Brown Trans Figuration: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies by Francisco J. Galarte (review)

Abstract

Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 9, no. 3 (2022): 232–235. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved. In 2019, the University of Texas Press announced the launch of a new book series: “Latinx: The Future is Now.” Edited by Nicole GuidottiHernandez and Lorigia GarciaPeña, the series invited authors to submit works that consider the multiple overlapping dynamics of queer and gender fluid potentialities embodied in the “x.” As I read and reflect on this call, I cannot help but giggle to myself. The “x.” It’s tiny. A miniature coda to a word. And yet, if you have ever been privy to conversations in Latinx and Chicanx studies, you know as I do, the teeny, little “x” generates colossal controversy. And it is this dichotomy that propels my chuckling. As I continue to reflect, however, my laughter subsides into a feeling of deep appreciation. It is this call that breathed life into Francisco Galarte’s Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies (BTF). The first book in the “Latinx: The Future is Now” series, BTF is a muchneeded intervention into thinking about brown and trans together. As Galarte notes, thinking about brown and trans together has the potentiality to unsettle theories of gender, race, or embodiment in transgender and Latinx and Chicanx studies. Indeed, he draws attention to the bodies, lives, and material realities of brown trans people to put brownness and transness in relation to one another. In so doing, BTF becomes a way to challenge the dominant narratives B O O K R E V I E W