Alex Brostoff (they/them) is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, where they are Affiliated Faculty in Global and Comparative Literature and the Center for Latin American Studies. Their first book, The Autotheory Effect: Hemispheric Encounters with the Grammar of Relation, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2027. They are co-editor of Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2027). In addition to guest editing special issues of ASAP/Journal on autotheory (2021) and College Literature on trans literatures (2025), Brostoff has translated a range of literary nonfiction from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Ancestral Future (Polity, 2024) and the late Brazilian activist Nêgo Bispo’s The Earth Gives, The Earth Wants (Polity, 2026). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in Diacritics, Representations, TSQ, Synthesis, and Critical Times, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere.
Project: Trans Creations and Other Tasks of the Translator
Bridging debates about language and gender justice across translation and trans studies, Trans Creations and Other Tasks of the Translator develops a comparative framework for understanding how translation constitutes and contests transatlantic and hemispheric formations of gender variance. While translation studies has reckoned with translation’s role as a colonial apparatus that extracts and betrays, this project traces its potential to intervene in structures that govern migration and belonging. Assembling transatlantic, Latin(x) American, and Brazilian self-narratives of struggle for trans bodily autonomy, and drawing on Brazilian traditions of transcreation and other decolonial methods, this project approaches translation as a metaphor for embodied and political transition and a practice through which those transitions are negotiated. From feminist critiques of the coloniality of gender by Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, to Hil Malatino’s intervention in distributions of trans care, to refusals of belonging in Alán Pelaez Lopez’s experimental poetics, this study accounts for the literary, legal, and medical contexts through which translation becomes a zone of conflict and potentiality. If to transcreate is to recognize how every translation is an interpretation, then to split the term in two, as this project does, is to foreground the critical and creative modes through which trans narratives defamiliarize relationships between national, linguistic, and bodily borders. As anti-trans legislation escalates, Trans Creations reorients contemporary debates about trans self-determination by showing how translation not only represents, but also reshapes the material conditions of trans life.