“From Havana to Jupiter: Possibilities of Trans/Queer Performance” This talk considers the genealogies of trans and queer performance in Cuba and its diaspora and asks what work such performances are doing today in both Miami and Havana. It relies on three sites in particular: the Wigwood drag festival in contemporary Miami, an album recorded by a Chinese Cuban diasporic drag queen in New York City in the 1980s, and the ongoing work of a prominent Black lesbian drag king in Havana. In each context, Santana will discuss the social and aesthetic lineages and contents of the drag performers’ aesthetic choices, focusing on how they might offer insight into the performances’ interventions in dominant LGBT rights discourses in the Americas and the groundswell of political repression of trans and queer people. M. Myrta Leslie Santana is an ethnomusicologist and performer whose work examines the social and political significance of trans and queer performance in the Americas. Her book Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba, an ethnography of drag performance in contemporary Cuba, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in February 2025. In addition to her book, Leslie Santana has essays published or forthcoming in Ethnomusicology, Small Axe, Queer Nightlife (Michigan), and Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford). Originally from Miami, Florida, Leslie Santana is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego.