Trans Urban Research: Comparing Across Las Américas.

Sharp, Wiley. 2024. “Trans Urban Research: Comparing Across Las Américas.” In The Elgar Handbook on Gender and Cities, edited by Linda Peake, Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, and Anindita Datta. Elgar.

This chapter traces the history of trans* urban studies, outlining how this emerging field understands the relationship between cities and trans* life. Employing a systematic literature review, it explores the resonances and dissonances between trans* research across Las Américas, where two significant corpora have emerged. While North American trans* urban research has focused on the gendered normativity of urban space, often engaging the experiences of homeless trans* youth, Latin American trans* urban research has analyzed how networks of collective care support trans* lives in the face of urban precarity, with an emphasis on the lives of travesti sex workers. By engaging these literatures in dialogue across geographic and linguistic difference, this chapter works to lay the groundwork for an urban studies that can analyze the production of gendered space and subjectivities beyond the colonial–modern gender binary and develop a fuller account of the relationship between gender and the urban.