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, transformismo, or drag performance, is now state-sponsored events. Transformismo suggests that these performances are making 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, which 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.

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

“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
 — Susan Thomas, University of Texas at Austin

“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
 — Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan