Travesti Dreams Outside in the Ethnographic Machine

Abstract

This article is a travesti assemblage. It is formed from three different but interconnected sections. The first is a life story of a young working-class Peruvian travesti, Sandra. My reading of this particular travesti narrative is an attempt to mark a queer existence or presence in and against worlds, institutions, and collectives that historically have attempted to erase such an existence. The second is an exploration of the encounter of an ethnographer and an informant. This second section attempts to undo and displace, through dialogue with dreams and nightmares, some of the certainties that the ethnographic encounter has come to imply. The third section introduces the queer art of lying, another form of aesthetic and political reflexivity, and rethinks all I have presented thus far by exploring its limits. The article concludes with a critical plea for engaging with the queer art of lying, in order to imagine new forms of travesti survival, and less cruel ways of travesti death.

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