BIBFRAME Work

Title

Transformismo

Other Titles (e.g. Variant)

Performing trans/queer Cuba

Type

  • Text
  • Monograph

Contribution

Subject

  • Drag performance--Cuba (LCSH)
  • Women, Black--Cuba--Social life and customs (LCSH)
  • Gender identity in music (LCSH)
  • Drag performance--Social aspects--Cuba (LCSH)
  • Gender expression--Social aspects--Cuba (LCSH)
  • Transgender people--Cuba--Social life and customs (LCSH)
  • Gender-nonconforming people--Cuba--Social life and customs (LCSH)

Language

Illustrative Content

Classification

Content

Supplementary content

Summary

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, transformismo, or drag performance, is now state-sponsored events. Transformismo suggests that these performances are making critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba's postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island's tourism economy, which has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women's creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital.

Table of Contents

Why Cuba? -- Transforming Cuba -- Las Vegas: transformismo and Cuba's capital -- Apocalipsis: transformismo at the end of the world -- El mejunje: provincial transformismo -- Transformista, travesti, transgenero: performing trans/queer subjectivity -- Transformismo masculino: the social project of Havana's drag kings -- The future of transformismo

Authorized Access Point

Santana, M. Myrta Leslie. Transformismo

Geographic Coverage

Admin Metadata

  • Date: 2026-09-11T20:21:47.988952+00:00
  • Agent: cbc
  • Status: c
  • Derived from: 23807915

Admin Metadata

  • Date: 2026-09-11
  • Cataloger id: Unknown
  • Description level: http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-2-6-0/
  • Description language: eng
  • Description authentication: pcc

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