Queering the museum
Surrounded by Cantua buxifolia—the sacred Incan flower of unity, purity, and passage—this image honors Giuseppe Campuzano’s radical heart and enduring hope for trans and travesti futures. Offering these flowers is a gesture of respect for the strength that continues to carry us forward. Art by M. Quechol.
Opinion • M. Quechol • September 25, 2025, 2024 • Leer en castellano
In early 2003, Peruvian philosopher, drag performer, and activist Giuseppe Campuzano created the Travesti Museum of Peru. For the next ten years, Campuzano carried this deliberately mobile project in suitcases and public spaces, leaving a legacy of a defiantly impermanent museum. A living counter-archive.
The museum was born at a moment when Peru was publicly reckoning with memory and violence through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC revealed the scale of the violence, documenting over 21,000 victims of killings, torture, and disappearances carried out systematically by the state. The hearings exposed a culture of impunity, where evidence was destroyed and silence was weaponized to conceal atrocities.
Campuzano responded by inserting travesti and queer lives into the Peruvian narrative, challenging familial and community structures to demand remembrance and recognition of marginalized identities.
Drawing on philosophy, performance, and decolonial art practices, Campuzano fomented the museum as a fugitive space where travestis could appear not as marginal figures, but as central protagonists of history.
“To dress the travesti up as a museum is to give them weapons to fight,” Campuzano is known to have said in her book Museo Travesti del Peru, and in various texts and talks describing her project. Dressing up and arming, then, was a strategic practice of appropriating and queering institutional power. (Editor’s note: Campuzano tended to use he/him pronouns in reference to their life outside the museum and she/her in relation to their performances, today travesti is considered a fluid gender identity in Latin America).
Although Campuzano passed in 2013, artists, scholars, and activists in Peru and beyond continue to preserve, exhibit, and expand the museum’s legacy, ensuring its vision of travesti self-representation endures.
Claiming a critical identity
Travesti is a critical identity across South America. It is classed, racialized, and geographically specific. According to LGBTT Peruvian scholar Machuca Rose, travestis “do not present femininely all of the time because you cannot afford to” and the identity has been claimed by marginalized people who refuse to be defined by a Western, binary logic of gender.
For Campuzano, travesti was more than an identity: it became a methodology, a practice, and a way of knowing—an opportunity and commitment through which Peruvian culture could be reread.
Born in Lima on September 14, 1969, Campuzano lived as a travesti in a society that routinely erased and criminalized gender-nonconforming lives. His work emerged from the intersection of embodied knowledge and intellectual rigor, offering a future that claimed, centered, and knew travesti life. His interventions cannot be separated from the political context of the time.
In Peru, travestis and trans women have long faced systemic violence, stigma, premature death, and exclusion from cultural representation—including national narratives of Indigeneity and Peruvian identity.
Against this backdrop, the Museo Travesti was an act of resistance. It asserted that travesti lives were not merely subjects of anthropology or criminal records but people whose presence traversed centuries. Although the museum has been inactive since the death of Campuzano in 2013, the museum remains alive as an archive, book, and curatorial framework.
I became interested in Campuzano and other contemporary travesti performers during my undergraduate research. As a trans Latina in the United States, where respectability politics and the pressure to pass often confine us to individualistic pursuits of legitimacy, I sought instead to mine our identities for collective identification.
This kind of identification asks each of us—whether together or in isolation—what else we might know about ourselves and one another, beyond being marked by erasure, and considering joy, care, celebration, and embodied knowledge.
Like Campuzano, I became invested in expanding my understanding of transness beyond Western frameworks and unlearning what I thought I knew about myself, trans identity, and transnational solidarity in pursuit of liberation.
A collective counter-archive
Documentation has long been weaponized against trans and travesti communities through police mugshots, medical case files, psychiatric diagnoses, and sensationalist media portrayals.
By juxtaposing official archives with street ephemera, Campuzano fractured the authority of state-sanctioned memory and replaced it with a performative, living archive curated by those who have been most denied historical recognition.
The act of self-documentation was central. To document oneself is to wrest control from these hostile archives and claim authorship over how one’s life and community are remembered.
Campuzano exemplified this practice by staging herself as the travesti curator: donning elaborate costumes and speaking as a figure simultaneously inside and outside the archive. The authority of the museum was queered—both mocked and reclaimed—as she performed as a curator who was neither neutral nor impartial, but rather partisan, implicated, and embodied.
For travesti and trans people, to self-document in the face of erasure is to transform survival and aliveness into a historical method. It is not only about preserving traces of existence but also about rejecting the temporal logic of erasure that casts trans lives as fleeting or marginal.
Travestis are written into this archive on their own terms: not as a marginal aberration, but as an integral part of Peru’s cultural memory that has always been present.
Traditional museums present themselves as neutral custodians of cultural heritage, separating objects from their contexts and positioning curators as authorities above the material. The Museo Travesti shattered this model with its deliberate impermanence.
In doing so, it reimagined the museum not as a static repository but as a performative space of encounter—where memory is contested, embodied, and alive.
Campuzano sought to invert the hierarchies of value that underlie museums. Instead of elevating elite or monumental artifacts, he curated street flyers, newspaper clippings, and costumes alongside colonial paintings.
He revealed how the travesti figure had always been present in Peruvian visual and cultural production, whether acknowledged or not. In this sense, the museum was less about recovering lost objects than about exposing how travestis were always embedded in the archive, obscured by the dominant gaze.
The Museo Travesti also forged collective memory practices and enacted a travesti mode of knowledge production.
Self-documentation was never an individual endeavor. It was collaborative, involving networks of performers, activists, friends, and audiences who helped build and sustain the museum.
Dissident archives, from south to north
Campuzano was not alone in shaping a travesti curatorial practice in Peru. A new generation of artists is drawing on Campuzano’s legacy, echoing scholar Machuca Rose’s insight that travesti life, though marked by precarity, generates new worlds through creativity, resourcefulness, and refusal.
One such artist is Lima’s José Carlos Flores, whose 2025 installation, Salón Unisex, exhibited at Marea Alta in Lima, is an homage to Latin American beauty salons and their conventional portrayal of masculine and feminine hair styles.
Centering friendship and moving beyond social codes of masculinity and femininity, Flores questions the boundaries of perception and social recognition in relation to travesti and trans Peruvian life.
This labor of self-documentation and collective world-making reverberates across Latin America.
In Argentina, the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT), initiated by María Belén Correa and Claudia Pía Baudracco on Facebook in 2012, became a lifeline for trans kinship. The archive of newspaper clippings, personal photographs, and diary entries sheds light on the brutality of security forces and state abandonment before, during, and after the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Similar to Campuzano, the AMT, inspired by Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, established a memory politic and demanded reparations for the violence they faced under the dictatorship and police edicts under democracy.
In Brazil, the Museu Transgênero de História e Arte (MUTHA), inaugurated by transmasculine scholar and performer Ian Habib in 2022, seeks to bring alternative historiographies into Brazilian society.
MUTHA, which is in the process of securing a public space, travels through Brazil and partners with various sexual diversity institutions. During my time at MUTHA in 2024, I had the opportunity to learn and work alongside the Sexual Diversity Museum, the Museum of Arts São Paulo (MASP) in São Paulo, and the Federal University of Bahia.
My work ranged from building a collection of archives that focused on the intersection of artmaking and the embodied knowledge of travesti and trans cultural workers, as shared by people in Bahia, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.
In 2025, the opening of El Museo de Arte Transfemenino in Mexico City, founded by curator Rojo Génesis and Sofía Moreno, has encouraged both Mexican and U.S. institutions to reconsider how trans life is archived across borders.
Campuzano, Rose, and Flores remind us together that the museum can be more than an institution of the state—it can be a fugitive space of joy and resistance.
In claiming the right to narrate their own histories, travestis and trans people transform the very meaning of the museum itself, turning it from a site of exclusion into one of radical possibility.
