Honorable Mention for the National Women’s Studies Association's 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize
2021 Finalist Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards
2022 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association
The Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, GL/Q Caucus, Modern Language Association (MLA)
2022 AAHHE Book of the Year Award, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education

Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances “brown trans figuration” as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences.

Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.

With this special issue on “Trans*formational Pedagogies,” guest editors Z Nicolazzo, Susan B. Marine, and Francisco J. Galarte redress such absences and argue that explicit attention to the institutional contexts of formal educational activities should be central to trans studies in the moment of its increasingly rapid institutionalization. The collection of essays they offer here range from an examination of how teachers renaturalize the gender binary in classroom practices, to a study documenting the privileging of masculine norms of embodiment among trans men in college, to a dialogue between two trans teachers in Spain about their approaches to trans* pedagogy in public school classrooms. The articles make visible the reproduction of gender normativity in most educational settings and point to the transformative potential of education for dismantling such unthinking “genderism.”