Trans activism in Latin America

Introduction

Like the contingents suggested by the descriptors trans and transgender, trans activism as a civil rights and resistance movement is varied, answering to different demands and articulated in different ways across different geopolitical spaces. This paper looks broadly at the manifestations trans activism has taken on in Spanish-speaking Latin America, examining the rise of a movement defending the rights and place in society of travesti and transsexual people in countries like Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Mexico and setting it in relief with trans activism as seen in Anglo-American and Australian contexts.

The evolution of transgender and trans as descriptors and political strategies

Although the term transgender was coined in the 1970s by Virginia Prince[1] in the USA, it only gained popularity there in the 1990s, alongside the rise of queer theory, as an umbrella term for a number of sub-categories, including transsexuals, cross-dressers, androgynous people, drag kings and drag queens. Some transsexuals began to prefer the term transgender because it sounded less clinical and put the emphasis on gender, which more than sexuality, was the issue for the individual who considered themselves incorrectly assigned at birth. Transgender for some provided an alternative to the medical model of the transsexual as ‘trapped in the wrong body’ and suffering from a pathology called gender dysphoria. It was a re-naming away from the doctor’s textbooks. Other transsexuals have stated a dislike of the term for its borg-like spread[2], collapsing the differences between the subgroups and their demands. Some transsexuals do not relate to any label at all, seeing themselves as men and women who through surgical and hormonal interventions have corrected a physical error. Thus the claim that they share ground with cross-dressers, drag kings or queens may be flatly denied.

The term transgender, as ambiguous as it may be, was an effort to unite diverse groups on the basis of the sense of difference from that which was determined for them as biological sex. Kate Bornstein underlined its political potential by arguing for a definition of transgender to include all those who are transgressively gendered and thus opposed to gender normativity – the prescribed roles and behaviours automatically dictated by culture to the entities ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and the behaviours described as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (234-5). This went above and beyond the desire of some transsexuals to blend in to society in their new roles as men and women and erase their former gender histories, and marked a call for conscientious objection to the two gender system in Anglo-American society. On this view, transgender people were not ‘trapped in the wrong body’ but rather, the wrong culture (Wilchins 30). Transgender was deliberately political, interested in concepts such as gender fluidity, ‘thirdness’, being out as transsexual, gender different, and contesting representations of such individuals as well as opening up space in culture for gender diversity. Many activists are increasingly using terms such as trans, transwoman and transman to avoid some of the problems which the term transgender has come to present in inter-group organising. I intersperse them here to reflect the patchwork variegations of the movement, although I understand the use of transgender and trans is changing and multifarious. ‘Transgender’ has also been criticised by some for its perceived middle class presuppositions which may further advance the defence of freedom of gender expression but ignore the specificities of class and race and how these interact[3]. This point shall be returned to at several points in this paper.

Being out in the open, openly identified as transsexual, transgendered, a cross-dresser or bi-gendered was a strategy not unlike that of coming out of the closet in the waves of gay and lesbian activism of the 1970s and 1980s. For spokespeople like Leslie Feinberg, author of Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992), and Transgender Warriors (1996), the banner ‘transgender’ had the potential to establish a social justice coalitionist platform among all gender-variant people who do not conform to social norms for typical men and women, and who suffer political oppression as a result. Alliances could thereby be forged between the transsexual community, the gay and lesbian community, among others. Feinberg and other transgender activists thus reinstated the potential for coalition politics along GLBT lines, which was incipient at the birth of the gay liberation movement in the United States. In the United States, transgender activism has had an on-going connection to the state of play in gay and lesbian politics, although it has not always been without conflict.

The trans movement in the US and Australia: brief overview

Speaking of the birth the first militant form of trans activism in the US, oral historian Susan Stryker observes:

Militant transsexual politics first erupted in San Francisco in 1966, when transgender street prostitutes in that city’s impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood rioted against police harassment at a popular all-night restaurant, Compton’s Cafeteria […] By the later 1960s, some strands of transgender activism were closely linked to gay liberation. Most famously, transgender ‘street queens’ played an instrumental role in sparking the riots at New York's Stonewall Inn in 1969 (Stryker).

Notably we see the formation by Sylvia Rivera[4] and others of STAR – Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which will later substitute the word ‘transvestite’ for ‘transgender’.
The Transsexual Activist Organization (TAO) was founded by Angela Keyes Douglas in the wake of these developments in 1970 to specify the needs of the transsexual struggle. This was functional until 1977. ACLU Transsexual Rights Committee, which operated from 1980-3 from South California, did pioneering work on employment rights for transsexuals there, state insurance funding for hormonal, surgical and counselling treatments for transsexual people and the right for post-op transsexual prisoners to be housed alongside others of their gender (Brown).

The emergence of a mainstreaming transgender movement was partially sidelined, however, when the growing gay and lesbian liberation agenda sought to declare itself distinct from the claims of transsexuals, transvestites and other gender atypical individuals, even within their own ranks. Lesbian feminist attacks on transsexuals, most notably via Janice Raymond’s inflammatory treatise The Transsexual Empire, marginalised transpeople in gay and lesbian circles and cut off political allegiances at the root.

The nineties saw a shift helped by two factors: the problematising of identity politics as seen in gay, lesbian and feminist debates and the advent of the internet. Scholars and activists of the new queer theory brought questions of identity in all its variations back into the fray, including gender identity. Transpeople of various kinds started to be accepted into new dialogues of resistance to normative paradigms around sexuality, gender and personhood. A minority smaller in numbers if compared to already out and visible gays and lesbians, many transpeople increasingly found contact all over the nation and the world through the internet. The main issues activating the movement in the US and elsewhere in the English-speaking world have been the following:

1. Legally changing gender in all documentation
2. Anti-discrimination protections around gender identity and gender expression (prevent dismissal from work, harassment, guarantee housing and services access etc)
3. State paid medical coverage for Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS)
4. Fair and balanced reporting in the media
5. Trans in prisons
6. Trans medical care
7. Hate crimes reporting, investigation and prevention
8. Trans-parenting and marriage rights
9. Rest room issues at work
10. GID reform[5]

Activists groups in the nineties sprung up all over the place. Chapters of organisations like Transgender Nation[6], Transexual Menace[7] and It's Time America[8] and most recently, GenderPAC[9], established websites on the internet and this facilitated communication from the Western to the Eastern seaboard and to other parts of the English-speaking world: the UK[10], Canada and Australia.
‘Transgender’, then, begins in North America – like queer – as a resistance to strict identity labels (like the medicalised idea of the transsexual) and gains momentum throughout the nineties beyond the USA, although its meaning changes and is contested according to setting and the group using the term or rejecting it. Transgender activists, in dialogue with queer theorists, begin to articulate not just a set of political strategies but a whole body of theory and inquiry, which have been broadly called ‘transgender theory’ and ‘transgender studies’.
In the state of Victoria, Australia, the rights group TransGender Victoria is established in 1999 in the wake of such developments[11]. Transsexual groups which had previously defined their agendas in terms of the rights of transsexuals begin to broaden their platforms, although this is by no means uniformly true. The early days of trans activism in Sydney see a movement whose concerns are very much tied to transsexuals involved in sex work and the drag queen scene – street girls and show girls. Groups working on welfare issues for transsexuals were formed based on the gay and lesbian advocacy formats that were in existence after gay liberation took hold in Australia. Some gays and lesbians sidelined the involvement of trannies[12] for the kinds of reasons already mentioned in reference to the US context. All the time though, individuals like Roberta Perkins worked with and advocated on behalf of trannies involved in prostitution and for greater legislative change. The diverse groups were not galvanised, however, until the coming of transgender theory and discourse[13]. The emphasis on the individual suffering from a disorder, treated by therapists and surgeons, kept things at a personal level. Transgender promised to raise things to a political level.

Latin America: the birth of a movement

The decade comprising 1990-2000 sees the eruption into the public arena of a coalition of transsexual and travesti individuals – primarily involved in the street sex trade – in Latin America. Often working with gay and lesbian groups established in the previous decade, these activists come from backgrounds not dissimilar to the original trans activists from the U.S. and Australia in the seventies – street sex work. Given the kinds of global flows that identity categories and styles are not exempt from, a very interesting development is the appropriation by many of these groups of the word transgender, its middle class history notwithstanding. It is rendered in Spanish as transgénero. ‘Trans’ is also being deployed in Spanish[14]. Admittedly for some, transgender is itself an exceptional term since it may serve less as an identity category and more as a point of political resistance which creates links between people based on shared oppression. It is being deployed in this way by diverse travesti and transsexual rights groups in Latin America. Transgender theory and studies are also finding dissemination amongst these groups, who in their taking up of the name ‘transgender’ are immersing themselves in gender theory and articulating their platforms for action in a very postmodern way, but without losing sight of the particularities of identity. The transgender movement or trans activist scene in countries like Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela differs in terms of the constituents it primarily answers to. Although open to currents forged by principally middle-class Anglo thinkers and activists, trans activism in Latin America responds to the demands of a group of people not just marginalised for their gender expression, but economically too: travestis/transsexuals in prostitution. The trans movement in America, the UK and Australia seeks change for a diverse group of individuals located all over the place who are exposed to discrimination because of their gender identity and expression. In Latin America, meanwhile, it originates from and continues to work on behalf of persons physically and economically ghettoised in their geopolitical spaces and in defence of their identities. The leaders of the movement are involved in an interesting blend of theory, situated knowledge, use of experience and action. Travesti/transsexual activism in Latin America is not simply an offshoot of trans activism in Anglo spheres. It is, rather, a new development which works along lines of analysis sometimes absent from traditional (Anglo) transgender efforts: class, race and the social negotiation of identity. Tellingly, the role of the state and its institutions and the effects of neoliberalism in Latin America are also in range for these trans activists.

What follows is a breakdown of the chief activist groups from these countries, their activities and some of the political interventions they have engaged in. The foregoing statement of the specificity of their struggle will be elaborated on in each segment.

Argentina

According to Josefina Fernández, travesti activism first becomes visible in the public arena in Argentina in 1991 with the foundation of Asociación de Travestis Argentinas (ATA – Argentinian Travesti Association) (116). This occurs in a decade where public protest ironically is in decline and social movements generally begin to see themselves split by internal divisions after a brief democratic opening, as Fernández notes (116). This division maps itself on to the beginnings of the movement when ATA subdivides into two groups – Travesti/Transsexual Organisation of the Republic of Argentina (OTTRA) and the Association for the Defence of Travesti and Transsexual Identity (ALITT). OTTRA saw the need to de-emphasise the involvement in prostitution of travestis and transsexuals and ALITT in contrast, argued it was a necessary platform in the struggle for the livelihood of their constituents (117). Later the Argentinian Travesti Transsexual and Transgender Association (ATTTA) was established as the chief coalition group (united under the inclusion of the term transgender) and information source with a central website for the concerns of all groups included.

Although the term travesti translates into English as transvestite, there is a substantial gap between the meaning of the term as used by travesti subjects themselves and Anglo understandings of ‘transvestite’. The alliance between travesti and transsexual individuals is of major consequence since travesti in most Latin American settings represents she who lives full-time in her assumed gender, has had hormonal and other interventions and is distinguished from transexuales primarily by virtue of being non-operative. Hence for travestis, their identity represents their sense of social and personal gendered self, not a recreational pastime.
Interestingly, the movement is galvanised with the help of legal advisors from the gay group Gays por los Derechos Civiles (Gays for Civil Rights) precisely on the issue of travestis/transsexuals involved in street prostitution. This is the watershed moment for the movement: which gathers force to contest a neighbourhood informant group denouncing travesti sex workers (116). When the Edicts Against Public Scandals expired in Buenos Aires, regulatory laws to control prostitution were not in place. This produced furious debate on what kind of laws would replace them. Into this breach, travesti/transsexual individuals manifest their point of view, being the chief protagonists or antagonists depending on the political/moral persuasion of the periodical discussing the issue. The revised Código de convivencia containing Article 71 is then installed. It aims to regulate prostitution. Trans groups in Buenos Aires continue to lodge protests publicly around this issue. Most recently, the effecting of Article 89 amends the Código Contravencional to adopt an abolitionist strategy on prostitution in the capital. The regulation of prostitution has never been a straightforward affair, given the corruption of police who use such prohibitions to further hassle, extort and abuse sex workers, both trans and non-trans.

From the beginning, travestis/transsexuals in Argentina articulate their activism in a two-pronged manner: (i) resisting the legal state of affairs which facilitates arbitrary incarceration through vague police edicts against cross-dressing, causing scandal or offence to public morality and modesty (in Buenos Aires and in other provinces) and (ii) via an interrogation of the symbolic representations of their identity in the culture, especially as evidenced in the media. Travestis themselves begin to form consciousness-raising groups to analyse cultural productions of themselves and plot their resistance to abject formulations of their identity. This is achieved through efforts at visibilisation in all arenas: to reclaim space, so to speak and announce themselves as a movement. They do this allied with gay and lesbian groups, leading pride marches through the city of Buenos Aires, gaining national coverage in major newspapers and television channels.

Entering into alliances with gay and lesbian groups brought travestis/transsexuals into contact with feminists within the latter group in particular. Travestis/transsexuals here began to sharpen their discourse to convince those who retained jaded notions of their identity even within queer circles to gain support.

Public political performances like ‘A night in the police station’, staged within the context of gay and lesbian events, articulated dramatically the kinds of state-sponsored violence travestis/transsexuals are commonly victims of (122). Protests following the police detention, torture and death in custody of Córdoba transsexual sex worker, Vanesa Ledesma, also underlined the kind of risks trans sex workers run in the current social-legal setting. This case was chosen by Amnesty International as one of six symbolic cases on the existence of torture to commemorate their fortieth anniversary. In theatre and public protests, travesti activists have demonstrated that the oppression faced by trans in Argentina is of a complex nature: in part owing to their criminalisation as subjects involved in illicit street sex work, their economic and social marginalisation as members of an underclass who frequently come from poor neighbourhoods and have had restricted access to the kinds of privileges enjoyed by Argentina’s middle classes: full education, housing, health and employment opportunities. All this things are linked to the fact that they are stigmatised by Argentinian culture at large. The following speech, delivered by the travesti contingent of the 1999 Buenos Aires LGBT pride march, registers well the terms of cultural stigma and the kinds of political-economic machinations that take advantage of it:

Hello dissolute negritas! Hello exhibitionists! Hello AIDS-infected masqueraders. Hello men dressed as women!

These words are very familiar to us, they still resound in our memories and they will for some time now. They’re the discrediting phrases most used by a middle class that feels its own hypocrisy threatened by the glow of our burning silicon breasts, phrases used by corrupt politicians that don’t hesitate in profiting from hunger and social exclusion, and used also by a church hostile to travestis, a church that so clearly distinguishes between gold and copper […] silver and tin […] but is never clear when it comes to working with the police, those provoking the violence, the death of 82 travesti friends and 30, 000 disappeared. But we negritas, dissolute, exhibitionistic masqueraders have been fighting for a while to strip the veil off a society which only sees the world as man or woman, leaving behind the infinite richness of the difference in between. And we won’t stop doing it, because that veil’s blindness kills us. Because we haven’t come to ask for a space, we’ve come to take our space. Fellow travestis, from the shadow of hypocrisy, shine your light! (203)

ALITT, under the direction of activists like Lohana Berkins, have been seeking legal registration of their group. In 2003 they issued a plan to seek state recognition so they could function as an entity to work with police and government and receive funding. They outlined their objectives as the following:

1. To fight for the acceptance of travesti identity by state and society as a real identity
2. To achieve full legal personhood for travestis and transsexuals in Argentina
3. To obtain a better quality of life for travestis
4. The implementation of a campaign in favour of travesti-transsexual citizenship, demanding rights to health, education, work, housing and other social benefits; to be achieved via education awareness campaigns, participatory workshops, state and civil organisation training programs and conferences to debate and work towards non-discrimination… undertaken via the distribution of information, publications and workshops by travesti groups in the places they live and work
5. The provision of spaces of reflection, campaigns to spread ideas and support to contribute to the above and the development of sex/gender rights and anti-discrimination materials by a network of researchers in travesti groups and in other non-government organizations that work with human rights
6. To encourage the participation of ALITT in national and international fora for human rights. (‘Protestemos’[15])

That struggle for social and legal recognition continues to this day. The Argentinian government rejected ALITT’s application for legal status, arguing that:

It does not seem […] that ‘To fight for recognition of transvestism as an identity by both society and the State’ nor ‘building travesti-transsexual citizenship’ offer a valuable framework for the development of coexistence, becoming part of the community’s spiritual and cultural heritage (‘Protest’).

Just as the conditions that transpeople face in Argentina are varied and multi-causational, so too the response of their activism in the public realm. The climate of competing class interests, recession and economic rationalism informs the situation to a major degree for these people and that is explicit in their activism. Like transpeople in the English-speaking world, travestis and transsexuals face a scenario of daily harassment and violence on many fronts. Unlike in our present-day setting, they do not have the choice of blending in or cocooning and do not enjoy the gains obtained in such things as the Gender Recognition Act (recently approved in the UK) and other legal protections in various US states are still out of reach. No Latin American nation permits a legal change of sex in its registro civil (civil registry, rather like that which pertains to births, deaths and marriages).

By necessity, then, Argentinian activism has taken on a more militant flavour than some of its Anglo counterparts, questioning the trans and difference-phobic system and its methods of social and economic marginalisation. Although not explored in detail here, groups like RedTrans which also work on behalf of female-to-male transsexuals, and activists like Mauro Cabral have been key, along with ALITT and ATTTA, in working with rights bodies like the International Gay and Lesbian Rights Commission and Amnesty International in raising awareness and demanding responses to what transpeople face in the nation. In Argentina, federal law prohibits surgeons from conducting Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) with up to 10 years imprisonment under the Penal Code for such operations. The decriminalisation of SRS, alongside the petitioning for the right to change one’s gender on State ID cards and birth certificates, has been a major concern for activists. The struggle for the right to legally ratify one’s gender identity has been known in US, UK and Australian contexts. I do not wish to suggest that trans activism in Argentina, the US, UK and Australia do not share some important goals and theoretical underpinnings. RedTrans, ALITT and ATTTA also have maintained dialogues with trans groups in the US and UK. As a contrast, however, US/Australia activist efforts on workplace transition and coming out to your boss are not even on the table in a setting where at least 80% of mtf transsexuals and travestis work in the sex industry and in a society that is not yet willing to even conceive of employing a travesti or transsexual in ordinary job. It is important to remember these distinctions.

Chile

Chile is also testament to the need to understand different forms of trans activism in their specific geopolitical locations. Travesti and transsexual activists traditionally proceed from the lower classes in the big cities and confront similar social realities of exclusion, stigma and marginalisation. Santiago has a large community of travesti sex workers who have begun to organise and fight for freedom from police mistreatment and access to those legal rights enjoyed by other Chileans but often denied to them on the basis of their difference – class and gender difference. There are differences, however, between Argentina and Chile. In Argentina, as we have seen, SRS procedures are outlawed. In Chile they are legal. The leading activist group in defence of the rights of transgenders in Chile, Traveschile, applied for and received legal registration by the Municipality of Santiago in 2001. The current administration under Lagos is much more reformist than previous ones, especially in dealing with issues of human rights.
Traveschile, functioning as a legal body since 2001, states its objectives on its website as follows:

1. To promote the respect of self-determination and the human rights of transgender people, as well as the recognition of specific demands of our community
2. Social, political and cultural administrative measures that permit the establishment of an industry-specific district in the city of Santiago
3. Promote the organization, unity and development of a transgender community at the national level
4. De-ghettoise the transgender population via intercultural exchange between the people and institutions that make up Chilean society
5. Promote support and advocacy initiatives that allow response to health, dietary, education and workplace training needs and projects for the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other STIs (‘Proyectos’).
Traveschile has coordinated a remarkable set of activities to these ends. In the area of human rights, notes their website, they have reported at a national and international level the conditions of discrimination faced by the transgender community in Chile. They have forged contacts with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Carla Antonelli, the Spanish transsexual activist who maintains a website on human rights abuses against transpeople worldwide, and Amnesty International, Chile. They have sought to establish fora of debate to shape public opinion on these issues, reporting on and sensitising the public to hate crimes committed between 1987 and 2002 which remain unexplained. Traveschile has campaigned against Article 373 of the Penal Code which empowers police to arrest transgenders conducting sex work in public spaces for offences against public morality and modesty. They have also reported publicly the actions of police in the media and through their coordinator Silvia Parada, conducted liaison work with high-ranking officers of the military and civilian police (‘Proyectos’).

Efforts in the sorely needed area of education and training have been threefold: courses in dressmaking, in HIV/AIDS prevention and small business planning and management. Traveschile works to create alternatives to prostitution for the transgender population by stimulating their skills base and tailoring their needs to relevant objectives (‘Proyectos’).
Traveschile also works on behalf of transgender inmates. This is an area of support and advocacy that has garnered backing in activist circles in the English-speaking trans world recently. It is especially vital in Chile, as each week transgender people are arrested under Article 373. There are currently 70 transgender inmates in the country serving sentences whose legal processes have become bogged down with little hope of resolution on the part of the respective tribunals. Traveschile visits jails and assists with the material, legal and other needs of these inmates (‘Proyectos’).

Mexico

The trans movement in Mexico, as in Argentina, has worked parallel with sectors of the gay and lesbian community, gaining support from activists such as Norma Mogrovejo and others, who have insisted on understanding the intertwining nature of homophobia and transphobia in Mexican culture. Sectors from trans communities all over the nation have marched in gay and lesbian pride parades which have extended their platform to the defence and celebration of all kinds of sexual diversity. The main issue drawing together this coalition of queers and transpeople is the violence inflicted on sex/gender diverse people in Mexico.

In Mexico activists have been instrumental in bringing about anti-discrimination statutes at the federal level which effectively cover discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression (gestures and corporeal attitudes are proscribed as grounds to dismiss someone from a workplace). However, there is still a major breach between law and practice. On a positive note, there are signs as of last year of a reconsideration of the need to change one’s legal sex as written in the registro civil with the publication of a paper in government circles suggesting its viability in some cases. However, the unevenness of guarantees for transsexual/travesti people can be seen in the case of Tecate, Baja California State. In 2002 local council passed an amendment to the city’s Police and Good Governance Act (Article 34.15, Chapter VI) providing jail terms and fines (40 days salary) for ‘men who dress as women and move around public places, causing perturbation’ (‘Ordinance’). Many such sanctions have been on local law books for over half a century, particularly in some of the more far-flung states. The fact that prostitution is illegal in all parts of the nation also creates punitive avenues for the detention and incarceration of trans sex workers. This is an all too common scenario.

Mexico contributes the highest number of hate crimes toward sexual minorities in Spanish-speaking America, which frequently go uninvestigated by authorities, who largely dismiss them as crímenes pasionales (crimes of passion). The issue of violence has hence been the chief rallying point across the nation for vulnerable GLBT populations, especially in the context of sex work.

Socially, queer and transpeople have had to forge these bonds in the wake of familial rejection. Expulsion from the family unit means not just a break in affective bonds, but a material breach as family units function to support each other economically in Latin societies. The intense social stigma associated with assuming another gender combined with expulsion from families and the neighbourhoods they reside in, places transpeople in the most economically and culturally fragmented space. Prostitution is a means of restitution to forge new links, families and survive where no other work is available.

The emergence of an activist movement to meet these challenges starts in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in 1994, with the formation of Comunidad Transgénero (Transgender Community). It starts off in response to police violence against trans sex workers in that state but proceeds to advocate on behalf of travesti/transsexual people all over Mexico. Significantly Comunidad Transgénero is the first (and so far only) group of its kind to gain legal recognition in Mexico.
This group began conciliatory dialogues with the authorities and the government of Guadalajara in 1995 around police behaviour and good government with the objective of guaranteeing the peaceful coexistence between neighbourhood residents and trans sex workers in that city. The aim was to allow the workers to continue their activities free of harassment and in an atmosphere of tolerance (‘Noticias Agosto’).

As in the case of efforts by Traveschile, many of the 300 sitting members of the group have engaged in programs for trans sex worker health and STI prevention, promoting involvement of travesti and transpeople as citizens participating in politics, education and the struggle for human rights. Community work in hairdressing has been arranged to foster social integration (‘Noticias Agosto’). Paty Betancourt, head of Comunidad Transgénero, has networked with other travesti and transsexual groups across Mexico and further afield. She recently took part in several plenaries on Trans Politics and Social Change in New York[16], including ‘Trans Activism Across Borders’ and ‘Policing and the Transgender Community: A Global Perspective’.

Colombia

The Transgenderist Support Network (TRAN-SER)[17] based in Bogotá, was formed in 1998 and gained legal status in 2003. Its background is in psychotherapeutic care. Its activist aims are largely reformist and educative and it frequently works with other groups to meet the needs of its constituents. It is also involved in lobbying for legal protections in defence of transgender persons (‘Objetivos’).

Perú

Peru has a range of groups working around issues of sexual diversity whose political history is leftist and militant. Trans issues are thus strongly linked to general human rights and social justice. Raíz Diversidad Sexual[18] and Instituto Runa[19] are both coordinating groups which work with LGBT populations.

Belissa Andía Pérez is a leading activist who has worked with all the significant groups, both nationally and internationally: Red Transgéneros, Claveles Rojos, Movimiento de Integración y Liberación Homosexual (MOVILH, Chile)[20] and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

Venezuela

Police violence against travesti sex workers has been the major issue for Respeto a la Personalidad, Venezuela’s chief trans activist group. The region of Carabobo in particular has witnessed the most severe actions on the part of police toward travestis. The group has galvanised around arbitrary detentions and incarceration by municipal police forces which has amounted to an organised form of persecution, often employing torture of the individuals arrested. Local prohibitions against offending public morality and causing scandal, as well as anti-prostitution statutes are readily used as punitive avenues for what could be described as a reign of terror against trans there. Two young transsexuals found shot, Dayana Nieves and Michelle Paz, were but the most high profile examples of a series of police killings between 2001-2003. Activists responded strongly to these cases, denouncing the police in national and international fora. They have also lobbied against the kinds of laws throughout the nation which facilitate police persecution of their populations. Organiser Maury Oviedo was forced into hiding after police issued a warrant for her arrest on dubious grounds. Denunciation of these crimes have often been met with reprisals on the part of the authorities. The space for activism in such settings is thus extremely restricted. In general, the situation for travestis and transsexuals in terms of many of the legal issues fought for in other zones requires urgent attention.

Concluding remarks

Like the early phases of trans activism in the US and Australia, then, trans activism in Latin America is frequently instigated through alliances with gay and lesbian groups and responds to the demands of a group marginalised because of their gender expression and their involvement in prostitution. The challenges trans activists face are often more basic and systemic than those faced by trans activists in the English-speaking world, who with several decades of formative work to cover the needs of their constituents (legal name change, state medical insurance coverage, non-discrimination in the workplace) have already created a more favourable setting for people in all stages of gender transition. Punitive codes that proscribe gender variant behaviour and circumscribe travesti/transsexual identity in Latin America represent significant obstacles to activists. It is useful to remember that before the waves of gay and trans activism swept through the United States, the UK and Australia in the seventies, eighties and nineties, such laws were also commonplace in the English-speaking world. Indeed, that is what the Stonewall Rebellion was about[21]. The levels of tolerated legal violence against transpeople in Latin America are alarming and suggest that locationally, transpeople are much more ghettoised and excluded from mainstream culture than in the English-speaking world. Activists recognise that this location is multi-causational: in part because of gender expression, in part because of class, in part because of the criminalisation of sex work and their increased visibility on the streets. The church and its opposition to sexual minorities is also a major hurdle. Church attitudes continue to influence and hamper public policy, especially around prostitution reform, HIV/AIDS prevention and the recognition of the basic rights and human dignity of gays, lesbians and trans. The US obviously also has a formidable Christian lobby which opposes at every turn legal improvements for LGBT individuals, but they do not have the kind of deep traditional authority and the power to shape opinion that the Catholic Church has in Mexico, Peru and Colombia, for instance.

In spite of these challenges, trans groups in Latin America have worked their way into the public sphere and on to local and federal government agenda as well as in the academic realm. The sea change noted in the US and the UK around transgender issues and representation – more transpeople in government offices, more trans representation on television, more and more major companies including gender identity and expression in their anti-discrimination statutes – can only follow eventually thanks to the grounded and self-aware efforts by activists in Argentina and Chile, for example. Argentina already has its first positive and major travesti character in the popular comedy, Los Roldán. Mexico has its own version too.

Trans activism in both Latin America and the English-speaking world shares some basic objectives, most notably, in campaigns against violence. While Latin American trans activists also find the analysis of Anglo transgender theorists which reinterpret gender as something fluid and changeable and not tied to ‘biological’ sex useful in visualising and articulating their identity, current efforts are not restricted to fighting on the grounds of the defence of gender expression, but rather, a whole raft of interrelated issues. Travesti/transsexual activists recognise that their identities are not just a question of individual liberties, but also the liberties or potential for autonomy of a whole class of people who, for reasons related to the economic climate, social and religious stigma and the legal system, are produced as a caste of second class citizens, one of the most marginalised in the present day. It is from this impulse that activists currently work and also re-meld the kinds of theories and principles of how gender oppression is actualised in the world, understandings often missing from American or Australian gender theory and activism. Recent calls in the US for a reanalysis of transphobic violence taking into account that the vast majority of transpeople killed in hate crimes come from non-white, working class or sex worker backgrounds would seem logical from a Latin American perspective, while in American, British and Australian circles they have not been primary considerations.

ENDNOTES


[1] Prince coined this term ‘as a contrast with the term “transsexual”, to refer to someone who does not desire surgical intervention to “change sex,” and/or who considers that they fall “between” genders, not identifying strictly to one gender or the other, identifying themselves as neither fully male, nor female’ (‘Transgender’).
[2] Transsexual activist, Margaret Deirdre O’Hartigan has characterised the term transgender in this way.
[3] How might we explain the preference of trans over transgender? The following quote is useful:

Trans - describing persons whose gender does not conform to norms, e.g., a trans man, the trans community. This is taken from the prefix used with several words used to describe gender variance, i.e., transvestite, transsexual, transgender. It is sometimes used as a less-controversial synonym of ‘transgender,’ in that ‘trans’ references, but does not specify, transvestite, transsexual and transgender people, as well as other gender variances. This makes it a fluid descriptor which is a broad, yet specific reference depending on context, which avoids the problems of the term transgender. ‘Transgender’ is problematic on several grounds. While the term ‘transgenderist’ was originally created to contrast with the terms transvestite and transsexual, referring to those who whose live in a sex role different from their anatomical sex, but who do not desire sex reassignment surgery (Holly 1991:31), ‘transgender’ has been extended by some to refer to all gender-variant people. Some criticize this extension on the grounds that it creates a problematic category which unites persons of differing, and perhaps conflicting political interests. Moreover, the understanding of ‘transgender’ as implying that gender is a social or psychological construct can ironically result in a solidification of the binary nature of ‘biological’ sex (Valentine 2001:2). Further complicating the picture, ‘transgender’ is a ‘discourse in motion,’ a term controversial even among those whom it purports to describe, and is primarily a white middle class US and UK identifier, reproducing social hierarchies of race, class and gender. (Ibid:7-8). For these reasons, many people prefer to use the term ‘trans’ (Weiss).
[4] Rivera was one of the original participants in the Stonewall riots.
[5] GID is an abbreviation for Gender Identity Disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition IV (DSM-IV) as a psychopathological condition, otherwise known as Gender Dysphoria. Although a diagnosis of GID enables access to treatment and transition for transsexuals, some activists have called for transgender conditions to be eliminated from the DSM, as it pathologises their identities.
[6] Transgender Nation was an offshoot of Queer Nation. Says Stryker: ‘Transgender Nation noisily dragged transgender issues to the forefront of San Francisco’s queer community, and at the local level successfully integrated transgender concerns with the political agendas of lesbian, gay, and bisexual activists to forge a truly inclusive glbtq community. Transgender Nation organized a media-grabbing protest at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association to call attention to the official pathologization of transgender phenomena’ (Stryker). It folded in 1994.
[7] Transexual Menace, founded in 1994 by Riki Wilchins, ‘tapped into and provided an outlet for the outrage many transgender people experienced in the brutal murder of Brandon Teena, a transgender youth, and two of his friends in a farmhouse in rural Nebraska on December 31, 1993. The murders, depicted in Kimberly Peirce's Academy Award-winning feature film Boys Don't Cry (2000), called dramatic attention to the serious, on-going problem of anti-transgender violence and hate crimes’ (Stryker).
[8] Formed in 1994, ITA lists its aims on its website: ‘1. To end job discrimination against transgendered people. 2. To end the harassment, violence and hate crimes committed against transgendered people. 3. To secure health care access and third-party reimbursement for the medical conditions of transgendered people. 4. To secure the parental rights of transgendered persons in divorce cases and their rights to adopt children. 5. To provide for hassle-free re-documentation for transgendered people, including new, unadulterated birth certificates, driver's licenses, school transcripts, and the retention of prior credit histories’ (It’s Time, America!).
[9] Formed and coordinated by Riki Wilchins, the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition is ‘the largest national organization in the United States devoted to ending discrimination against gender diversity. GenderPAC, which has sponsored an annual lobbying day in Washington, D. C., since the late 1990s, is but the most visible of many transgender political groups to emerge over the last decade’ (Stryker). It recently generalised its platform to cover discrimination on the basis of gender expression for all people, trans and non-trans alike.
[10] The UK’s most visible and active trans organisation is Press For Change. See: http://www.pfc.org.uk/.
[11] According to their website: ‘The objectives of TransGender Victoria are: (1) to achieve justice and equity for transgender people and their supporters; (2) to consult with the transgender community; (3) promote understanding of transgender issues; (4) to address areas of disadvantage and discrimination against transgender people; (5) to act alone or in concert with other persons or organisations in the furtherance of any or all of the objectives of the Association; (6) to do such other things as the Association may consider being necessary and desirable to achieve and advance the objectives of the Association’ http://home.vicnet.net.au/~victrans/.
[12] This was an Australian term for transsexuals whose use continues to the present day. It has strong class resonances. In hypothetical terms, a middle class transsexual woman with job security may be less likely to self-define as ‘tranny’, whereas a trans sex worker may indeed relate to the term. Trannies tended to be the most visible of transpeople.
[13] As noted by Robert Reynolds: ‘Transsexuals had begun to organise in the late 1970s. In 1981 the NSW group changed its name to the Australian Transsexuals Association and set out to develop national links. The organisation’s focus was very much the kind of welfare and support work that many gay and lesbian organizations were undertaking at the time (counselling, employment and housing assistance), but the group set up a subcommittee to look into lobbying and media outreach. Its work was supported by the Gay Solidarity Group, which leapt at the chance to express solidarity with the social and political aims of the group. 41 The emergence of transgender politics, as opposed to transsexual, represented the application of gay movement arguments to a group that was not actually gay; evidence that liberationist ideas could indeed have as wide an application as had been claimed for them. Transgender activists' first breakthrough was to reject the hard distinction between male and female. Drawing upon the feminist critique of gender, they argued that it was neither necessary nor desirable that people force themselves to conform to society's norms of masculinity and femininity. Their own lives and personalities told them that they, at least, should not to do so. It followed, then (and here the liberationist rejection of the medicalisation of sexuality became important), that surgery to bring personality and body into conformity was equally unnecessary. As Roberta Perkins, one of the first in Australia to make these arguments, suggested in 1984,”‘It's not about changing the body so much as changing the lifestyle”. 42 If change was required, it was society, not the transgendered person or their body, that should adapt. This argument was directed as much at transgendered people who still believed in the old medical model as to the wider world’ (Reynolds).

[14] The publication of works like Sexualidades migrantes. Género y transgénero (2003) and others demonstrate the incorporation of such neologisms into Spanish at academic and activist levels. The terms have also been used in Spain for some time and are circulated on websites throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
[15] All translations from websites in Spanish are mine.
[16] http://web.gc.cuny.edu/clags/transpoliticsinfo.htm
[17] http://www.geocities.com/trans_ser/
[18] http://www.raizdiversidadsexual.org/
[19] http://www.runa.org.pe/
[20] http://www.movilh.org/
[21] Tired of arrests on the grounds of kissing, performing indecent acts or wearing ‘at least’ three items of clothing of the opposite gender, patrons of this bar rioted against police oppression. Those arrested were primarily ‘those without IDs, those dressed in the clothes of the opposite gender’ (Duberman 192). Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues paints a vivid and oftentimes harrowing portrait of this police persecution of butches, nellies, trans and drag performers in the period.

Works Cited


Asociación Travestis Transexuales Transgéneros Argentinas. 20 May 2005 .

Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Brown, Kay. ‘ACLU Transsexual Rights Committee.’ Transsexual, Transgender and Intersex History. May 20, 2005 .

Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: A Dutton Book, 1993.

‘En memoria de.’ Red Carla Antonelli: Portal de información transexual. 2003. 20 May 2005 <http://www.carlaantonelli.com/archivos_en_memoria_de.htm>.

Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. New York: World View Forum, 1992.

---. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Fernández, Josefina. Cuerpos desobedientes. Travestismo e identidad de género. Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004.

It’s Time, America! October 8, 2003. May 20, 2005 <http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Heights/7396/Its_Time_America.html>.

Namaste, Viviane K. Invisible Lives: the Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

‘Noticias Agosto.’ Red Carla Antonelli: Portal de información transexual. August 2004. 20 May 2005 <http://www.carlaantonelli.com/noticias_Agosto2004.htm>.

‘Objetivos.’ Red de Apoyo a Transgeneristas. May 20, 2005 <http://www.geocities.com/trans_ser/popup.html>.

‘Ordinance Against "Men Who Dress as Women"’ Gay Law News. May 20, 2005 .

‘Protest Denial of Legal Registration to Transgender Organization.’ International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. May 20, 2005 .

‘Protestemos contra la negación de personería jurídica a una organización de travestis y transexuales.’ International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. 20 May 2005 <http://www.iglhrc.org/site/spanish/section.php?id=39&pos=0&print=1&detail=35>.

‘Proyectos.’ TravesChile. May 20, 2005 <http://www.traveschile.cl/html/proyectos.htm>.

Reynolds, Robert. ‘The End of Gay?’ 20 May 2005 <http://www.allenandunwin.com/academic/loud.pdf>.

Stryker, Susan. ‘Transgender Activism.’ An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture. May 20, 2005 <http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/transgender_activism.html>.

‘Transgender.’ Wikipedia. 20 May 2005 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender>.

Weiss, Jillian Todd. ‘Definitions published in “Sexuality: The Essential Glossary”’ May 20, 2005 .

Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Connecticut: Firebrand Books, 1997.

Transgendering the nation

My research concerns the representation of gender variant acts, behaviors and identities as they are figured in contemporary Latin American film and literature. By gender variant I mean that which is deemed gender atypical by a culture whose gender concepts are organized by a gender bipolar frame. Individuals who perform, identify and live out genders which are seen to be at odds with their biological/anatomical status as male or female, present a problem for heteronormative modes of thinking, and this is true for Latin American and Anglo settings.

Heteronormative modes of thinking rely on narratives which describe sexuality, gender and identity in restricted terms. They construct a norm and make an argument for this norm’s status as real, authentic and standard by recourse to something called ‘nature’. In this view, men and women can be said to exist because humans can be biologically-classified into two types based on their genitals or chromosomes or hormonal make-up, which ignores of course intersex bodies with ambiguous genitalia, and individuals who chromosomally are neither XX nor XY. Cultural variations notwithstanding, this nature-normative view also suggests that our biology (in two-sex morphology) dictates our behaviour. The sex dimorphic model constitutes a telos of sex-gender destiny: a way of reading ‘nature’ back into a deterministic binary frame. ‘Natural’ men are masculine because of testosterone and their XY chromosomal pattern; ‘natural’ women are feminine because of the flow of oestrogen and their XX chromosomal pattern. That’s it. End of story. Heteronormative arguments also grant the status of natural to sexual expression between individuals which leads to reproduction. Real or natural sexuality has as biological purpose the reproduction of the species. These notions of the natural in gender and sexuality enshrine but one possibility for each person in terms of their gender (in a very phallogocentric turn, penis = male, absence of penis = female) and one possibility in sexual expression: only heterosexuality can really be normal because it fulfils the function of making babies and populating the planet.

This argument of the normal in sexuality and gender is supposedly justified by statistics: numerically there are more heterosexuals and fewer bisexuals, lesbians, gays. There are more men who are masculine and women who are feminine and fewer people who don’t fit this picture, therefore the norm is fact. Added to this, Judeo-Christian discourse on the origins of humans posits the primordial Adam from whom was created Eve, and prohibits such behaviours as cross-dressing and erotic expression between members of the same gender, as well as other forms of erotic practice which are non-reproductive such as prostitution. The hetero-norm gains its authority from a long tradition of medico-legal and religious statements that have shaped culture at a deep level. The moral-scientific preoccupation with defining what is normal and deviant, natural and unnatural, real and artificial in gender and sexuality seeks to control and jurisdict out of existence whatever does not conform to the so-called laws of nature or God. Heteronormative thought is fundamentally concerned with power. Furthermore, its reliance on binary notions which demand a strong differentiation of one group ‘men’ from another ‘women’ ensures that these terms are defined against each other. ‘Male’ is sustained as a category via a disavowal of its supposed opposite ‘female’, and the femininity said to flow naturally from it. In this binary men are represented as the basic state (see Adam and Eve). Femininity derives from adornment and embellishment, a softness which contrasts with male hardness. Like most binaries, one term is valorised over the other. ‘Male’ accrues the values of strength, active virility, rationality and ‘female’, submission, passivity, weakness, irrationality and an incapacity for intellectual thought. Heteronormative systems thus establish hierarchies around sex and gender and in just about every aspect. Feminists have long argued for the deconstruction of binary modes of thinking about men and women, masculinity, femininity and the supposed natural destiny of the sexes. The notion that women’s sexuality is always passive and submissive and this is because of biology has been exposed as a method of controlling women, a system deeply interested in the dominance of one group of people (‘men’) over another (‘women’).

Everyday experience tells us that people come in all shades of masculine and feminine and most of us live our lives in some degree of contradiction to the traditional notions of what is normal for men and women. However, heteronormativity still has a great hold on us. We still tend to think in binaries when it comes to gender, as from the year dot we have been taught that there is only one choice ‘male’ or ‘female’ for each of us based on ‘nature’. One way in which this binary thinking reveals itself as persistent is the way in which we constantly assign a gender to every person we see. It is as if we cannot perceive a person without assigning them as male or female. Where in doubt, we will assign them a gender anyway, regardless of how that person conceives of themselves and regardless of their genitalia. We are uncomfortable with letting the issue just lie.

People who live out their lives in seeming contradiction to the law that says ‘male’ sex morphology always equals man or masculine and ‘female’ sex morphology equals woman or feminine challenge therefore what is deemed natural, normal, good and right. In Latin America, where the Judeo-Christian tradition in the form of Catholicism has had a long history and where gender and sexuality have been seen in very heteronormative ways this is also the case.

In my research I am interested in the ways that gender non-normative individuals are related to problems in national identity. I follow on from the work of Viviane Namaste in her analysis of three texts which link transgendered subjects to crises in ideas of nationhood: two from her native Quebec (The Sex of the Stars and Hosanna) and one from Australia (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). The discourse of nation or national identity relies on very gendered notions. In her analysis Namaste examines how, through rhetorical manoeuvres, gender is related to nation in mass culture. National identity and culture rely on notions of traditional gender roles. As Namaste eludicates, this gendered nationalism assumes an imagined nation that ‘can only be comprised of masculine men and feminine women…MTF transsexuals and transgendered people can never be citizens of the nation, but must only represent its identity crises’ (98). I take this as a very pertinent point.

As Benedict Anderson has indicated: ‘The nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (quoted in 6), a passionate brotherhood, or in the words of Robert Irwin McKee in Mexican Masculinities, nationhood has in Latin America and other places been conceived of as ‘a virile institution’. Moreover, critics from feminist post-colonial studies have long argued that nationalism and the process of nation formation are structured in masculinist terms. In Latin America from the time of Conquest to the present day, the concept of nation building has relied on naturalized notions of ‘male’ and ‘female’, with the first category subordinating the second. One could well agree with George Mosse’s words that ‘nationalism had a special affinity for male society and together with the concept of respectability legitimized the dominance of men over women’ in Latin America as Jean Franco and others would hold. The criollo project of nation in the new republics of Latin America in the colonial period was very much a gendered one. In modernity, the process of nation-state formation -- forjando patria (forging the fatherland) -- also relied on gendered notions. The state is the father and also the mother; the citizens are the children. The phrase madre patria, invoked by modern constructions of nationalism, relies on a metaphor of gender complementarity, re-installing the male image in the guise of power and government, and the female in the role of nurturer, protector, the womb from which springs the life of the nation. Idealization of motherhood was thus key to this discourse of nation: reproduction at all costs, a very heteronormative project, which would seem to exclude that which is deemed non-productive in terms of continuance of the national race.

Doris Sommer argues in Foundational Fictions that the symbolic construction of nation as an imagined community is seen in Latin American romantic literature’s representation of heterosexual romantic pairings that transcend the boundaries of race, class, region etc to signify the unity and unification of nation. This confirms the gender-bipolar heteronormative elements in nation discourse. Irwin argues however, that as a masculinist discourse, nationalism is modelled more on relations between men, arguing that Sommers underestimates the central role of the figuring of male homosocial relationships in the image of nation-building and unity.

Clearly both critics see a strong link between the culture’s gender conceptions, sexuality and its concepts of national identity.

Talking of nations in that very famous phrase as ‘imagined communities’, Benedict Anderson pre-empts the link between gender and nation that is only latent in his work:
“in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender”.

But what if you are gender variant or transgender? What if your very gender expression doesn’t fit in the scheme of male and female, how are you read in terms of the discourse of the nation? What if your sexual desires/relations threaten to overstep the national credo of virile male homosociality (which borders but disavows homosexuality) and make it blatantly homoerotic? Are you impossible, as seen in heteronormative systems of thought, are you, being outside the norm, also outside nation? Are you a threat to natural laws, illogical, irrational, unreadable? And through the tint of Judeo-Christian morals, are you therefore some kind of monstrous embodiment, the repository of the unvirtuous, sinful and abject? Is your gender variance and sexuality seen as a source of potential contamination: a mutation of nature and the risk of degeneration and seduction into deviance?

It has been noted that nation, like gender, is a relational term. As Anderson also incises: Implying “some element of alterity for its definition,” a nation is ineluctably “shaped by what it opposes”. But by the very fact that such identities depend constitutively on difference means that nations are forever haunted by their various definitional others’ (5)
Who are these various definitional others in the Latin American context? Nationalist discourse triumphs the concept of the Unity of the nation. This unity is frequently modeled on sex and gender norms. Usurping of this unity is represented through a subversion/transgression of these norms. (6).

In his study of turn of 19th century Argentina, Jorge Salessi maps the presence and locations of these definitional others who are key to the discourses that shape nation and national identity. The nation which is shaped by what it opposes seeks unity through spreading panic about those subjects who subvert sex and gender norms, “projecting beyond its own borders the sexual practices or gender behaviors it deems abhorrent.” (10) That is, sexual or gender behaviours judged as deviant according to the culture’s heteronormative modes of thinking. In his book, Médicos maleantes y maricas, Salessi talks of ‘Los males que llegan de un afuera’, which include a variety of 19th century labelled sexual inversions and gender mutations, evidenced according to range of scientists, criminologists and intellectuals of the time in the sexual corruption and confusion in gender of masculine women and feminine men who didn’t conform to the gender schema and notions of bourgeois respectability of the era (180). Independent women with their own sources of income were one manifestation of this. They were seen as constituting the arrival of a ‘third sex’ because they did not conform to their social gender role. Masculine women and feminine men or ‘inverts’, represented a threat to the Argentinian nation and the future human race. This threat was frequently described as coming from elsewhere: Europe, America or Asia, ‘una degeneración “extranjera”, no argentina, acechando los espacios nacionales del nuevo sujeto argentino.’ (185-6). Homosexuality, which appears in discourse linked to this effeminacy in men (inversion) is that danger which comes from elsewhere, a contamination to the national body and spirit. But all these sexual and gender mutations where only a ghost of another evil which haunted Argentina and was difficult to name: the threat of working-class migrants from Italy and other places which presented a crisis to the concept of the purity of the Argentinian ‘race’.

The way that sexual and gender different individuals are interpellated in discourse may have changed since then, but their existence, I argue, within heteronormative systems of thought and representation is still seen in some quarters as a symptom and stand-in for other ‘males’ afflicting the national sphere. In the masculinist formulations of nation, sex and gender different people are related at times even today in the imaginary to ideas of disruption or trouble at the national level. This is even more so the case for those people who contravene natural laws in both gender AND sexuality, as is the case for locas and travestis in Latin American zones. To be sure, this is not the only current that can be traced in the representation of such people in texts. There are other modes of representing locas and travestis which I also explore in my PhD thesis. However, it is still a rather compelling one, and warrants examination.

In Post-boom Latin American literary and filmic production there has been a resurgence of such gender ambiguous figures. Although no list can be exhaustive, some of the female writers who have incorporated gender ambiguous figures into their works to different effects include Isabel Allende, Gioconda Belli, Cristina Peri Rossi, Luisa Valenzuela, and from the late nineties, Mayra Santos Febres. Mexican directors María Novaro and Arturo Ripstein stand out for their inclusion of transgendered characters in two of their films. Authors of the 80’s and 90’s who hail from sexual minorities and who have featured gender different characters in their texts include Jaime Manrique, Reinaldo Arenas, José Dimayuga, Mario Bellatín, Pedro Lemebel, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luis Zapata and José Joaquín Blanco. In works by these writers and directors we find depictions of feminine-identified homosexuals who have relationships with macho males, others who desire to emulate or become women; we also find male-born individuals who have crossed the gender divide in dress and embodiment and become women, individuals who perform across gender for public view and entertainment, dual sexed characters, temporary cross-dressers, in short, a multitudinous array of transgressively gendered moments, acts and identities.

In some of these texts, locas and transgendered travestis are presented in a degree of complexity which avoids reducing them to mere symbols of some crisis in national identity and culture. I would cite Mayra Santos Febres’s Sirena Selena vestida de pena as one example of this kind of open inscription of gender variant and transgendered subjects. However, others seem to maintain this connection between gender variance and crisis in nation, and view locas and travestis through the heteronormative lens of their own cultures. In my work I argue that this tendency can be seen in the representation of locas and travestis in works by Reinaldo Arenas for instance. Gender crossing as an act of hybridity, inversion and ambivalence can also be found in the work of Jaime Manrique (Colombian Gold) and Luisa Valenzuela.

Arenas’s work and its context is an interesting case, because although on one level, one can see a move towards recuperating the loca and travesti as sexual and gender others, Arenas’s lexicon of the grotesque and abject and his ambivalence that codes duplicity and contradictory duality onto these characters ironically repeats the kind of discourse which circulated in Castro’s Cuba about effeminate homosexuals and transgenders in the 1960’s and 70s. In profiling these gender others as figures in a larger politically dualistic national culture, one can see a correlation being made between the transgressive gender performatives of his characters (always superficial, artificial, orchestrated, hiding or masking another true and denied reality, the fixity of biological sex) and the regime’s orchestrated lifeless counterfeit face imposed on the authentic Cuba which lies beyond appearances. My chapter on Arenas is hence fittingly titled ‘Grotesque Spectacles: the Janus face of the State and the gender transgressive body’.

Cuba’s national discourse is one beset by notions of gender normativity for men and women, and underwritten by constantly patrolled borders between homosociality as ideal and homosexuality as moral nightmare. Gender subversion is the public manifestation of a betrayal of sex and sexual norms (artificial, frivolous, non-reproductive) and national identity. The loca and travesti are key definitional others in national discourse for post-revolutionary Cuba as in other zones and times.

The locas and travestis here and in other contexts that I have hinted at, threaten the virile institution of nation and the notion of unified national subject because their very locura (madness or unreadable gender ‘extravagance’ and visibility) refuses and deconstructs the naturalness of masculinity, points to the assumption of much-derided femininity and also sexual passivity. As in Mexican constructions of national identity, la raza nacional no se raja nunca, (to cite Paz) and masculine sexual active positions are key to the symbolic triumph of the advancement of national culture, not giving in. This returns us to the heteronormative fixing of the binary in which women and femininity are inevitably submissive, inferior and not active agents in the personal or larger sense of the world: a prop for nation, yes, but not its driving force. Men who assume such feminised positions represent threat and reversal of ‘the order of things’ and expose the possibility that masculinity can be lost. Cuban discourse was a deeply masculine and resistant one, which constantly exported or located outside the Cuban sphere perceived political threats. The loca and travesti were embodiments of this par excellence, a threat to virile nationhood from without (being resolutely not-male) even as they presented the possibility of counter-revolutionary forces from within.

In Arenas, locas and travestis are relocated within culture, as central to that landscape of repression and double-talk. He re-dresses the masculinity of the elite and its discourses of the virile nation in highly parodic ways which I explore on my chapter ‘Grotesque Spectacles’. The nation cannot be seen as exactly the same as before: it is transgendered. Strangely, where his language of irreverent social inversion and carnivalesque bringing down to earth turns to the grotesque the various stigmas of artificiality and imposture deployed in Cuban discourse on locas are still evident, to such an extent that they may be said to mirror the kind of impostures and dualities Arenas finds in the national culture he assails. Arenas seems to be unable to break away from the heteronormative ways of figuring gender atypicality, even as he inscribes his own homosexuality as radical and questioning of the regime and its tactics.

If the nation is transgendered in texts and this transgenderedness only stands in for corruption or perversion, what kind of space does this create for gender variant individuals in the national context? Has this space in fact been evacuated all together since as stand-ins they do not stand anywhere but in place of something else: a cultural miasma, a phantom menace? A transgendering of nation that might upset discourse so as to cause fissures and entry points for those excluded as definitional others would be one that does not draw on received notions of what gender variant and transgendered people are. Rather, it might be one that grants them the complexity which is granted to other subjects which one expects to find in the popular imaginary as valid human beings, part of the variegated social fabric of cities and towns, itself contradictory in many ways, but not a symbol of its contradictions. People as real and artificial as so called other ordinary men and women, who after all, are always much more than simply their gender.

The gender ambiguous figure is sometimes mined or appropriated to broach ambiguity in other areas, being symbolic or indicative of crises in other categories but not faced directly as a way of acting and being in the world. Clearly, there exists a tension between representation that accounts for the lived experience of gender ambiguity and the troping of such ambiguity or the textual deployment of gender non-normative acts, behaviours and figures for metaphorical purposes. This is key to looking at the representation of gender variant and transgender individuals in any national context.

The conference came & went. Verdict: stunning & enriching. Stand-outs: seeing the rough-cut of Susan Stryker's doco Screaming Queens: the riot at Compton's cafeteria and hearing her speak. Plus the keynote by Jamison Green, an incredibly charismatic speaker. Other highlights: slideshow by Mariette Pathy Allen; hearing of Gill Dalton's experiences transitioning to womanhood in Thailand; learning about the Gender Recognition Act in the U.K.

The whole event inspired me. The people were fantastic: a deeply human and intelligent bunch.My presentation (without the visual content) is included below. The entire conference was taped and as such will soon be available to order.

Transgender in the Mexican cinematic imaginary

Vek Lewis

This morning I will discuss two films from Mexico which feature transgendered characters: Maria Novaro’s 1991 production Danzón which has received international distribution, and the older classic, Arturo Ripstein’s 1978 film Place without Limits based on an even earlier novel by Chilean writer José Donoso.

Danzón and Place without Limits, though separated by some 13 years of time, are united by the genre they recall: the cabaretera genre of Golden Age Mexican Cinema. Films of this genre take place in the cabaret nightclub, dancehall or brothel. This genre usually features an innocent young girl who due to sudden poverty is forced into a world of bars, drugs and prostitution. Commonly the genre’s exploration of women’s identity and sexuality is framed in patriarchal terms: she is exploited and dependent on men. By the end she is usually punished for her transgression of gender and sexual norms.The two films to be discussed today re-work this genre and free it up somewhat from the usual patriarchal restraints. They continue the cabaretera genre in the sense that the nightclub and brothel are at the heart of both films. Ana López has called the cabaret/brothel as depicted in Mexican cinema a liminal space, where what is usually contained by the moral order of the day is given full rein. Sergio de la Mora, another critic says that ‘throughout the history of Mexican cinema, the brothel-cabaret has been the privileged space for articulating gender/sexual identities’ (83). Importantly, the brothel-cabaret has also been a site for negotiating issues of changes in nation and identity. Both these films engage elements of the genre to this effect, though with a post-feminist, post-sexual revolution spin. Although resistant to the patriarchal articulations of men, women, and national cultural norms their depictions of gender and sexually diverse people are often engaged to represent other more paradigmatic concerns.

Danzón and Place without Limits both feature travesti performers in their visual narratives. In Danzón, we have Susy, who runs her own nightclub act in the tropical seaport town of Veracruz. Susy is an artista whose high-femme tributes to stars of Mexican and Caribbean musical and cinema culture form a highlight of the film. But she is no mere drag queen; off stage too, she is female-identified, whether dressed en femme or in male mode: she is unequivocally transgendered.In Place without Limits, we have La Manuela, also a performer, but foremost the owner of a brothel in a remote fictional town in Mexico’s north called El Olivo. She is strongly female-identified, although her trans-presence for most of the other characters of the film is by turns a cause for attraction and a cause for unsettling phobic obsession.Today we will see scenes from both films, but first I will give some background to the characters and story of Danzón and Place without Limits, in order to contextualize them.

Danzón

Danzón follows the story of Julia, a forty something telephone operator from a lower-middle class suburb of Mexico City who is a dance hall enthusiast. She is an aficionada of the traditionalist dance form, danzón, a slow, stately dance which entered Mexico in the 30’s via Cuba. In 1990’s Mexico City it has the exotic appeal of a far off nostalgic world where men were galanes (genteel but strong lovers) and women their dedicated partners whose look contained a subdued and feminine eroticism that paired with her partners’ guiding suave macho grace.

For Julia, the danzón is not just a pastime; it is an escape from her dreary world of work and lack of romantic prospects. She is a single mother of a young 14 year old daughter. Her circle of friends are her other female workmates. Her dance partner, Carmelo, is the quintessence of her nostalgic vision of what men should be for women: aloof, masculine, older, authoritative but gentlemanly. She will dance with no other.

One night Julia and her friend from work Silvia are at one of the danzón clubs in the city. Julia is restless because Carmelo has failed to show up, which is very uncharacteristic of him. Julia gets word that he has disappeared after being accused of stealing money from the bar at which he works. Increasingly moody, directionless and unable to trace her beau, acting on the rumor that Carmelo has gone to Veracruz, Julia takes time off work and cashing in some of her retirement fund, embarks on a 5 hour train trip to that city of tropical dreams of Mexican cinema Veracruz but ends up finding a lot more than Carmelo awaiting her.On arrival in Veracruz, the contrasts with the capital are immediately obvious. The port city has the air of an anything-goes attitude. Julia becomes relaxed and changes into holiday mode. She sets out to find Carmelo. Booking into a hotel, the proprietress and a working girl called ‘Red’ advise her on how to go looking for her man. Both seasoned in the world of sex and relationships, they commiserate with her plight. She dines out in the town plaza hoping to chance upon Carmelo, without luck.Back at the hotel the prostitute Red tells her to look for him where the danzón habitués gather nightly. Julia sets off but doesn’t find Carmelo. Instead, she finds Susy. The two chat and become immediate friends. Susy promises to assist Julia in her search for Carmelo, but also invites her to her show, where she performs ‘el coquero’.

Julia doesn’t end up finding Carmelo in Veracruz, in spite of hers and Susy’s better efforts. She does however, find a completely different world which doesn’t observe the ordinary rules – in Veracruz, in Red’s independent sassy working girl attitude and in the fluid gender performativity of Susy. Wide-eyed to these developments, she herself is transformed – both physically and inwardly, under Susy’s influence. The rather staid notions on the roles of men and women so cherished by Julia in her vision of the danzón (itself paradigmatic of allotted places for men and women, predictably organized in a traditional but comfortable fashion) are given a shake up. Susy as a transgendered person and performer is the instrument of this.Susy brings out the femininity in Julia, allowing her to reclaim an eroticism which was previously subdued and disavowed by the patriarchal logic that women who dress sensuously and with attention to their appearance only seek male attention and are hence always available to them. Susy, an expert in high-femme visibility, allows Julia to overcome her fears of stepping outside the lines in terms of sexuality and gender expression. For Julia, she is an example of a strong, self-defined and self-made woman.Of course, some notions die hard, but Julia is changing almost without realizing it herself. The scene where Susy pleads with Julia to teach her the danzón, the female part, is challenging to her fixed notions of gender and gender role.Julia teaches Susy the danzonThanks to the liberatory influences around her in Red but most centrally, through the agent of Susy, Julia transcends her expectations directly when she takes a younger man as a lover. Carmelo, by now almost completely forgotten, is but a romanticized projection and through Rubén, the long-haired sailor, she discovers the potentiality for giving her sexuality free rein, outside precious notions of what a decent and unmarried woman should do in conventional Mexican cultural mores. She returns to Mexico City with a visible warm glow: a changed woman. But she also returns to the danzón halls, with a renewed determination, and in a moment of cinematic closure, finds Carmelo awaiting her again, just where she left him.

Place without Limits

This film begins on a morning in a brothel in the arid town, El Olivo. The brothel’s owner and madam, La Manuela, and her daughter La Japonesita, are awoken from their sleep by the sound of the arrival of a truck in the street. This truck is owned by the infamous Pancho. We discover forthwith that Pancho is deeply feared by La Manuela. A swaggering lower class macho, before leaving town he had come to the brothel and roughhandled La Manuela, tearing her red dress. He swore to return and do worse. Three months have passed, but it appears that Pancho has come to fulfil his promises.La Manuela, identified by the film’s characters on several occasions as loca (a crazy queen), marica (effeminate homosexual) and joto (gender variant queer), had previously expressed sexual interest in Pancho, thinking him a hunk and admiring his brawny Stanley Kowalski type masculinity. This is not the first film in Mexican history which has featured a gender variant loca or travesti alongside the usual sexually voracious macho figure who frequents brothels, but it is the first film in which the transgendered character has been so central to the narrative and most clearly articulated.La Manuela now sees Pancho as nothing more than a brute. With her daughter’s help, she seeks the protection of the local town mayor, Don Alejo, who in terms of class and authoritative masculinity undoes Pancho. Don Alejo is a rather castrating father figure, constantly deriding and disempowering Pancho’s masculinity, which Pancho seeks to express away from Alejo’s jurisdiction in the brothel.

However, the brothel itself looks to be subsumed by Don Alejo, who has bought almost every property in town. La Japonesita wants to maintain it, striking a deal with Don Alejo. La Manuela, in contrast, wants to sell it and leave El Olivo, which is like hell for her.

The film explores in depth the psychological fragility and violence at the heart of the macho male and the relations he forms and deforms. La Manuela for most critics is in this sense a foil for the masculinity of Pancho, an alternative construction of gender off which the other characters define and read their own gender and sexual desires. For me La Manuela in fact forms the heart of the film and hence a trans reading is vital. Several critics note that the film is a critique of machismo and homophobia, but in placing La Manuela as simply a foil or an effeminate gay (many American viewers frame the film this way) they fail to account for how her transgenderedness is negotiated in the film.La Manuela, like Susy in Danzón, does not conceive of herself as a cross-dressing man; her sense of identity is more complex than that. She sees herself as inwardly female, in spite of her anatomy. In one part of the film she talks of a penis only being good to pee with, which elicits laughter from those who are around her. Like Susy, she constantly refers to herself in the feminine, an aspect of gender identification in speech which cannot be achieved in English. The women in the brothel appear to accept her this way, referring to her with the correct pronouns and female gendered adjectives. Her daughter sees her papa as mama, although her gender identity and erotic expression is still a conflict for her.

Her gender identity and sexuality of course, represent a conflict for others as well, even as it seems that out of sheer insistence La Manuela has obtained a kind of de facto recognition of herself as woman. La Manuela is depicted in the first two thirds of the film as a disquieting figure, but as Jorge Ayala Blanco states, she is the film’s fundamental objective. ‘She brings together the strong moments and structures the story as an accumulation of intensities, sometimes symbolic (her red dress matching Pancho’s red car, the red of returning desire; the red of seduction, the red of her challenging lips)… she is a vertical column, a lightning rod’.

By the third part of the film, these intensities are fully in play, and this is enacted by scenes of La Manuela performing. La Manuela seems an ambiguous figure, apparently maudlin, scared and tragic, but she also holds an eroticism which draws men near. Important to note, however, is that her gender and its legitimacy is subject to the presence of others in authority – Don Alejo is one such authority both in terms of political and social position. His legitimization comes in showing approval for the eroticism of her dancing at the brothel, which the men initially ridicule in one flash back in the film but then fully engage in.Comparative analysisTo return to my analysis of the two films, I am encouraged to find such transgendered characters as Susy and La Manuela featured in mainstream Mexican cinema. However, I am not assured that as characters they function independently of each film’s larger issues, concerns and conflicts. Susy, for instance, seems only to exist as an agent for temporary change in the non-transgendered Julia’s life. When Julia returns to Mexico city, the free gendered world of Veracruz is a postcard memory; Mexico City is the reality. Men, women, work, and the romance of the danzón with its fixed, defined roles are the reality.The film received ecstatic approval outside Mexico. Its positive tone of acceptance for open sexuality and gender difference surely plays a part in this, but belies the reality that queers and transgenders face in a culture which does not wholly embrace them. The director seems to acknowledge that there has been a change in values of masculinity and femininity since the cherished old days and this is a new age of gender unconventionality and transformation in roles expected of men and of women. Maria Novaro’s travesti characters – Susy and her friends Karla and Yadira, who play a more minor role – seem to symbolically point to those concerns, to stand in for those changes. They are nevertheless left behind, expendable narrative helpers who move the plot and thematic concerns: or put another way, they function as performative figures on a distant stage in an unreal setting, Mexico City is the real world off the stage that stays with us once we have left the cinema.

La Manuela, more at the forefront of her film, is nevertheless a point of unresolved obsession. She meets what seems like an inevitably tragic end and this perpetuates the idea that such an identity that is not quite male or female and perhaps both is untenable. In several parts of the film the townsfolk seek to fix La Manuela’s gender, looking for its source in her genitals. The first time she performs for them ends badly enough. After a night of dancing with this erotic vision of uninhibited trans sensuality, they drag her to the lake and strip off her dress, content to declare that she is not a lady anymore.There is a constant urge to get behind La Manuela’s gender performance, to paraphrase David William Foster. The possibility of being complexly gendered is not, in the final analysis, confirmed. When La Manuela comments that the men seem to be scared of her, it is because of this: she upsets the notion that we are the gender we are diagnosed as by genital morphology and other body paradigms. They are scared of her otherness or difference which is also the source of her eroticism – and hence deeply troubling, because her gender identity imbricates itself in their own sexuality and gender. This is especially true of the macho Pancho.In spite of a slightly clumsy choice of words, Sergio de la Mora is right when he states: ‘Pancho’s desire for Manuela is mobilized by difference, best articulated in her drag performance. It is not the “masculine” man who excites Pancho but the “effeminate” man (wo+man), the convergence of gender traits traditionally kept separate but here reconfigured in a single polysignifying body’ (99).That is, her trans-status, which would transform Pancho’s own sexuality and concepts of gender by contact with this fully unimagined other. As the film kills her off, it also kills off in the Mexican imaginary the possibility of visualizing this fully unimagined other and leaves this viewer hungry for a portrait that might have legitimized the complexity of La Manuela’s sexuality and gender as valid and possible, as part of the cultural landscape (which it is!) instead of playing her body off as a site of sexual and gender contestation.

To conclude, in Novaro’s film the travesti nightclub performer, Susy, points to changes in gender norms and gender role expectations between women and men in mainstream Mexican culture; rather than having a life of her own, she functions (however sympathetically) as that signifying other for the film’s main concern about changes in gender relations. Place without limits is very much preoccupied with gender, but here with the gendering of bodies, that is, the meanings made of bodies and the difference between bodies. Touted as a film that challenges discourses of machismo, it nonetheless struggles with the authorisation and eroticisation of its transgendered character’s body. Several critics have pointed out how transgressively gendered persons have traditionally been played for comedy or played for tragedy. In Arturo Ripstein’s film, la Manuela is played for tragedy and ultimately stripped of her eroticism which is her only power. In the heteroerotic economy of the film, bodies must be anchored to ‘male’ and ‘female’, that is, given sex-gender coherence and intelligibility to be fully authorized as possible and erotic.