More woman than "just" a woman.


Kulick, Don. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Kulick presents a detailed ethnographic work on travesti sex workers in Salvador, Brazil. He is interested in the ways that travestis understand and give meaning to their daily practices and identities. Kulick argues that studying the lives of travestis can tell us a lot "about the ways in which gender is imagined and configured in Brazilian society." (11)

1. Travestis in Kulick's research do not identify themselves as women, but as homosexual men who derive pleasure from looking like a woman and triggering (masculine) men's desire. They also do not label transsexuals as women, and refuse to give up their male genitalia as a source of sexual pleasure (I suspect that also as a source of sexual power). In this way, all the analysis that want to elevate travesti subjectivity as the ultimate post-modern condition of a non-identity miss the point that travestis claim a homosexual identity for themselves.

2. Travestis practices and discourses help us understand better how gender is seen as a binary that does not separate irreversibly women from men. Travestis rather seem to think in terms of a gender binary that is not determined by anatomy, but rather by sexual practice, and more specifically, determined by who is in the place of penetrating. Penetration then is the definitive act that defines gender binary, thus holding a transformative gender power. In this binary, women and homosexual men share the same gender.

3. The figure of the travesti has a symbolic role in national discourses and cultural imaginaries in Latin America, and is frequently used as a metaphor for the national character in many different directions.

4. Travestis see themselves as "perfecting" femininity. Whereas their female co-workers are destined to be "just women", travestis have the possibility to become "more woman than woman", by taking the performance of femininity to an extreme.

Kulick's agenda is to challenge stereotypes, misrepresentations and myths about travestis that inhabit bot academic and common discourses. His research moves away from pathologizing them and presents them as subjects who display survival skills and who manage to make sense of their lives amidst and despite poverty, marginalization, homophobia and violence.

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