Trans misogyny in the colonial archive: Re‐membering trans feminine life and death in New Spain, 1604–1821
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Traces of trans feminine pasts are scattered all across the colonial archive. In New Spain, glimpses of Indigenous trans women's lives can be found in the records of conquistadors as early as the sixteenth century. While such early colonial representations of trans femininity span myriad religious, imperial and literary contexts, they are all underpinned by one harrowing reality: the widespread, colonial pursuit of trans feminine death. To ‘re‐member’ – á la Saylesh Wesley – trans feminine pasts in the colonial archive, this article traces structures of, and resistance to, colonial trans misogyny in the sodomy criminal trials of Mexico (1604–1771) and the Catholic missions of California (1769–1821). Pushing against an extant ‘cistoriography’ that has simply archived these stories within the history of sexuality, I ask: What may be gleaned by centring trans femininity and womanhood as core to not only the lives of historical subjects, but the reason many of their lives were so violently taken? By re‐membering trans misogyny in this way, we may finally name and centre the long‐erased trans feminine historical subject, illuminate the complex, changing structures of her past worlds and trace the oft‐forgotten lineages of not just trans feminine death, but trans feminine survivance in its face.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it