Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, 2023-24 Distinguished Visiting Scholar, will give a talk hosted by the Department of Sociology entitled “Neither Deficit nor Joy: Formal Education and the Life Course for Travestis in Buenos Aires, Argentina.”

U.S. scholarship on transgender studies often moves between two extremes: a normative emphasis on violence (corporeal, symbolic, or systemic) as a social problem that merits attention; alternatively, a recent emphasis on joy has emerged (as a superfluous form of validation ignoring the structural barriers faced by transgender people). Yet plenty of lived experiences, emotions, and ways of being exceed this simplistic binary. This talk is based on a 5-year collaborative project with a high school/GED program for adult transgender students (ranging from their 20s to their 50s), named The Bachillerato Popular Travesti y Trans Mocha Celis. (In Argentina, as in other countries, “trans” is not the only nor most used category to express self-identity for transgender people; travesti is an identity marker preferred by older, racialized, migrant trans women, but used by many in Argentina and other Latin American countries.) Salvador Vidal-Ortiz’s work is in the fields of Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, race, ethnicity, (im)migration, diaspora, transnationalism, gender and sexuality, and racialized sexualities. He co-authored the book Race and Sexuality, co-edited, in English, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men and Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism and in Spanish, “Travar el Saber/“Transing Knowledges,” on Argentine trans education. This year, he is one of ten Distinguished Visiting Scholars in the College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo, and is focusing this time on a book: An Instrument of the Orishas: Racialized Sexual Minorities in Santería.