Transgressing Che

Bibliographic Data

ID4053569
AuthorsRobert Franco (0009-0005-4996-3603)
Year2020
Volume2020
Issue136
Pages75-97
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueRadical History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-6545 • E-ISSN: 1534-1453
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/01636545-7857271
OpenAlexW4240915921
LanguageEN
References cited41

This article uses the life of Irina Layevska Echeverría Gaitán, a transgender and disability rights activist from Mexico, as a lens to examine the circulation and appropriation of the discursive New Man and the figure of Che Guevara by a broad set of actors from leftist revolutionaries to sexual rights activists in Mexico. Grappling with questions of temporality and intersectionality throughout, it follows her struggles to amend revolutionary discourses with her personal life despite her exclusion from normative models of the revolutionary figure. It argues that those excluded from the heteronormative able-bodied ideal of militancy-gay men, women, trans folk and those with disabilities-used the futurist, universal, and self-developmental aspects of the New Man to reject exclusionary leftist politics. Furthermore, the New Man as an aspirational yet abstract goal enabled the formulation of radically transgressive subject positions and provided a discourse with which to construct a militant identity that was inclusive and oppositional to the masculinist and ableist revolution

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Epistemology · Left-wing politics · Militant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Temporality · Cuban History and Society · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America

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