ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, drag performance is now a state-sponsored event. Transformismo suggests that these performances make critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba’s postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island’s tourism economy and has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women’s creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

M. Myrta Leslie Santana is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego.

REVIEWS

“Transformismo is a fascinating, evocatively written exploration of performance, affect, politics, and identity among transformista artists, particularly Afro-descendent artists, and the communities that support them. As an ethnography, Leslie Santana’s book is also one of the most successful examples of feminist praxis in ethnographic writing.”— Susan Thomas, University of Texas at Austin

"As much about mutual aid and communities of belonging as it is about the spectacle and sensationalism associated with transformista performances, tenderness and care radiates across these pages, offering life affirming renderings of Black/Queer/Trans Cuban life struggling to sprout blooms of possibility. Aché."— Juana Maria Rodriguez, UC Berkeley

“Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba is an indispensable addition to hemispheric queer studies, urging readers to reconsider the role of performance and identity politics in cultural resistance within postsocialist societies. This celebration of cultural resilience and critique of mainstream LGBT movements makes Transformismo a powerful testament to the continued fight for visibility and liberation of queer and trans communities in Cuba.”— Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, University of Pennsylvania

“Transformismo engages in what I would describe as radical transparency. The focus on drag, trans masculine experience, and Blackness is pioneering in Latin American and Caribbean drag and trans studies. It is a brilliant book.”
— Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Why Cuba?
Introduction
Transforming Cuba
Chapter One
Las Vegas: Transformismo and Cuba’s Capital
Chapter Two
Apocalipsis: Transformismo at the End of the World
Chapter Three
El Mejunje: Provincial Transformismo
Chapter Four
Transformista, Travesti, Transgénero: Performing Trans/Queer Subjectivity
Chapter Five
Transformismo Masculino: The Social Project of Havana’s Drag Kings
Coda
The Future of Transformismo
Toward a Glossary
References