"Becoming Travesti: A Partial History of Ontoformation" explores the discursive production of the figure of travesti, defined broadly as male-assigned technologies of feminization, as it circulates within public discourse in Mexico. In other words, through ontoformation this project highlights the historical and sociopolitical associations that congeal, through repetition, to give an identitarian category -travesti- a sense of essence. In order to do so, this project analyzes articles within the mainstream Mexican press, ranging from the colonial period to the present. The first phase of this project involved the compilation and analysis of all twenty-first century articles mentioning travesti in the three newspapers with the widest circulation in Mexico in order to determine the primary constitutive elements of the contemporary figure of travesti. The second phase, in turn, involved a historical exploration of these constitutive elements by way of analyzing mainstream news sources dating back to the colonial period. As such, this project explores the work performed by ontoformative narratives that congeal to give the identitarian category of travesti a sense of essence. Among the narratives explored are the detravestification of homosexuality and continued homosexualization of travesti, the criminality of travesti, the spectacularization of travesti, the disposability of travesti, and the affective registers mobilized by and through travesti. Moreover, this project explores the consolidation of the contemporary figure of travesti in relationship to other identitarian categories of sexual and gendered non-normativity in Mexico, such as the homosexual, the transsexual and the transgénero (transgender), suggesting that travesti has been instrumental in the historical production and sanitization of these categories.

This dissertation explores discourses in the contemporary United States surrounding the creation, coding, sterilization, and general keeping of canines in order to interrogate how sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, and species together serve biopolitical formations of social control, patriarchal white supremacy, and heteronormativity. Interrogating these socially constructed and oftentimes stereotypical narratives through an interspecies lens demonstrates how taxonomies of power and systems of oppression and privilege become situated across species. This project utilizes interviews and ethnography, as well as analysis of popular culture, legislation and news media.

Interspeciesism is informed by feminist influences, functioning as a framing paradigm that engages with a politicized question of the animal that explicitly acknowledges human-animal entanglements across sites that are shaped by imperialism and colonialism. This interspecies project considers the political nature of relationships between humans and canines. It suggests that people situate their own identities and power not only in relation to other humans but also to other species. Simultaneously, the interspeciesm I engage with extends analyses of biopolitics, or the regulations of living bodies, beyond humans to all species. It interrogates how contemporary U.S. society has organized and identified itself in part through the ways in which it controls and monitors canines, often in relationship to the multiple ways dogs in the U.S. are racialized, classed and gendered by specific breeds. This coding of canine bodies with various taxonomies of power is not about dog breeds’ in-and-of themselves, but instead indicates that dominant U.S. society seeks to assert control over certain populations that are constructed as undesirable and unproductive.

Canines exist in a unique space in the U.S. cultural imaginary where they have multiple and oftentimes contradictory meanings that are influenced by a variety of power relations that transcend species. At stake is a critical concern regarding how interspecies bodies are made, controlled, formed, and refigured together under heteropatriarchal white supremacist modes of power. It draws attention to what these corporeal un(makings) imply for an ethics of being with, and thinking of, the other—human and animal.