Drawing from his book, Brown Transfigurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx and Latinx Studies (2021), Galarte’s lecture will focus on the figure of the Chicano/Latino FTM and the pervasive assumption that Chicano/Latino transmasculinities are invisible. The lecture focuses on representations of transmasculinity within Queer Chicana and Chicana lesbian feminist cultural works, and psychological studies of transsexualism. The sources assembled reveal how the figure of the Chicano/Latino FTM and/or transsexual exist as pathologized, failed, and unimaginable subjects. Galarte demonstrates how their bodies and narratives are often rendered as battlegrounds for shoring up claims to racialized gender categories that bolster cultural nationalisms. He argues that the expressiveness of the trans masculinity embodied by these subjects unravels hegemonic heteropatriarchal Chicano masculinity. Through close readings of selected texts, Galarte propose that the pathologized Chicano transsexual and/or Chicano FTM in actuality, transfigures Chicano/x masculinity.

Francisco J. Galarte is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona,
where he is a member of the Transgender Studies Initiative—a collective of faculty that is the first of its kind in
the world, that brings together scholars in Transgender Studies from various disciplinary backgrounds to
foster cross collaboration in the form of research, writing and teaching. Galarte’s research bridges
Chicanx/Latinx Studies and transgender studies. He is the current chief editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly.