ABSTRACT
Travestí, a Brazilian Portuguese word, refers to people assigned male at birth who are interested in relationships with males in which they are the penetrated partner, who also modify their bodies to be more female and 'do gender' in a feminine fashion. Theorization in gender studies within humanities and the social sciences has generally adhered to one of two main strains of thought: poststructuralist/queer theory's performativity, or the sociological interactional/accountability 'doing gender' approach. By focusing on people who were or were striving to be sex and gender congruent, or by re-categorizing people into categories that made them seem more congruent, interactional/accountability theorists fell into a similar trap as those using the poststructuralist/queer theory perspective. Trans* studies, then, has made strides in clarifying some conceptual distinctions, such as between sexuality and gender, and provided examples of people with a wide variety of identifications and perspectives.
