Sideways Selves: Travesti and Jotería Struggles Across the Américas

How trans and non-binary networks engage in decoloniality across hemispheres.

A deeply informed, theoretically rich work of inquiry and critique, Sideways Selves learns from two communities of migrants as they contest their marginalization under the colonial regime of gender--colonial because, as PJ DiPietro affirms, Indigenous and Afro-diasporic conceptions of embodiment have been displaced by the European-Christian order of gender. Following gender-nonconforming Aymara, Kolla, and mixed-race exiles in Buenos Aires and K’iche’, Nahua, and Central American migrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, DiPietro takes stock of a collective, transnational effort to reimagine ideas of personhood and kinship that gender makes unthinkable.

The communities DiPietro studies create new kinds of identities, collective and genderless in nature. Their ways of thinking and doing, though radical, are motivated by old wisdom, storytelling, healing, and religion--brujería, curanderismo, Voudoun, and other practices that colonialism, capitalism, and the nation-state have unsuccessfully tried to erase. In equal measures philosophical and ethnographic, Sideways Selves witnesses and listens as these displaced people--displaced from their homes and from the moral geography of the West--show us what a just, decolonial world could actually be.

PJ DiPietro is associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University. They are the coeditor of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones and Trans Philosophy.