The Future Is Child's Play

This essay analyzes Lucía Puenzo's 2007 film, XXY, to articulate a collaborative process of gender-ambiguous becoming, what the author ultimately calls a theory of child's play. Building on María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo's theorization of developmentalism and an extended engagement with work by Marlene Wayar and Mauro Cabral Grinspan, the article argues that XXY reveals an emergent “transition ideology” that aligns gender development with national development and internalizes a buried history of national racism. It then contextualizes XXY in a longer history of neoliberal politics in Argentina, connecting current divides between an older generation of travesti activists and younger trans people to long-standing invocations of generational kinship at the national level. The second part of the essay scales beyond scenes of individual and national transition to transnational notions of trans progress. Taking critiques from trans studies and anticolonial thought, the essay explains how the transnational abstraction of a “right to gender identity” in transition has shifted from its original activist framings of material access to limited notions of self-declaration.