Keywords

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex claimed that women’s social subordination was not due to biological factors. On the contrary, it was the patriarchal system that placed women in the position of the ‘second sex’ to perpetuate male dominance. Margaret Mead (1935), with her ethnographic studies in Samoa and New Guinea, discussed the idea of the variability of the human species, that is, that sexual roles and people’s behaviours were modified according to socio-historical contexts and were not fixed by nature. These first contributions, among others, began to open the way to denaturalise gender identities by distancing them from a sexed body that was used to justify women’s oppression.

Alongside the denaturalisation of the category ‘woman,’ from the late 1960s and during the 1970s, feminist theorists developed the concepts of sex and gender to give them a different nuance than those implied by their use in the medical field until then. These early efforts succeeded in turning the concept of gender into a sociological category, distancing it from the psychological bias provided by the medical discourse (Stolcke 2003). In the 1950s, mainly in the United States, cases of intersexual and transsexual people drew the attention of physicians, endocrinologists, and psychologists to explain the breakdowns between the biological sex and the desired sexual identity. The term gender referred to the social sex, that is, it was a socially prescribed ‘role’ acquired through experience. This category was used not only to explain these cases that, although they were not new, were subject to incredible media attention and ‘scientific’ interest (for example, in the case of the famous transsexual Christine Jorgensen, see Aizura 2012), but also to justify the surgical interventions that were performed on bodies which were considered ‘wrong’ and did not adjust to the ‘real’ self. Harry Benjamin (1966), Robert Stoller (1968), and Richard Green and John Money (1969) contributed to developing the idea that these people had malleable bodies, and it was necessary to ‘adequate’ their sex to the ‘correct’ gender through surgical interventions.

Yet, feminist scholars primarily used gender as a social and political category. The sex/gender binary was thus actively employed to position sex as ‘the biological differences between females and males defined in terms of the anatomy and physiology of the body; with gender as the social meanings and value attached to being female or male in a given society’ (Richardson 2008, 5). However, while trying to minimise the biological differences and provide them with different meanings and cultural values in claims for women’s equality, this political and theoretical crusade focused mainly on analysing gender and, on the contrary, leaving intact and unquestionable that of sex (Millett 1970; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Rubin 1975). As Haraway (1991, 134) stressed:

Fatally, in this constrained political climate, these early critiques did not focus on historicizing and culturally relativizing the ‘passive’ categories of sex or nature. Thus, formulations of an essential identity as a woman or a man were left analytically untouched and politically dangerous.

Since the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, the questioning of the sex/gender distinction was emphatic. The impact of postmodernism and the destabilisation of the categories sex, gender, and sexuality, coupled with the theoretical and critical rethinking of feminist studies, queer theory, and, to a lesser extent, anthropological studies, fostered a propitious field for this debate. In this chapter, I consider this theoretical turn in order to (1) describe some cases of the so-called third gender used in anthropology to show that the binary gender system is neither universal nor innate and how this, apparently, destabilises hegemonic and dualistic notions of female/male; (2) examine some feminist contributions that destabilise more deeply the sex/gender distinction; (3) analyse queer theory and its great theoretical and political impact in regard to trans issues; (4) question queer theory’s deconstruction of identity categories and its overemphasis on transgression; and, finally, (5) propose the necessity of an embodied ethnography to bring travestis’ own particularities and corporeal experiences into analytical focus.

Anthropological Approaches and Critiques of the ‘Third Gender’ Category

Towards the end of the 1980s, the consensus on the biological (sex) as a passive and empty surface that provided the basis for the cultural (gender) was coming into question. Sex could no longer be understood as acultural and prelinguistic, nor gender as a subsequently constructed category. A new conceptual framework arose to transcend and undermine the sex/gender distinction and the dichotomies associated with it. Feminist anthropologists Martin and Voorhies (1975) were among the first to argue that there are more than two physical sexes in some societies. They used the term ‘supernumerary sexes’ to refer to the possibility of finding ethnographic examples that evade the hegemonic sexual dichotomy of our society. Nevertheless, in most anthropological studies, the idea of the multiplicity of sexes did not have as much impact as that of multiple gender roles to highlight, precisely, variations in gender relations according to different cultures. But Martin and Voorhies clearly refused to accept as universal and hegemonic the duality of sex and gender. Among the Navajo, in the Southwestern coast of the United States, nadle is the term used to identify intersexed-born children, a third possibility of sex/gender.

Rosalind Morris (1995) discusses ‘decomposing difference’ in literature that ‘emphasizes moments of collapsed, blurred, or subverted difference; instances of secondary ambiguity; and so-called ‘third gender’s’ (579). The term ‘third gender ’ is used to highlight the impossibility of employing dichotomous gender categories as a framework for the ethnographic evidence found in some non-Western societies (Towle and Morgan 2002). The sexual and gender binarism of the West has a history and cannot be seen as universal because there are examples of less rigid and restricted sex/gender systems worldwide. Gilbert Herdt (1996) understands that it is precisely the consideration of sexual dimorphism as one of the hegemonic principles of social structure that has marginalised the study of sexual and gender variations. According to him, classic studies on sex and gender within anthropology ‘have assumed a two-sex system as the “normal and natural” structure of “human nature”’ (34).

Ethnographic literature on two-spirited people (formerly known as berdache) gender identities among Native North Americans (Blackwood 1984; Callender and Kochems 1983; Goulet 1996; Jacobs 1983; Roscoe 1996), the xaniths of the coast of Oman, in the Arabian peninsula (Shaw 2007; Wikan 1991), the hijra s in India (Nanda 1990), the kathoeys in Thailand (Totman 2003; Ünaldi 2011), or the muxes of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico (Subero 2013) seems to challenge the sexual and gender dichotomy of Western society through gender and, to a lesser extent, sexual variety. Most of the people studied are assigned male gender at birth (or are intersex) and dress, behave, and perform the tasks ascribed to women. However, instead of being considered ‘women,’ they are constructed as an intermediate gender, a ‘third’ one, as men and women simultaneously.

The scope of the term ‘third gender ’ was not ignored by a significant number of anthropologists who encountered various limitations to it. It was employed more as an alternative to dualistic theories than as an appropriate category. Towle and Morgan (2002) elaborated one of the most systematic critiques to the concept. They considered that it is a Western concept that must be questioned when thinking on ‘how “our” narratives about “them” (cultural others) reflect our own society’s contradictory agendas concerning sexuality, gender, and power’ (476). There is a danger of believing that adhering to the triadic gender system would imply greater freedom and less oppression than in the binary system. It is usually reinforced in the distinction between Western (as oppressive) and non-Western (as potentially liberating) gender systems. This distinction leads to essentialising other cultures and ‘distorts the complexity and reality of other peoples’ lives’ (490). The ‘third gender’ system can also be very rigid and intolerant. Moreover, the belief that intercultural evidence about gender variation in ‘other’ cultural contexts can inform radical changes ‘at home’ is a fallacy. Morris (1995) considers that it is necessary to analyse these examples in relation to the social, economic, and political dynamics of each cultural context and go beyond the ‘third gender ’ category because, frequently, those who are identified in this way are so in relation to an earlier socialisation which is not always based on admiration and respect.

Some ethnographic examples of gender variability may strengthen, rather than dismantle, the ideology of the dichotomous gender system. Don Kulick (1998), in his ethnographic study of Brazilian travestis in Salvador, asserts that the ‘third gender ’ theorists naturalise and reinforce traditional conceptions of sexual dimorphism by suggesting that people who do not fit into the male/female binary opposition are left out of the binomial or transcend it, instead of reconfiguring and altering it. Carolyn Epple (1998) also examines how the supposed discovery of a third, fourth, or more gender roles reifies and leaves the male/female binary system intact, rather than disrupting it. According to the author, understanding the nadle Navajos as an alternative gender ‘keeps the meanings of “man” and “woman” safe from its disruptive influences, and thus forecloses the opportunity for truly radical reformulations of gender’ (273).

There is also a tendency while employing the ‘third gender’ category for each type of gender variation to be so aligned according to a nation or culture. For example, India has its hijras , the Arabian peninsula its xaniths , Thailand its kathoeys , Native America its two-spirits , and Mexico its muxes . Although the categories are useful to understand the social world, they also establish an unalterable model of interpretation. Finally, Towle and Morgan express their discomfort with how non-Western examples are employed in certain popular trans literature in the United States. Often, it is understood that the presence of the category ‘third gender’ assumes the existence of difference and freedom. Equating the hijras or two-spirits with contemporary Western trans politics and identity is, according to the authors, an incongruous move. They consider that it is a mistake to import and appropriate these categories, idealise them, and imagine their adaptation to other (Western) cultural contexts.

Therefore, the ‘third gender ’ category can leave intact an essentialising male/female binary opposition. These ethnographic examples are usually decontextualised by Western anthropologists in attempts to understand ‘our’ gender system and, simultaneously, eventually establish ethnocentric presuppositions about ‘other’ cultures. Although anthropological examples of gender variant systems contribute to widening gendered social expressions—as they show that there is no an accurate and fixed correspondence between the sexed body and the gendered identity—anthropologists have not succeeded in dismantling the female/male distinction or questioning the supposed biological component of sex. In the next section, I focus on how feminist scholars, allied with postmodernism and queer theory, do question and challenge the relationship between sex and gender by arguing that sex is also a social and cultural construction.

Disturbing the Sex/Gender Binary and the Emergence of Queer Theory

In one of the most influential studies on the history of the construction of sexual difference, Thomas Laqueur (1990) argues that ‘sex’ is the product of concrete cultural and historical events. For centuries, both male and female bodies were interpreted hierarchically and along a vertical axis according to the same sex category: the vagina was considered the internal version of the penis. The prevailing belief was in the existence of a single sex, but of two genders, independent of biology. From the end of the eighteenth century, the conception of sexual difference changes radically, due to political and epistemological shifts rather than scientific advances. The ‘two-sex model ’ emerged, which emphasised physical differences between men and women. The two sexes were not only different but also immutable, two opposite sexes ordered horizontally according to the presence or absence of the phallus. A radical dimorphism of biological divergence between male and female bodies was progressively established.

Laqueur’s great contribution shows us how the social meanings of an era have shaped understandings of sex. Thus, the association of XX-chromosomes, ovaries, or female genitalia with an exclusively biologically female body is rather a new invention in history. Similarly, Fausto-Sterling (2000) argues that labelling someone as male or female depends on a social decision, that is, our conception of gender is what defines sex, and not the other way around. As she states, the ‘more we look for a simple physical basis for “sex,” the more it becomes clear that “sex” is not a pure physical category. What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in our ideas about gender’ (4). Evidence of intersexed bodies ‘that evidently mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both males and females’ (31) challenges the certainty of the ‘true’ sex of a person. The two-sex model has been naturalised and constructed as truth cared and continuously reiterated by science. Children who are born with sexual indeterminacy ‘usually disappear from view because doctors “correct” them right away with surgery’ (31).

Judith Butler , in her very influential book Gender Trouble (1990), has shown that feminist understandings of the binary sex/gender distinction have limited the wider possibilities of different masculinities and femininities when analysing sex as independent of gender. Butler does not only question the sex/gender distinction but reverses the relationship established so far between the two, arguing that gender creates sex. In her well-known quote, Butler asserts:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (1990, 7)

For Butler , gender is performatively enacted. The solid and ‘natural’ appearance of gender is instituted and reinforced through a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (140).Footnote 1 She uses the idea of ‘gender parody’ when referring to practices of drag and cross-dressing to analyse how we are all performing gender as a kind of parody or impersonation. Our beliefs that we are ‘really’ women or men are, in fact, an illusion. Thus, there is neither a ‘real’ gender nor an ‘original’ identity on which gender is moulded. Gender reality ‘is created through sustained social performances’ (141) in a continual process that produces the effect of a stable gender identity. For Butler, performances are performative ‘in that they bring into being gendered subjects’ (Richardson 2008, 12). Moreover, ‘sex’ is an effect of discourse as discourses construct meaning. When a doctor proclaims a newborn ‘girl’ or ‘boy,’ she/he is making a normative and performative claim while producing a concrete action. For Butler, performative acts are forms of speech that authorise, that is, the statements generate an action.

Butler ’s work, alongside other great influences as Foucault (1990), Rubin (1984), or Sedgwick (1990), lays the grounds for the development of queer theory . Queer studies emerged in the late 1980s as a theoretical and political strategy to denature heteronormative understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, and their interrelation (Sullivan 2003). Before becoming a theory and political movement, the use of the concept ‘queer’ was—in an English-speaking context—a homophobic slur; a way of insulting directed at homosexuals and all those whose behaviour, appearance, and lifestyle ‘escaped’ from the dominant rules of human nature. The appropriation of ‘queer’ reflects an ensemble of practices and discourses which transgress (or aim to transgress) essentialisms related to the institutionalisation of heterosexuality. Queer activism—which emerged from a reaction to the ethnocentrism and androcentricity of gay activism (Coll-Planas 2012)—and its heterogeneous theoretical corpus are based on a critique of the male/female and the hetero/homo binaries and the criticism of any essence and naturalisation of gender and sexuality. In other words, queer analysis and politics represent ‘a deconstructive raison d’etre that aims to “denaturalize” dominant social classifications and, in turn, destabilize the social order’ (Green 2007, 28).

With queer theory’s emphasis on the performativity of gender, trans people have become ‘the vanguard in the war against a binary/heterosexist construction of gendered identity’ (Alsop et al. 2002, 204). Trans bodies contradict hegemonic gender expectations, and thus, trans people ideally represent gender disruption. According to Sandy Stone (1991, 296), trans people are ‘a set of embodied texts’ with the potential to challenge fixed male/female identifications based on dichotomous categories of gender and sexuality. Queer theory then understands trans people’s experiences as a ‘deconstructive tool’ (Hines 2006, 51) that contributes to queer theory’s main objectives towards, first, a ‘radical deconstructionism’ that interrogates our gender and sexual orientation categories, making evident they are not exhaustive; and, second, a ‘radical subversion,’ which means that ‘queer theory seeks to disrupt the normalizing tendencies of the sexual [and gender] order, locating nonheteronormative practices and subjects as crucial sites of resistance’ (Green 2007, 28). Yet, based on poststructuralist and postmodern deconstructions of identity categories, one of the main criticisms of queer theory lies in its radical deconstruction of identity categories and ‘a tendency to over-state the relationship between trans and transgression’ (Hines 2010a, 608). In the next section, I examine the most contested aspects of queer theory and politics.

The Limits of Queer Analysis: Beyond Transgression

The indeterminacy and radical constructiveness of queer theory have been questioned from different angles. One of the issues that seems to be more problematic is, following Sally Hines , that ‘queer theory presents the dilemma of how to deconstruct identity categories and positively account for difference, without losing sight of the experiences that constitute difference’ (2008, 26). Queer theory has been criticised for not paying enough attention to the issues of structure and materiality, neglecting trans people’s lived experiences (Connell 2012; Felski 1996; Hines 2006, 2009, 2010a; MacDonald 1998; Namaste 1996, 2000; Prosser 1998). For example, Viviane Namaste (1996) understands the centrality of trans people in queer theory to dismantle the strict binarism of gender and sexuality. However, she questions why queerness becomes detached and completely ignores the suffering and precarious situation of black transsexual women who are sex workers, suffer transphobic violence daily, and do not seek to disrupt any pattern because they are focusing on surviving. Also, transsexual scholars have argued that queer analysis neglects the importance of the body within transsexuality while refuting transsexual people’s narratives based on authenticity and identity (Prosser 1998). Connell (2012, 864) discusses the tendency in deconstructionist theory to ‘degender the groups spoken of, whether by emphasizing only their nonnormative or transgressive status; by claiming that gender identity is fluid, plastic, malleable, shifting, unstable, mobile, and so on; or by simply ignoring gender location.’

Thus, there is a tendency in queer analysis to overemphasise the transgressive potential of trans identities in destabilising sexual and gender binaries. The fight against any kind of heteronormativity becomes final: it is compulsory to subvert, transgress, dismantle, denaturalise, deconstruct and defy any power relationship in any way possible. Clearly, not all experiences can be read as transgressive, nor should they be seen and understood solely within this perspective and with this end. Butler (1990) discusses the subversive capacity of drag when referring specifically to the documentary Paris is Burning where the gay and trans community of Latin and Afro-American origin organise fashion shows and dance competitions in New York in the mid-1980s. She considers drag as a subversive practice, which makes evident the parodic nature of the gender identities. Nevertheless, in Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler recognises that not all drag performances are necessarily subversive. Although transvestite practices can be read as subversive because they evidence the performativity of gender, this impersonation is not enough to undermine the roots of heterosexuality. Doing drag can repeat, imitate, and parody gender norms, but does not necessarily challenge such norms. As Butler states, ‘heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its denaturalization, as when we see denaturalizing parodies that reidealize heterosexual norms without calling them into question’ (1993, 231, emphasis in original).

Since the 1990s, trans/queer activists have faced different accusations when they reassert that they are not conformist and they do not intend to fit in any identitary model. For instance, Leslie Feinberg (1996) rejects any kind of association between gender identity and a specific bodily expression. On the contrary, she/he proposes to transit through male and female identities constantly and that the requirement of passing is the result of oppression. Kate Bornstein (1994) argues that transsexuals cannot become men or women, not due to the fact that they are not ‘authentic,’ but because those who refuse to identify themselves as ‘men’ or ‘women’ radically deconstruct the sex/gender binary system.

Myra Hird’s (2000) critical contribution is that queer theory combines existing gender practices while performing gender. The supposed queer subversion does not imply transgression because ‘all modern expressions of sexual and gender identity depend on the current system of the two-sex system for their expression’ (Hird 2000, 359, emphasis in original). For Hird, there is transgression precisely when sex and the sexual difference can be transcended. According to Van Lenning (2004), the bodies themselves can never be subversive by definition, but they depend on the meanings assimilated into them. Van Lenning suggests broadening the categories of femininity and masculinity and considering that the lives of those people who subvert the limits of sex should not be romanticised because not all of them intend to transgress and, rather, they are surrounded by suffering and pain . In this way, Aizura (2012) proposes that the idea of the gender variant is one which should be theorised as a threat to the dominating order, instead of transsexual and transgender people themselves. In fact, rather than ‘disrupt the social order, the complexities of transgendered histories and bodies may disrupt the lives of trans people’ (Davis 2009, 98).

In sum, these theoretical discussions have often positioned trans/queer issues ‘as a site of either gender rebellion or gender conformism’ (Hines 2010a, 600). In order to avoid the polarities and the dichotomies associated with it (oppression/empowerment, stable/fluid, hegemonic/subversive), Erin Davis (2009) proposes understanding trans experiences in an intermediate way because ‘while transsexed bodies, histories, and identities may “exceed” the limits of intelligibility, trans individuals are engaged in meaning making—creating coherence both for themselves and for others’ (99). Queer theory’s emphasis on the fluidity and subversion of identities cannot represent the complex and lived experiences of trans people, many of whom seek social recognition in their everyday interactions and, therefore, aspire to become intelligible subjects. In other words, and as Davis clearly states, ‘gender identity is not static, but it is also not unbounded’ (99–100).

There are also two other aspects of queer theory which deserve to be considered critically . Firstly, queer theory is used as the most legitimate referential framework to analyse issues related to sex, gender, and sexuality in academia. It sets itself up as a universalist proposal which becomes the most ‘correct’ way to get closer to the trans’ experiences. Acknowledging the great value queer analysis and politics have in dismantling the hegemony of psycho-medical knowledge on the regulation of bodies, genders, and sexualities, queerness may assume the risk to become ‘the norm’ and exclude those identified as non-queer for being ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘conservative.’ At the same time, and secondly, I understand that this focus may become ethnocentric by being constituted as the milieu (above all, English-speaking, white, and middle class) entitled to examine other sex or gender non-normative variants. In effect, when reading all these variants from the exclusively queer point of view, we run the risk of homogenising experiences and conceptions which should be explained according to their own political, social and cultural context.

As I describe next when referring to Brazilian travestis, although their bodies interpellate the sex/gender binary system, travestis’ experiences cannot be thought of exclusively in terms of transgression. I examine how they understand their becoming travestis by focusing on their actual lives, desires, and feelings. In addition, I question queer theory’s tendency towards the disembodiment of identities (Salamon 2010) as the body becomes a key element to understand travestis ’ experiences. Throughout Brazilian Travesti Migrations, travestis’ identity constructions are experienced in/through their bodies. In this way, I align with a ‘move towards materiality within deconstructive approaches to gender and sexuality’ (Hines 2010b, 13).

On the Subversive Potential of Travestis and Its Limits

The bodily, social, and sexual trajectories of travestis contribute to avoid thinking about their practices in either/or terms of transgression/submission . It was not my aim (nor my task) to grant travestis’ experiences a political scope that should be understood according to an academic/queer language. I preferred to be attentive to how they defined themselves and explain what it means to be a travesti sex worker in Brazil and Spain today. To start with, most of the research participants in Rio de Janeiro but also in Barcelona did not consider themselves as ‘transgressors,’ many of them did not even know the meaning of the term (as was the case with the concept ‘transgender ’). Although Samanta did not understand my question if she had ever felt that she was transgressing any norm, she claimed that ‘since she became a travesti she feels more powerful ’ (Field notes, 23 July 2008, Rio de Janeiro). Reyna also stated:

In order to be transgressive, it is necessary to go against a rule. I am not against any rule, I am not normal but I am not against anything! (Personal interview, 6 May 2008, Rio de Janeiro)

Rather, most of the travestis with whom I interacted preferred to give sense to their gender in terms of their bodies, that is, they considered the conjunction of female and male characteristics as: ‘fascinating,’ ‘mysterious,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘odd,’ and ‘different.’ They were proud of their bodies, especially those recognised among the group as ‘beautiful’ and ‘successful’ travestis.Footnote 2 Many of them were also fulfilled with their penises, an element that made them feel ‘different’:

For men, my body is like a fantasy, a fetish. More on my day-to-day I see [myself] a woman with something different, do you understand? But in my work [sex work] I know that I am a fantasy. (Priscila, personal interview, 22 May 2008, Rio de Janeiro)

I love my penis, I love looking at myself naked in front of a mirror and looking at my feminine body with a penis in between my legs. Ah, that’s very gratifying to me. (Samanta, personal interview, 8 September 2008, Rio de Janeiro)

As we see throughout the book, the ‘mystery’ and ‘fascination’ that their bodies generate are aspects that travestis relate to beauty and their particularity for which they are sought out, admired, and desired—mainly—by men. Most of them recognise themselves as feminine and ‘beautiful’ travestis which can also have the ability to penetrate and give pleasure to other bodies.

Concurrently, although most of the participants did not actively claim to disrupt any sexual and gender binarisms, travestis are not passive subjects unaware of the meanings attached to their bodies. As we see in the next chapter, since childhood, they have suffered rejection and violence by a transphobic society that is not ready to respect gender differences . However, in spite of the great adversities, most of them decide (to continue) living as travestis. Evidently, reaffirming what they want to be is an empowered decision with concrete and sometimes lethal effects over their lives. Travestis strategically combine performing and embodying their own ways of understanding femininity with the desire to claim the sexual pleasure of being penetrated and, at the same time, penetrating, creating in this way a ‘game’ where the symbols of masculinity and femininity are appropriated, sometimes rejected, and sometimes accepted in certain contexts of social and sexual interaction. Furthermore, their penises destabilise the assumption—a foundation of heteronormativity—that female bodies have a vagina (‘cultural vagina,’ according to Garfinkel 1967). Travestis repeatedly declare that they are sought out and desired due to their penises, that thing that makes them ‘fascinating’ and determines—in the field of sexuality—how they will behave and negotiate the gender roles they will perform. However, and whatever the level of ‘reaction’ to their bodies, and even though there is no a political will of transgression on the part of travestis, it can be said that their bodies interpellate and mobilise the male/female dichotomy.

Thinking about travestis as an ‘alternative’ or a ‘third gender’ would imply recognising that the male/female binary is ‘overcome’ or ‘transgressed.’ In effect, any attempt to overcome or transgress the binary, in reality, does not modify it but leaves it intact, because, as suggested by Hird (2000), the supposed transgression of gender and sex identities depends on the current dichotomous system for its expression. For example, one person can defy gender rules by dressing and acting one day as a ‘man’ and another as a ‘woman.’ This way, that person breaks up the association of a body with a specific gender identity. However, although it is acknowledged that such an action destabilises the sex/gender system and blurs its boundaries, the meanings of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ remain unchanged because it is ‘transgressed’ within known parameters of gender. Transgression implies a radical reformulation of gender, transcending any sexual difference.

Nonetheless, travestis also reinforce a normalised heterosexuality . Travestis’ gender constructions are intimately related to how they experience and live their bodies and sexualities. In this way, they attach to the bodies and sexual practices a quite ‘conservative’ meaning that, ambiguously, strengthens the male/female binarism. For instance, Roberta, a self-identified transsexual who underwent a sex reassignment surgery, told me that, before the surgery, she loved penetrating men. However, she always ended up regretting the penetration because her feminine appearance was problematic for her when feeling so much pleasure. Roberta also asserted that, unlike travestis who liked drawing men and women’s attention, she wanted to use less silicone prosthesis ‘because I had the [sex reassignment] surgery and I became a woman’ (personal interview, 7 August 2008, Rio de Janeiro). Therefore, Roberta assumed that women are more ‘discrete’ in their way of performing femininity and since she was operated upon she had to behave in that way . Cristina recounted that if travestis imitated women it was because they really liked women, she thought that ‘women’s feminine body shapes are beautiful, their sensitivity, when the women are sensitive for being mothers’ (personal interview, 12 September 2008, Rio de Janeiro). Similar to Roberta, Cristina also associated ‘sensitivity’ to womanhood, something that many travestis admire and aim to imitate (though, without getting rid of their male attributes). Finally, following the same ideas, Rosanne told me that ‘I think a travesti does not want to be ugly , it’s a combination of aesthetics with the psychological. To be a travesti is not only to think about being like a woman but to know how to be beautiful, to be attractive … that is common in a woman’ (personal interview, 27 August 2009, Barcelona). These statements reinforce hegemonic gender norms based on stereotyped conceptions on how to be a ‘woman.’ As it is examined in Chap. 5, travestis also usually seek a boyfriend or marido (husband) who assumes the ‘macho’ role in sexual intercourse and social behaviours, thus reinforcing travestis’ own femininity and strategic ‘submissive’ position. According to Larissa Pelúcio (2009), in travestis’ gender constructions, ‘they subvert the gender and, paradoxically, also emphasise the character of submissiveness behind the contemporary cult to standards of normality, health and beauty’ (184).

Therefore, travestis’ gendered experiences cannot ‘satisfy’ more radical queer assumptions about gender disruption because, as Davis (2009, 102) expressed, ‘unintelligibility may disrupt individual lives.’ Travestis’ particularity lies in the fact that they are capable of performing the gender assigned to men and women, without being men or women. In this way, they can follow normative gender conceptions which provide meaning to their bodies and sexual practices in order to become intelligible subjects without giving up some features that also make them ‘different’ and ‘fascinating.’ It is in the intersection of gender and sexuality that travestis will transit simultaneously among the margins of femininity and masculinity. Consequently, their experiences, bodies, and sexual practices are what provide sense to their gender identities. In fact, it is precisely this chameleon-like ability which can reinforce heteronormative gender norms and, at the same time, that can be very disturbing, which outlines most of the travesti gender expressions . Although for my research participants, such particularity may be called neither ‘transgression’ nor ‘submission,’ it definitively mobilises and interpellates the structures on which the learnt notions on sex, gender, and sexuality lie. In the next and final section, I focus on the critiques of dematerialisation within queer theory to understand the meaning of the material in this research project.

Looking for the Material

We have already advanced the great importance bodies have throughout Brazilian Travesti Migrations. As we explain further in the next chapter, this research is based on an embodied ethnography delineated by the corporeal experiences of the participants and myself (Vartabedian 2015). Whilst bodies are key elements to understand travestis’ gender constructions, as an anthropologist, I also used my own body to get into participants’ universe and become an intelligible subject/researcher . In this way, this embodied research aims to show the body that suffers, enjoys, is transformed, beautified, or injured, taking also into account the ‘sociality of matter’ (Clough 2000), that is to say, the materiality of the bodies is the springboard to examine the social practices and discourses which, ultimately, constitute that matter.

Rahman and Witz (2003) explore how feminists have used the concept of the ‘material.’ In the 1970s, feminist materialists addressed women’s oppression as the historical result of the social relations rooted in capitalism. Also, feminist sociological constructionists’ accounts of the concept ‘gender’ allowed them to overcome the reductionist presumptions based on the biological difference between men and women. Material feminists like Delphy or Hartmann aimed to ‘develop a materialist foundation for a theory of patriarchy’ (Rahman and Witz 2003, 247) in which patriarchy was considered a ‘mode of production’ where men controlled the labour of women in the private and public spheres. In the 1990s, feminists expanded the concept of the material to go beyond the economic. Butler ’s (1998) problematisation of the distinction between the material and cultural emphasised that the social is under-theorised within Marxist materialism and, thus, it was necessary to include the cultural, privileging poststructuralism as the more proper theory to analyse ‘the effectivity of the discursive (that is cultural) rather than the determinism of the material (namely, the economic)’ (Rahman and Witz 2003, 249, emphasis in original).

As we have discussed earlier, Butler (1993) asserts that we cannot consider the matter (that is, the body) as prior to discourse because ‘is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality’ (29). For Butler, the matter is always materialised in the way that has ‘to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed, materializing effects of regulatory power in the Foucauldian sense’ (9–10). Therefore, she reshapes the matter into materiality to denote ‘the process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’ (9). In this way, Butler’s cultural materialism is criticised by the idea that ‘bodies can only ever come to matter through discourse and culture’ (Rahman and Witz 2003, 255). In other words, while querying any ontological stability of gender and sexuality’s construction, Butler evokes materiality as the ‘materialized effects’ of the discursive formation of gender. Although she asseverates that ‘to call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it’ (Butler 1993, 30), materialist feminists consider problematic that poststructuralist and deconstructionist analyses have contributed to an uncertain and ephemeral way to account for a social ontology of gender and sexuality.

Finally, as Rahman and Witz suggest, other feminists have recuperated the body from the term ‘materiality .’ For example, Bordo (1993, 1998), Rothfield (1996), or Young (1994) analyse the embodied practices of gendered and sexualised beings in order to recognise that we are bodies and cannot avoid the physical locatedness in time and space, in a specific socio-cultural context from where we interact with the world. However, this bodily and lived experience cannot be detached from social practice and discourse. The materiality is linked not only with being but also with a ‘similarly practical “doing” of the gendered social—that sense of “materiality” as actual practices and actions’ (Rahman and Witz 2003, 256). Similarly, Hines (2009) refers to an emerging ‘material queer turn’ that aims to address ‘the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed through cultural meanings and practices, and the ways in which gender and sexuality are lived through the body’ (97). In other words, it is necessary to examine the material and cultural together and analyse how discourse, structure, and embodied experiences converge as multiple layers to acknowledge how power relations are produced and resisted. Likewise, Connell (2012) is not satisfied with the exclusive explanation of gender as performative and citational. Rather, she characterises gender as ontoformative because ‘social practice continuously brings social reality into being, and that social reality becomes the ground of new practice, through time’ (866). Brazilian Travesti Migrations, thus, brings the body to the foreground to examine how the material, the discursive, and the embodied are entangled to develop an account of travestis’ gender and sexuality constructions.

This chapter has presented a review of the main theoretical frameworks used to question the sex/gender binary system. Anthropologists and feminist scholars have contributed to destabilising—with disparate efficiency—the male/female binary and visualise the fictional character of sex, that is, there is no correspondence between the sex assigned at birth and the performed gender. The deconstructionist turn, particularly through queer theory and politics, has used trans issues as the paradigm of disruption and transgression . However, queer theory has also been criticised for its radical indeterminacy and detachment of materiality and trans people’s lived experiences. As we see throughout the next chapters, I bring Brazilian travestis’ own particularities and bodily experiences to explore gender, sexuality, and space as structuring axes in travestis’ lives.