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Paper short abstract

This paper examines epistemological tensions in feminist anthropology around who can research trans lives. Drawing on ethnography with Brazilian travesti sex workers, it reflects on positionality, queer expectations, and the limits of dominant emancipatory feminist frameworks in trans research.

Paper long abstract

This paper engages with current polarisations within feminist and queer theory by reflecting on epistemological tensions surrounding who can research trans lives and under what conditions. Building on Gerard Coll-Planas’ (2011) warning against the colonisation of trans experiences through claims such as “we are all trans”, I examine how non-trans researchers position themselves as feminist allies while studying trans communities.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Brazilian travesti sex workers, the paper addresses three interrelated questions. First, why do non-trans researchers study trans experiences, and how are these motivations shaped by dominant feminist-queer emancipatory frameworks? Second, to what extent do these frameworks project normative expectations of gender disruption onto trans bodies, interpreting their practices through the lens of our own political desires and queer anxieties rather than through sustained ethnographic attention to lived realities? Third, how can non-trans anthropologists navigate concerns of appropriation and misrepresentation without retreating into silence or paralysing guilt?

Situating these questions within ongoing transphobic attacks emerging from feminist and academic spaces, the paper argues that such conflicts are not only political but also epistemological. They reflect deeper investments in particular notions of subjecthood, agency and emancipation that do not always resonate with ethnographic realities. Rather than seeking epistemological purity or moral innocence, I propose embracing the messiness of feminist knowledge production as a decolonising practice grounded in accountability, situated knowledge and relational ethics in trans research.