Populism and rights. The struggle of the travesti/trans collective for labor inclusion in Argentina

Abstract

In this article we reflect on the identity development of the Argentine travesti/trans collective in the context of the struggles for labor inclusion that culminated in the approval of the national law “Diana Sacayán-Lohana Berkins” in 2021. Assuming the onto-epistemological and methodological assumptions of political theory and discourse analysis inspired by the work of Ernesto Laclau, we examine the process of political identification provoked by these struggles for access to work. We analyze the different enunciations of the demands for inclusion they formulated, as well as the strategies they deployed in their defense, the antagonistic border they drew with a neoliberal political project they defined as “anti-rights” and the articulatory process that took place in the framework of the struggle for access to work with other political and social organizations that contributed to what we call “peronization of the travesti/trans collective”. Finally, we characterize the populist logic that, from our point of view, articulated the discourse of rights from which the travesti/trans collective enunciated its demands for inclusion.