Antifascist feminisms: forging a travesti-trans international

Abstract

In her foundational work Feminist International, Argentine feminist theorist and activist Verónica Gago raises one of feminism's most primary and driving questions: ‘[w]hat does it mean to act together when the conditions for doing so have been devastated?’. With the global ascendance of fascism, I take up Gago's feminist provocation anew to suggest that Latin American travesti theorising and activisms are vital to imagining global models of coalition for an antifascist feminism. To do so, the article explores connections (and gaps in conversation) between Latin American travesti theorising, Latin American feminisms, and US feminist theory. I draw specifically on thinkers whose work remains essential to these theoretical projects: travesti theorists and activists Lohana Berkins and Marlene Wayar, Latin American feminist theorist Gago, and US queer of colour critique theorists Cathy J Cohen and Roderick A Ferguson. From an international and intergenerational close reading, I revise feminist political concepts such as ‘transversality’ and ‘transversal politics’ through travesti theory to reimagine antifascist coalition politics. As animating concepts that move us across geographies and scales, transversality and transversal politics shape alliances born of material precarity and proximity, of economies of sex work and incarceration, and of social reproduction and labour. Offering concrete examples of transversality, I connect the feminist strike (2017–) and the travesti reparations movement in Argentina (2017–), analysing each movement's reterritorialisation of social reproduction as the basis for expanded coalition. In doing so, I suggest that together these activist demands show us how to enact and theorise coalition, even before liberation can be imagined. I conclude by calling for a ‘travesti-trans international’ grounded in reparations to illuminate globally articulated projects of fascisms past and present and the centrality of international racial and sexual terror to global fascisms’ operations.