PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)
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What is the central premise of Sideways Selves and how does it address coloniality of the body?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share. A map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at occulehyphenmundi.com while you listen.
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Carrie Figdore and Blaine Newfeld. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with PJ D. Pietro, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. Their new book, Sideways Selves, Trebesti and Hoteria's Struggles Across the Americas, is just out from the University of Texas press. How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies?
More importantly, how do gender nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality, but also make, connect to and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced peoples use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves, D. Pietro listens carefully across many registers to the creative work of making and living Sideways Selves. Their work offers paths to decolonial worlds. We may need to develop new eyes to see. EJ D Pietro, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hello Sarah. Thank you for the invitation and thank you to your audience for listening carefully.
Well, let's start with um hearing a bit about you and your background as a theorist and how you came to write this book.
Well I uh tend to think about the situation from within which I speak as collaborative, as with a larger sense of the self. Maybe that's one of the the roots um of the title of the book that we're going to discuss later is Sideways Selfs. Um I grew up in um the Andean. northwest of Argentina and In within a situation in a political context where um mm many like myself who found uh are gender non conforming uh dissidence or expression or bodily project uh at a precarious uh uh situation and many of us were pulled right we're pulled in different directions by the the project of the nation of the nation state and the project of the nation state that is about um building up uh white supremacist values About imagining the nation as European-like or connected to European histories.
Also, a project of the nation that safeguards minoritized differences only for the sake of ornamental. Appreciation. And so being pulled in those directions, like okay. Um How is it possible to think about the flesh and particularly dissident flesh when we are being pulled towards common nationalism, assimilation into um traditionalist, um supremacist cultural, socioeconomic projects at the same time that we are being asked to have some visibility.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central premise of Sideways Selves and how does it address coloniality of the body?
0:00–9:26
2
How do the concepts of “Black Holes” and “Sewage Realities” frame gender‑nonconforming embodiment?
9:26–19:42
3
What do the Travesti and Jotería communities reveal about decolonial resistance?
19:42–29:40
4
Why does the book emphasize “prints” and the afterword as a way of honoring lived practices?
29:40–40:01
5
How does the notion of “sideways relationality” reshape ideas of community and solidarity?
40:01–47:39
6
What is “nesting” and how is it positioned as an anti‑fascist, decolonial response?
47:39–57:31
7
How do the author’s current projects connect debt, extractivism, and trans childhood?
57:31–1:07:07
8
What future directions does PJ DiPietro suggest for decolonial feminist philosophy?
1:07:07–1:13:26
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