From Ernesto Cuba on Facebook today, reporting on:
Féminas Speaking Up: Three Papers on Feminine Transgender Identities, Gender Identity Activism, and Language Reform in Lima, Peru (PhD dissertation in Linguistics, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2024)
with this happy note:
Fresh out of the oven! My doctoral thesis on identities, culture and trans linguistic reform in Lima, Peru is now available for download. The thesis is written entirely in English to allow for a more global reading. However, since the work was done with Hispanic-speaking women, the original quotes in Spanish have been maintained. One of the three articles that make up thesis will be published in September this year and the other two are looking for a home in academic journals these months.
You can access the thesis by clicking here.
[My attempts to access the dissertation were frustrated for a while, but now I can give you the abstract:]
ABSTRACT: Féminas Speaking Up: Three Papers on Feminine Transgender Identities, Gender Identity Activism, and Language Reform in Lima, Peru by Ernesto Cuba (Advisor: Cecelia Cutler)
In this three-paper dissertation, I explore the linguistic and discursive practices of Féminas, a leading transgender rights activist organization based in Lima, Peru. Building on scholarship on language ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000), queer linguistics (Motschenbacher, 2011), and socio-onomastics (Ainiala & Östman, 2017), I analyze the role that language beliefs and language-in-use plays in performing local (trans)gender identities and shaping grassroots politics within this specific community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992). Based on an extensive corpus of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic material gathered during my long-term investigation with Féminas, I present three studies exploring distinct –- though related –- ideologically-driven sociolinguistic facets of this activist community: gendered language, language reform, and naming strategies.
I start with “Enregisterment of a Peruvian queer argot: What transgender women think about Lóxoro”, which studies the metapragmatic discourses around a local cryptolect stereotypically associated with trans sex workers (Barrett, 2018). I argue that contrary to the external, dominant belief that Lóxoro is a full-fledged secret language exclusively employed among trans women in extreme situations, transgender women whom I interviewed view Lóxoro as a relatively context-free set of linguistic signs, in order to stylize and sometimes also encrypt daily speech, creating a sense of belonging (Boellstorff, 2004). Additionally, although Lóxoro is seen to some degree as an identity marker by the participants, it is not considered as a tool for transgender activism.
In the next paper, “What is the ‘e’ in ‘nosotres’? Metadiscourses about gender-inclusive language in the Peruvian trans activist scene”, I explore local understandings and attitudes towards lenguaje inclusivo, a manifestation of gender language reform promoted by grassroots trans activists in their public-facing discourses and community-based repertoire (Zimman, 2017). Using the framework of glottopolitics (Del Valle, 2017), I found that respondents –- almost unanimously –- equate lenguaje inclusivo with the relatively new use of ending -e and pronoun elle(s); and while very few participants consider -e a feminist strategy to avoid the androcentric bias of masculine forms, most of them associate this morpheme with the language practices of non-binary people. Then, the adoption/rejection of -e contentiously instantiates social differentiation between local feminine transgender and non-binary subjectivities and activisms.
In the last paper, “‘I rename me after her’: Renaming strategies in a community of transgender women of the city of Lima, Peru”, I explore the indexical work behind the onomastic practice of self-renaming, which has a central, performative role in gender transition trajectories (Obasi et al., 2018). In analyzing Féminas members’ rationale when choosing new first names, I identified alignments and divergences from dominant Spanish anthroponymic patterns (Fernández Juncal, 2021), motivated by ideologies around femininity, images of cosmopolitanism, and intimate affects. Some strategies are common in the overall population, such as adopting the names of women in their families and social circles, famous women celebrities, and mass media characters. Other strategies, in contrast, are specific to the reality of transgender women, such as deriving a feminine-sounding name from their assigned masculine- sounding name or self-renaming more than once throughout their lives.
With this dissertation, I aim to contribute to the sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropology literature regarding transgender subjectivities and communities in the Global South, and to fill in the gaps in social science research focused on the Peruvian transgender community which often overlooks the performative and gendering work of language. Together, I hope these studies help researchers and social justice activists to better understand the social lives, joyful moments, and urgent struggles of Peruvian transgender activists. Finally, in working closely with the Féminas community, my hope is that this dissertation will raise awareness about and help address the actual needs and priorities of Peruvian transgender women.
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