ABSTRACT
The main road leading from the old centre of Salvador, Brazil’s fifth largest city, heaves by day with shoppers and hawkers. By night, scantily clad feminine figures cluster to sell sex. Ambiguity is part of the game on the trottoir: these glamorous ‘women’ are often travestis, with the allure of a phallic femininity. Also at night, in any of the hundreds of temples (terreiros) of the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, filhas de santo (literally ‘daughters of the saint’, devotees) clad in white lace dresses take to the floor as they receive their deities (orixás) in possession. In most Candomblés, it is only ‘women’ who can be ‘mounted’ (gún, Yoruba) by the orixás. In many terreiros, travestis enjoy this privilege. On the trottoir and in the terreiro, travestis adorn themselves in feminine trappings. They shape their bodies to exaggerate the curves identified with the female body, with a ‘hidden extra’: bodies with breasts and a penis. They do not self-identify as homens (men) or mulheres (women), but as travestis. The literature on prostitution (e.g. Espiñeira 1984; Bacelar 1982; Oliveira 1986;
Pereira 1988) and on Candomblé (e.g. Bastide 1978; dos Santos 1988; Fry 1982; Segato 1986; Teixeira 1987) contains scant but suggestive references to those who move between the domains of the trottoir and the terreiro. My interest here is in the gendered identities travestis assume and are accorded by others as they traverse these spaces. Drawing on a range of secondary sources, including some excellent unpublished Master’s theses from the University of Bahia – especially the work of Oliveira (1986) – complemented by preliminary ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Bahia in 1990 for an undergraduate final year dissertation project, I examine gendered identities and gender ambiguity in street prostitution and in the performative and ritual domain of Candomblé. My interest is in exploring wider questions about processes of gendering and with it, questions of masculinity, agency and power. So pervasive is the gender dichotomy within western discourse that anthro-
pological accounts of cross-gender behaviour have either re-created it using different, but equally fixed, criteria (Whitehead 1981; Devereux 1937) or defined an
intermediate ‘third gender’ (see Wikan 1977; Mageo 1992): that which Carpenter (1919) called ‘the hybrid kind of life’. Reconfiguring the gender dichotomy or placing the travesti in the category of a ‘third gender’ implies that the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ have some kind of presence outside their situational usages in different activities and arenas. This merely reinforces an essentialized notion of gender. Such a move side-steps the issues of power in the attribution and enactment of gendered identities. The apparent gender ambiguity of travestis poses several theoretical challenges for
analyses of gender. I begin by exploring some of these issues. Setting travesti prostitution within the wider frame of prostitution in Salvador, I explore representations of adult ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ prostitutes who possess penises. I go on to examine what Foucault (1978-86) terms the ‘historical apparatus of sexuality’, looking first at hegemonic discourses about sex and gender and then at subordinate variants that establish alternative frames of reference within Candomblé. Taking up the issues that arise from the intersections of these schemas in different settings, I explore implications for analyses of gender.
