Trap/Trope: Galarte's Trans-Figurative, Racialized Readings

At a moment when racialized and gendered terms are under considerable pressure, Francisco J. Galarte's Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies asks us to think under and with this pressure through the register of figuration. Galarte's reading of the figurative takes inspiration from Emma Pérez's (1999: 8) provocation, in a revision of Hayden White, that Chicana/o historians have been “captives of tropological interpretation.” This tropological capture reflects and refracts more concertedly when considered with the additional rhetorical strictures facing Chicanx trans folks—narratological pressures that have, historically, policed access to gender affirming treatment and resources. Galarte writes with the ethos of Eva Hayward's (2017) claim that universalist narratives entail “an investment in nameable identity over and against the precarity of subjectivity” (Hayward quoted on 14). The larger task and accomplishment of Brown Trans Figurations is to question the figuration in these namings,...