Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Don Kulick - Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture Am...
Preface: This is the second of seven reviews on transgendered roles in a range of cultures. (The noncontinguous first one is of Will Roscoe's book on Native North American berdache: Changing Ones at http://www.epinions.com/content_48150843012.) It seems that I should not assume that all readers understand the distinct analytic categories sex, gender, and sexuality. In the (second-wave) feminist schema that I use, "sex" is biological (male or female, usually identified by genitalia, but ultimately chromosomal),
"gender" is cultural (acting and dressing in ways that are regarded in a particular culture as "masculine" or "feminine" with variance in what features are important and what kinds of behavior and garb mark femininity or masculinity), and
"sexuality" is how individuals within a society define their primary sexual desires (this is often labeled "sexual orientation"). In many times and places there have not been labels for masculine males whose sexual "outlets" (to borrow Kinsey's term) are boys or less-masculine adults.
Although for the majority of people here, there, and everywhere, these analytically distinct categories bundle neatly (feminine females who have sex with males, masculine males who have sex with females), there are other combinations. My book Homosexualities (University of Chicago Press, 2000) goes into great detail about various types of same-sex sexuality, but in these reviews my focus is on persons whose gender role differs from that conventional to their biological sex. Travesti and Beauty and Power (and the not-yet reviewed Neither Man Nor Woman the transgendered (effeminate males) have sex with masculine males. In other books I am reviewing, the authors present no evidence of homosexuality for those taking the transgendered roles conventional in their society and contend that there is none.
Brazilian travestis
Stockholm University anthropologist Don Kulick's engaging book is based on ethnography in a poor neighborhood in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil’s third largest city) rejects interpretations of there being a ''third gender,'' arguing that the Brazilian travesti (homosexual transvestite) role supports the cultural view of sex-gender being dichotomous and that the travesti fully support this view.
During two-thirds of his year of fieldwork Kulick rented a small and porous room in a house in which thirteen travestis live that was situated in one of the poorest and most dangerous area of the city. He was integrated as a nonparticipant observer by a particularly articulate travesti, Keila Simpson, to whom he dedicated the book.
Like the senior Bahian scholar of homosexuality, Luiz Mott, Kulick challenges the romanticization of Brazil as a land of tolerance for sexual and/or gender diversity. Mott has documented chronic violence and frequent murder of transvestite male prostitutes. Kulick writes of ''the deep sense of fear and disgust that they evoke in many Brazilians'' , including in non-transvestite homosexual men. He also challenges recurrent anthropological romaniticization of whatever subalterns do as being ''resistance,'' as well as of Brazil as a land of sexual freedom (the purported lack of any notion of sin south of the equator).
Travestis do not identify as women. Although they dress in the style of female prostitutes, take female names, ingest hormones and inject up to twenty liters of industrial silicone to enhance their breasts and buttocks, they reject sex-reassignment surgery and enjoy sexual pleasures from penetrating other males and ejaculating. They ''alter their body to approximate that of the opposite sex without claiming the subjectivity of that sex. . . . They are not transsexuals. They are instead, they say, homosexuals—males who ardently desire men and who fashion and perfect themselves as objects of desire for other men''. They certainly do not see themselves as ''playing'' with gender or at ''transgression,'' as Judith Butler and various others romanticize gender-crossing and -mixing: ''Just as travestis are not striving for womanhood, neither are they rejecting identity or striving for ambiguity. What they are striving for, they readily tell anybody who will listen is homosexuality. . . . Travestis consider themselves to be homosexual desire in its fullest and most perfect form''.
Kulick argues that the travestis (who usually refer to themselves as viados or bichas, both derogatory terms for effeminate, penetrated males) do not see themselves as a ''third kind'' of anything. Although he is too post-structuralist to diagram category trees, his argument is that there are two kinds of human beings: those who are penetrated and penetrators. There are also two sexes defined by genitalia. Viados have penises, and may use them for sexual penetration, but if they are penetrated (or potentially penetrated, as travestis believe males who prefer males are), they are in the same category of sexuality as women. Exclusively heterosexual males have anuses and exclusively homosexual males have penises, but these biological attributes do not determine a male's sexuality. All that matters (in the travesti model) is seeking penises. Travestis claim to penetrate many of their male clients, so even frequently taking the penetrating role is irrelevant, whereas even those who have never been penetrated but who touch or show interest in penises are consigned to the category of those who give (dar) access to their bodies. Travestis do not challenge, transcend, blur, or disturb the gender-sexuality binary (of comer/dar - eat/give). Nor do they challenge the binary of sex (±penis), but biological ''sex stands in no particular privileged or even necessary relation to gender'', which is inextricable from sexuality in the travesti model.
Kulick found the ''boyfriends'' supported by the travestis to be generally inarticulate and totally introspective. Although he managed one fairly extensive interview with one travesti's partner, such men were more often bragged about in absentia than visible in the travesti milieu. ''Travestis do not socialize in the company of their boyfriends, and vice versa,'' he wrote. ''Most boyfriends are ashamed to be publicly known to be the boyfriend of a travesti'' (p. 212), because an ongoing relationship is interpreted as a homosexual preference, not expediency or choosing the easy life of being supported by a prostitute. Keila's explanation of what others will think is: ''You're living with a viado, so that means. . . you don't want a woman, you want a viado, and a viado has what? A dick to penetrate you with. So you're a viado, too'' . This is a travesti explanation, and travestis have a strong interest in keeping their partners away from potential rivals.
Simulation of female appearance is also tactical in that it provides a cover for conventionally masculine partner to have sex with a male while denying that setiology. “sacred prostitution.is what he is doing. The strength of the cultural model of dichotomizing gender is so strong, and the equation of homosexuality and effeminacy so taken-for-granted, that even masculine males who have just been sexually penetrated may deny having sex with males. In Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere, men find getting penetrated by an obviously unmasculine person is less threatening to their masculinity than being penetrated by someone who presents himself as masculine. Even being “dominated” in other ways (than being sexually penetrated) by a woman or a travesti is less serious than being topped by a masculine male. The transvestites may disparage the clients they mount, but the stigma of having been mounted by a travesti is hard to make stick, though proclamation can be embarrassing and silence about such conduct sometimes must be paid for.
Activos (ativos in Portuguese) do not brag about their penetration of effeminate males. Such bragging about male sexual conquests as occurs is done by the viados and jotos in their own social circles (de ambiente). In Mexico, as in Bahia, the boyfriends are reluctant to talk to each other (about anything; particularly about sex), and are far less willing to discuss their sexual histories with alien researchers than are the ever-voluble and generally more articulate homosexuales, who also socialize with each other: whereas their homosexual relations are heterogendered, their social relations are homogendered.
While Kulick is very critical of Brazilian research and of American romanticizing of ''third gender,'' it seems to me that he is insufficiently skeptical of some travesti statements denying that they experience sexual pleasure except when they are penetrating. Although exalting in occasions when they penetrate other males, they define themselves as those who like to be penetrated (rather than by their dress or occupational specialization), and talk about being the epitome of homosexual desire and seek partners with large penises. I find it hard to believe that such a quest is purely aesthetic and unrelated to their sexual pleasures. They seem to be acutely concerned (in regard to their boyfriends) that the pleasure is addictive, that a ''boyfriend who begins to dar, to 'give,' will become so smitten with the joys of anal penetration that he will never want to return to his old [penetrating] ways'', ''joys'' about which they know something. Kulick contends that his ''discussion of sexual pleasure is based on how travestis talk about sex'', but even in what he quotes from them there are statements such as ''I liked getting penetrated and I was a homosexual'' (222) and ''If there is any pain in the beginning [of being penetrated], by the end it turns into pleasure'' (204). If these are not instances of ''sexual pleasure,'' that category has some special meaning for Kulick.
And, considering that Bahia is the part of Brazil with the strongest African cultural heritage (not to get into the proportion of "African blood"), the book is remarkably silent about not only racism and racial fetishization but about how so African culture-influenced a site can be the basis for some generalizations not only to the huge nation of Brazil but to all of Latin America.
In this dramatic and compelling narrative, anthropologist Don Kulick follows the lives of a group of transgendered prostitutes (called travestis in Po...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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