Towards a more nuanced and subtle analysis of gender practices



Lancaster, Roger N. 1998 “Transgenderism in Latin America: Some Critical Introductory Remarks on Identities and Practices”. Sexualities 1(3): 261-274.

Lancaster's article is an introduction to a series of study cases that deal with gender power, sexual resistance, corporeal norms, and performative subversion in Latin America. To the question of how and when do transgendered performances deconstruct or re-stage normative gender identities?, Lancaster warns us about reading all transgendered and transexual practices as already subversive because this depends always on the specific context that they take place. Along with this, Lancaster makes an argument against a global agenda of international gay politics based on a unitary gay identity imported acritically from an urban, middle-class, North American context. In this sense, Lancaster reminds us that identities are always contingent and a product of specific practices.

"When we say that a practice either ratifies or subverts a normative system, we also need to ask: for whom? from whose perspective? when? and under what circumstances?" p.273

Along the same lines that Butler, Lancaster points at the ways that transsexual practices as a "sham" and a "deception" reveal also the ways that all gender practices and identities are ultimately a sham and a deception. If identities cannot be considered unitary, ready-made and never find closure, we should be looking for a kind of politics that does not take identity as their fundament, this is what queer politics could offer as long as we do not use queer as a replacement for a unitary and universalizing gay identity.

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