Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America

276 Pages·2010·1.154 MB·English

by  Vek Lewis (auth.)

Crossing Sex and Gender
in Latin America
Crossing Sex and Gender
in Latin America
Vek Lewis
CROSSING SEX AND GENDER IN LATIN AMERICA
Copyright © Vek Lewis, 2010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10402-0
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph from the series La manzana de Adán by Paz
Errázuriz
Chapter 2 was previously published in May 2009 in Chasqui: Revista
de literatura latinoamericana 38, no. 1:104–24 in a slightly different
form.
First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the
United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout the
world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-28849-6 ISBN 978-0-230-10996-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230109964
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Vek.
Crossing sex and gender in Latin America / Vek Lewis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Latin American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Latin American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3.
Transgender people in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5.
Motion pictures—Latin America—History—20th century. 6. Motion
pictures—Latin America—History—21st century. 7. Transgender
people in motion pictures. 8. Gender identity in motion pictures I.
Title.
PQ7081.L4535 2010
860.9'35266—dc22 2009053916
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: August 2010
Este libro se lo dedico a mi amigo del alma, N. D. You know who you are.
Your influence is alive in these pages.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Persistence of Vision(s): Sex and Gender
Variance in the Past and Present 1
1 Thinking Figurations Otherwise: Reframing Dominant
Knowledges of Sex and Gender Variance in Latin America 17
2 Grotesque Spectacles: The Janus Face of the State and
Gender-Variant Bodies in Reinaldo Arenas 45
3 Life Is (More than) a Cabaret: Gender Crossing and “Trans”
Signification in Contemporary Cinema from Latin America 73
4 Authorizing Subjectivity: Eroticism, Epidemia, and the
(In)validation of Bodies in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s El Rey
de La Habana and Mario Bellatin’s Salón de belleza 107
5 Trans Bodies, Popular Culture, and (National) Identity in
Crisis: Luis Zapata’s La hermana secreta de Angélica María
and Mayra Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena vestida de pena 143
6 Scandalous Embodiments, Shameful Citizenships: Loca
and Travesti Subjectivities in the Work of Pedro Lemebel 181
Epilogue 221
Notes 227
References 249
Index 265
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Diana Palaversich and Stewart King, who helped
me with the initial work conducted for this book. Thanks should
also go to those who assisted me in its final phases: Debra Castillo,
Paul Allatson, and Jeffrey Browitt. Finally, without the intellectual
exchange and friendship of Viviane Namaste, Talia Mae Bettcher, Ben
Singer, Natalia Anaya, Rosío Córdova Plaza, Mauro Cabral, Rodrigo
Parrini, and Ntennis Davi, I would not have had the context or the
faith to see this project to completion.
Sincere thanks also to friends and family in Australia, Mexico, and
Puerto Rico for your love and solidarity.
4
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The Persistence of Vision(s)
Sex and Gender Variance in the Past and Present
T
ravestismo, or male-to-female gender crossing, notes critic Anke Birken-
maier (2002), has become a fashionable feature of contemporary Latin
American literature. This is by no means restricted, of course, to the liter-
ary domain. There has been an explosion in the depiction of “trans” sub-
jects and acts in contemporary cultural production, particularly in television
and print media. Three countries have run soap operas that feature travesti
characters (male born individuals who live in feminine mode) played by
real-life travestis and transsexuals to great acclaim: Los Roldán (The Roldán
Family) in Argentina, starring Florencia de la V., Los Sánchez (The Sánchez
Family) in Mexico with Libertad, and Los Reyes (The Reyes Family) with
Endry Cardeño in Colombia. In particular, de la V has gained the status
of megastar in Argentina. An increasing number of films feature locas, or
gender-crossing characters. There have also been several high-profile docu-
mentaries, some of which are mentioned in the course of this book. Other
examples of representation include performance by transvestites in art and
on stage in academic and cultural settings, as well as La manzana de Adán
(Adam’s Apple), a coffee-table book with photographs from the 1980s of
colas (locas) from Chile, an image from which adorns this book’s cover.
Puerto Rican salsero Willy Colón is still heard singing on the radio about a
travesti who defies patriarchal control and dies of AIDS in “El gran varón”
(“The great man”). Newspapers, magazines, and television networks have
devoted considerable column inches and airtime to the subject of travestis
and their place in society in venues such as Página 12 in Argentina, Letra S
in Mexico’s daily La Jornada, and Chile’s Teletrece, to name just a respect-
able few, that is, aside for the more voluminous popular and tabloid press.
2 Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America
This book is concerned with contemporary visions of nonnormative
sexualities and genders in Latin America. It looks at cinematic and literary
texts produced over a twenty-year period from 1985 to 2005. In these
texts, as in the majority of contemporary representations in other popular
forms, change in sexual identity and gender refers principally to crossings
from male to female. Only a small number of novels have been published
in recent years that deal with female-to-male changes.1 This fact is not in
itself new. Birkenmaier notes that even in the golden age of Novohispano
(New Spain) literature, during the time of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for
instance, gender crossing was principally from male to female. If in time
past, transvestite figures were used in Latin American literary works in the
name of a certain exoticism that recalled disguise and festivity, the mask
and the pageant, the inversion of orders, and the play of desires between
man and woman or man dressed as woman, then the new subject of the
travesti in modern and contemporary literature still points to a critique of
the social order. Birkenmaier sustains that contemporary representations
of travestis rely less on the idea of the mask and more on the sexual inde-
cision the figure embodies. The image of the mask, I hold, still pertains
in some representations of travestis and their metaphorical use to explain
the social order; travestis, in some cases, continue to be engaged from a
position of marginality, both in terms of their envisioned cultural space
and in terms of the textual space accorded them. They are also persistently
viewed in the name of spectacle, as Birkenmaier also argues.
Their cultural marginality was mirrored in the narratives that depicted
them in the period before the 1980s. Mostly minor characters in these
texts, homosexuals and travestis function as plot devices or symbols of a
certain order. They are signifying others. In a wide range of texts, they
function performatively to point to or embody larger issues at hand. Nar-
rative marginality is not a precondition for them to function metaphori-
cally, however. Even when writers install the travesti to a more central
place in their works, they frequently maintain the symbolic function, and
very little in the way of an exploration of the subjectivities of those exist-
ing outside of normative sex and gender relations is evidenced. Many of
the attributions of doubleness, superficiality, frivolity, and dangerousness
remain. Here I would cite the celebrated works of José Donoso, Severo
Sarduy, and Manuel Puig—all from the 1960s and 1970s. Donoso and
Puig give great precedence to the depiction of their travesti characters in
El lugar sin límites (1966; Place Without Limits) and El beso de la mujer
araña (1976; The Kiss of the Spiderwoman), respectively. La Manuela
and Molina were breakthrough characterizations in the sense that they
formed the main foci of their narratives. Never before in Latin America
had same-sex desire and gender difference been visualized with such
insistence. Puig’s work has a noticeable investment in this visualization,
The Persistence of Vision(s) 3
since as a homosexual writer, he wished to challenge some of the pre-
vailing notions about homosexuality in the period. He was also deeply
pledged to opposing authoritarian regimes of control around all aspects
of existence—libidinal, social, and political. Thus his narrative is greatly
connected to such a project, as is Donoso’s.2 But since their works precede
the emergence of a politicized travesti subjectivity, they do not entirely
break free of the most stereotyped formulations of effeminate homosexu-
ality and cross-gendered identity. Their pledge to critiquing the social
order also programs the structure of their representations to the level of
paradigm. As such, La Manuela and Molina operate symbolically in each
work’s take on social reality, and a perspective from the gender-variant
or sexually different subject is largely occluded. Sarduy’s controversial
work, meanwhile, which incorporates a collection of so-called deviant
subjects—including transsexuals and travestis—is disposed from the start
to the use of transvestism and sex change as symbolic of historical and cul-
tural change and the evolution of Cuban nationhood. For example, the
travestis in his works of fiction—De donde son los cantantes (1967; From
Cuba with a Song), Cobra (1972) and Colibrí (1984)—serve as themes or
components in a grand baroque opera about the constitution of Cuban
identity. Auxilio and Socorro, two travestis, move in and out of the nar-
rative of De donde son los cantantes, commenting on Cuban history as it
unfolds, and are directly related to its elements of African, Indian, Spanish
and Chinese heritage.
While these writers are indispensable in conceiving of the lineage of
representations of locas and travestis in Latin American cultural produc-
tion, much has been written on them—notably by Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui
in Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature: Genders
Share Flesh (2001), a predecessor to this work. In this book I have there-
fore chosen to read texts that come from the period after the formative
work of Donoso, Puig, and Sarduy. The works I examine pertain to a
period of cultural emergence of sexual and gender minorities as distinct
political identities—the homosexual and the travesti. As subjugated dis-
courses from a minority perspective gain ground—for travestis, especially
after 1990—one might expect some shifts in the depiction of gender-
variant, visibly marginalized homosexual and trans subjects as frivolous, as
sideline, as grotesque, and as signifying others. The films and novels and
that I examine in this study are produced in this new period.