“Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism and Travesti Resistance.” In Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies , “Rethinking Obscenity in Latin America: Censorship and Libidinal Politics,” vol. 32, no. 4 (December 2023): 681-703.

*Winner of the Crompton-Noll Prize for Best LGBTQ Studies Article (2025) awarded by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and the Q/T Caucus of the American Studies Association.

*Winner of the Sylvia Molloy Prize for Best Article in the Humanities (2024) awarded by the Latin American Studies Association Sexualities Section.

*Winner of “Best Article in Latin American Visual Culture Studies” (2024) from the Latin American Studies Association Visual Culture Studies Section.

This article develops a concept I call gore aesthetics by focusing on the regulatory and productive capacity of sexual obscenity and gore in contemporary performance art to diagnose shifts in neoliberalism’s perceptual regimes. It centers the artistic practice and legacy of Chilean performance artist and underground, travesti punk monstrosity Hija de Perra or Daughter of a Bitch (1980-2014). Reading her work, the extractive circumstances surrounding her untimely death from HIV/AIDS complications, and the postmortem performances that ensued through sexual obscenity and gore, I argue that gore aesthetics ultimately foreground necroliberalism’s intensification and operate as a travesti strategy of resistance to the extractive violence this form of power and governance occasions. At the same time, I consider gore’s limitations when state actors coopt gore aesthetics as with the Chilean estallido (2019).

“‘No State Apparatus Goes to Bed Genocidal then Wakes up Democratic:’ Fascist State Violence and Transgender Politics in Post-Dictatorship Argentina.” In Radical History Review, “Fascisms and Antifascisms Since 1945,” no. 138, (October 2020): 82-107.

This article tracks the persistent legacies of fascist state violence in Argentina and such violence’s deadly imbrications with the politics of sex and gender. Analyzing state archives of terror and contemporary activist visual culture, this article claims that, in democracy, the enduring afterlife of fascism creates conditions of possibility for Argentine travesti and trans activists to mobilize shared experiences of fascist violence in the service of contemporary gender and sexuality-based rights claims.

“Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina.” In Journal of Visual Culture, “New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies,” 19(2): 197-211.

*Short-listed for the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture Early Career Researcher Essay Prize.

This article analyzes a recent exhibition of the Argentine Trans Memory Archive. Turning to haptic images, I read trans kinship alongside national narratives of kinship and disappearance to argue that this exhibit and its attendant viewing rituals together refashion Argentine history by situating transwomen as the proper subjects of national mourning. Such a move challenges hegemonic narratives of loss and mourning by insisting on the centrality of trans life and death to projects of national collective memory and identity formation in the wake of dictatorship.

“Estéticas de sobrevida. Arte de reparación / Aesthetics of Survival, Art of Repair” exhibition catalogue essay in ¿Cómo retratar a una sobreviviente? / How to Photograph a Survivor? Germán Menna (ed.) (2024): 157-167. ISBN: 978-631-00-3845-2.

This catalogue essay explores the relationship between carceral photography and studio portraiture, connecting these two genres through trans women’s sensory acts of survival. Analyzing artist Germán Menna’s installation ¿Cómo retratar a una sobreviviente? (2022) I argue that, as an artistic act of repair, the work surfaces an aesthetics of survival by illuminating those sensory acts of subterfuge trans women employed to resist photographic capture and carceral detention. I suggest that tactics like “becoming-blur” disorder the liberal consolidation of both the subject of representation and the subject of repair, reimagining trans photographic portraiture and carceral photography alike beyond individual repair and figural representation. In this way, portraiture itself becomes a site to renegotiate and reimagine the subject of national injury and collective repair.  

*Image copyright and image courtesy of photographer Germán Menna

Download full catalogue here (PDF).

“Visualizing (trans)masculinities” Balam, no. 9, special issue “Nuevas masculinidades” (August 2023): 31-32, 250, 257. *Introduction to special issue of Balam, contemporary Latin American photography magazine in Spanish/English/Portuguese.

Purchase Balam special issue “Nuevas masculinidades/New Masculinities”

Introductory catalogue essay to special issue of contemporary Latin American photography magazine Balam on new masculinities. Balam centers the work of queer, cuir, trans, and non-binary photographers and subjects working across the Américas to highlight the work of established and emerging artists.

“We wind our way deep into the bowels of a basement, Nikon D-90 in hand. Past rusted out bikes and tight storage spaces jampacked with abandoned belongings that threaten to overflow their wire cages. Sophia is standing there, legs spread, arms cocked with a sly smile creeping along their face. Acid-washed skinny jeans and freshly shaved steps register with each flash as they negotiate the image-making process…”

“Trans Visibility and Trans Viability: a Roundtable” Journal of Visual Culture vol 21, no. 2 (2023): 297-320.

JVC Roundtable Abstract (by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg): “This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture on new work in transgender art and visual cultures, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, and suggested for the journal by Jill H Casid. The themed issue emerged from a session run at the College Art Association in New York, 2018, programmed by Metzger and Ringelberg. For the event in November 2021, some of the contributors to the journal’s themed issue (Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Stamatina Gregory, Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg) were joined by interlocutor Jill Casid, and respondent Jack Halberstam to share their thoughts on trans visual culture/s now, and to consider what it is to write trans visual culture, as well as to live in relation to transness. The event happened to fall on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Given the fraught or ambivalent feelings that many have about such a day, the event was also taken as an occasion to talk about ways of untethering trans visibility from what is lethal to trans viability. After the event, the organizers solicited a few additional reflections on concerns that emerged – in particular around matters of the visual, trans visibility, and lived experience. These are brought together to act as a refractive prism for what happens when we center thinking seriously with the implications and potentials of trans art and visual culture for trans hopes and fears, kinship and community, lives and loves. The publication of this Roundtable takes the themed issue as a crucial springboard for critical, transversal trans* imaginings of the variant worlds to be unfolded by undoing the lock of the gender binary and its settler colonial and white supremacist violences, and to further the demand that thinking with trans alters substantially the ways we approach the visual.” -Metzger and Ringelberg

“Trans-, Translation, Transnational,” Translation Section introduction, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly vol 8, no. 4 (November 2021): 532-536.

“As I sat to write this introduction as TSQ's new translation section editor, I realized that translation, when framed as a semiotic process, may appear at first glance as a misnomer for the intellectual and epistemic work that I hope this section can perform. Much of the intention behind the translation section has been “to decenter the Northern, white, anglophone bias” of trans studies by including work-in-translation (Stryker 2020: 303). To continue this important project and expand on its aims, this section now also invites short reflections that develop alternate genealogies for the field through knowledge formations and disciplines that do not reproduce the imperatives of US American studies, which has largely overdetermined trans studies' field imaginary. In other words, this will require recognizing trans studies for what it has often been to date: an unmarked area studies formation that takes US American studies as its unspoken...”

“Latin/x American Trans Studies: Toward a Travesti-Trans Analytic.”TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Trans Studies en las Américas,” vol. 6, no. 2 (2019): 145-156.

Introduction toTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue “Trans Studies en las Américas”(2019).

Versión en español: "Estudios trans latinoamericanxs: Hacia una analítica travesti-trans"

“Travesti activist Lohana Berkins stands in the foreground, her fist raised in struggle and solidarity (fig. 1). Behind a wave of blood red fabric, a swell of protestors chant, lifting pink and blue signs high above their heads demanding justicia for Diana Sacayán. The hand-painted word compañera peeks out from the fabric's folds, curling across the collective's banner in bold, black cursive outlined in soft baby blue. Compañera—a word thick with complicity, friendship, solidarity, and struggle—manifests the crowd's affective commitments. The banner enfolds the march in a loose, sensuous weave as protestors flood the streets of Buenos Aires denouncing Diana's murder…”

Invited guest editor of NACLA: Report on the Americas special issue “Cuerpos Furiosos: Travesti-Trans Politics in Revolt” vol. 57, no. 1 (March 2025) on travesti, trans, and cuir/queer activisms across the Américas (published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese).

Purchase a print copy of “Cuerpos Furiosos” // Access free web exclusive content.

Read the introduction here. (English) // en español // em português

This special issue frames travesti-trans politics across the Americas as an antifascist and transversal politics with the power to reshape our world. Starting from the South, authors foreground expansive solidarities and collective resistance across diverse lines of struggle, orienting us toward a primarily material and redistributive politics that challenges fascism and authoritarianism, extractivism, dispossession, anti-Blackness, settler-colonialism, and imperialism. From timely political analyses of security force violence against trans men in Colombia, to pandemic era mutual aid practices in Brazil, to union and labor organizing against debt and dispossession in Argentina, to autonomous trans health networks in Guatemala among many other topics and territories, this special issue moves boldly across travesti-trans political formations and movement histories. Authors likewise foreground creative and embodied forms of resistance unfurling across city streets, gallery spaces, printed pages, and bodies in revolt—from ballroom to vogue, from dissident archival to photographic practices, from spoken word to embroidered chapbooks, from performance art to documentary film.

Please consider donating to NACLA to help support travesti, trans, and non-binary authors, artists, and archivists from the Global South who contributed to this special issue.

Translation Section Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, (2020-present).

The translation section is actively accepting submissions (up to 5,000 words) that treat translation as a cultural, aesthetic, and material process. Short essays on translation might attend to how transcultural, transregional, and transnational flows of ideas, subjects, capital, and resources impact the field of transgender studies—its constitutive categories, critical vocabularies, institutional boundaries, and disciplinary commitments. This includes theoretical reflections, meditations on artistic and aesthetic practices, and writing on activist projects that change how we conceive both translation and our field(s). In addition to featuring such reflections, the section will also continue to publish work in translation though this is no longer the section’s primary focus. The section encourages work by academics, artists, and activists working across disciplines, in and from the Global South, as well as work by scholars with deep area training.

• Cole Rizki, “Trans-, Translation, Transnational,” section introduction, vol 8, no. 4 (2021): 532-536.

• Cynthia Citlallin Delgado Huitrón, “Transtocar, Three Fragments” in vol. 9, no. 1 (2022): 119-125.

• Francisco Fernández and Andrés Mendieta, “Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America” in vol. 9, no. 3 (2022): 524-534.

• Elizabeth Rose, “Trans* Poetics in Translation: Desire and Capacity in the Work of Susy Shock” in vol. 10, no. 1 (2023): 59-70.

• Marlene Wayar, “In My Mind There is a Cemetery / Hay un cementerio en mi cabeza” translated by Tania Balderas in vol. 11, no. 1 (2024): 135-140.

• Eugenia Azar and Pilar Cabrera, “To Exist and Resist: a Photographic Essay / Existir y resistir: un ensayo fotográfico,” translated by Tania Balderas in vol. 11, no. 1 (2024): 141-148.

• Emi Frerichs, “Strategies of Irreverent Refusal: Care for the Incommensurable in Naty Menstrual’s Continuadísimo,” with translations of Naty Menstrual’s Continuadísimo (2013) by Frerichs in vol. 12, no. 1 (2025): 123-137. [Forthcoming]

• Amara Moira, “A Língua Coça or ‘Secret Tongue?! My ass!’” a selection from Neca (2021) translated by Jesse Rothbard in vol. 12, no. 2 (2025): 263-274. [Forthcoming]

• Cheryl Morgan and Margarita Vaysman, “Translating Historical Trans Life-Writing: Aleksandr Aleksandrov (1783-1866).” In preparation (expected 2025).

*Please send all queries and submissions to cr3np [at] virginia.edu.

“Trans Studies en las Américas,” Co-editor with Juana María Rodríguez, Denilson Lopes, and Claudia Sofía Garriga-López. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6:2 (May 2019).

This volume represents an unprecedented English-language collection and the first peer-reviewed special issue of its kind dedicated to Latin American Trans Studies. The special issue curates a conversation between trans and travesti studies scholars working across the Americas to explore how shifts in cultural epistemologies, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven theorizations of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment.

*Download the full issue here (PDF).

Review of Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas. In special issue, "Views from the Larger Somewhere," Women & Performance, 30:3 (April 2021).

Book review of Kaitlin M. Murphy’s Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

“Contemporary artists and activists throughout the Américas have long turned to visual culture production, performance practices, and narrative forms in response to shared regional experiences of Cold War politics, authoritarian violence, and US imperialism. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists and activists alike privileged testimonio, first-person survivor narratives, and figural representation in the wake of state terror. Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú’s canonical I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) and the Argentine Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s use of portrait photography are paradigmatic of these genres and historic moments…”

“Hemispheric Translations,”GLQ, vol. 25, no. 1 (2019): 199-201.

Book review of Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba’s Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books, 2016.

“It is, by now, axiomatic that queer—a once pejorative and injurious signifier—was recuperated by activists and theorists alike in the early 1990s. The possibility of linguistic and affective resignification is, in part, what continues to load queer with the promise of radical destabilizing force. But as Latin American studies scholars, among others, have repeatedly attested, the same cannot be said when queer moves into other languages. Some Latin Americanists like Brad Epps (2007: 227) note that, as an English-language signifier, queer loses its potent affective charge in translation: rather than resignify harm, queer enacts it through academic imperialism, dressed as metropolitan theory. Indeed, queer sheds its thick verbal and corporeal history through travel; it becomes a concept without affective memory or place…”