “relational.” It interacts. And it is in that interaction

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that recognition occurs, understanding this category in relational terms, but also self-referential ones. While recognition is given from the other at the same time and as a result of that recognition, the subject also recognizes itself. One of the authors who worked on this idea was the anthropologist Mead in his theory on Symbolic Interactionism, where he argues that it is through communication that the person can leave his or herself and occupy the position of the other person so as to see his or herself. That is, the interlocutor is a mirror through which one observes oneself. Although anthropological studies have privileged the “symbolic” part of this interaction, the truth is that this interaction is always somatic, through gestures, symbols, and performances, among others. In other words, recognition is not an incorporeal subjective fact, but a fact that is always embodied.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have navigated through the first and second skin of trans women who have collaborated with this study, through which the identity configuration process is reflected, one that, as we have seen, occurs at a very early age. I have called this complex process “self-recognition,” where the metaphor of the mirror enters; that is, the need these women have to look at themselves. The identification with the feminine and its performance will be present throughout all skins. However, the analysis of the first and second skin has allowed us to observe the initial process of affirming their identity and where they live it, first in solitude, in front of the mirror and fantasy, and, almost simultaneously, the need to see oneself through the gaze of the other appears until the sanction is met. It is there that the problem of power arises. Likewise, through what is analysed in this chapter, it can be argued that in any recognition system as we see in Chap. 2, both in its positive and negative forms, the performance of a habitus is involved. There is a social habitus that precedes the life of a trans woman and has to do with all of the expectations that one has about a living being that is born as a biological male. Through socialization, certain behaviour patterns are reiterated and end up being embodied. The important thing to highlight in this process is that this embodiment ends up forging a sensitivity, an aesthetic. That is to say, it not only ends up established in the organic body, but also finds form and content through emotions. The people who oppress them, who violate them, and/or mistreat them are part of that social habitus. We

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observe this process described through transphobia, for example, where as a result of this socialization, a sensitivity is produced that activates an entire system of hatred and violence in a person when he or she sees a child wear a dress. There, it is acting out of emotion. So, it must be recognized that aesthetics is part of all daily life. What emerges from the analysis presented in this chapter is that what trans women seek is the recognition of the other as their first skin, their own identification with the feminine, and her performance as a woman, via the second skin. It is precisely there that the intersection between aesthetics and politics occurs (Rancière, 1999). In other words, what trans women do throughout their lives is challenge that common sense, that habitus linked to heteropatriarchality and the association between gender and anatomy. Power’s battlefield is aesthetics; it is what trans women do through the first and second skin, through which they build themselves from the body territory and build themselves from the space territory. And, in turn, this trans politics would agree with Elizabeth Grosz because she argues for the importance of the body vis-à-vis discourse (as seen in Chap. 2, she criticizes Butler’s theory for focusing on discourse). However, Grosz also argues for the internal life force of the body and, through this, rejects a politics of recognition for focusing too much on externality rather than affirming diversity and life. Nevertheless, what we have observed in this chapter is that recognition and materiality are not contradictory, they are required for both domination and emancipation. Therefore, a politics of the body is not contrary to a politics of recognition. Third, the entire argument presented through the configurations of the first and second skin leads us to postulate that the experience and praxis of trans women are a direct critique of the modern Cartesian subject, where the body, the res extensa, ends up being a corpse. This analysis enters into dialogue with the entire critical tradition of a global nature stemming from sex/gender studies, the contributions of feminist studies and decolonial theory to the subject of Cartesianism. The evidence shown in this chapter tells us that the lived body is central for trans women. From the decolonial point of view, this way of living and being in the world enters into dialogue with different and historical nuclei of resistance, such as that of indigenous peoples, where the body is conceived in a different way. For trans women their body is not an accessory. It is not an accident of being, it is being itself. That is to say, unlike the Cartesian subject where the body is that thing that I am not, these women are affirming “my body is me,” where there is no split but instead a me-body. The experience of trans

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women returns centrality to the body through identity configuration, where it ceases to be a corpse body and becomes a living body (soma). It is in this praxis, which transcends discourse, from where heteronormative and heteropatriarchal visions that are typical of modernity and Cartesianism, which is the founder of that modernity, are questioned and dynamited. Finally, it is important to highlight the contributions and reflections of Jana, the most theoretical of my interlocutors, on the experiences of trans women in reference to the debate that exists about body, gender, and sexuality. Indeed, all of my interviewees claim to be women; in other words, they are not fighting for a third gender nor for a non-binary or queer sex, but for a practical recognition of the existence that they are men with vaginas and women with penises. In this sense, this understanding, as already referred to in Chap. 2, dialogues with the position of the trans theorist Talia Bettcher (2014), where a horizon of universal understanding is not being sought, but rather the recognition and respect of multiple possibilities. This is linked to a more pragmatic, and at the same time, relativistic epistemic stance where the no need for a universal theory is implicitly being affirmed, a stance that would enter the wave of criticism towards the coloniality of knowledge and the single subject produced by modernity.

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Lander, E. (2000). Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos. En E. Lander (comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Le Breton. (1990). Antropología del cuerpo y modernidad. Presses Universitaires de France. Levine, P., & MacNaughton, I. (2004). Breath and consciousness: Reconsidering the viabllity of breathwork in psychological and spiritual lnterventions in human development. In I.  MacNaughton (Ed.), Body, breath, and consciousness: A somatics anthology (pp. 267–293). North Atlantic Books. Maffesoli, M. (2007). En el crisol de las apariencias: para una ética de la estética. Manzo, S. (2013). Una introducción al estudio de las Meditaciones Metafísicas de René Descartes. En J. Moran (Comp.), Por el camino de la filosofía : Pensar de nuevo la modernidad (pp. 23–38). De la Campana. https://www.memoria. fahce.unlp.edu.ar/libros/pm.3759/pm.3759.pdf. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993). Fenomenología de la percepción. Traducción de Jem Cabanes. Editorial Planeta-De Agostini. Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203006757 Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Quijano, A. (2006). 2006 Entrevista “Romper com o eurocentrismo”. Brasil de Fato. Ranciere E. J. (1996). El desacuerdo. Política y filosofía, Buenos Aires, Ediciones Nueva Visión. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. University of Minnesota Press. Ranciere, J. (2006). El odio a la democracia, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu Editores. Shuterman, R. (2012). Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press. Turner, B. (2012). Routledge Handbook of Body Studies (1st ed.). Velázquez, T. (1998). Cultura y personalidad en mujeres a través del psicodiagnóstico de Rorschach. Tesis (Lic.)  – Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas. Psicología Clínica. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1979). “Perspectivismo y multinaturalismo en la America indigena” la traducción del portugues realizada por Rosa Alvarez y Roger Sansi del capitulo 7 del libro del mismo autor A inconsttincia da alma selvagem (Sao Paulo, Cosac y Naify, 2002, pp. 345–400). Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies, 3(2), 137–156. JSTOR.

CHAPTER 6

Third and Fourth Skins: Sexuality, Identity, and Power Relations

I would like for each of the girls to have the opportunity to go to college and that they don’t die before finishing high school, because we are killed. We are killed not only literally, but symbolically, killed every time we are deprived of opportunities, every time we are kicked out of our homes, every time we are prevented from finishing school. (Gahela)

In the previous chapter, I analysed the link between aesthetics and politics through the study of the experience of the live body in trans women. We observe how the body is considered a territory through which trans women build, sculpt, and attain the image they have about themselves. This process is achieved through a static dimension related to the first skin and the primary identification with feminity and related to kinaesthesia, gestures, and performance and, at the same time, through a dynamic dimension connected with the second skin, related to object, clothes, and decoration. Through the static and dynamic construction of trans femininity, we find, in turn, that the leitmotiv is in the sense of liberation and in the search for authenticity. This initial process of identity affirmation, which involves looking at oneself alone in the mirror, then needs to see oneself through the gaze of the other. Is in this moment that the sanction appears and the problem of power arises. However, an issue that is

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fundamental to the building of trans femininity and which is at the centre of the search for recognition has yet to be discussed: the experience of sexuality. As I have pointed out in Chap. 2 dedicated to the theoretical framework, when we talk about a lived body, we implicitly affirm the presence of a desiring body. This desire is precisely the certification that this body is alive. In the previous chapter I focused, for analytical purposes, on the shape and kinaesthesia of the body, as well as the performative process of the materiality of the body. As discussed, this creative process is driven by a desire that denies or rejects a particular corporality (in this case, the masculine) in the same process of affirming through the desire to “feel,” in particular to “see oneself,” with a feminine corporeality. This corporeality refers to the shape (gestures, performance, and kinaesthesia), to the desire, and, therefore, to the relationality of that corporeality. This feeling and seeing requires a “mirror,” an otherness that implies the affirmation of that desire. It is through the desire of the other that one’s desire for recognition materializes. This materialization from the desire of the other leads us to see the topic of desire as a search for recognition. I affirm, along with Butler (2004), that desire is always a desire for recognition. Throughout the analyses of third and fourth skins, in this chapter I will address how the experience of sexuality is interwoven with the desire for recognition but also with power relations. I understand sexuality as a corporeal, affective, and relational experience: three dimensions that are bound together since they are crossed by desire. Desire, then, is the transversal category. Throughout the life trajectories of trans women with whom I have talked, the experience of sexuality appears at an early age and is the inverse face of the desire to recognize their femininity. In many cases, that desire opens the door to abuse of power and enters into a tense dialogue with the affirmation of her feminine identity. We will see how sexuality is a secret and yet fundamental chord in the construction of the identity of trans women. In other words, the double game between sexuality and desire opens the door to symbolic violence and abuse but also to the satisfaction of being recognized as a woman. This participation or experience of sexuality implies accepting power relations that can range from care, affection, provision, or protection to abuse and violence. The vast majority of the stories of trans women’s sexualities collected for this investigation are intimately related to self-perceived masculinity as heterosexual, revealing not only the desire of trans women themselves but, in

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turn, a certain aesthetic that perhaps reveals characteristics of Peruvian masculinity in particular and reflects the verves of a global masculine aesthetic. Desire, in particular sexual desire, is an aspect of life that has received special attention from the human species in order to regulate it. In some cases, to control it and, in others, and what is most relevant here, to repress it. From the discipline of anthropology, we know that every known human society controls the sexuality of its constituents, detailing prohibited and permitted behaviours. In stateless societies, sexuality is controlled through the kinship system, in particular through the taboo of incest (Lévi Strauss, 1949). Remember that the kinship system refers not only to familial affiliation but also to alliance, which is strictly an ethical, political, economic, and legal system of relationships. Likewise, we know that in societies that have left a written record, sexuality control dates back 4000  years, the Code of Hammurabi being known as the first source. However, the notions of guilt and heteronormativity introduced by the Jewish people are of particular interest to highlight, as sex was no longer only controlled but also began to be repressed. This tradition of sexual repression was then perpetuated in the Christian system, shaping ways of feeling and perceiving desire that endures in our times.1

The Third and Fourth and the Configuration of Sexuality From the studies of social geography, a distinction is made between the categories of space and place, where place is constituted by human presence and, in turn, place constitutes that being. There is a dialectical relationship where the human community builds its communality in a space, but that place constitutes it as a community. This is linked to what the Greeks called the khora, a place that is being done to the extent that the polis is constituted and, at the same time, it is the khora that establishes the polis. Incidentally, this has gender connotations, because the concept of khora contains the polis in the sense of a receptacle but also of protection and care. In fact, this is the root of the word uterus: the uterus contains and nourishes the baby, but at the same time, the baby shapes the uterus. 1  See, for example, the count of “Sex and Punishment. Four Thousand Years Judging Desire” by Eric Berkowitz, 2013.

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This metaphor of relationship between place and community can also be applied to the individual, where we understand the body as a space that is going to become a place, and at the same time, it is the place (the body) that will build the subjectivity. That is, the body is the place where a self and a sense of identity (relational, historical, and situated) are constructed.2 This dialectical relationship between body and subjectivity has been presented in the previous chapter where the process of sculpting the body, that is, the creation of the place, makes it possible to perform the desired subjectivity. The Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwaser tells us about five levels or skins: the epidermis (first skin), clothes (second skin), the house (third skin), the social environment (fourth skin), and the world environment (fifth skin). In the previous chapter, I referred in particular to the first and second skin. The guiding thread of this chapter will be the desire and experience of sexuality, and in methodological terms, we will follow a temporary space route that covers the home, the neighbourhood, the school, and the street—the spaces constituting the third and fourth skins. These skins allow us to link the individual history of my interlocutors with a territoriality (places) that defines an ecosystem configured by their desire, and at the same time, this desire shapes the places as well. This way of organizing information in methodological terms, as we saw in the previous chapter, allows us to have a chronicity, a timeline of the lives of trans women. So, if in the previous chapter, dedicated to the first and second skins, we focused on early childhood memories, in this chapter we will focus on late childhood and adolescent memories, which mainly occur in the spaces constituted by the third and fourth skins. As we will see, the third and fourth skins, as well as the first and second skins, skins are constituted through relationships and imply in the life of these women a desire for recognition (Butler, 2004). In particular, it is 2  In the Peruvian Andes the notion that unifies the Greek concepts of polis and khora is that of ayllu. Ayllu alludes, on the one hand, to a human group that is emotionally linked that, in turn, gives way to kinship relationships that organize life together; and on the other hand (historically speaking) to the extent that this category comes from agricultural societies, it also names the place. To illustrate this idea, we can point out that a community member will respond differently to the questions of “what’s your name” and “who are you.” The first will respond with the proper name while the second will respond with the name of their ayllu, making known both the community to which they belong and the place where they live. Furthermore, this reveals that identity is a social relationship and that it is not self-referential.

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a desire to recognize their femininity. That is, being seen and treated as women, being desired as women, and participating in sexual acts as women occupy a central place in their life narratives. Nevertheless, it is this same desire for recognition that will be met with acts of domination and submission, as we will see later. The Third Skin: Home In the Western tradition, the home (the nuclear family in particular) is part of the narratives of the construction of the self, where this self is constituted as a function of alterity. The affirmation of “I am the other” is part of both the anthropological tradition (symbolic interactionism) and Freudian psychoanalysis. This logic of the constitution of the self is given by a process of disjunction/separation rather than conjunction. As we pointed out in the previous chapter, the truth is that the construction of this subjectivity (of this self) also requires belonging to a community, to an “us.” That is, the self is constituted by a copulative process. This last possibility allows the “home” community to be named and, in turn, allows this home to become a third skin. It is a place that is supposed to contain, protect, and nourish. In other words, it is the place where the self finds the recognition that is essential in shaping its subjectivity and identity. As we saw in Chap. 2, the category of recognition is a concept with a long historical tradition and one with an important place in contemporary social theory. However, here I would like to recall the terms of recognition that Judith Butler points out, through which this category is expanded and nuanced, becoming a place where power operates through which the human is produced in a differentiated way. As Butler sustains: The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. (…) The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. (2004: 2)

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In addition, Wieviorka in his analysis of racism and domination relations, exclusion, persecution, and destruction talks about “prejudice, segregation, discrimination, and violence as empirical categories that can function at different political or infrapolitical-levels, as categories linked, in each particular case, to one of two distinct logics, theone being the logic of inferiorization, which aims to ensure the racialized group receives an equal treatment, the other the logic of differentiation, which tends to set it apart and, in extreme cases, expel or exterminate it” (1995, XV). As we will see in the testimonies below, with one exception, the third skin constitutes the lives of trans women themselves, but from logical of inferiorization (Wieviorka, 1995). That is, the terms of recognition define a diminished humanity (Butler, 2004). Nonetheless, as will be discussed, although this is the intention of the recognizer, the perception of the recognized, of trans women, is polysemic. The story of Yazmin demonstrates this phenomenon well, which I referred to in Chap. 3 but to highlight an issue concerning the ethnographic method. I met Yazmin through Jana. As with the vast majority of trans women with whom I had the opportunity to talk, it took time for the meeting to materialize. The penultimate time we talked to agree on the meeting, she told me to call her in two weeks because she was going to get breast implants. After two weeks, she came to my house with Jana for breakfast, and we stayed together for more than three hours. Yazmin, at the time of this meeting, was 26  years old, and from the moment she arrived at my house, she was very open to talk. It helped a lot that Jana was present and that Jana and I already have a trusting relationship. Yazmin felt the same way to expand upon her memories. Shortly after arriving, I asked about her surgery. She told me that it still hurt a lot. She had already had a nose job, but, as she said, the surgery for breast implants did not compare in terms of pain. I asked her if she had always wanted them. She replied: “There has not been a single day that I did not get up without thinking about those breasts.” Then I asked her about the size that had been made. In response, she lifted the t-shirt and lowered her bra to show them to me. I do not remember what I said when I saw them; I assume that I said they were beautiful and how well they fit. Immediately, Jana did the same: she lifted the shirt she was wearing and took off her bra to show me her breasts. It was a very intimate moment, yet the level of intimacy

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made me a bit nervous. For a moment, I thought about showing them mine too. That is, Yazmin showed her breasts, and then Jana did the same, and it seemed like a logical operation to follow the pattern. But that thought passed as soon as it appeared. I felt confident, but a confidence that stressed my body. Among my world of cis women, we do not tend to be so detached, nor do we talk about, much less show, our bodies to people we just met. Jana concluded the “ritual” by saying: “Do you realize how easily we talk and show our bodies?” This anecdote was the introduction to the life story of Yazmin—a preamble of confidence, intimacy, and detachment. This unique ethnographic situation can be read as a moment of seeking recognition from woman to woman without mediating some kind of implicit abuse. Yazmin and Jana performatively build this trust for nudity and to satisfy the desire to be confirmed in their beauty by a cis woman. Yazmin, of all my interlocutors, has shown the most openness to tell me her history and, as I will demonstrate, her memories are crossed by unhappy episodes that are at the antipode of the scene that started our meeting. She also had a lot of expertise in relating her experiences and an impressive narrative cadence. As soon as she started with her childhood story, she told me the following: My mother was told not to feed me, because she was going to work—I remember she worked in a food service—and she left my grandmother to feed us. But my grandmother made me pay for my bad behaviour de alma (very strong), and she did not feed me until my mother returned, until 6 pm that my mother appeared. So, I was waiting for my mom to eat. I cried because my guts sounded, but luckily it was the farm. There was everything [to eat?] in the farm, and I climbed up [to get food?], and Mr Vargas let go of the dogs, he was the owner, and the dogs were running around me de alma (very fast), but since I was younger and did not use shoes, I ran faster than the dogs. Finally, I used to have my whole back scraped, because on the farm, as all the people have to steal, they had fenced with those iron bars with barbs, they had surrounded the whole farm but out there I got in and out with my back all scraped, and the dogs did not reach me. (Yazmin)

This family situation was the result of Yazmin being considered a “maricona [queer?] child,” which led her mother to decide not to send her to

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school.3 Therefore, she stayed at home under the control of the grandmother while waiting to correct herself, and in the meantime, she did not embarrass the family. That correction happens by not letting her go outside, by not enrolling her in school, and by making her starve. We observe, the whole heteronormative ideology configuring the daily life of little Yazmin. Nonetheless, we observe through the quotation that Yazmin could somehow sneak out of her house, which was located in the middle of a semi-rural area, and enter into the farm to steal food (fruits and vegetables), overcoming her fear of guard dogs in order to satisfy her hunger. It is in these circumstances that a neighbour of the owner of the farm sees her stealing and offers tamales as a way of “exchange.” The man had a back door where he made tamales and there was a banana tree inside the farm and I saw them very mature, but there was no way to get there because the tree was huge and there was no way to climb it and I was hungry, I wanted to eat, I wanted to eat something even … because … for being so maricona as a child because I have been very openly maricona … they made me go hungry, they made me pay my faults. And the man saw me and I approached and I told the man that if he could help me get the bananas that I couldn’t reach and the man says “What? Are you hungry?” And I said “yes.” “I have tamale, if you want, I invite you tamale,” he tells me. Gladly I went to the house of the man to eat the tamale and sucked his cock. He was a 30-year-old man … “Tamale, I have tamale, I have plenty of tamale, come by,” he says. “But notice that nobody sees you,” and I said, “nobody sees me.” And I went to the house of the man. I just wanted to go to eat tamale, because in that time nobody ate tamale easily. You had to have money to eat a tamale. And I got in and the man gave me the tamale to swallow it and said “You like men, don’t you?” And I kept quiet because it was the first time someone asked me questions like that. And I remember he made me watch porn and see the scene where the woman is sucks and sucks and asked me if I had ever done that and I said no and he said if I would like to do it and told me he gave me 5 soles. And I said “¡5 soles!” Which for me was like 50,000 soles. The man turned me a whore. He was the first one who made me suck pinga (cock) and even gave me something, he gave me 3  The term maricón or mariconas can sometimes be translated as “queer,” “fag,” or “gay,” depending on the context in which it is used. Likewise, depending on the place of enunciation, it can be considered either an insult or an affectionate nickname among peers. There is debate around the translation of certain nomenclatures that come from the North in regard to situations of the South. From the decolonial perspective, “maricón” is one of the categories that defends its political use as another form of recognition of sexual identity for Latin American gays.

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5 soles, he gave me 2 more tamales and I sucked his pinga (cock). And I was suck and suck and suck and suck. The man came, and I was happy. The man already grabbed me habit … And he gave me my 5 soles and my tamales. (Yazmin)

This is perhaps the clearest quotation of the polysemy of desire. From an external point of view, we clearly see a situation of abuse. Yazmin was only a six- or seven-year-old. Here I want to underline something that is not possible to transmit in the quote, and in relation to the way that Yazmin expresses herself concerning these episodes of her childhood. Yazmin, throughout the conversation, did not convey at any time a clear condemnatory judgement of the experience. Even when she says “he turns me into a whore” (in the next chapter we will see that she ended up practising prostitution), her attitude is funny and playful rather than condemnatory. After telling me this story, I asked her if she liked how she felt when she “sucked cock,” she smiled and said “yes.” This illustrates the “satisfaction” of two desires: on the one hand, satiating hunger and, on the other, being recognized as feminine. This was the first time a man made her “suck cock.” According to her, after this episode many more would occur, but not only with the tamales man. The 14- or 15-year-old boys in her neighbourhood also asked her the same. “I was seven years old and they couldn’t penetrate me because they could get in trouble, but all the big boys made me suck their dicks.” I asked if she liked it. She replied: “The truth is, I was very happy because I wanted to suck dicks” (laughs). Yazmin, at the same time that she had sexual experiences with the tamales man and the adolescents of her neighbourhood, as noted above, experienced the full force of the heteronormative regime in her family, which was established through sexual violence that she does name as abuse. A few minutes after starting with her life story, she tells of the meetings with the tamales man and the youth of her neighbourhood. It took her much longer to tell me about her relationship with her mother’s brother, her uncle, with whom she shared the house. I assume her reticence in telling this story stems from the difficulty with which survivors share memories of child sexual violence, as others have studied (Cantón-Cortés et al., 2011; Cukor & McGinn, 2006; Sen, et al. 2007).4 Although it is girls who constitute the main social sector with the greatest lack of protection and who 4  The Global Study prepared by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, 2014) estimates that more than one in ten girls suffered sexual abuse in their childhood.

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suffer chronic neglect of their needs, studies that investigate the mental health care of these problems from a gender perspective, and in particular focused on the childhood of trans girls, are still incipient. Nevertheless, the evidence indicates that gender violence has serious consequences for women’s health in general (Sen, et al. 2007). In that sense, it is significant that Yazmin had begun very quickly to talk about her “accepted” sex life and that she waited for the end of her childhood story to tell the story of rape, having happened simultaneously to the sexual stories referred to earlier. In effect, she tells us the following: My mom’s brother. The oldest. He drove me crazy, crazy, crazy, whenever he saw me, he beat the shit out of me, he found me outside and he beat the shit out of me, he raised me as if I were in a barracks … as if I were in a military headquarters. Getting up with water on my face. He came from work at 5 in the morning because he worked in the early morning and I had to be like a cachaco (soldier), already awake because if I was sleeping, look what would he have done… ¡son of a bitch! I was a little boy. I was six or seven years old. I didn’t go to school, nobody wanted to make me study. Nobody, nobody, nobody gave a sol for me. I didn’t go to school until I was eight years old, I didn’t know how to read or write and all my friends of my age were already in first grade, second grade. I was seven years old and I dreamed of going to school (…). And I was crazy since I was 7 years old when my mother’s brother broke my ass … from the age of 7 to the age of 13, when he found a woman. The oldest, the one who beat me, broke my ass since I was seven years old, took me to cut my hair and … Yes. He broke my ass all day long on the farm. Near the cemetery, another farm nearby. (Yazmin)

Because she told me this story almost at the end of her childhood history and after having told me with some pleasure the other stories about her sexuality that happened in parallel to this, it was not clear to me whether what she was telling me belonged or not to the same kind of memory. That is why I asked her if these acts were consensual or not. But did you want to? No, ¡how disgusting! no. That was total rape. More so with someone who beat the shit out of me … yes … so far, I hate him. He drove me crazy every day ... to fuck me (para cacharme). Because that was supposedly what I liked, but go see that I opened my mouth, he hit me hard and I never opened my mouth. I never opened my mouth. I always believed until this

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year that that was what I was going to take to the grave, this year I told everything. And so I have been growing until he got a woman when I was 13 and he stopped doing that to me. He saw that I was growing … so the man stopped, he stopped doing all that and well … He got a woman and when he took her to live with us, I assume he was a little afraid that I would open my mouth because I was bigger, and the best thing to do was throw me to the street. They threw me out of my house at age 15. (Yazmin)

Yazmin’s gender identity and sexuality make up an ecological niche where her own biological reproduction is endangered (she is not fed), her social reproduction and potentially her economic agency are truncated (she does not go to school), and her affective reproduction is damaged daily. However, the most violent experience she lives throughout her childhood, from 7 to 13 years old, is the systematic rape by an uncle, her mother’s brother, who lives with her, and who “corrects” her. As it is clear in the quotation, to turn her “man” he resorts to acts of violence of military style (violently wakes her up, pours cold water on her, cuts her hair, hits her, and mistreats her physically and psychologically). But in addition to all this, the uncle rapes her sexually in secret from the rest of the family and frightens her to keep her silent. What allows Yazmin to tell two parallel stories of her sexual experience with adults (the tamales man and uncle), which are happening at the same time, in such a different way? One is narrated as “total rape” while the other is not qualified as such. Regarding the latter, although we cannot say that it is celebrated, her narrative is of an experience that is somehow remembered as an achievement. An achievement in two senses: it transgresses the law of her house (enclosing it) and manages to feed herself by showing agency to survive. On the other hand, it is also an achievement because she is confirming her gender identity through sexual performance: “I am very happy because I wanted to suck cock (laughs).” There is a very early experience of sexuality. She is subjected to sex and she does not recognize abuse. She finally talks about how she liked it; she looked for it because she liked cock. It is not clear if she ends up living her sexuality freely: she gets tamales because she likes to suck cock or if she asks for something, and from hunger she has to accept and ends up “liking it.” We observe through Yazmin’s childhood story that, based on her primary identification, of the fact that she recognizes herself as a girl from an early age and performed as such, her childhood ends up revolving around sexuality. Her story is an emblematic case of what would be the life of a

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low-income trans person in a city like Lima. It is normally said that trans women are engaged in prostitution because they have no other options. Generally, this argument is about adult women who, as they cannot study and are not accepted in jobs, prostitute themselves or are hairdressers. That is the stigma. However, here we see that this trend (to be discussed later and in the next chapter) applies to her whole life story, because she cannot go to school. She cannot go out, they lock her up, and she has to run away. They take away her food and she starve to death. Her first “client”—her first cock—is the tamales man at the age of seven. That will be repeated throughout her life. Through this story we can observe that Yazmin’s desire for recognition comes in terms in which the perception of the recognizer and the recognized (Yazmin) is different. However, from the point of view of those who recognize her, according to Wieviorka, two recognition logics seem to coexist. Then, on the one hand, we observe an inferiorizing logic where Yazmin is treated—less than human—and, on the other hand, a logic of differentiating recognition that seeks to isolate her (not let her out) or outrage her to make her “disappear” as a trans woman. The Fourth Skin: School and Neighbourhood School The school, as an ecological niche of secondary socialization, is also an arena where gender violence, homophobia, and “discipline” are reproduced and the inconsistency of recognition is often sustained. In this section I focus on the school experience of my interlocutors. It is a common occurrence in the life stories of trans women to leave school before the legal age due to the intersection between gender violence, adolescent sexuality, the need for money, and all this from the hand of domestic violence they endure. All these variables enter into dialogue with the desire for autonomy, to travel in search of a friendlier world with their self-perceived identity. While here I focus on specific school experiences, it should be noted that in some cases, access to school is impeded by the families themselves, as in the case of Yazmin, due to the early gender expression of trans girls who are grounds for family shame and/or their admission at an extra age. As we will see, the school space greatly expands the territory of vulnerability and dehumanization. And, again, it is a space to search for affirmation of their gender identity.

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One of the last interviews that I conducted was with Leyla, one of the three most important trans leaders in Lima. She is a founding member of the organization Féminas and is quite loved and respected by the LGBT community in the country. Leyla is considered and named as a “mother” by many trans women with whom I had the opportunity to talk. Although I called her as soon as I started my fieldwork in Lima, we were only able to set up the meeting almost four months later. We were able to be together for a short time. She had a fairly busy schedule, and after 20 min she told me that she had to leave and that we would agree to another meeting. We talked about her childhood, about her family, about how she went through school. It was in the first years of school that her dreams began to be plagued by anxiety and fear. She told me that she had almost forgotten them all, but that there was a dream that sometimes returned. The dream, she said, was somewhat confusing. The dream was as follows: the central element was a puzzle. Leyla as a child in a room surrounded by many geometric pieces tried to complete the figure, trying to choose the key piece that makes sense to the image. But every time she found the piece and grabbed it with her hands, the piece began to grow exponentially and this made it never fit. They were pieces that changed dimensions, transformed, and would never engage in the moulding. I wonder how the dreams of all trans women have been. It is a dimension of subjectivity that I did not contemplate during my fieldwork but, nevertheless, tells us a lot about the subjective and affective world. These dreams, many recurring, accompanied her throughout her childhood and adolescence. Density and darkness in part of her oneiric world began to appear after some episodes of bullying at school and as a product of all the anxiety and guilt she felt for being different. After talking about her dreams, she told me that in elementary school, around seven years old, she began to kiss secretly with a classmate in the classroom. At that time, she was already treated as the “sissy” in the school. It is at this point where contradictions appear. I was considered the girl of the group, right? … In elementary school it was the issue of fear that I could be discovered, right? But everyone identified that I was different, right? I remember that I was going with my little shorts and I was walking through the middle and it happened because I liked that the sixth-grade boys bothered me. They bothered me because I seemed different. And I liked it and I went on and on and on as many times as I wanted and there were windows and the boys bothered me. (Leyla)

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In the first part of the quotation, we observe Leyla’s fear on a conscious level of being discovered as different by her peers. Also, in the unconscious plane, in the dream world, we see the fear and anxiety to not fit as an equal. However, despite this terror there is something that exceeds and that is evidenced in the second part of the appointment when Leyla argues that she finds pleasure in children bothering her as a girl: “I remember that I was going with my little shorts and I was walking through the middle and passing by because I liked that the sixth-grade boys bothered me. They bothered me because I looked different, I looked feminine.” We see how a plurality of antagonisms is reflected in the construction of trans subjectivity where, on one side of the spectrum, we find an extreme fear of not fitting in, for not being considered the other children, for looking and feeling different, while on the other extreme, we see rather how the desire to be treated and be recognized as a girl is imposed. I want to highlight, in turn, it is important to recognize that it is a unique lived experience that I am separating for analytical purposes. I want to highlight, in turn, that it is important to recognize that it is a unique lived experience that I am separating for analytical purposes. Thus, I want to emphasize that Leyla’s experience is polysemic. Her emotional bond with the performance she develops in the quotation has several nuances that will accompany her throughout their life, as is the case with Yazmin, which is exemplified in their experience of sexuality and in their desire. Leyla’s childhood history, which I had the opportunity to know about in the time we had together, is traversed by abuse, in some cases sexual abuse, for performing femininity. She did not want to go deep into these memories. At first, she said not to remember them and after a moment she mentioned she did not want to do it. After talking about this issue, I told Leyla that in many of the testimonies of trans women, I had identified a diffuse line, a porous border, between the desire for recognition of femininity and what I considered abuse. For her, the fact that some girls do not recognize certain episodes of their lives as abuse and/or violence is because there is a lot of ambiguity in the life of a trans woman in Peru. In childhood, even in adolescence, she said, a trans woman identifies herself as a woman, with the female world but, at the same time, the whole world, all the beings that surround them, tell them that they are not. Then, some kind of abuse makes them feel more female. We find in the experiences of trans women a very early desire to be recognized for being what they are, for what they feel they are, despite the body in early stages. It is an affirmation that “oh men like me” and if they like me it is because

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they see me as a woman. In the case of cis men and cis women, on the other hand, the fact that a man and/or a woman likes them does not make them more or less a man/woman. In the heterosexual world, this is more unconscious. You may feel more attractive with the fact of being desired, but you are not building your gender identity for that. Instead, there is something in the trans that needs confirmation. A search for more active, more conscious confirmation. Confirmation of cis identity occurs in the same home; parents, mothers, and the family environment all the time are confirming it, by how they dress you, how they tell you, and how they present you. The ambiguity in the case of the narratives that I present is that what I considered abuse also ends up recognizing their femininity because they want them and treat them as women. Where does the desire of the other end and recognition begin? What are the limits of recognition? What is the link between recognition and domination in trans experiences? When inquiring during my fieldwork about the life histories of my interlocutors, it was very evident that their experiences of femininity construction are interwoven with dimensions of class, race, and heteropatriarchal violence. Understanding the experience of sexuality requires, therefore, placing it in an ecology of desire, where the condition of poverty, the lack of support networks, and the strength of the heteronormative mandate will create an ecosystem where the affirmation of sexual identity intersects with situations of abuse and symbolic violence, in general, and sexual violence, in particular. It is clear that the simultaneous perception of the recognition of their femininity and the acceptance of verbal and/or physical violence, harassment, and symbolic violence expresses the relationality of desire in the midst of a heteronormative discourse but which, however, refers to masculinities that are not heterocisnormative. We will address this issue in the next chapter. Although Leyla’s recognition of her age group in school regarding her femininity is a discourse that has resonance with the history of Yazmin in the neighbourhood, the school is also a space where peer recognition appears. “Female” children also recognize each other and form “gang” groups where they identify each other from their performance, gender expression, and orientation. The school is a previous space before trans women do their public presentation. This also offers extracurricular socialization spaces where trans girls test their sensuality, and attractiveness, and in many cases experience their first emotional encounters with cis pairs. This is Jessica’s case:

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Yes, it was a men’s school. So, I looked at the boys’ things, I loved seeing them naked… They bullied me because they wanted me to show my penis and told me to take it out so they can see how I have it, right? And I told them no, they told me to take it out, to take it out, and the teacher also told me that I had to take a shower and I said the teacher that I would do it when everyone leaves. I didn’t want to take a shower because I used my mother’s underwear and because of that I was ashamed to be seen. But finally, I was taking a shower. I remember that in the middle of the year, well … we started having drinks with liquor and at the school where I studied at José de San Martín in Pisco next to the sea and like other little friends who were terrible like me, we had our group of mariconas, from different classrooms in the same school and we went to the beach to have a strong drink that was like a rum, but it was stronger. And there we went with the boys and this guy who studied with me had always liked me and now, I don’t know it was if the touching, and we went under a little boat and I thought it was normal to have a relationship like that. That a penetration was normal … and I remember that it penetrated me first and it hurt and I said no, but he stayed erect and moreover we were with alcohol and I remember that he kissed me and it was my first kiss too. Everything at the first time and then I liked it and as we continue to drink… I was bleeding and just that day was a physical education and that day I had gone with old socks that was almost knee length.  I was bleeding and did not understand what was happening and what happened? That by penetrating me he had torn me and he had also lost his virginity. I fell in love with the boy eventually. We were in first year of high school. (Jessica)

In this quote it is clear the two socialization groups with peers that Jessica has. On the one hand, her group of mariconas is a group of affirmation, and mutual recognition, and we can conjecture that it is a support group for comfort and perhaps even protection. On the other hand, the peer group, where ambiguity is present, serves to recognize her as feminine and in turn harass her. It is interesting that she already performed as a woman from the second skin (the clothes), materialized in the mother’s underwear. However, it is a skin that cannot be shown in public and that shames her. Jessica’s first sexual experience is an agreed, desired, and romantic experience, with a person with whom she will maintain a love relationship for several years, though secretly, which she eventually ends. We recognize through their sexual experience, in turn, the tenuous information that the Peruvian school system generally provides about sexuality and, of course, the non-existent sexual information outside the heteronormative.

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Despite this case, the school has also meant for some of my interlocutors the beginning of sexuality in flagrantly violent conditions. If in the case of Yazmin, it was in the home environment, a family member with power and authority in that space of primary socialization, in the space of secondary socialization of the school there appears a new masculine character (“powerful” and an educator) as an alter ego of Yazmin’s uncle. Like Yazmin’s uncle, Gahela found her oppressor in the physical education teacher under the alibi of educating her to become a “man.” I was six or seven (…) It was in this school that because of the femininity that I showed I suffered rapes. From a physical education teacher. So … that’s when I just feel the magnitude of how this system punishes you when you give up social mandates, right? Because until before I had only received repressions from the adult people, but who thought it was correctable, with the children never … in the children there were never those questions that come from the older people, right? Then, but it was there that I understood how they punishes you, how they repress you, how they try … to get you right into the concept of what is allowed and not allowed in the system … Yes, sexual violence as such. With penetration, with blows, with abuse, with threat of not telling anyone... And not only with me, but with all those small children that were showing femininity at that time, right? Because he understood that he was a subject who believed himself with the right to repress us so that we adjusted to what is right and normal, right? He told us all the time, for example, that this was something that had to happen to all of us to become a man. That we had to be real men. So … I learned to remain silent for fear, for threats because they said they were going to kill our parents, and that he going to kill us. (Gahela)

In this quote, we observe a similarity with the previous experience of Yazmin and her uncle; however, this time of a disciplining sexual experience from a “teacher.” In fact, abuse in this case is perpetrated by a teacher who under the Peruvian educational system is responsible for forming and enhancing the male body of students, in terms of a relationship of domination of the body through exercise and physical training with militarized characteristics.5 Gahela tells us that the teacher forced her to have sex under blackmail and intimidation. We can also note that again the rape, as 5  In Peru, the physical education course has been present since the late nineteenth century in the school network and until the mid-twentieth century was not in charge of career teachers but of military personnel assigned to schools. For this reason, the vision of physical education as an exercise in mastery persists until today.

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in the case of Yazmin’s uncle, is phrased as a corrective act of straightening: “that was something that had to happen to all of us to become men. That we had to be a real men.” At the same time, we observe that the need to keep the secret in the teacher’s speech reflects his self-awareness of committing a crime. In the next chapter we will return to this topic by addressing the issue of masculinities and the desire for trans women. Like Yazmin, in the case of her uncle, Gahela names her sexual experience as rape and both share the description of the same logic of coercion. Here we can digress regarding the category of recognition, which I will return to in the final reflections. For now, I want to underline that, as we pointed out in Chap. 2, after a first stage of approaching the category of recognition in strictly positive terms (Taylor, 1992; Honneth, 1996) this category was questioned both by the indigenous movement and by scholars such as Judith Butler. In particular, Butler indicates that recognition can dehumanize the person being recognized because there are recognition schemes that generate recognition scales. Butler’s point of view, in some way, leads us to a linear hierarchy of recognition and, at the same time, emphasizes the action of the one who recognizes. The cases of Leyla and Yazmin (the tamales man and the young people of their neighbourhood) suggest rather to clarify the conception of recognition because, as has been pointed out, this can be inconsistent, polysemic, and plural. In particular, the testimonies collected place emphasis on how the person who is being recognized perceives recognition, regardless of the subject’s intention who recognizes it. There is a moment when that does not matter. The same act performed by a “recognizer” is perceived by my collaborators as a pleasant or satisfying act, as a confirmer of a female proprioception. It does not seem to follow a consistent logic: what hurts me is good for me. This is true despite being able to name the ecosystem of power. The paradox of these situations is that the terms of recognition of the recognizer can dehumanize (bullying and sexual abuse) and indicate the person recognized as “less than human” or “inhuman,” from that point of view. This recognition that “dehumanizes” paradoxically humanizes them, while confirming, through being the subject of desire, their own desire. I would like to emphasize that there is a different perception between the trans women involved in these experiences I am narrating and my own judgement as a researcher. Through the testimonies presented in this chapter, it is observed that trans women clearly distinguish the experiences that have represented sexual abuse for them from the experiences that have been consensual and/or pleasant for them. Thus, it is clear that

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Gahela’s experiences with her physical education teacher, and Yazmin’s with her uncle, are not part of the duality that I have identified as part of the ambiguity of recognition. From the evidence presented, and as will be seen in the next chapter, it is instead observed through the memory narrative of trans women, when they want to do something and they don’t, when there is an exchange and when there is not, and when it is pleasant and when it is not. Both Yazmin’s uncle and Gahela’s PE teacher would be the perverse in this scheme. There is very little research on boys’ and girls’ first sexual experiences with adults, especially in sexually diverse populations. In particular, there is a dearth of studies on the first sexual experiences of boys who, over time, assume a female gender identity. Most studies on the sexual experiences of cis boys and girls with adults are classified as abusive. In this sense, it is of the utmost importance, as Carballo Diéguez et  al. (2012) maintain, to understand the various experiences, as well as the multiple meanings attributed to these relationships. These understandings must go beyond normative and theoretical criteria, which tend to perceive these acts only in their dimension of abuse. One of the few studies on the subject is “Recalled Sexual Experiences in Childhood with Older Partners: A Study of Brasilian Men Who Have Sex with Men and Male to Female Transgender Persons” (Carvallo-­ Diéguez, 2012), which focuses on memories of sexual experiences from childhood among men who have sex with trans men and women, in Campinas, Brazil. In this study, children had an average age of 9 and their older partners had an average age of 19. One of the main findings highlights, in the first place, that sexual experiences in childhood, in most cases, did not develop negative feelings in the participants. Furthermore, it allows for the possibility that these childhood experiences are experienced differently from those of other population groups (such as heterosexuals), somewhat removed from the social and cultural norms concerning sexuality in Europe and the United States. A second study found on this subject is “Travestí. Sex, Gender and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes” by Don Kulick (1998), which studies a group of poor trans women engaged in sex work in the city of Salvador. This study represents a rich exploration of the subjectivities around gender and sexuality in a group of people who experience situations of violence, public humiliation, and possible murder every day. Kulick argues that the perception of the ambiguity of gender and sexuality is the product of ideas that people have in a particular localized,

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historical, and cultural context. Although the research does not pretend to be a chronological narration of the life of transvestites in Brazil, it carefully recounts the path to “becoming a transvestite,” in which their sexual experiences with boys and men in early childhood represent an important moment in their story. Furthermore, it suggests that trans women’s recollections of early sexual experiences with older men are perceived as periods of erotic games that ended with anal penetration, yet without a connotation of harm. The findings of Ximena Salazar’s doctoral thesis in Anthropology, titled “I Came to the World Because God Wants Me to Be Here: Identity Journeys of Trans Women in Lima, Iquitos, and Ayacucho” (2015b), are of particular interest for this research and especially for this chapter. Salazar’s thesis, through a methodology based on a biographical design, goes through the life stories of seven trans women with the aim of analysing the ways in which trans identity, gender transgression, and its representation in the body are configured, as well as the difficulties that trans women have faced throughout their lives. In Chap. 4 of the thesis, in a section called “The Sexual Initiation with Older Men” (p. 163), she finds, through several quotes, that the sexual experience in childhood between trans women and older men is a constant in her research: “This is a constant in the stories, namely: the masking of a power dynamic, under other less brutal reasons, that allow them to survive (…) and instead remember it as a relationship that made her feel like a woman” (2015b: 165, 166). Likewise, it affirms that “qualifying these reports of sexual initiation with older men as sexual abuse of minors is very limited if the perspective of trans women is considered. (…) Narrated in retrospect, the stories assume that this had to happen, not as fatalism, but as gender destiny; these experiences take on enormous meaning for them as moments of discovery and/or confirmation of their feminine condition” (2015b: 170). The similarity between the findings of this thesis and the findings of my research is interesting because despite the difference in time (Salazar’s fieldwork was carried out in 2011 and my fieldwork was carried out six  years later), a direct correlation exists between the two. The author maintains, in turn, that although the great imbalances of power in which relationships between children and adults are circumscribed must be mentioned, her objective is to present the way in which trans women perceive and resignify their sexual experiences with adult men. As Salazar shows, for trans women, some sexual experiences in their childhood are not

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considered abuse and sex serves as the consummation of an aspiration to be recognized as a woman (Salazar, 2015b). What we observed through the memories of the trans women in this research is that the recognition about the body of a trans woman in Peru is still a negative recognition. That is to say, domination requires recognition. Exclusion requires recognition: you have to know who is being excluded. When there is a hate crime against a trans woman, there is recognition from a position. Therefore, that political body, that body that transforms itself and goes out to public sphere levels, activates this kind of recognition. Therefore, the recognition that I perceive in my research does not have to do with being recognized or not; rather it has to do with changing the polarity of recognition, towards a recognition that does not attack, marginalize, or exploit them. On the way to this recognition is that sexuality becomes very important because it is through sexuality that these women find that they are recognized as women and there comes the ambiguity of the acts. Trans women know how to typify when an act is violent, or aggressive, which would be of negative recognition, and they distinguish them from acts that from the outside we could typify as violent acts but which, nevertheless, are for them positive recognition. This leads me to think that the reality in which they live means that they cannot be positively recognized without violence. Violence is always involved. Back to the Neighbourhood Returning to Yazmin’s story when she was already 12 years old, she tells us the experiences of her sexual desire. As we will see, here we can also perceive the ambiguity of the search for recognition. At one point, she participates as a voyeur when a gay neighbour has sex with the youth of the neighbourhood. Yazmin identifies herself with him, indicating that she is not a sexual object due to her age. The same expressions with which she describes her neighbour’s sexuality are the ones she will use to narrate her own experience. Again, she describes a sexual performance without value judgement about what she is seeing. She simply reports an experience that somehow prefigures what her life will be like later.6

6  This narrative in fact tells us more about the masculinities of the neighbourhood. I will return to it in the next chapter when I talk about masculinities for trans women. It is clear that a trans woman requires a masculinity that like trans women.

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And so, I have grown up between the farm and stealing bread, right? Sucking pingas (dicks) … I have grown, grown, until at age 12… there was a guy who was 26 years old and a friend of mine who lived in front of my house, Edson, and everyone le metían pinga (got their cock inside him). I saw him, how he was getting penetrated … I saw … Because I hang out with him from top to bottom. And I went with him because his grandmother went to work from 12 noon and returned at 10:30 at night, he had the house so he can do whatever he wants. And we invite all the chibolos (young guys) there. And everybody was fucking him, everybody, not me because I was still little, then. Everyone was afraid and he was 19 or 20 years old and all the 15- or 17-year-old chibolos (young guys) put their balls on him as you can’t imagine! (Yazmin)

Although she does not participate in the sexual games of her gay neighbour, she nevertheless maintains a relationship with a married 26-year-old neighbour, who takes her home daily to have oral sex. This relationship lasts about a year and a half: And I saw then, I saw … until one of the 26-year-old guys, a bigger one, who even had two children, had taken the habit of letting me in ... he lived on the third floor, and in the afternoon I used to play in the passage and the guy made me go up every time to suck his pinga (cock). He had already gotten used to it because maybe his wife would not give him the ass, drink his cum. What would happen, right? He was mental. He had got used to it, the guy was very handsome, I saw a white 26-year-old boy, legs full of hair and I thought the guy was hot and I was happy, I climbed to the third floor and was sucking and sucking and sucking… Until … I spent a year and a half in that routine of going up, going up, going up, every day. (Yazmin)

This relationship comes to an end when an “emergency” situation occurs: the subject’s wife arrives and at the same time she is faced with the possibility of stealing money, something that she does. I was almost 14 years old and in one of those days, the guy told me to come up around 6 pm and at that time I remember that the minimum salary was 650 soles to 700 soles (180 dollars)... and the guy makes me suck his dick and his wife begins to scream “Álvaro” from the first floor and he told me to get under the bed, he threw the key, the woman came in and I saw the feet of the woman there and I was scared, right? The man went out with the woman to confirm that she leaves when ... and I see in the bunch of diapers a 20 soles bill sticking out, and I said I was going to grab the 20 soles, but

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it wasn’t 20 soles, it was a bunch of 100 and 50 ... and I said, “So much money?” And I had never seen so much money together. At first, I thought to just grab the 20 soles. In the end, I said that I better grab the 100 and leave the 20. I peeked the 100 and left the 20 in his little envelope as it was. I was with the bills of 100 soles under the bed and put them in my socks and left only 20 soles. The guy only saw the 20 soles that were there, and told me to leave and once I left the guy realized after 30 seconds, he realized that there was no money, and the guy went crazy. He didn’t know how to tell me and he found me the next day and told me to return the money or he would tell my mother. (Yazmin)

Yazmin is not afraid of reprisals because, unlike the bond with her uncle, she now knows that her neighbour can lose a lot if his relationship with a minor is made public. Yazmin’s story expresses an agency directly linked to her sexuality. We could typify these situations as abuse from an external point of view of their experience, but for her they are an achievement that confirms her gender identity, on the one hand. But, on the other hand, we find in Yazmin’s narrative also agency in the link between sexuality and the reproduction of her material life: as a child obtaining food and as a pre-adolescent learning to obtain money. Sexuality is used for recognition and sexuality is also used for material and social reproduction. The history of Yazmin allows us to build a triangle scheme where sexuality is at the base, one side shows the desire for recognition and the other side shows the search for material sustenance. This scheme makes her participate in relationships where she is apparently living in a situation of submission and exploitation. However, her narrative also suggests a great capacity for agency (as opposed to submission), and she uses her sexual desire and her body to be viable as a person and as a social subject.

Conclusions Generally speaking, through this chapter we have gone through the third and fourth skins of trans women, skins that refer to socialization spaces such as home, school, and the neighbourhood, allowing us to observe how the development of their first skin, that is to say, of their own identification with the feminine world and their subsequent plan of action through the second skin, enters into tension with the spaces formed by the third and fourth skins. Going through the third and fourth skins draws

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attention to the relationship between trans women and the people who inhabit these skins, mainly made up of family members, friends, neighbours, schoolmates, and teachers. In a particular way, through the exploration of the third and fourth skins, it has been observed how sexuality crosses their lives; that is, how sex becomes a centrepiece by placing itself at the base of shaping the lives of trans women from a very young age. The experience of their own desire and their identity opens doors to different types of relationships. We find consensual relationships, exchange relationships that reach their tipping point with perverse acts, such as physical violence and sexual abuse, where it can be seen that desire is not immune to power and submission. In this sense, it can be deduced that there are two types of experiences according to the perception of trans women: on the one hand, sexual experiences that are remembered as consensual and pleasant, despite the age at which they occurred. In this type of experience, sex is positioned as the other side of the desire to recognize one’s femininity. In other words, the experience of their sexuality is interwoven in various and polysemic ways with the affirmation of identity and with the desire for recognition on the part of the other. And on the other hand, there exist experiences recognized as sexual violence, based on corrective actions for a type of perverse masculinity. Likewise, in the analysis of the first type of experience, a blurred line is observed between the recognition of the other and the self-recognition of trans women, through which, from my place of enunciation as a researcher, I identify a duality motivated by the desire to be recognized as a woman that leads them to not recognize situations of violence and power relations, even under the perception of the listener, not to feel that they are narrating an abuse. These types of experiences are the ones that precisely give us ambiguity in the perception of who is recognized, in this case, trans women. In the second type of experience, the place of enunciation of the one who recognizes is who draws the attention, where following Butler, he empties trans women of all humanity. This type of recognition is still aesthetic, as was already mentioned in the previous chapter; that is to say, the violent way in which men proceed would be a perverse sensitivity, where desire is lived the wrong way. As we have seen throughout this chapter, diverse skins, from home, school, and neighbourhood to the global order, as we will see in the next chapter, exert a power over trans women. We have also seen that trans women exercise an agency both to live their gender identity and their sexuality and to reproduce their lives materially. This agency is deployed in

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situations that we can recognize as perverse since early childhood and youth. As they grow up, this scheme will work again in another space to achieve their autonomy, leave their homes, etc. They live two processes. First is the construction of a peer network, which is “a kinship system.” It is a system where they find support, healing, learning, advice, mutual help, and at the same time fights, jealousy, and competition. It is a normativity, a system that goes out of state. It is a family. The second process is prostitution. This topic will be addressed in the next chapter, where, following the metaphor proposed by Hundertwaser, we must refer to the fifth skin: the global order. This order is structured around capitalism, patriarchy, and modernity/coloniality. In this sense, the cases we have analysed exemplify Nancy Fraser’s contribution to the recognition problem, when she claims that the fact that recognition as was proposed by Taylor and Honneth is not enough because it takes place in an environment, in a fifth skin, full of material inequalities related to income, property, access to education, salary, etc. As we will see in the next chapter, what we find then is that the fifth skin that expresses the world’s patriarchal system with its mode of production and redistribution, typical of capitalism, defines the conditions of abuse and exploitation and, in turn, the possibilities are an expression of agency. In many cases that we saw in this chapter, the search for gender recognition and the search for material provision are “resolved” through sexuality.

Bibliography Berkowitz, E. (2013). Sex and punishment: Four thousand years of judging desire. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge. Cantón-Cortés, D., Cantón, J., Justicia, F., & Cortés, M. R. (2011). Un modelo de los efectos del Abuso Sexual Infantil sobre el estrés post-traumático: el rol mediador de las atribuciones de culpa y afrontamiento de evitación. Psicothema, 23(1), 66–73. Recuperado de: http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/727/7271720 7011.pdf Carvallo-Diéguez, A. (2012), Recalled sexual experiences in childhood with older partners: A study of Brazilian men who have sex with men and male-to-female transgender persons Carvallo-Diéguez, A., Balan, I., Dolezal, C., & Mello, M.  B. (2012). Recalled sexual experiences in childhood with older partners: A study of Brasilian men who have sex with men and male to female transgender persons. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-­011-­9

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Cukor, D., & McGinn, L. K. (2006). History of child abuse and severity of adult depression: The mediating role of cognitive schema. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse: Research, Treatment, & Program Innovations for Victims, Survivors, & Offenders, 15(3), 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1300/J070v15n03_02 Honneth, A. (1996). Reconocimiento y obligaciones morales. Estudios Políticos, (14), 173–187. Recuperado de http://espacio.uned.es/fez/eserv.php?pid=bi bliuned:filopoli-1996-8-6443431F-2BE8-F544-3A97-47F0DA074DF8 &dsID=reconocimiento_obligaciones.pdf [Links] Kulick, D. (1998). “Travesti”: Sex, gender, and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. University of Chicago Press. Lévi Strauss, C. (1949). Las estructuras elementales del parentesco. Paidós Básica. Salazar, X. (2015b). Vine al mundo porque dios quiere que yo esté aquí: recorridos, identitarios de mujeres trans en Lima, Iquitos y Ayacucho/ Tesis (Dr.) Sen, G., Östlin, P., & Asha, G. (2007). La inequidad de género en la salud: desigual, injusta, ineficaz e ineficiente. Organización Panamericana de la Salud. https:// www.paho.org/hq/dmdocuments/2007/La%20inequidad_de_genero_en_ lasalud_desigual_injusta_ineficaz_e_ineficiente.pdf Taylor, C. (1992). El Multiculturalismo y la Política del Reconocimiento. Colección Popular. Wieviorka, M. (1995). Face au Terrorisme. Edt. Liana Levi.

CHAPTER 7

The Fifth Skin: Capitalism, Modernity/ Coloniality and Patriarchy

A gay historian used to tell me that unlike all of the model heroes we have in the country, they are heroes of defeat because they did not win any wars; trans women are heroes of triumph because they came out of poverty by hooking for 5 or 10 soles in this city. (Jana)

Miluska is one of the three most important trans leaders in Lima. She runs the Trans House, dedicated to doing HIV testing and working for trans women to have access to the National Identity Document (DNI).1 A central component of the work of the Trans House is to locate and map the places where trans women work and live. This work is carried out 1  According to data from the Cayetano Heredia University, more than 10% of trans women do not have a National Identity Document (DNI). This data has nothing to do with the gender identity law, the change of name, or the right to identity. It is related with trans women who never got their ID with their birth name. This is due to various reasons: either because they suffered discrimination at the time of carrying out the procedure or because they were thrown out of the family nucleus before the age of 18 when this type of paperwork loses priority, or because they left their place of origin without the papers that account for their citizenship (in Peru, the ID is processed with presentation of the birth certificate). It is basically due to the HIV problem that having an ID card begins to be an important issue in the lives of many trans women as without this document they cannot access the health service or the retroviral loads.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Patiño Rabines, The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42816-6_7

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mainly in the Historic Center of Lima because it is geographically where the highest concentration of trans women dedicated to sex work in the city is found. Kiara is the person who fulfils the function of “linker.” She walks through the main streets and avenues of the Center of Lima, visiting the main brothels as well as the houses shared by trans women, spreading the work of the organization.2 When Miluska told me this, I asked her if it was possible to meet Kiara and if there existed the possibility of accompanying her one day to make the visits and, thus, get acquainted with the work they do more closely. She told me it was no problem and added that it would be best for me to go with Kiara. She said that even for her, a trans woman herself, it was not easy to access the universe of trans women in the Center of Lima and that one of the reasons she had hired Kiara was because trans women trusted her more as she belonged more to their world. Kiara was imprisoned in the San Juan of Lurigancho prison for stealing a cell phone.3 Miluska made me understand that because of Kiara’s life experiences, because of how hard her life was, trans women identify with her. That is to say, she made me understand that because of her corporality, in terms of her movements, her demeanour, and her way of speaking, trans women dedicated to sex work feel closer to her: “Kiara has access to places that I do not. Kiara is the link to the girls. She speaks to them like a bagretona, then they feel comfortable and everything is cool.”4 And that’s how it went. She gave me Kiara’s phone number and I contacted her. A few days later, we met near a place that they sometimes use to meet with allied institutions. Kiara arrived with another person and introduced her to me, but between all of the commotion around me, I didn’t catch her name. As soon as we met, we started to walk. Spending time in the Center of Lima can be an overwhelming, albeit interesting, 2  A brothel is generally defined as the establishment where prostitution or sex work is practiced, which consists of having sex in exchange for money. Generally, these enclosures are managed by a woman who is called madame or matron, who manages the place and negotiates prices with clients. In the case of the brothel to which I had access, this is self-managed by the same trans women, who rent rooms for hours and are shared among various women to organize themselves and their work schedules. 3  Kiara was given 12  years for stealing a cell phone. Miluska met her when she was in prison. Kiara only had a birth certificate. She had no ID. When Miluska met her, Kiara had served five years of her sentence and Miluska presented a plea to reduce her sentence. When she got out of prison, she began working at the Trans House. 4  “Bagretona” derives from the name Bagre, which is a type of dark river fish without scales, medium in size, with a very large head. In Peru and other Latin American countries, it is designated as slang for women (also men, but less frequently) who are considered ugly.

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experience. Lima, founded in 1535 as the “City of the Kings,” is an amalgam between beauty and decadence. It is overloaded with information on all levels. Lima always had the pretence of being European, but on its back, it was inhabited by Peru. Official Peru merges into the same space, represented in all current and historical national symbols (a government palace, state entities, monuments, and statues of the nation’s heroes) and, at the same time, tells the history of the defeated (brothels, delinquency, informality, homelessness). There all of the contradictions of a country commune with one another. The Historic Center of Lima, in other words, is a dense place in terms of data, to put it in anthropological jargon. During the 10 or 15 blocks we walked, I focused all my attention on Kiara. At times, I remember wondering why Kiara had arrived with this other person. At one point, I asked if we could go into an establishment so we could talk calmly. I felt that there were too many distractions around and that by the very fact of walking, the focus of the conversation went to the background. At the end of the journey, a few houses away from the brothel, Kiara told me to talk to Marisol while she spoke with the girls so that I could have somebody to talk to. It was at that moment that I realized the reason why Kiara came with someone else. It was also at that moment that I realized that the reason for my strangeness was that I had been reading Marisol as a man. It was nothing obvious to me, making a reading about her corporality, that Marisol identifies herself as a woman. She was roughly between the age of 45 and 50  years old. Her gender expression did not expose any femininity to the naked eye. At least, not like the trans women with whom I had had the opportunity to talk. Marisol had short hair, shaved at the sides, and wore a wide t-shirt and baggy pants. Her appearance read closer to the masculine world than to the feminine. It was noon. Marisol and I stayed on the street, about three houses away from the brothel, and while we talked, we saw trans women go outside and could observe the occasional interaction with potential clients. While we waited for Kiara to leave, Marisol told me that she was involved in prostitution for 20 years and that the Center of Lima was her work base. She told me that she no longer dressed as a woman, but that many people still knew her as Marisol. Nowadays, she has a food truck in a suburb of the city. When I asked her how she identified herself, she did not know what to answer. She just told me she had sex with men. When Kiara left the brothel, she told me that I could talk to Camila, but that she wanted me to give her a box of condoms, 20 soles, and pay for her lunch in return.

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I found it to be a fair enough exchange to make up for the time she would waste talking to me. Camila arrived. She was skinny and petite, and had dark brown hair that reached her hip. She wore a babydoll dress or, at least, that was the reference that came to mind. All of her makeup was runny. Her voice was hoarse and dry. I could feel all her defences activated towards me because she had a hard time looking at me. Or, rather, maybe she ignored me. So, Kiara, Camila, Marisol, and I walked to a small restaurant that was just around the corner from the brothel. The meeting lasted for the time it took to eat the food. It was difficult to get their attention between the food, the noise from the television, the diners who arrived at the establishment, along with the fact that there was a lot of complicity between them. They teased one another, calling each other sexually active, butch, pecheras (women who support their men financially), misias (broke), whores, chipis (having a small penis), and HIV positive. They also used slang I did not know. At times, they spoke in loxoro.5 They gossiped about people from their community, so-and-so who got her concha (vagina) done, another one who has the bu (HIV) or won the Tinka (the name of a lottery which is used as slang for HIV), among other gossip. In the moments of silence, which were almost non-­ existent, I managed to ask them what their weirdest experiences in prostitution had been. Camila made an effort to make a kind of customer typology: “customers pay you 40 soles; some pay you 30. The coqueros (cokeheads) pay you 150 soles per hour to accompany them, drink with them, snort cocaine with them. It’s called a white party. And they get pensive, they ask you, “What am I, why do I like men?” ... because they all have their wife. There are others who become aggressive, who want to bite or hit you. The “modern” ones pay you double. They show up looking like manly men, then they get on all fours for you to penetrate them. There are plenty of them. But that’s all for money, not for pleasure. For pleasure, I have my husband who is very sexually active and gives it to me hard. But sometimes we need to vent, too. What we don’t find at home, we find outside.” To that, Marisol added: “Prostitution is not easy. You often get disgusting clients who want to have unprotected sex. We call it

5  Loxoro is an encrypted language created by the community of Peruvian trans women with the aim that people outside their world do not understand what they are saying. They use it to maintain their privacy and as a form of resistance to the hostility of the world around them

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French style. Some of them hit you because you don’t want to do what they want, and/or they rob you.” Camila, laughing, said that once a client asked her to cum in his mouth and that another one asked her to tie his belt around his neck and treat him like a puppy. Marisol, on the other hand, said that the strangest experience she had had was with a man who had asked her to put on a wedding dress and get into a funeral coffin. She agreed because he offered a good sum of money (500 soles). While she was in the coffin, petrified with fear, the man drank whiskey, cried, and he “se corría la paja” (jacked off). Camila added that: “Being a sex worker is a risk. It’s not easy. You expose yourself to many things. The worst thing you are exposed to is being killed.” Camila and Kiara were in the same prison together. They strengthened their friendship there, inside. It was inevitable that I be curious about the experience of a trans woman inside the San Juan de Lurigancho prison. Kiara and Camila brought to the table a series of anecdotes from those years of confinement. They were very playful references and funny memories, which happened between alcohol, sex, and drugs. If someone had heard the stories, it would not have been easy to deduce that the place where everything happened was located in a medium security prison, supposedly. Camila was imprisoned for a year and a half for stealing a cell phone.6 She says that if she hadn’t been able to afford a lawyer, she would have been given a 12-year sentence, like Kiara. Camila said that the prison was not so bad because she fell in love. She was dating a man prosecuted for rape: “I fell in love with a rapist because they sent us to the rapists’ pavilion. He was very nice, he talked to me a lot. He worked in the Santa Anita wholesale market and since he was handsome, a 16-year-old girl had fallen in love with him and had been chasing him. She told her mother that he had been seducing her and touching her, but the girl was already deflowered (she wasn’t a virgin) and that’s how they got him. There are many innocent people inside.” She also told me that one day the same nice man who talked to her a lot choked her in a fit of jealousy. He left her passed out. She told me this in between laughs and jokes: “He left me like Snow White asleep in her bed” (laughs). Kiara ended the meeting saying that inside, in the prison, everything was nice because the prisoners treated her like “a woman.” And not only 6  Camila argues that she was prosecuted by a homophobic prosecutor. She had no criminal record and did not have to go to jail. Still, they sent her to jail.

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her, but all trans women. Camila interrupted her and added, “When I entered, and when I entered my head was shaved mind you, because they shave your head when you go in, I put on my makeup and my hoop earrings and men started coming at me like flies. Inviting me to the disco, inviting me out to eat, they were lining up. They paid to be with me.” The recording ends when Kiara says: “In prison I felt like a concha (woman). I don’t regret being in jail, I learned a lot of things there.” We finished eating, I paid the bill, and said goodbye to the three of them. Marisol gave me her phone number and told me to call her whenever I want to take her out to eat. Camila told me the same. I gave her 20 soles plus 10 more soles for the box of condoms. I walked a few blocks, and I felt my head explode. Each and every one of the muscles in my body felt tense. My heart was beating fast. I could feel the sun on my face but I didn’t feel any pleasure. I don’t remember what route I took to go back home. I just wanted to leave the Center of Lima, that Center of Lima that has nothing to do with the supposedly glorious and heroic past that the monuments proclaim. I only smelled part of their lives, part of their daily lives. Their stories were full of violence, sex, alcohol, crime, abuse, poverty, and, above all, a lot of “street.”7 The lumpen world. I smelled a street that I know exists but that I have never walked through and never will. A street that marks the subjectivity of these women, which marks their emotional structure and way of seeing the world. I arrived at my house in Barranco (my neighbourhood) and sat on my little terrace where I remained silent for several minutes trying to relax my body. The sun was the same but, nevertheless, it felt different. All of the differences and gaps between class, race, and sex/gender were engrained in my body at this meeting. I, a cis privileged woman with education, felt with my entire body that the sun does not shine for everyone in the same way.8 I had this meal with Marisol, Kiara, and Camila shortly after starting my field work in Lima. I had done some interviews prior to this meeting, and little by little, I began to recognize that something that was apparently exceptional, prostitution, was an activity that is valid for most trans women 7  Someone who has “street” is a person who cannot be scammed, who generally speaks in slang and understands dynamics that are outside the formal and legal functions. 8  Viviane Vergueiro, a Brazilian trans economist, uses the term “cisgenderness” as an analytical category that serves to dislocate the naturalized and therefore hierarchically superior position of cis identities. In this way, classifying or categorizing what is supposedly “normal” makes it possible to analyse the domination relations inversely, putting the privileges of the dominants first, in order to rethink the experiences of the dominated.

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in Peru. And in this context, I could clearly see how the considerations of class, race/culture, and sex/gender are interwoven. Nonetheless, the reality of exclusion and oppression in which they live will in turn dialogue with characteristics of the lumpen world. The situation of being a trans woman in Peru leads them to steal (and be stolen from), leads them to deceive (and be deceived), leads them to participate in an increasingly instrumental relationship with the other (and be treated like an object). This, in turn, leads to depression and/or a lack of self-esteem, which leads to things like having sex without a condom, for example.9 Before making this visit to the Center of Lima, although I had a handle on certain data about the conditions and life expectations of trans women in my country at a theoretical level, I recognized above all things their transgressive political-­aesthetic proposal. However, as I went into the investigation of the reality in which they live and the possibilities they have, I tried to find a balance between the fertile and the barren or, in any case, to relativize the extremes. Finding a greater sense, at least a truer one, in the oxymoron of flesh and life. I think, somehow, this colours all of my research. Throughout the analysis chapters, we have seen how the conditions of recognition of gender identity, the experience of sexuality, and the need for material reproduction-production intersect in the different skins. We have found these three axes that make up a system throughout this investigation in the presentation of the different skins that are embodied in the trans subject. In the previous chapter, we focused on micro and meso social aspects. However, a thorough understanding of being and the being itself for these women in the world requires addressing the fifth skin, which deals with the global order. The three aforementioned axes that are part of a “triangle,” that is, they are axes that refer to each other and constitute a complex system that shapes the corporeality, subjectivity, and socialization of trans women, both of their lacks or restraints as well as of their agencies. However, what has been narrated up to this point throughout the book has been limited to the lives of women with respect to their first four skins: their bodies, their body recreation, and their primary and secondary socialization, with a narrative that has privileged the lives of the women themselves. In this

9  The highest incidence of HIV in Peru is found in the trans women population. According to data from the Ministry of Health of Peru, the incidence of HIV/AIDS among the gay and bisexual population is between 10% and 15%. For the trans population, it rises to 30%.

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chapter, I want to follow the opposite path and show how the lives of trans women are also “built” by a global social order. When one throws a stone at a still liquid surface, the encounter between these two elements generates concentric motion waves that propagate and grow through vibration. This same metaphor can be used when doing the reverse exercise: the waves, from highest to lowest, are what will reveal the appearance of the stone. This chapter will make a counterpoint, a round trip movement, through which we will be able to travel through the pores that make up the fifth skin; that is to say, the global order and the world-­ system (the ripples), until it reaches the stone (the trans subject). In other words, we are going to see how the ripples produce, shape, cross, and, in the same way, create the margins for the position that trans women occupy in the Peruvian context. Throughout this research, we have observed that sexuality, on the one hand, becomes a “currency of exchange” for many purposes. Trans women exchange sex for something: sex for food, for money, for shelter, for breasts, for asses, for affection, for recognition. And, on the other hand, it is a field of affirmation of gender identity that often occurs in the midst of relationships that we can categorize as abusive. In childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, trans women appeal to their sexuality to affirm a gender identity that is not granted to them socially because they are considered deviant, a term that combines medical, moral, and political considerations. Likewise, it has been noted that sexuality becomes an activity that allows for the reproduction of these people. From the girl who eats in exchange for oral sex to the already adult trans women who are the subject of this chapter and whose main productive activity is sex work. Trans activism in Peru in the current circumstances prioritizes the struggle for recognition (either at the state level or of the transformation of a common mentality within which we coexist). In addition, the struggles of trans women also have to do with leaving material, subjective, and social precariousness (see below) behind and with seeking out the possibility of public participation in decision-making (representation). Although trans activism advocates specific issues such as changes in legislation, access to education, and common safety, among others, in the long term, their struggles have to do with questioning a complex system of practices, beliefs, and sensibilities. Almost all of my interviewees have practiced or currently practice prostitution. This fact confirms the trend, since according to the Peruvian University Cayetano Heredia, 70% of the population of trans women is engaged in prostitution nationwide. At first, it seems to

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be a personal decision made to earn income, given their class position and concomitant poverty. However, here I want to put prostitution in broader terms, taking into account the fifth skin related to the “global environment” of Hundertwasser. For the purposes of my research, this fifth skin is constituted in an intersectional way which we can analytically refer to as considerations of sex/ gender, race/culture, and class; in other words, by the intersection of patriarchy, modernity/coloniality, and capitalism.

The Fifth Skin: Capitalism, Modernity/Coloniality, and Patriarchy Capitalism, Globalization, and the Production of Bodies Starting with the political economy, the life of these women must be understood from several dimensions. First, the years they have had to live coincide with the exponential globalization boom and, in particular, with the hegemony of a social organization of the economy based on neoliberal principles. Neoliberalism has had the consequence of creating a new social class that Social Sciences calls precariat, a term used to define a social class made up of people whose living conditions do not have predictability or security (be it economic or social). This class condition directly affects material well-being as well as mental health. The word precariat is a hybrid term composed of the concepts “precarious” and “proletariat.” This term came up during the global economic crisis to explain the situation of a large population in the so-called first-world economies. It is important to remember that in most Latin American countries, historically the highest percentage of the economically active population has been informal and does not enjoy labour rights. Although this category is born to account for a process of the political economy of the northern countries, it works function for this study. Nonetheless, it is important to mention that the precariousness in the Latin American and, specifically, Peruvian case has been consubstantial to the formation of the nation-states of these latitudes. Another useful category to understand the situation in which trans women live is the lumpenproletariat, a German Marxist term that designates the socially situated population outside or under the proletariat, from the point of view of their conditions of work and life, formed by the degraded, declassed, disorganized elements of the urban proletariat and,

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generally, living on the edge or outside of the law (Marx, 1981). Currently, there are a number of studies on the notion of the surplus of expelled populations, which are based on the Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat, but reworked for the neoliberal present. This is the case of Saskia Sassen (2015) who argues that in the context of the advanced global capitalism that we live in today, new logics of expulsions appear, where many people end up being expelled from the socioeconomic order. For Sassen, this type of expulsion is the product of what she calls “predatory formations,” which are formations that are the product of the sum of public policy instruments, as well as technological, financial, and market advances. The “predatory formations” generate never-before-seen levels of inequality, where many people end up being literally thrown out of the economy. In other words, they become statistically invisible, as Wayar (2018) argues in her book about the case of Argentina. For his part, Achille Mbembe in his book “Necropolitics” (2003) analyses how contemporary forms of subjugation of life are under the power of death, and thus force some bodies to remain in different spaces between life and death. Mbembe uses the examples of slavery, apartheid, the colonization of Palestine, and the figure of the suicide bomber to show the different ways in which necropower acts on bodies, reducing people to precarious living conditions. Thus, the category of “necropolitics” would be in connection with the concept of “necroeconomics,” where the latter refers to the fact that one of the functions of current capitalism is to produce a superfluous population on a large scale that no longer needs to exploit, but that we must continue to manage. One way to dispose of these population surpluses is to expose them to danger and risk situations and contexts that often end up being fatal. In short, these categories inspire me to describe the dynamics and practices that structure the lives of trans women. We are facing a social class that travels between these categories, allowing me to talk about the lives of trans women as precarious and lumpen lives. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this symbiosis between precarious and lumpen condition occurs very early in the life of trans women who have collaborated with this study. We see it in the case of Yazmin, the girl who, at six years old, runs away from home, steals from a farm, and eventually enters into a contractual relationship of sex for food. Similarly, the cases of the trans women who begin this chapter, whose lives occur amid overcrowding, theft, jail, drugs, prostitution, HIV risk, and poverty. All of this with finality of reproducing their lives by entering into the sex market.

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On the other hand, capitalism has historically required corporealities to be organized, distinguishing between productive bodies and “deviant” (unproductive) bodies. From the exclusion of left-handed people in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, over to the exclusion of people with some level of disability, to women in activities considered to be “naturally” masculine, to bodies that do not meet the criteria for publicly acceptable kinesthesia (Butler, 2004). The history of the human body, then, can be read as the history of its domination in general terms and its exclusion, for certain groups. The social analysis of the life of trans women leads us to argue that, in effect, they do sexual work because they have no alternative. They do not finish school, and not only do they not have support at home, but they are thrown out at an early age. For this reason, most do not have the skills to do more paid jobs and/or are not accepted in low-grade jobs because of their gender identity. Burger King probably does not accept a trans cashier woman, for example. As Jana argues: The more education you have… while your class, your social context is less unfavorable, you have more options to position yourself. But if you are poor and you don’t have education and you lack schooling; you have to go through other resilience processes to get by. Which one is that? Going to stand on a corner in your hometown to prostitute yourself. (Jana)

At the South American level, Peru together with Paraguay are the only countries that do not have legislation that condemns discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation (UNAIDS, 2015).10 Likewise, Peru does not have legislation that allows marriage and civil union between people of the same sex, nor does it have a gender identity law (allows the change of the national identity document according to the gender with which a person identifies), nor national laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And the majority of trans women do not have a National Identity Document, which evidences the null link between the State and its permanent condition of non-­citizenship. The interesting thing is that some trans women begin to exercise

10  However, at the local level, various municipal governments have issued regulations against all forms of discrimination in their respective jurisdictional areas that include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

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citizenship through the health services provided by the state due to HIV, which is closely linked to the practice of prostitution and sexual practices. In this context of exclusion, only the body and its sexuality remain because it is the only profitable resource, given the male market demand. It is a capital that has been accumulating through the construction of “all skins.” From body shape, gestures, kinesthesia, to the dress and makeup, which turn them into desired bodies. That desire allows them, on the one hand, to access income to reproduce their lives—even under conditions of insecurity, violence, illness—and, on the other hand, the sexuality experienced in this niche is also a source of affirmation and recognition of their status as women. That is to say, there is an issue of economic calculation, but prostitution is also probably one of the few jobs where they can live their feminine identity and, in addition, they are paid for being themselves. The other social space where it is very common to find trans women is hair salons, due to the fact that they constitute a space where, similarly to prostitution, they can work as trans women and, in turn, beyond the stigma, the vast majority can put the skills they have to work with the second skin, into practice. That is to say, they are able to work with the aesthetics of the body, proportions, and colours. In many cases, both spaces alternate to obtain higher income. For trans women, exclusion from work due to their identity, together with the stigma that falls on them, pigeonholes them into these two professions. In the case of prostitution, what we observe is that they are involved in this activity given their precariousness and given the lack of public policies, redistributive policies, recognition policies, and the presence of transphobic social sensitivities. Nevertheless, this activity is also a source of recognition, despite the precariousness of their citizenship status. As Argentine trans activist Lohana Berkins said: It is not possible to split the construction of identity from the conditions of the existence of travestis (trans) in our societies. These conditions of existence are marked by the exclusion of travestis from the formal education system and the labor market. In this kind of scenario, prostitution is the only source of income, the most widespread survival strategy, and one of the very few spaces for the recognition of travestis identity as a possibility of being in the world. (In “Thinking feminisms in Bolivia: Series Forums 2” 2012: 223)

As we observe in the ethnographic description with which this chapter opens, the concentration of trans sex work in an area of the city of Lima

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and the “privatization” of certain streets where sex work is exercised can be seen from two angles. On the one hand, simply as a tendency to a spatial specialization from an economic activity. And, on the other hand, it also expresses a sort of discipline, where a place of confinement of the deviant is tacitly being created. It is a place without physical confinement, but with socially consented barriers due to the need to concentrate “garbage” and, in turn, also as a place of protection and precarious security. In this way, brothels that are self-managed by the same trans women function as spaces of recognition, where they can work, be, and live their feminine identity, recreating their lost ties to the familial, the affective, as well as the contractual. It is important to recognize that the insertion of a trans woman in this sexed economic order, although it occurs on individual terms, is also part of what we can call the social organization for the production of transgeneration. Thus, trans prostitution also requires the constitution of certain networks, whether they are for mutual help and/or strictly contractual, which involve, for example, the creation of specialized brothels and websites. That is, there is a construction of places: the street with its respective rules, LGTBIQ places to have fun, sex tourism, even virtual spaces. In the current economic order, the abject has been converted into merchandise. Not only because of the action of trans women, but because the system has metabolized them. Beyond the direct world of sex work, there are plastic surgery procedures (in most cases precarious) and, today, after the HIV pandemic, there are specialized NGOs that provide health services. In other words, this economic fact, prostitution, creates a social organization that enables its productive activity. As Saskia Sassen argues in “Counter-geographies of globalization” (2003), the illegal circuits of the informal economy are not anomalies of the systems, but rather are a constituent and structural part of the globalized economy. In the Peruvian case, prostitution, while not illegal, is deeply criminalized and stigmatized as an activity that disrupts public order. Likewise, the absence of a gender identity law implies that trans women are excluded from any existing legal framework around prostitution. In this context, they become a focal point for abuse by police and municipal security, making street sex work even more vulnerable. Even though trans prostitution is an illegal and informal activity in Peru, it is an activity that functions as a space where recognition is found in a country that does not consider trans women citizens. So, we are facing a space of

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resistance against the modern colonial patriarchal state that was never intended for diversity. If we think from the fifth skin, the question that is at the centre and that emerges is: How is it that trans women arrive at this condition that lies between the precarious and the proletariat lumpen? That is to say, in order to understand the situation of these women, it is not enough to pay attention to the globalized capitalist neoliberal economy.11 Modernity/Coloniality As I previously argued, capitalism (class), modernity/coloniality (race/ culture), and patriarchy (sex/gender) are three axes that should be seen as a system. In other words, a one-dimensional reading cannot be done because it would be insufficient to account for the fifth skin that shapes the previous skins of trans women living in these latitudes. In expository terms, I have started from the precariat category of political economy. However, the precariousness of these women not only depends on the capitalist economic order, because they are anchored to other forms of domination such as modernity/coloniality and patriarchy, which also jeopardize their lives and lead them to simultaneously live in precarious and from lumpenproletariat conditions. The world system (Wallerstein, 1974; Mignolo, 2000b; Quijano, 2000) that we know today was sustained by the exploitation of labour. The political economy that gives rise to the modern/colonial world, which begins with the conquest of America, was organized through the division of social classes based on race criteria. This segmentation positioned certain populations either in conditions of abjection, inferiority, or subalternity. As Anibal Quijano argues: The ongoing globalization is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and that of colonial/modern and Eurocentral capitalism as a new world power pattern. One of the fundamental axes of this pattern of power is the social classification of the world population on the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination. (2000: 201) 11  It is possible to think that neoliberal capitalism, due to its own market needs, brings favourable spaces of recognition to the trans world. In fact, Nancy Fraser (2015) argues that in the case of American feminism, there has been a shift from emphasis on redistribution (and with its concomitant criticism of capitalism) to a policy based substantively on recognition.

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This power dynamic is rhizomatic, as we will see, since it does not follow a simple division between the dominators and the dominated, but rather constitutes a dense footprint that expands through bodies and produces subjectivities. Modernity/coloniality has jeopardized a large part of the world’s population not only in economic terms, creating conditions of poverty but also in subjective terms, creating feelings of inferiority for not being and not resembling the modern European subject. In other words, the naturalization of racial and social divisions and hierarchies that are at the base of the geospatial domination reproduction that enables the re-­ production of capital, obliterated and subalternized knowledge, practices, and ways of perceiving and living in the world of the dominated. As Quijano holds: [...] Indeed, all cultural experiences, histories, resources, and products also ended up articulated in a single social order around European and Western hegemony [... which] concentrated [...] the control of all forms of control of subjectivity, of culture, and especially of knowledge, of the production of knowledge. [...] [...] it is time to learn to get rid of the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted. It is time, in short, to stop being what we are not. (2000: 246)

In other words, the centrality that Europe acquired in this described process not only alters the representation of the other but, at the same time, distorts the self-understanding of the dominated. In this sense, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, both anti-colonial thinkers, put the process of subjectivity formation at the centre of their political and intellectual lives, where the independence and sovereignty of one’s gaze is twisted towards the predominance of being looked. Fanon analyse the process by which a dominant and colonizing representational consciousness is inscribed in colonized bodies. In his book Black Skin, White Masks, (2009) he would go on to say, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white” (2009: 44). Through this famous phrase, it is observed that the subjectivity of the black man is entirely coloured and dominated by the representational form that confirms the negative attributes assigned to him. In this process of colonization of subjectivity, the limits between one and the other are erased to the point of non-­distinction. This scheme is not the result of the naturalization of the body in a world of free relationships, but of the naturalization and normalization of racial defects. We are facing a type of internal colonialism, a process of

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internalization that founds both the type of experience and the colonial relationship. For his part, Achille Mbembe (2003), a Cameroonian philosopher, would say that it is a gaze that determines that the other has more weight. Mbembe, following Fanon’s paths for the current era, argues that the original violence of the colonial era and genocidal drive processes are reproduced in the sensory-political dimension of neoliberal globalization. As we observe, the perceptual development of the gaze serves as a metaphor to all of these authors dedicated to the colonial problem, to depict how domination enters and is installed in the bodies of the dominated, producing, as Quijano maintains, a distortion in the exercise of its own sovereignty. The colonial political economy that is apparently not in force today has defined, and continues to define, a map of poverty on a global and national scale in terms of race and culture. Even today, when nobody talks about race to talk about capital, that inertia is still imprinted in the economic sector within which a person continues to be defined. The racialization of poverty is indicated in the case of trans people by Ximena Salazar, a senior researcher at Cayetano Heredia University, when she maintains: The social class greatly determines how effeminate the person is. I believe that more because of the stigma in the upper and middle classes towards someone who goes through the transition to trans and, generally, those who do it go abroad. The people I know from the middle and upper trans classes go abroad to make their changes because it is extremely stigmatized here. That is, this society will not accept them so easily.

Salazar added that being a trans woman from the lower sectors would be less stigmatized since there is a role that is assigned socially, through stereotypes, to the effeminateness of the masculine, such as hairdressing or decoration. However, for the middle or upper classes, a trans woman simply does not fit in anywhere. For this reason, and taking into account that they have the material and symbolic means, the majority of trans women from more affluent sectors of Peruvian society decide to make their transition and lead their lives abroad. In the absence of visible references in the dominant sectors of Peruvian society in the mainstream, in particular that with which the Peruvian upper classes are associated, the status of being a trans woman only occurs in impoverished sectors, without education, which feeds into a double discrimination. In other words, for the well-off sectors, the fact of belonging to a “lower race” would explain that they

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have abject tastes and practices. It is a false tolerance that one would not have with their peers. In the Peruvian context, the term racism includes discrimination based on phenotypic features as well as cultural belonging. Indeed, as the anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2000) maintains, culture has always been racialized and vice versa. The construction of the country in terms of a political economy based on race during colonial times always indicated a cultural distinction and vice versa. That is why race has always been cultured and culture has always been racialized.12 Likewise, various authors agree that a key piece that accompanied the criteria of races for the exercise of domination was gender. In her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002), Ann Laura Stoler, a researcher in the field of colonial studies, puts her attention on the domestic space and the sexual sphere, which for her, are at the heart of the microphysics of colonial rule. For Stoler, gender inequalities were essential to sustaining colonial racist structures and were central to the ways in which colonial cultures operated. In the case of Latin America, Verena Stolcke’s study “Racism and sexuality in colonial Cuba” (2017) shows how in nineteenth century Cuba, elite men were men with light complexions. They affirmed their dominant position through controlling the sexuality of white women, on the one hand; and, on the other, through easy access to women with darker complexions and lower social status. In these power dynamics, the white woman’s notion of (sexual) honour occupied a crucial role for domination, putting her at the centre of social questioning if she engaged in inappropriate behaviours. On the other hand, the honour of men was unquestionable, allowing them to maintain extramarital relationships with women of lower status than theirs. Moreover, as Quijano (2000) points out, the coloniality/modernity process printed new shared mentalities in the population through authoritarian domestication processes that range from the eradication of idolatries, the inquisition and in more republican times, the school system itself. 12  As we saw in Chaps. 2 and 4, before talking about limited versions of races, in a country like Peru we have to talk about races/culture. What is produced in the colonial era are multiple mixtures, where the bodies cannot be separated nor the spirits manage to be evangelized, which is the objective of the colony. In practice, what we have is a hierarchical system where neither the bodies stopped mixing nor the spirits were standardized. It is for that reason that race is going to join the class criterion. So, the Peruvian situation in fact cannot be analysed by clear and distinct racial categories because they are mixed; class defines race membership and race defines class membership.

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Along with heteronormativity, one of the mentalities installed has been, and still is, transphobia. Let us remember first how, from colonial times, trans people become abject. The then-new Judeo-Christian and Western ideology sought to impose itself on the existing sex-gender systems among the original peoples of what would later be called America. For the conquerors, the already “sin” of sodomy constituted one of the prohibitions and causes of excision; however, the case of trans women was prosecuted much more radically.13 This transphobia that begins in colonial times has lasted until today. As we have seen in Chap. 3 dedicated to the context, the Marxist groups raised in arms during the 1980s and 1990s, also dedicated themselves to “cleansing” society of tares that supposedly expressed bourgeois deviations. This coupled with hate crimes and the permanent harassment of girls, adolescents, and trans women reveals a component of modernity/ coloniality that has not been addressed by Latin American decolonial theorists.14 Nonetheless, although this theory recognizes that the construction of gender and sexuality are part of the process of modern colonial domination (Quijano, 2000), the situation of trans people in Peru remains obliterated from decolonial analysis and practices. Likewise, the main currents of mainstream feminism and of those protesting patriarchal and heteronormative hegemony in general, have also failed to address the trans theme in a sustained way. In fact, at one point, as in other latitudes, feminism, along with the nascent movements of homosexuals and lesbians, censored and criticized trans women. Gender, then, was the reverse side of the race criterion that served as a fundamental piece in the exercise of domination of bodies (Stoler, 2002; Federici, 2004). The device of sexuality is heternormative and, together with racism, operates in the same time and space to regulate subjectivities and discipline bodies (McWhorterm, 2009). As we will see more in depth in the next section, although Quijano focuses on racial and cultural  See the section “Colonial and Early Republican Historical Background” in Chap. 4.  Although the groups raised in arms carried homophobia and transphobia to extremes, in 2015, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published the document “Violence against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex in America.” In the particular case of trans women for the region, it states that from an early age, stigmatization, violence, and discrimination begin in all social spheres, with most being killed at an average age of 35  years. Between January 2013 and March 2014, 283 murders of trans women were reported for reasons of gender identity. 13 14

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discrimination, various decolonial feminist authors have delved into this idea by pointing out that modernity/coloniality also includes the sex/ gender axis. Indeed, the modern/colonial project was, and continues to be, a patriarchal and Eurocentral project which was always heteronormative and transphobic. Patriarchy The decolonial project proposed by Quijano, among others, received a contribution (or criticism) from the Argentine thinker María Lugones (2008a), who argues that gender oppression is inherent to that of “race.” Lugones argues that Quijano’s analysis is already co-opted by patriarchy and heteronormativity to make a critical reflection about what he names as “sex, its resources, and products” (2000: 378). That is, for Lugones, the vision of Quijano is given from the lens of the modern/colonial organization of the genre through which society is organized through biological dimorphism, the dichotomous vision man/woman, heterosexuality, and patriarchy. For its part, the Bolivian decolonial and community feminist María Galindo, argues that the colonial structures are patriarchal and the patriarchal structures are colonial, an idea embodied in the title of her most widespread text, “You cannot decolonize without depatriarchalizing.” Galindo analyses the Latin American patriarchate by distancing herself from the definitions that have been developed in the northern hemisphere, arguing that when one is talking about patriarchy in societies like that of Bolivia, one is talking about a patriarchy built on the basis of colonial structures. You cannot think of one without the other. She introduces the notion of depatriarchalization, where she affirms that what women need is a horizon, an idea, and a logic about how to dismantle, disarm, and deconstruct the system instead of reproducing it by means of false victories through its inclusion.15 Rita Segato, Argentine anthropologist and feminist, in turn argues that the colonial intervention that remains in force until now ended up positioning the female world and women in a constant state of “minorization.” Segato, in her book The War against Women (2016), alludes that 15  Despite these advances, it is important to recognize that Latin American decolonial and depatriarchal thinking has not addressed trans issues in a substantive manner. In fact, this book seeks to help fill that void.

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this term refers to treating women as inferior beings and delimiting their issues to the sphere of the intimate, of the private. In general, to treat women’s issues as minor subjects with minor issues. This transit began with the modernity that is historically colonial and continued with the formation of nation-states. What was dual before the colony was made up of complete ontologies in of themselves and, in that way, they complemented one another. The transition from colonial modernity to the colonial-­state followed the paths of hierarchy and left one of these spheres devoid of meaning and sense, positioning the universal man as the only referent of truth and supremacy. The public sphere, which was and continues to be the domain of the masculine order, became the only enunciation locus with political value. In that way, the history of the State is the history of men. And it is, in turn, the history of the kidnapping of politicity. This process led to the other sphere, the intimate or private world, being characterized above all as an apolitical place, incapable of stating something of universal interest and value. For Segato (2016), the cause of the exercise of cruelty on women’s bodies and homophobic and transphobic hate crimes lies in the search for discipline that patriarchal forces try to impose on all those beings that are on the margin of politics. They would be high-intensity crimes of the modern colonial patriarchate against all that which destabilizes it. For the case that we are analysing in this chapter, that of prostitution by trans women, there is an issue that is obvious and that is directly linked to how the offer is sustained. As we have already seen, almost all of my interviewees report having been or currently being sex workers and we have already indicated the motives that take them to this activity. However, and quite obviously, there is a supply of trans female sexual service because there is a demand. It should be noted that prostitution has historically been and continues to be a patriarchal institution based on the desire and sexual power of men. In the case of prostitution of trans women, the locus behind it, as we have seen in the previous chapter and in this one, is the supposedly heterosexual male subject. I have already argued that the only link that trans women have with the Peruvian State is through the health sector due to HIV. This is because there is an official and medical discourse that names them as the largest population at risk. However, how they get it is completely obviated. That is to say, the sexual practice itself is completely invisible as is, above all, the population that demands said service. Then, the formal/official (the State)

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and the informal/illegal (prostitution) are connected in the case of the life of trans women on the issue of HIV.  Behind this connection there is a heteronormal male subject who is not named in the official discourse (but is named the informal one), but who, nevertheless, passes through this entire structure. That subject is the one who violates and, at the same time, recognizes them. The question that arises is: What kind of masculinity does this state produce that, for the purposes of this investigation, is urgent to refer to as a modern colonial capitalist patriarchal colonial state? On this point, Jana argues: We, trans women, are used to leaving what we love. To heartbreak. We know that we live in this context where men can love us very much. They may feel very good, but there will come a time when they will be with a woman because of social pressure, despite not loving her. Even if she doesn’t satisfy him sexually, but they want to have children, and then they look for you. Because it is also part of what a professional man needs to reach his ideal of a success in the world. He won’t carry a trans woman and say, “she’s my partner.” Very few of them do that. That man is buried socially, it is all marginalization, all discrimination. I used to think that we were the ones who suffered discrimination in all its forms. But being with them and understanding their own traumas and their own masculine roles a little better, they also suffer. They are not going to be seen as true men. Everyone will tell them, “you are not a man.” All of his masculinity will be questioned. (Jana)

As we have been arguing throughout this chapter, the three strands that produce a restraint system and that, through the fifth skin, will shape the place that trans women occupy in the world system, will in turn affect the masculine sphere. Throughout the described process, we observe that from the transition of the modern colonial system to the capitalist colonial state, from evangelization to modern rationality, what is given at all times is the control of sexuality as a fundamental requirement for domination. Always, sooner or later, every process of domination has to control sexuality. This process will produce masculinities that cannot out loud that they like trans women. They cannot publicly show their desire. We observe then that this system that we are naming generates covert behaviours, practices, and desires. A culture in the shadows. The men themselves, in turn, will blame trans women for their own desire or their homosexual desires.

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Capitalism, coloniality/modernity, and patriarchy have created certain commonalities with respect to sexuality and at the same time constrained to live in a sexuality that is marginalized. The possibility of reproducing the lives of trans women, as Jana’s quote illustrates, depends on a male demand to satisfy a “forbidden” desire. While we are in a situation where sexual desire has become a commodity and, therefore, we can talk about prostitution as the provision of a service within the capitalist economy, its “hidden” and marginal exercise reflects the presence of non-hegemonic masculinities. They, as Jana points out, are victims of heteronormative patriarchy and modernity/coloniality.

Trans Women as Antagonistic Protagonists of the World-System: The Figure of the “dehero” The first time I met Jana, we talked extensively about the situation of trans women in a country like Peru. I told her about my research and about the approach I was giving to the presence and political activism of trans women, highlighting the positive changes I saw. We listed several of them with unusual optimism. It was there that she recalled the quote with which I opened this chapter. A gay historian used to tell me that unlike all of the model heroes we have in the country, they are heroes of defeat because they did not win any wars; trans women are heroes of triumph because they came out of poverty in by hooking for 5 or 10 soles in this city.

What kind of hero is the trans woman in Peru? In general terms, a hero is someone who possesses characteristics and personality traits that common people do not possess. These traits, generally idealized, allow heroes to perform extraordinary acts for the benefit of the community. Jana’s quotation has been in my head throughout all of my research. And as I went into the stories of each of my interlocutors, I felt that the image of the antihero was more suitable than that of the hero. The antihero is, rather, an ordinary character with characteristics opposed to the hero. They can be amoral, alienated, cruel, unpleasant, or passive, among others. Their actions are determined by their own moral compass that generally opposes those positively recognized by the society to which they belong. It is important to add that antiheroes act in this way because they have had dark, painful, and, in many cases cruel pasts, which lead them to

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have a vision and course of action that differs greatly from the so-­ called hero. In general terms, the heroism of the lives of trans women, their presence in the world, and the quote that names them as “heroes of triumph” because they emerge from poverty through the exercise of prostitution would be closer to the characteristics described for the figure of the antihero. However, there is something that does not fit entirely because the antihero is somehow still a hero and, therefore, is in the same frame of reference. The hero in coloniality/modernity is a man who embodies certain values with which masculinity is ideally constructed as they will become archetypes for Western society and, therefore, become ideals of the self. In the case of the Western hero, we are facing an individual than does not represent or talk about a town nor a community. It is something that affects the entire history of modernity/coloniality that has to do with the construction of the modern individual. This highlights the idea of freedom and autonomy that will give rise to the bourgeoisie and its struggles against feudalism in Europe. He is the conqueror.16 This idea of individuality is fundamental to modernity/coloniality not only in the realm of what is heroic in military terms, of war and conquest; but also, in the construction of self-referred man.17 For the purpose in mind of highlighting these characteristics, I have chosen to name them as deheroes, with the prefix “de” and in plural, 16  In Peru, one of the great monuments destined to highlight heroism is found in the monument to Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conqueror who led the conquest of Peru at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Being deemed of lesser importance, even in terms of the construction of the mythical ex post hero, the monuments that are built are destined for Inca men, as is the case of Manco Cápac and Túpac Amaru. Mama Ocllo (wife of Manco Cápac) or Micaela Bastidas (wife of Túpac Amaru) does not have the same status in the public space or in the consciousness of heroicity. 17  Ian Watt in his book Myths of Modern Individualism (1996) builds his hypothesis from four characters in modern literature: Don Quixote, Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe. The author departs from Don Quixote to describe how individuality is being constructed, from Faust who represents how the intellect is chiselled, and ends up selling his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. Don Juan, who is looking to build relationships and is not forming any bonds, uses deception and artifice to achieve his sexual purposes. For his part, Robinson Crusoe would sequentially be the paradigm of the man who believes he can do everything by himself. For Watt, the four figures would reveal the problems of individualism in modernity linked to loneliness, narcissism, and the demands of the self against the forces of society.

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making way for a type of heroism that is always collective and that always deconstructs the hero’s ideals. The other untold aspect of this hero’s construction is that he is Western, he is Judeo-Christian, he is a man, he is heterosexual, and he has no disability. In short, the construction of the national hero is the exacerbation of the modern man, of the Cartesian ego. The (de)heroism of trans women, rather, is that their struggle goes against an archetype that is masculine, heterosexual, patriarchal, and Western. Therefore, one of the central characteristics of the trans (de)heroism that I am naming is that it begins to deconstruct that hero. Among other things, it gives him a body, it gives him a sex, and it is not a Cartesian res cogita. The body is not accidental. The idea of the hero also revels in the fantasy of individuality because he is a hero who does not depend on his environment or his community. And in the exacerbation of modern man, they are even immortal men. However, the ideal mandate of modern/colonial and patriarchal construction of gender and sexuality is a system that is also made up of cracks and crevices of resistance or opposition.18 Therefore, the question that emerges in that sense is: What are the agency practices that face this system? Parallel systems of informality/illegality, where one of them is prostitution, brothel, and the street with all its contradictions. These fractures in the system allow for replicas to be created where the lost emotional maps will be reproduced as new ones will arise. The female subject of birth and female identity is fucked but it’s like a cheese. You have seen how you cut cheese open and it’s full of holes. I have always said that that’s what this system is, like a cheese with holes. And, the female subject, regardless of whether or not she has a vagina, is much more capable of cheating the system. The masculine is not. He doesn’t have it in him. So, there is a hole, and you get in there and do your thing, just as how, despite such an adverse context, trans women choose to live the way they do. It is because that hole exists. Because if no such fixation and desire for the trans body existed, these girls who were expelled from their homes, their instrument, their body as a political tool, would not have allowed them to survive even if it was for 5 soles or 3 soles. Do you understand me? The 18  Let us recall what Silva Santana (2019) argues about the Brazilian case of the use of the term “Mas Viva,” where he argues that it is a liminal space that arises in order not to forget the relationship between oppressive forms of power and agency, between experiences of violence, racist, and sexist dialogue and, at the same time, the ways in which the trans community finds resilience, recognition, and support.

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subject that buys in, not because I want to my dick sucked, not because I want to cum, beyond the sale, the thing is that there is an attraction to trans women. Then, that trans female subject sees that hole. I don’t starve. I will stay out until 3 or 4 in the morning but at least one guy will give in. At least I can suck your dick and have two soles worth of bananas to eat tomorrow, ripe or green. I could even boil them, but I won’t starve. And if he’s drunk, worse! I can steal his money. While I’m sucking his dick, I can steal his money or his cell phone and he won’t even notice. Those are the holes. (Jana)

Jana talks about the cheese holes as a metaphor for the system, where the holes work as an alter of the visible, legal, and hegemonic. The gaps would be those spaces where nobody sees you, where you can hide and live on the side-lines. These holes depict at the same time the hidden desires, not visible to the system, and the world that works outside the official/legal, where prostitution fits in, along with theft and everything associated with the lumpen world. It is thanks to those holes within the system that they exist. It is a very interesting metaphor of how social dynamics occur. It is, in turn, a version of Foucault’s heterotopias of deviation, which would be the places that society shapes in its own liminality, in the voids that make it up, on its margins, reserved for those individuals who represent a deviation in relation to the required standard. These are blind spots where the marginality of the world exists, resists, lives, and finds the ability to reproduce. In the official/legal discourse, being a whore, having AIDS, being poor, and all of the adjectives that trans women joke about, as we saw in ethnography, places them at one extreme of social “trash.” However, in the informal/illegal world, in those holes of the world system, their (de) heroism lies in the fact that having all forces against them, where each of these adjectives is inscribed in their first skins, they continue to exist and move forward. The modern/colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist state has generated an absolute violation of trans women, but they are simultaneously surviving from their feminine identity and agency. We find, in turn, within that (de)heroism, a radically different way of doing politics through which micropolitical practices are observed in each of the skins that inhabit them. Where the trans girl who uses her grandmother’s underwear to go to school can be understood as a micropolitical practice. To which Jana maintains:

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That’s why I love it when people say that we are doing something that might not constitute as legal. But a man who once loved or related to a trans woman will never be the same. And if that man has a gay son or a trans daughter one day, he will not see him in the same way that a man who has never sexually or emotionally related to a trans woman would.

She is talking about doing politics from the body because these micropolitical practices are creating new common ways of thinking that are going to have repercussions in society. It is a political proselytism from sexuality. They change society by having sex. Having sex is doing politics. The (de)heroism of trans women would then lie in political proselytizing from bed. Taking from Jana’s voice, prostitution for her is power where the body is seen and lived as an agency. Through her narrative, some myths about prostitutes as victims of a system are nuanced because they do not stop in the sense of the fourth and fifth skin. But the vital experience becomes a resource to survive and get ahead. It is a survival strategy. The body as a political tool faces the system from the desire to be a woman and from sexuality. She is speaking for her class. She is rescuing an agency and with that also a lifestyle about sexuality. She sees it as resistance, as a political tool. Prostitution is interwoven, in turn, to a freer sexual experience, which does not circumscribe to the more typical monogamous sexuality of private property relations. They can have several relationships with different types of men. Some are commercial in the sense of prostitution; others are fuck buddies and others are partners. As Camila put it, “what we don’t find at home, we find outside.” The first world system does not want ambiguity. The ambiguous is the inconsistent. We are facing a system/state that continues in the binary, where the categories “man” and “woman” are, from a legal point of view, stable, coherent, logical, and oppositional categories that are defined by otherness from a biological standpoint. Trans women identify with the female gender so that they can be located within the only narrative that exists and, thus, enter the oppressor’s game so as to be included. However, at the same time they transgress those same rules, destabilize them. Trans women do not fit into binaries and as a result of being rejected for their inconsistency and ambiguity, the first-world states provide them with all of the resources to move from one gender to another. In Latin America, this does not exist due to a series of variables, which ends up placing the population somewhere residually ambiguous outside the system.

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Conclusions In this chapter, my intention has been to show the fifth skin of trans women, a skin that refers to the global order and that, for this reason, is a skin that contains and shapes all the previous skins. It is, in a way, the dermis that is located at the origin and at the end of the life trajectory of trans women that we have travelled through the first, second, third, and fourth skin. In turn, the fifth skin accounts for the mechanisms of power and subjection that position them in a place of constant precariousness. However, as already mentioned, the logics of power are rhizomatic, and where there is power there will also be resistance. As already said, modernity/coloniality only reformulates an abject vision of trans women that is already in the early colonial discourse when non-heteronormative sexualities and trans gender individuals are literally persecuted and murdered. Although we have made the analytical distinction between modernity/coloniality, capitalism, and patriarchy, in terms of concrete human experience these dimensions constitute a system that acts together, which materializes and corporates in a single vital experience as fifth skin. The heteronormative patriarchal discourse gives trans women a position of subject in a double dimension: both for claiming a “false” gender identity and for living a sodomite sexuality. This discourse anchored in the ancient Abrahamic tradition, which in turn is metamorphosed by the rational modern discourse of the Western Enlightenment, and even pathologized from the nineteenth century onwards, shapes the global social context of the fifth skin. On the other hand, as Federici (2004) argues, the construction of a patriarchal gender system from the sixteenth century onwards is part of the capitalist production mode construction itself, which establishes a division by social classes that place part of the world population in a situation of economic subordination, status, and poverty. This, in turn, as we have seen, is the terrain that leads to both a criminal situation (to theft) and to an “illicit” sexuality. In other words, the events of their lives led to an experience of their own sexuality beyond borders. However, the position trans women as a subject is not only conditioned by capitalism and patriarchy. Trans women belong to a post-­ colonial society, and it is important to mention how the coloniality of power and knowledge continues to operate in the epistemic and ontological frameworks with which in general legality in Peru is built. This situation generates what Latin American thinkers have called an internal

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colonialism (Cotler, 1968), where a self-defined elite as Western has marked the ways of defining coexistence and, at the same time, exclusion. We must understand this regulation not only in legal terms but also in terms of the construction of common sense that defines “the right” of “the wrong,” the normal of the deviant. As we know, Western modernity, as Foucault’s studies (1975, 1976, 2006) show us as a process of permanent rationalization (Weber, 2002), has sought to build a systematic order and define unequivocally through scientific, political, philosophical, and legal what is “right” of the “wrong.” This discursive matrix is based on its respective disciplinary and controlling institutions, and has produced the consequent “deterritorialization” or exclusion of the deviant. All this together with the development of technologies to straighten what goes beyond the norm. One way to understand this process from Peru, as Rocío Silva Santiesteban (2008) reminds us, is through the category of “disgust factor.” This factor, as the author maintains, transforms the other into a “symbolic trash” and, in this way, “the multiple ways of” evacuating it “from the system” are argued. In that sense, disgust is not only an effect but rather the political measure to attribute one’s own actions and those of others as allowed or prohibited. In this sense, prostitution, which is practiced by the majority of trans women who have participated in this study, positions them outside of normative society. However, what the evidence shows is that the effects of this activity on the lives of trans women become diffused for the analysis, since, on the one hand, although it makes them even more vulnerable and precarious subjects, on the other, it allows them to reproduce their material life and live their feminine identity. This fact leads me to find the coexistence of apparently contradictory elements between agency and subjection, between being heroes and being victims, between freedom and slavery, between Eros and Thanatos, in the life experience of trans women. And in that sinuous path of elements, the micropolitical aesthetic acts that struggle for the change of sensitivities stand out.

Bibliography Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge. Cotler, J. (2021 [1968]). La mecánica de la dominación interna y del cambio social. En Obras escogidas, vol 1. La dominación interna en el Perú (pp. 133–165). Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. De la Cadena, M. (2000). Indigenous Mestizos: The politics of race and culture in Cuzco, Peru 1919–1991. Duke University Press. Fanon, F. (2009). Piel negra, máscaras blancas. Akal.

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Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, body and primitive accumulation, Nueva York, Autonomedia. Foucault, M. (1975). Vigilar y Castigar, Siglo XXI Editores, Madrid. Foucault, M. (1976). Historia de la sexualidad, 1. La voluntad de saber. México: Siglo XXI. Foucault, M. (2006). Defender la sociedad. Traducción de Horacio Pons. Argentina: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Fraser, N. (2015). Fortunas del Feminismo. Del capitalismo gestionado por el Estado a la crisis neoliberal, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños. Lugones, M. (2008a). Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa, 9, 73–101. Marx, C. (1981). El 18 de brumario de Luis Bonaparte. C.  Marx y F.  Engels, Obras escogidas en tres tomos, Editorial Progreso, Moscú 1981, Tomo I, páginas 404 a 498. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1): 11–40. Duke University Press. McWhorterm, L. (2009). Ladelle McWhorter, racism and sexual oppression in Anglo-America: A genealogy. Indiana University Press. Mignolo, W. (2000b). La colonialidad a lo largo y a lo ancho: el hemis ferio occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad. En Lander, E. (Comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Comp.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO. Santana, D.  S. (2019). Mais Viva! TSQ. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 6(2), 210–222. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-­7348496 Saskia, S. (2003). Contrageografías de la globalización: género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos. Traficantes de sueños. Saskia, S. (2015). Expulsiones. Brutalidad y complejidad en la economía global. Katz Editores. 294 p. Segato, R. L. (2016). La guerra contra las mujeres. Traficantes de Sueños. Silva Santiesteban R. (2008). El factor asco: basurización simbólica y discursos autoritarios en el Perú contemporáneo. Stolcke, V. (2017). Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial. Intersecciones. Ediciones Bellaterra. SGU. Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. University of California Press. UNAIDS. (2015). Modeling the expected short-term distribution of new HIV infections by modes of transmission. United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Watt, I. (1996). Myths of modern individualism. Cambridge University Press. Wayar, M. (2018). Travesti. Una teoría lo suficientemente buena. Editorial Muchas Nueces. Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant ethic and the “spirit” of capitalism and other writings; edited, translated, and with an introduction by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusions

I am writing this final section from Pisac, a small town located in the Sacred Valley of Cusco, capital of the Inca empire, while looking at the Intihuatana (Quechua sundial). The territory was governed from this region just before the arrival of the Spanish. Here, the last battles against the Spanish colony took place. The day I moved here, I met Mr Huamán, a community member of this area and the owner of the house I have rented. Among other things, we talked about the weather. He told me that this year the rains would start in October, but this week a strong wind would blow, so I should keep warm. I asked him how he knew this. He replied, “We know from the stars. We know how to read the sky and the stars.” I thought, “I can’t read the stars.” I can read letters. I was raised and educated in the capital, where we are taught that to have a good life you have to enter the competitive world and that a synonym of success is to accumulate money, titles, properties, and companies, among others, but nothing related to knowing how to read the stars. Peru is a diverse, multicultural, and multilingual country, with narratives that reflect different epistemologies and ontologies that are not part of scientific knowledge. Throughout the last five centuries, this knowledge has been seen as non-knowledge or as pre-knowledge: pre-modern, pre-­ political, pre-scientific. This “pre” has always reflected a hierarchical order, reproducing hegemony in a way of seeing the world, building it, knowing

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it, and naming it. However, over the centuries, these same populations have consistently done politics by questioning domination, but from aesthetic practices in general, and performative practices in particular, such as dance and music. In a similar way to this community member and his knowledge about the stars, throughout my research, I have listened to the voices of trans women who have transmitted to me their knowledge of doing politics, which travels paths outside of Western rationality. The trans women’s movement has knowledge made up of the aesthetic political practices with which they struggle to survive and achieve their recognition and full citizenship in the Peruvian society. In that sense, this research represents my commitment to contribute to the academic debate on aesthetics, politics, and gender from feminist and decolonial perspectives in a Southern context; in particular, I focus on how political action and the struggles around the positive recognition of trans women are being understood in Lima, Peru, where the body and aesthetics are paramount in the struggle for a change in sensitivities. This book has focused on building a knowledge that has used the dialectic between modern and non-modern forms of understanding politics and the body to “humanize” forms of struggle that have been invisible for a long time. This is due to the postcolonial condition in which a society like Peru lives, where, as Quijano maintains, certain ways of being and existing in the world have been degraded and silenced, some absorbed and modified, while others have ceased to exist; however, many of them have remained alive, resisting, and have been modifying meanings. This book wants to pay a deep tribute to these practices and the human groups that are behind them, and, at the same time, to give an account of the power of these forms that arise as alternatives to formal politics, where the body and affections are at the centre. In methodological terms, my approach to the research topic has tried, from the design itself to the interactions with my collaborators, to move away from positivist ethnography; that is to say, of that ethnography that contemplates the study subjects in a distant way, as objects that produce data, and with the pretension that the researcher does not participate in the encounter. In contrast, my methodological approach starts with the recognition of the other as a subject of knowledge, which modifies the status of the “other” as object to that of subject. In this sense, this research represents a call for the construction of relational knowledge, where knowledge is produced in the encounter between the researcher and the researched, and in this process the embodied emotional affects play a

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predominant role. In this sense, it was important to bring the feminist contribution of self-reflexivity to my research, which enables a critical approach to my own knowledge production in terms of my own subjectivity, the process of intersubjectivity with participants, and the methods and epistemology that I worked. This fact also calls for a reflection on the challenges that are imbricated in the encounter with respect to power relations during the research and to be aware of not reproducing colonized and patriarchal practices of domination. And, in turn, the methodology of this research has privileged the production of knowledge located in a specific context and at a particular moment in the history of Peru. The conversations with trans women have shown that they do not feel identified with the notion of a third gender or with the categories of queer or non-binary sex. Rather, the place from which they identify is more pragmatic and has to do with accepting that a woman can have a penis and a man a vagina. Therefore, from my point of view, it is not that the development of gender categories that have emerged in other latitudes has to be cancelled, but rather that these definitions serve some contexts and not others. The big problem, as Bettcher (2014) argues, is that a universal category is being sought to account for trans, when in reality there may be different ways of understanding trans, which may even be inconsistent among them, but are no less valid. It is important, then, to introduce a debate about how the academy of the South assumes categories that the academy of the North produces without necessarily deepening or thinking about their relevance, since sometimes it ends up in an authoritarian position that is “to teach the people how to think.” This would be an act of internal decoloniality. In this sense, this research is part of the decolonial struggle, moving away from the reading that is done from the North of what happens with the subordinate populations of the South. In that sense, I have to ask myself if the globalization of categories and, finally, of submission to modern analytics is ultimately a problem, because it ends up placing everything in hermetic and impermeable boxes. This is an open question that seeks reflection on multiple possibilities, rather than fixating on the answers: where should these struggles go, towards sustaining the imposition on how sexuality is conceived and how it is analysed? Or, is there something to learn from the old and ancient Indo-American cultures? It would mean, then, to rethink the entire system. That is the powerful thing about trans and its materiality. In the trans, everything is embodied, that is why the metaphors of the skins take on a special meaning. Although they are metaphors, they are also literal. It is a body and a

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materiality wherein everything that has been presented in this investigation happens and inhabits them. In methodological terms, one of the topics in debate that emerges from the ethnographic component of this research is that the interpretation that researchers have is present from the beginning of the field work, from the encounter with the study subjects, in the conversation itself, in the topics that we write down in our notebooks, in the cross-questions that we formulate on certain topics. In other words, that interpretation is not a moment that can be isolated from the entire research process, but rather responds to the place of enunciation of the researcher herself, her story, how he or she sees the world, her ghosts, to put it with Castoriadis. According to this, the researcher actively participates in the investigated topic and the product is always co-authored among the universes that are in the investigative act itself. In this sense, the social research process is also one in which aesthetics is present, where the encounter influences, modifies, and conditions the approach to the investigated topic. On the other hand, in reporting the meetings with my interlocutors, I have not appealed to the grand theory but to the metaphor of an artist who refers to the five skins, where sensibilities are located at the centre of the world’s knowledge. I chose this metaphor because it symbolically finds another way to establish recognition at the centre. The forms of recognition in the West are enunciated from the discursive, the contractual, the logo-centred, and from a distance, from where the optical vision has been built, culturally, in a paradigm of masculine vision, which is the vision of science, of the man who takes distance, of the man who is not in touch with his gaze, but instead moves away and observes. The metaphor of the five skins, for its part, proposes a way of recognizing, through a haptic vision that engages all the senses, all skins. This way of approaching the research topic and of relating to my interlocutors has largely defined the results of the investigation. In this regard, the first question we need to answer is what we are understanding by doing politics. One of the components of the response has to do with expressing a sensitivity and being recognized for it. Trans women are born with a body that is biologically male; however, as seen in Chap. 5, from a very early stage, they begin to identify and develop a sensitivity linked to the world of the feminine. What has been observed throughout this research, across all skins, is that the search for recognition of a sensitivity not only has to do with identification, the identity part, so to say, but also with the act of creating one’s own body, its shape, its kinesthesia, its

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gestures, its clothing, and its sexuality. We are facing an extreme expression of the intersection between politics and aesthetics that, in turn, travels outside the modern colonial system, moving away from what is expected of formal politics. Among the many characteristics of the Peruvian trans movement, I have focused on the use of the body as an emancipatory political tool above all. In this sense, the analysis of the body of trans women reveals some characteristics of the political meaning of the movement itself. It is not a movement organized from above, based on formal institutions or organizations, such as political parties or unions. And although organizations exist, in reality, the movement is more decentralized; it does not have exclusive heads. Some leadership is shared and, at the same time, in conflict. Nor is there a sole message shared by members of the trans population; there are indeed non-homogeneous views on their own condition. However, they are united by a shared experience that leads them into action. They are collective bodies, congregated or not, that present themselves with force in the public space to say, “I exist,” “I am,” “recognize me.” To the extent that recognition is sought where there is no recognition or where there is precarious recognition or negative, we are faced with a political fact. Through the first skin, which presents identification with the feminine world, and the second skin, which deals with the construction, sculpture, and performance of the body, we witness an aesthetic fact is constituted in the broad sense of the word. Therefore, aesthetics and politics, in the sense that Rancière (2004) gives to these categories, are already present in that desire for recognition and in the work that is done. This recognition can then be produced from the gaze of the other. It is there that the body and aesthetics of trans women come together and produce modifications and transgressions that deregulate the senses of a modern/colonial society that has normalized a distorted way of producing knowledge through representations always organized binomially and hierarchically: premodern-­ modern, deviant-normal, and irrational-rational, among others. It could be called civil disobedience if we say it in more liberal terms. But what this research highlight is that it is a transgression not from the world of ideas, but from aesthetics. It is a transgression of performance, action, painting, body sculpture and kinesthesia, makeup and clothing, as a way to destabilize the hegemonic order. There is a moment when these forms of transgression go from being circumscribed to the private order and to closed cycles, to being transgressions in the public space. Observing that politics

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is in each of those moments, in those small aesthetic micropolitical acts, ranging from wearing grandmother’s pants to the very exercise of sex work, where a border is being broken; a limit is crossed, breaking bounds, transgressing. As we have seen throughout the chapters, the analysis of the lives of trans women leads me to argue that they have a precarious existence, and it is in this condition of existence that the body of trans women emerges as one susceptible to multiple types of violence, attacks, and humiliation (Butler, 2017). The reasons for sustaining the precariousness and vulnerability of trans women abound. As we have seen, the life expectancy of trans women in Latin America is 35 years, either because they are killed or because they die of HIV. Very few finish schools and the vast majority are expelled from the family nucleus at an early age. They do not acquire skilled or well-paid jobs. And to this, it is added that they do not have a document of identity that recognizes their citizenship as women, or laws that protect their rights. It is due to this context that the privileged theme in these lives, given their conditions, is that of recognition rather than redistribution or representation. If the environment were friendlier, all that physical and psychic energy expended in recognition could have other uses, other paths. And although the theme of recognition appears as central to their life project, the lack of recognition is directly linked to the lack of redistribution because if they were recognized, their material life would be better. In other words, we find a vicious cycle between the lack of recognition and the lack of redistribution that, in turn, will influence the lack of representation. As we saw in Chap. 7, trans women do not exist for the State except as a public health problem. The intersection between lack of recognition and lack of redistribution, characteristics of the bulk of trans women who participated in this research, intimately linked to the fifth skin, generates an ambiguity of recognition that positions them on the border between domination and liberation. As we saw in Chap. 6, from the perception of my interlocutors, there are acts that could be considered domination acts when seen from the outside, such as the exchange of tamales for sex, which are emancipatory acts for them in the sense that they represent recognition of their femininity. But, in turn, they submit to this domination by fifth-skin conditions. The social structure leaves them no other way. These lives that resist assimilation, to put it with Butler (2004), do not find friendly conditions for existence. In terms of the studies and research that have been done on indigenous populations, for example, many of the historians from the North,

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including theologians, have labelled their forms of political organization as pre-political, their forms of spirituality as pre-religious, their forms of knowledge as pre-scientific, and so on, in different aspects of life, as I have already mentioned above. This is something that has been developed in depth by various scholars, such as Chakrabarty in his book Provincializing Europe (2000). Therefore, something that from my point of view is a very subtle way of saying that they are ignorant. In this line of thought, from a position of power, one way of seeing the history of trans women who have participated in this research is to maintain that they do not recognize the difference between abuse and free will because they are ignorant. Conversely, what my research tries to show is that within a context of deep inequity, violence, and discrimination, sex is a way of doing politics. It represents a survival path, on the one hand, and, on the other, it is a space of recognition for the power of their sexuality. The interesting thing is that they distinguish between abuse and negotiation. And although from my ethical and political position, I consider many of their life experiences to be undesirable situations, as Salazar (2015c) points out, at the same time I recognize that they are a consequence of the system, of the relational configurations of the third, fourth, and fifth skins. In other words, what this research shows is that it responds to an empirical need and not to an epistemic need. It is a need that comes from the social structure: from transphobia, from classism, from poverty, from heteronormative ideologies. In other words, from a legal, ethical, and moral standpoint, we come to understand how what can be considered abuse or a lack of respect for fundamental rights, as Carvallo-Diéguez (2012) and Salazar (2015c) sustains, is at the same time a struggle that expresses the agency of trans women since childhood. Here, sexuality plays a central role because it is used for recognition, but it does so in the midst of a structure of patriarchal, sexist, and transphobic abuse. This is perhaps what has cost me the most to write, because I wondered how to endorse something that in itself is despicable, while also aiming to recognize in it the agency of women who struggle to survive without giving up their identity. In this case, a binary reading of “this is right” and “this is wrong” does not work; it is as if we think that a clear division exists between the good and the bad. In reality, I think that we have to think about the function that sexuality fulfils in the lives of trans women as a Möbius band type geometry, where everything is mixed. In other words, at this time in these women’s lives, there is no separation.

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However, through the analysis of the chapters, we observe that trans women are both vulnerable and capable of resistance. In other words, vulnerability and resistance happen simultaneously. Sex work is the space they find to reproduce their material life and, at the same time, to be able to live their gender identity without restrictions. This book has shown how the vulnerability and precariousness of trans women coexist with modes of feminist agency, resistance, and resilience, as well as with proposals for political action to change sensitivities. At the same time, the precariousness of the lives of trans women puts into perspective that their bodies do not represent a closed unit. On the contrary, they are open entities that are affected by others and the world (and that of course affect). Therefore, this fact highlights that existence itself is relational. The centrality of the analysis of the body shows that there is a bond between social beings and the environment from the beginning of life and that the quality of existence always depends on the third, fourth, and fifth skins, that is to say, on the closest environment, but also on how favourable or not the social, political, and economic structures of the society in which we live in are. The analysis of the body of trans women, then, is simultaneously questioning both the ontology of individuality of Western society and the limitations of a way of doing politics that does not cross the senses of society. The skins of trans women emerge as a bordering sensibility capable of exposing the fiction that sustains the modern subject and modern/colonial politics. Society, in general, is also made up of bodies that are not closed, that are not individual or indivisible, and that, therefore, have the potential to be affected. In this sense, the trans movement, being an aesthetic political movement, has the potentiality and incredible force of making society feel something, of influencing and mobilizing old structures of order of sensibility (Rancière, 2004). Therein lies, again, its political potential; that is, destabilizing those habitus that are always anchored in the body, in the affections, and in the way in which society perceives good and evil, normal and deviant, ideal and abject. In this sense, the very presence of trans women, as bodies that resist in this world, represents the struggle for recognition and the battles for the historical memory of beings considered less than human (Butler, 2004). This research has paid close attention to how, in a Southern context, the history of oppression, as well as transgression, is woven into the bodies and lived experiences of trans women. The characteristic of resisting domination has been present throughout Peru’s history, under other dimensions. As pointed out in Chaps. 2 and 4,

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the crossover of aesthetics and politics is not new, but rather has happened throughout our history. However, in this process some ways of aesthetics and its political meanings have been considered as pre-modern or pre-­ political, where the “pre,” as already mentioned, indicates inferiority to the modern. Today, faced with the failure of the modern/colonial, these historical practices are beginning to cease to be exotic and are beginning to come to the fore as ways of doing politics. This research represents an attempt to defend a way of doing politics that has a history and that takes shape in the struggles of a particular group, that of trans women, who had better life chances in pre-colonial times. This book has explored the potential of the affective dimension of recognition and the construction of the bond, which is not a contractual bond, but rather an affective one. Said bond establishes recognition in a more corporeal way, such as that which occurs especially in the first stage of preverbal life. This way of recognizing would be closer to the notion of empathy, which is the idea of putting oneself in the place of the other, in the place of his or her emotions and ways of experiencing. It is a type of recognition where your own way of recognizing, in other words, the habitus, is put in parentheses; and you try to put yourself in the place of the other, from where he or she feels, thinks, and acts. In other words, it is the recognition from the world that is more sensitive, more affective, more primary, so to say. Conclusion 171 made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding the bloodiest conflict that Peru has experienced in the republican era, where the toll was around 69,000 victims and had both ethnocidal and transphobic elements, refers to the importance of the positive recognition of diversity to end the discords of our history. Here “discord” is not referring to the logos, but to the core, that is, to the heart, to affection. This book represents a contribution along this line, rescuing an ethical proposal based on the world of affective ties to build community from a political and aesthetic perspective. It, in turn, means thinking about the decolonial from an affective standpoint, which is perhaps an additional contribution of this book, because in that way we will be healing wounds, emotions, fears, mistrust. We will be healing more in the affective world to make life more liveable for all, as Butler argues. And, if life is more liveable, the principle of humanity is recognized in every person and the hierarchies of the less than human and the inhuman are set aside. Finally, this book represents a gratitude to the trans women of these latitudes for their great contribution to the renewal of politics in Peru.

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And although I am not representing trans people, I am deeply involved in the search for alternatives to produce a world in which we all live with dignity. In that sense, I am studying politics and I thank trans people because they give me the option of showing something hopeful for my country. This book also represents a contribution in the transmission of the history of the excluded and in the struggle for social justice in the present. I finish this section a week later, the wind is blowing, just as Mr Huamán predicted. I never saw a starrier sky than this.

Bibliography Bettcher, T. M. (2014). Trapped in the wrong theory: Rethinking trans oppression and resistance. Signs, 39(2), 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1086/673088 Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge. Butler, J. (2017). Cuerpos aliados y lucha política. Hacia una teoria performativa de la asamblea. Título original: Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, de Judith Butler Publicado originalmente en inglés por Harvard University Press. Traducción de María José Viejo. Carvallo-Diéguez, A., Balan, I., Dolezal, C., & Mello, M.  B. (2012). Recalled sexual experiences in childhood with older partners: A study of Brasilian men who have sex with men and male to female transgender persons. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-­011-­9 Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe. Princeton University Press. Ranciére, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetic: The distribution of the sensible. 2004. Salazar, X. (2015c). Vine al mundo porque dios quiere que yo esté aquí: recorridos, identitarios de mujeres trans en Lima, Iquitos y Ayacucho/ Tesis (Dr.)

Index1

A Abjection, 2, 79, 116, 117, 212 Adulthood, 4, 9, 64, 72, 206 Aesthetic process, 7, 27n8, 146 Aesthetics, vii, viii, 2, 3, 5, 7–9, 12–14, 17–64, 72, 73, 79, 89, 97–99, 103, 124, 125, 128–131, 135, 138, 139, 140n19, 145–170, 173, 175, 196, 210, 226, 230, 232–234, 236, 237 Aesthetic territory, 7, 145–170 Affection, 8, 9, 14, 57, 82, 93, 140, 149, 174, 206, 230, 236, 237 Affects, 14, 103, 153, 207, 219, 221, 230, 236 Agency, viii, 4, 9, 42, 45, 48, 57, 72, 84, 85, 90, 183, 195–197, 205, 222–224, 222n18, 226, 235, 236 Aisthesis, 15, 27, 28, 58, 62

B Body, viii, ix, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 22, 26–28, 26n6, 33, 38, 38n16, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54, 57, 59, 62, 70, 72, 75, 77–79, 83, 89, 90, 93, 95, 97–99, 103, 115, 119, 123, 127–129, 134, 135, 140, 145–170, 173, 174, 176, 179, 186, 189, 192, 193, 195, 204, 205, 209, 210, 213, 222, 224, 230–234, 236 C Capacity, 1, 63, 74, 104, 151, 195 Cartesian dualism, 7, 61, 146, 163, 166 Childhood, 4, 7, 9, 11, 39, 46, 53, 64, 72, 74, 84, 140, 146, 147, 150,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

153, 154, 176, 179, 181–183, 181n4, 185, 186, 191, 192, 197, 206, 235 Class, 1, 6, 11, 14, 26, 28, 45, 55, 62, 70, 82–84, 87, 92, 93, 120, 121, 123–125, 137, 138, 139n18, 149, 163, 187, 204, 205, 207–209, 212, 214, 215n12, 224, 225 Colonial, vii, viii, 1–4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 18, 20n2, 22n3, 26, 27n9, 28, 29, 31–34, 36, 41, 42, 49, 53, 55, 62, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80, 89, 90, 92, 101, 110–119, 130n16, 133, 138, 140, 140n19, 164, 166, 167, 212, 214–219, 215n12, 222, 223, 225, 233, 236, 237 Colonialism, 25, 27, 34, 55, 90, 111, 112, 116, 138, 213, 226 Coloniality of gender, 18, 35 Coloniality of knowledge, 31, 103, 137, 167, 170 Coloniality of power, 25, 31, 35, 225 Corporality, 63, 83, 154, 174, 200, 201 D Decolonial, vii, 2, 3, 5, 17–64, 71, 74, 76, 80, 140, 155, 164, 167, 169, 180n3, 216, 217, 217n15, 230, 231, 237 approach, 4, 103 horizon, 7, 59, 61, 70, 146, 167 theory, 17, 18, 21, 24n5, 51, 74, 169 Decoloniality, 14, 17, 23, 31, 35, 53n22, 62, 231 Decolonize, 217 Decolonization, 13 Depatriarchalize, 217 Desire, vii, viii, 7–9, 11–13, 15, 52, 56, 57, 62, 72, 89, 97, 100, 101, 104, 119, 124, 128, 141, 146, 149, 150, 152, 154, 158, 161,

174–177, 179, 181, 184, 186, 187, 190, 193, 195, 196, 210, 218–220, 222–224, 233 Diversity, 3, 4, 9, 13, 19, 20n2, 25, 26, 33, 34n13, 35, 37, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 72, 81, 88, 92, 93, 109, 113, 120, 122, 130n16, 136, 138, 166n9, 169, 212, 237 E Emancipation, 5, 14, 17, 56, 58, 59, 162, 169 Embodied aesthetic-political practices, 1, 71 Embodied performance, 1, 71 Emotions, 63, 87, 90, 101, 168, 169, 237 Empathy, 46, 237 Ethnographic study, 4, 5, 90 Ethnography, vii, 45, 76, 90, 91, 97, 98, 102, 223, 230 F Feelings, 7, 14, 33, 38, 47, 58, 59, 63, 79, 83, 86, 86n3, 88–90, 99, 102, 133, 141, 146, 148, 152, 156–158, 163, 174, 175, 186, 191, 213 Femininity, 8, 40, 41, 44–46, 63, 94, 123, 147, 162, 173, 174, 177, 186, 187, 189, 196, 201, 234 Feminist, 3–6, 12, 13, 18, 23, 32, 35, 35n14, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 51, 57, 70, 71, 74, 76–78, 80, 81, 83, 97, 103, 104, 110, 112, 118, 119, 121, 122, 122n6, 124–126, 132, 135, 138–140, 157n5, 159, 159n7, 169, 217, 230, 231, 236 Feminist approach, 56, 78, 80 Five skins, 4, 5, 72–76, 103, 109, 147, 232

 INDEX 

G Global order, 9, 196, 197, 205, 206, 225 Global South, 5, 47, 48 H Hegemony, 1, 27, 32, 35, 53, 57, 62, 71, 112, 118, 118n4, 122, 207, 213, 216, 229 Heteropatriarchal, 9, 170, 187 I Identity, viii, 4, 7–9, 14, 15, 31, 32, 38, 40, 42, 44–48, 51, 52, 56–60, 64, 70, 72, 73, 75, 79, 84, 87, 92, 93, 112, 122, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 136–138, 141, 145–149, 151, 154, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 168, 170, 210, 211, 222, 223, 226, 232, 234, 235 Intersectional, 5, 75, 120, 207 L Latin America, 6, 19, 31, 43, 46n18, 48–51, 61, 80, 102, 110, 111, 116, 122, 125, 155, 215, 224, 234 LGTBIQ movement, 6, 79, 100, 109, 110, 124, 129 Logocentric, 1, 27, 28, 53n22, 54, 62, 71, 167 M Masculinity, 8, 26n7, 63, 117, 134–136, 153, 154, 162, 174, 175, 193n6, 196, 219, 221 Mestiza, 51 Mestiza consciousness, 5, 83 Mestizaje, 50–52, 50n20, 111

241

Metadiscourse, 2, 20, 22, 28, 103, 130 Micropolitical practices, 9, 223, 224 Modernity/coloniality, 2, 6, 9, 13, 14, 17–19, 21–31, 22n4, 33–36, 41–43, 48, 49, 53n22, 55, 58, 58n24, 60–63, 78, 91, 92, 103, 110, 114n2, 122, 137–139, 163, 167, 170, 197, 199–226 Modern politics, 1, 3, 17–30, 71, 80, 101 P Patriarchy, viii, 6, 9, 13, 14, 31, 36, 81, 110, 117, 126, 137, 162, 197, 199–226 Pattern of power, 32, 212 Performance, ix, 15, 21, 27, 29–30, 57, 123, 128, 129, 140, 147, 153, 158, 159, 161, 168, 169, 173, 174, 183, 186, 187, 193, 233 Peru, vii, viii, 1, 3–6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–19, 26, 26n6, 27, 30, 36, 39, 43, 47–51, 53, 56, 58, 61–63, 69–104, 109–141, 155–157, 158n6, 186, 189n5, 193, 199n1, 201, 205, 205n9, 206, 209, 211, 215n12, 216, 220, 221n16, 225, 226, 229–231, 237 Poiesis, 4, 72, 98 Political action, 3, 5, 9, 15, 17, 30, 52, 72, 101, 138, 160, 230, 236 Political praxis, 1, 63, 139, 166 Political struggles, 1, 2, 6, 64, 71, 75, 97, 110, 139, 157n5 Politics, vii, viii, 1–5, 15, 17–64, 69, 71, 72, 76, 80, 81, 88, 97, 100, 101, 103, 123–126, 128, 132, 133, 139, 139n18, 140, 140n19, 157, 160, 161, 169, 173, 218, 223, 224, 230, 232, 233, 235–238

242 

INDEX

Power, vii, viii, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11n2, 12, 13, 23, 24n5, 25, 32–34, 36, 41, 44, 51, 58, 59, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 85, 87, 94, 96, 100, 103, 104, 119, 120, 126, 131, 140n19, 151, 154, 157, 159, 161, 162, 168, 208, 212, 213, 215, 218, 222n18, 224, 225, 230, 235 Power-agency, 2 Power-domination, 2, 111 Power relations, 5, 8, 25, 79, 83, 100, 103, 118, 125, 231 Precarious life, 9 Prostitution, 4, 9, 43, 44, 87, 93–95, 133, 135, 137, 139, 150, 181, 184, 197, 200n2, 201, 202, 204, 206–208, 210, 211, 218–224, 226 Q Quechua, 13, 20, 50n20, 229 R Race, 23, 26, 32, 35, 36, 40–42, 45, 50n20, 51, 52, 56, 61, 83, 85, 87, 92, 93, 111, 111n1, 112, 114n2, 117, 118n4, 125, 130, 139n18, 155, 159n7, 164, 177, 187, 204, 207, 212, 214–217, 215n12 Recognition, vii–ix, 2–5, 7–9, 15, 17–64, 72, 77, 79, 84, 85, 90, 93, 98, 129, 139, 140, 146, 151–153, 155–162, 167–170, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180n3, 184, 186–188, 190, 191, 193, 195–197, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212n11, 222n18, 230, 232–237

Resistance, viii, 2, 4, 9, 19n1, 24n5, 28, 29, 33n12, 40, 43, 44, 48, 58, 72, 79, 114, 146, 154, 167, 169, 202n5, 212, 222, 224, 225, 236 Rite of passage, 130 S Self-recognition, 7, 146, 152, 154, 162, 168, 196 Self-reflectivity, 55n23 Sensibilities, 3–5, 7, 9, 12, 17, 19, 27–29, 31, 47, 54, 58–60, 62, 63, 72, 79, 85, 125, 128, 139, 140, 146, 157, 158, 160, 161, 206, 232, 236 Sentipensar, 13 Sex/gender, vii, 4, 6, 9, 11, 17, 34n13, 46, 48, 62, 89n4, 93, 110, 112, 115, 117, 126, 129, 150, 151, 154, 159, 164, 169, 170, 175, 177, 182, 183, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 200–209, 200n2, 211, 212, 217, 218, 222, 224, 234, 235 Sexuality, 6, 8, 9, 11, 26, 33, 34n13, 35, 36, 45, 49, 51, 53, 56, 61, 72, 83, 84, 99, 101, 111, 114, 116, 117, 119, 128, 129, 137, 155n2, 157, 159n7, 163, 170, 205, 206, 210, 215, 216, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 231, 233, 235 Sexual violence, 20, 181, 187, 189, 196 Sex work, ix, 44, 45, 48, 85, 86, 93, 94, 191, 200, 200n2, 206, 210, 211, 234, 236 Skins, viii, 4, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 41, 58, 64, 69–104, 109,

 INDEX 

140, 141, 145–170, 199–226, 231–234, 236 Skins of Desire, vii, viii, 15, 72 Southern context, 2, 27, 230, 236 Subjectivities, 5, 7, 12, 31–33, 35, 46, 56, 63, 70, 75–77, 80, 81, 83, 85, 90, 91, 97, 98, 100, 127, 145, 147, 152, 158, 160, 176, 177, 185, 186, 191, 204, 205, 213, 216, 231 T Terms of recognition, 1, 71, 79, 151, 177, 178, 190 Transgression, 45, 62, 72, 129, 130, 192, 233, 236 Trans movement, 3, 4, 6, 12, 18, 29, 36–53, 58, 63, 64, 81, 85, 86, 92, 104, 109–141, 146, 156, 161, 233, 236 Trans people, 3, 6, 15, 18, 36–38, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 56, 63, 64, 84, 88, 90, 92, 97, 101, 109, 110, 122n6, 126, 127, 129, 130, 136, 153, 154, 157, 214, 216, 238 Transphobic, 40, 84, 131, 151, 159, 210, 217, 218, 235, 237 Trans woman, 7, 29, 40, 81, 87, 88, 94, 95, 101, 135–137, 146, 149,

243

150, 155–158, 160, 168, 184, 186, 193, 193n6, 200, 203, 205, 211, 214, 219, 220, 224 Trans women, vii, viii, 1–9, 14, 17, 18, 20, 36, 37, 39–41, 43–46, 53, 56, 63, 64, 69–104, 126, 131–139, 145–147, 149, 152–155, 157, 158n6, 160–162, 167–170, 173, 174, 176, 178, 184–187, 190–193, 195, 196, 199–201, 199n1, 204–212, 214, 216, 216n14, 218–226, 230–237 V Violence, 8, 10, 11, 20, 40, 41, 45, 48, 59, 74, 82, 84, 87, 92, 113, 127, 128, 133, 135, 137, 148, 151–153, 169, 174, 178, 182–184, 186, 187, 191, 193, 196, 204, 210, 214, 216n14, 222n18, 234, 235 Vulnerability, viii, 48, 84, 90, 148, 184, 234, 236 W Western modernity, 1, 25, 55, 71, 226