Transfeminism and fake mustachios

What is transfeminism? The concept denotes a plurality of proposals to rethink the “isms” that encompass the politics of gender, transitional identities and, clearly, the ideologies of feminism, their subject, and their conceptual boundaries. A commitment to the systematic critique and deconstruction of the binary structures that organize gender, as a “naturalized artifice,” ¹ and its derived social order may be considered an element common to them. Many transfeminist theorists, however, reject a closed definition of the term and opt to focus instead on what it does, what it proposes, and how it relates to other concepts, such as feminism, queer, trans-sexual, masculinity, post-identity, intersectionality, post-porno, and trans. Its proactive character derives from an emancipatory discourse based on the decentering of the category of gender and its conceptual limits. In that sense, and narrowing on the particular case of Spanish America, the link between gender and politics, from the micropolitical level upwards, appears at the center of an interdisciplinary agenda and as the main focus for the activism and “artivism” ² of many groups, collectives, and organizations. For the Spanish theorist Paul B. (ex-Beatriz) Preciado, transfeminism “no existe sino como un conjunto de prácticas de resistencia, desborda la denominación queer” (Grupo 2015). This has been echoed by the contributors of the critical anthology Transfeminismos… (Solá and Urko: 2016), for whom the concept is “a way to understand gender as a system of oppression and heterosexuality as a political regime” (Marea Negra 2016: 7). ³