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Don Kulick[1]

          In a small, dimly-lit hotel room, a man and a transgendered prostitute have just had sex. The price of this transaction had been agreed on before the couple entered the room, and the man, now dressed and anxious to leave, removes his wallet from his back pocket.
          The travesti straightens her bra-straps and eyes the man. “No”, she murmurs, as she sees him open the wallet and take out a few notes. “More. I want more”.
          The man is startled. “What do you mean, you want more?”, he asks warily. “We agreed on thirty reais, and here's thirty reais. Take it”.
          The travesti slips towards the door, in a swift, resolute gesture. “Listen love,” she says calmly, blocking the man’s exit, “The price went up. You wanted me to fuck you. You sucked my dick. That's more expensive. That's not thirty reais. It’s sixty”.
          The man growls that the travesti can go fuck herself if she thinks she can rob him like that. He flings the notes in his hand at her and moves towards the door. But the travesti moves too. Practiced. Fast. She slams her purse on the floor and plants her feet firmly apart, in a stance that makes her seem thicker, stronger, more expansive. A pair of tiny nail scissors flash in her hand. Suddenly afraid, the man stops in his tracks. He stands in front of the travesti, staring at her and wondering what to do next. Suddenly, he sees her coral-red mouth open and he hears her begin to shout; to utter loud, harsh, abusive screams that fill the room, the hotel, and, horrifyingly, it seems to the man, the whole neighborhood:

“Have shame you pig! You disgraceful faggot! You act like a man but you come in here and want to be fucked more than a whore! You sucked my dick and begged me to fuck you! Disgusting faggot! Maricona without shame! You're more of a woman than I am! You're asshole is wider than mine is! You're more of a puta than me!”

          In travesti parlance, what is occurring here is um escândalo, a commotion, a scandal. A scandal is an example of what ethnographers of communication call a performative genre: it is a named act that has its own structure, dynamics, and intended consequences. Like all performatives, scandals have illocutionary force; that is, they announce a specific intention on the part of the speaker -- in this case, the intention is the conferral of shame. Scandals also ideally produce a set of perlocutionary effects, namely the surrender by the client of more money than he had agreed to pay in the first place.

          Scandals as performatives can only operate and make sense within structures of shame. They work to the extent that they elicit shame and channel it into service that benefits travestis. What is the specific configuration of this shame? In this case, it hinges on widespread and violently upheld sanctions against male homosexual relations. For the flame being fanned here is the fact that travestis are males. They are males who habitually consume estrogen-based hormones and who often have impressively feminine figures, due to those hormones and to the numerous liters of industrial silicone that they pay their colleagues to inject into their bodies. But they are males nonetheless. They have penises. These penises are usually kept tightly pressed against a travesti’s perineum and well out of anyone’s view. But in their professional lives as prostitutes, travestis remove their penis from concealment and frequently put it to use. And during a scandal, a travesti’s penis is rhetorically unfurled and resoundingly brandished at anyone within hearing distance of her shouts.

          The point of drawing dramatic attention to that part of the travesti's anatomy that she normally keeps concealed is to publicly reconfigure the social status of her client. The overwhelming majority of men who pay travestis for sex are married or have girlfriends, and they identify themselves as heterosexual. Even if these men are publicly revealed to have been in the company of a travesti (for example, on the relatively rare occasions when they go to the police to report that a travesti robbed them, or on the relatively more frequent occasions when police arrest them for having shot a travesti), the majority will steadfastly maintain that they were unaware that the prostitute they picked up was a travesti. Travestis, however, know better. They know that the men who pay them for sex come to the specific streets on which they work looking for a travesti, not a woman. They know that the sexual service requested by many of the men (travestis say 'most of the men') is anal penetration, with the travesti assuming the role of penetrator. Finally, travestis also know that the last thing one of these men ever wants revealed in public is the fact that he has paid money to have a transgendered prostitute insert her penis in his ostensibly heterosexual ass.

          So in order to blackmail her client and scare him into parting with more money than he would ever agree to, a travesti will “give a scandal” (dar um escândalo). Scandals constitute one of the everyday, mundane means by which individual travestis see to it that they earn enough money to support themselves. They are not collective actions. Although scandals can turn into brawls, in which other travestis within hearing distance will come to the aid of their colleague and help attack a particularly violent or recalcitrant client, for the most part, they are singular actions taken by individual travestis. Indeed, travestis actually prefer not to involve other travestis in scandals, since they know that they will have to split their takings with any travesti who helps them extract money from a client.

          Despite their individualistic nature, scandals can be analyzed as a kind of politics -- a micropolitics certainly, and one that produces only smallscale and temporary crinkles in the overall social fabric. But these little crinkles are not altogether without interest. Or irony. For note: in excoriating their allegedly heterosexual clients for being effeminate homosexuals, travestis are drawing on the exact same language that is habitually invoked by others to condemn travestis and to justify violence against them. What is perhaps most striking about scandals is that they do not in any way correspond to the noble “hidden transcripts” of resistance that liberal scholars like James Scott expect to find among oppressed groups (Scott 1990). Scandals do nothing to contest or refute the socio-cultural basis of travestis' abject status in contemporary Brazilian society. Quite the opposite -- instead of challenging abjection, scandals cultivate it. And with a skill that is nothing short of dazzling, travestis use scandals as a way of extending the space of their own abjection. A scandal casts that abjection outward like a sticky web; one that ensnares a petrified client, completely against his will.

          But not only do scandals compel their recipient to explicitly acknowledge his relationship to a travesti (and listen as his own ontological distance from travestis is challenged and mocked); scandals also force the client to part with more of his money than he had intended. In this way, scandals can be seen as resolutely political actions that result in both recognition and redistribution – to use the two terms continually bandied about and debated in philosophical and political science debates about recognition struggles. Furthermore, despite their locally-managed nature, scandals draw on largescale structures for their intelligibility and their efficacy. The existence and salience of these largescale structures suggests the possibility that scandals could be tapped and extended into larger, more organized and more collectivized spheres.

          One dimension of my current research that I am going to foreground here today concerns the relationship between scandals and the emerging political activism of Brazilian travestis. Since the early 1990s, Brazilian travestis have been forming activist groups and making demands for recognition and rights. These demands -- which include protection from brutal police violence, the possibility of using their female names on certain official documents, and the right to appear in public space unharrassed -- seem modest and even self-evident in our eyes. However, I want to argue that there is something fundamentally scandalous about travesti demands. In emerging as a public voice and asserting entitlement to equal citizenship rights with others, I see travesti activism as building on the same kinds of principles as those which structure scandals. In both cases, travesti politics is a politics anchored in shame. It is a politics that invokes and activates specific structures of shame not in order to contest them, but, rather, in order to extend their scope, to imbricate others. In both scandals and their more recognizably activist modalities of political action, travestis transgress public decorum and civil society not by rejecting shame (and championing something like 'Travesti Pride'), but by inhabiting shame as a place from which to interpellate others and thereby incriminate those others. In doing this, I want to argue that travestis are deploying what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called a “shame-conscious” and “shame-creative” vernacular; one that inflects the “social metamorphic” possibilities of shame (Sedgwick 1993:13,14). This means, in turn, that travesti demands for more money from clients, or for uninhibited access to public space are not what Nancy Fraser (1997:23) has dubbed “affirmative” demands for redress. They are not demands that build upon and enhance existing group differentiation in order to claim additional recognition. Instead, travesti demands are transformative, in Fraser's terms -- they work to undermine group differentiation (between normal, upstanding citizens, and low-life, perverse travestis) by foregrounding and challenging the generative structures that permit that differentiation to exist in the first place.

Travestis in Brazil

          As already mentioned above, travestis are males who refashion their appearance, their self-presentational styles, and their physical bodies in a markedly feminine direction. The word travesti derives from transvestir, or cross-dress. But travestis do not only cross-dress. Sometimes beginning at ages as young as eight or ten, males who self-identify as travestis begin growing their hair long, plucking their eyebrows, experimenting with cosmetics, and wearing, whenever they can, feminine or androgynous clothing such as tiny shorts exposing the bottom of their buttocks or T-shirts tied in a knot in above their navel. It is not unusual for boys of this age to also begin engaging in sexual relations with their peers and older males, always in the role of the one who is anally penetrated. By the time these boys are in their early teens, many of them have already either left home, or been expelled from their homes, because their sexual and gender transgressions are usually not tolerated, especially by the boys' fathers. Once they leave home, the overwhelming majority of travestis migrate to cities (if they do not already live in one), where they meet and form friendships with other travestis, and where they begin working as prostitutes. In the company of their travesti friends and colleagues, young travestis learn about estrogen-based hormones, which are available for inexpensive over-the-counter purchase at any of the numerous pharmacies that line the streets in Brazilian cities. At this point, young travestis often begin ingesting large quantities of these hormones. By the time they reach their late teens, many travestis have also begun paying their colleagues to inject numerous liters of industrial silicone into their bodies, in order to round out their knees, thighs, and calves, and in order to augment their breasts, hips, and, most importantly (since this is Brazil), their buttocks.

          Despite irrevocable physiological modifications such as these, the overwhelming majority of travestis do not self-identify as women. That is, despite the fact that they live their lives in female clothing, call one another 'she', and by female names, and endure tremendous pain to acquire female bodily forms, travestis do not wish to remove their penis, and they do not consider themselves to be women. They are not transsexuals. They are, they say, homosexuals -- males who feel “like women” and who ardently desire “men” (i.e. masculine, non-homosexual males). Much of a travesti's time, thought and effort is spent fashioning and perfecting herself as an object of desire for those men.

          Travestis occupy an unusually visible place in both Brazilian social space and the national cultural imaginary. They exist in all Brazilian cities of any size, and in the large southern cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, they number in the thousands. They are most exuberantly visible during Brazil's famous annual Carnival, but even in more mundane contexts and discourses, travestis figure prominently. A popular Saturday afternoon television show, for example, includes a spot in which female impersonators, some of whom are clearly travestis, get judged by a panel of celebrities on how beautiful they are and on how well they mime the lyrics to songs sung by female vocalists. Another weekly television show regularly featured Valéria, a well known travesti. Tieta, one of the most popular television novelas in recent years, featured a special guest appearance by Rogéria, another famous travesti. Another widely watched novela featured a saucy female lead whose speech was peppered with words from travesti argot, and who sounded, everybody agreed, just like a travesti (Browning 1996). But most telling of all of the special place reserved for travestis in the Brazilian popular imagination is the fact that the individual widely acclaimed to be most beautiful woman in Brazil in the mid-1980s was -- a travesti. That travesti, Roberta Close, became a household name throughout the country. She regularly appeared on national television, starred in a play in Rio, posed nude (with strategically crossed legs) in an issue of Playboy magazine that sold out its entire press run of 200,000 copies almost immediately, was continually interviewed and portrayed in virtually every magazine in the country, and had at least three songs written about her by well-known composers. Although her popularity declined when, at the end of the 1980s, she left Brazil to have a sex-change operation and live in Europe, Roberta Close remains extremely well-known. A book about her life appeared last year (Rito1998), and in 1995, she was featured in a nationwide advertisement for Duloren lingerie, in which a photograph of her passport, bearing her male name, was transposed with a photograph of her looking sexy and chic in a black lace undergarment. The caption read “Você não imagina do que uma Duloren é capaz” - “You can't imagine what a Duloren can do”.

          As it happens, famous individuals like Roberta Close, Valéria, and Rogéria are not representative of Brazil's travestis. Instead, they are more like exceptions that prove the rule. And the rule is harsh discrimination and vituperative public prejudice. The overwhelming majority of travestis live far from the protective glow of celebrity, and they constitute one of the most marginalized and despised groups in Brazilian society. Most travestis (like most Brazilians) come from working class or poor backgrounds, and many remain poor throughout their lives -- even though many, these days, also travel to Europe and earn enough money working there as prostitutes to return to Brazil and secure their own futures, and those of their mothers. In most Brazilian cities, travestis are harassed so routinely that many of them avoid venturing out onto the street during the day. And at night while at work, they are regularly the victims of violent police brutality and random assassinations by individuals or gangs of men who take it upon themselves to “clean up the streets”, as local governments periodically order their police forces to do -- despite the fact that neither cross-dressing nor prostitution are criminal under the Brazilian legal code.

          So the nature of the relationship between the Brazilian populace-at-large and travestis is hot-cold, and love-hate: hot and loving enough to propel a handful of travestis to national celebrity, and also to sustain a thriving market in which tens of thousands of travestis are able to support themselves through prostitution. But cold and hateful enough to ensure that the majority of those travestis live in continual anxiety that their right to occupy urban space will be publicly challenged and perhaps violently denied. Jovana Baby, president of the travesti activist organization Grupo Astral (Associacao de Travestis e Liberados de Rio de Janeiro), provided a pithy summary of popular Brazilian sentiments towards travestis when she remarked in an interview with me that “Brazilians love travestis, as long as they stay on television or on the covers of magazines. A travesti on the street or, God forbid, in the family -- that is another story altogether”.

Deferred signifiers

          Ambivalent public sentiments toward travestis are mirrored in ambivalent public perceptions about the precise composition of travesti identity. One of the most striking dimensions of the Brazilian preoccupation with travestis is that despite the habitual presence of travestis in both what we might see as the 'high' contexts of popular culture and the 'low' contexts of seeing them on city streets and in the crime pages of the local newspaper (frequently in lurid close-ups as murdered corpses), there appears to be no clear consensus about what exactly travestis are. In the press, travestis are sometimes referred to as 'he', and sometimes as 'she'. Some commentators insist that travestis want to be women; others insist that they self-identify as men. Still others, especially those commentators influenced by postmodernist ideas, claim that travestis reject identity altogether. They are usually depicted as homosexuals, but occasionally this identity is elided, and they are identified, instead, as transsexuals. Expressed in structuralist terms, the result of these various depictions of travesti identity is that the signifier 'travesti' is continually deferred and never finally coalesces with a specific signified. This means that the Brazilian public can never be certain that it knows what 'travesti' means from one context to the next.

          All of this is evident from the language used to discuss travestis, and I want to examine one example in detail to illustrate the kind of indeterminacy to which I am drawing attention here. On January 7, 1996, the Sao Paulo-state based newspaper A Tribuna ran a full-page story about an individual named Márcia Muller, who is identified as a travesti in the headline, in a head-shot photo captioned “The travesti Márcia Muller”, and throughout the text. The story appeared under the headline “Travesti spends 45 days detained in Women’s Jail” (Travesti passa 45 dias preso na Cadeia Feminina). In bold print and large lettering directly under the rubric, the following text appears (the nouns and pronouns used to refer to Márcia Muller are highlighted in bold print):

What can have caused the police of [the city of] Dise to imagine that the travesti Márcia Muller was really a woman and put her (a prendessem) in the Women’s Jail of Santos? Did the pseudohermaphrodite really look like a woman or was there just a tiny resemblance? The terrible mistake committed by the police is already cleared up, but there could be lasting disagreeable developments (mas teria desdobramentos desagradáveis se perdurasse). The female prisoners, naturally, protested against the intimacy of having to use the same bathroom as Márcia, her being a man (sendo ela homem). For the first time in this region, the Courts face such a problem (se defronta com tamanho problema).

          The article reports that thirty-eight year-old Márcia Muller was arrested with eighty grams of cocaine and taken to the local police station. According to the newspaper, “In the police station, during a body search conducted by a policeman, the male sexual organ of the accused was perceived (foi percibido orgão sexual masculino do acusado), but because he was convicted (porém como ele foi convicto) claiming to be a hermaphrodite, and presenting documents plus check stubs with the name Márcia Muller on them, the end result was the Women’s Jail”.

          “In the jail” the article continues, “there was a climate of speculation. The topic was discussed in all the jailcells. Some women believed that she was a hermaphrodite, but the majority doubted this and thought that their new colleague (a nova colega) was really a travesti”.

          One of the inmates who did not want Márcia in the jail contacted a criminal lawyer. This lawyer could do nothing, the newspaper explains, because “the girl (a moça; i.e. Márcia) was detained in the custody of Justice”. In order to move Márcia out of the Women’s Jail, a court order was needed. The lawyer brought the case to the attention of a judge, who had Márcia examined by a medical doctor.

          “The doctor confirmed, after various examinations, including touching (inclusive de tocque)” that Márcia era homem mesmo -- Márcia was really a man. But at this point, Márcia’s lawyer intervened and argued that if his client was transferred to a male jail, her life would be in danger. In the end, Márcia was moved to the Men’s Jail, but placed in a cell in the male jail that contained “two more travestis”.

          The final paragraph of the article contains the following coda, which, given the outcome of the doctor’s examination, does more to add to the mystery of Márcia’s identity than it does to resolve it:

Márcia Muller has all the features of a woman [?!], but has big feet and coarse hands. If it weren’t for a low voice and a light sashay when walking (sua voz desafinada e um ligeiro requebro no andar), her conduct could easily be confused with that of a woman.

So even by the end of this 1,400 word report, Márcia Muller’s sexed and gendered identity remains unresolved. Despite the fact that the article makes an explicit reference to Márcia’s “male sexual organ”, and to the medical examination that concluded that Márcia was “really a man”, she is referred to with a masculine pronoun only once throughout the entire text (in the context of having had her male sexual organ “perceived”). In all other cases where gendered grammatical pronouns, articles and adjectives are used, Márcia is consistently referred to with female forms. At one point she is even called “the girl”. In the series of questions prefacing the article, Márcia is called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite”, even though it is later determined that she is in fact not one. And even though it would seem that the issue of Márcia’s sex/gender is finally resolved with the Court order to transfer her to the Men's Jail, the closing coda of the article reopens the issue, ending on a note of provocative indeterminacy.

          The public uncertainty about what travestis are and who qualifies as a travesti that newspaper articles like this promote lays the foundation for what scholars like Charles Taylor (1992) and Axel Honneth (1995, 1996) would identify as the “misrecognition” of travestis. In other words, by keeping the meaning of 'travesti' vague, articles like the one about Márcia Muller encourage people to not recognize their particular identity. And such a lack of recognition is not trivial or merely insulting -- both Taylor and Honneth argue at length that it is pernicious and profoundly harmful.

          When it comes to travestis, these scholars are, of course, in a sense, right. Uncertainty about Márcia Muller's identity led to her being subjected to invasive physical examinations, and had her lawyer not succeeded in getting her placed in a cell with two other travestis, she would have been in real physical danger by being transferred to a men's prison. A more politically significant example of the harmful nature of travesti misrecognition occurred not long ago in an interview with the then-mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Luis Paulo Conde, in the monthly gay magazine Sui Generis. In an otherwise generally affirmative and sympathetic interview about homosexuality, the mayor suddenly announces that he finds travestis “offensive” (O que agride é o travesti). The reason? “A travesti doesn’t admit to being gay. He dresses in women’s clothes to be accepted by society. When he puts on the clothes, it’s to be accepted by society. Since society doesn’t accept homosexuality, he creates a woman so that he will be accepted”. Now, leaving aside the mayor's intriguing suggestion that Brazilians might be more tolerant of men in dresses than they are of homosexuals, here we have a case of misrecognition in which mayor Conde denies the homosexual component of travesti identity, thereby necessarily disqualifying them from any of the rights or protections that he might eventually be willing to grant homosexuals.

          But while public ambivalence about travesti identity is indeed harmful in many of the ways discussed by Taylor and Honneth, it not only harmful; and this is a point that seems likely to be missed by the analytical frameworks elaborated by those scholars. For besides constituting damage, public uncertainty about the precise nature (and hence, the precise boundaries) of travesti identity also generates a space of ambiguity that travestis can use to their advantage. If travesti identity remains fuzzy, it becomes possible to suggest that the identity, or at least key dimensions of the identity, is/are not specific to travestis, but are, instead, shared by others who do not self-identify as travestis. Hence, ambivalence provides travestis with a wedge that they can use to insert themselves into the identificatory constellations of others, and, in doing so, compel a reconsideration and perhaps even a reconfiguration of those constellations.[2]

          A forced realignment of identity is what I believe travesti scandals accomplish. Scandals publicly accuse a travesti's client of being a depraved effeminate homosexual, one who is so pathetically abject that he actually pays money to be abased at the hands of a person who herself is at the very nadir of sociocultural hierarchy.

          The reason why scandals work (that is, the reason why they nine times out of ten produce the desired result of more money) is because travestis are right. Or, rather, scandals work because travestis might be right. The great majority of a travesti's clients would certainly hotly disagree with travesti assertions that they are depraved effeminate perverts. However, because the boundaries of travesti identity are not neatly demarcated or entirely clear-cut for most people, the possibility remains open that travesti ontology does not occupy the place of the absolute Other, in relation to the public-at-large. On the contrary, because the contours of travesti identity are ambiguously outlined in relation to others, there is a distinct possibility that travestis might be right when they point a finger and assert affinity with a particular individual. Especially if that individual did what the travesti says he did (and he may or may not have -- who can know for sure?), public perception of the man will change, and he will be resignified by anyone who hears (or hears about) the scandal as someone who does indeed share a(n until that moment) secret affiliation with his travesti accuser.

          So travesti scandals raise a specter of ontological similarity between the travesti and her client. But they depend for their effectiveness on the simultaneous assertion of the shameful nature of that ontology (“Have shame you pig! You disgraceful faggot!”). Shame here becomes the channel through which identification flows; the contours within which it takes form. Eve Sedgwick has addressed this identity-delineating power of shame in her essay on the politics of performativity. Sedgwick argues that whereas guilt is an affect that focuses on the suffering of another (and the self's blame for that suffering), shame concerns the suffering of the self at the hands of another.[3] Furthermore, while guilt is a bad feeling attached to what one does, shame is a bad feeling attaching to what one is. “[O]ne therefore is something, in experiencing shame”, Sedgwick explains (1993:12). But that is not all. For conferred by another, shame always responds. It performs, as Sedgwick phrases it. Often, embarrassment, a blush, an aversion of eyes, a turning away -- these are the responses, the performances, of shame. In the case of scandals, shame performs by compelling acquiescence to the travesti's demands for more money.

          Sedgwick suggests that this performative dimension of shame has overtly political consequences. In order to better understand the import of this suggestion, let us first contrast it with the way in which shame has figured in the work of another scholar who has recently discussed shame and politics. In his writings on recognition struggles, philosopher Axel Honneth (1995:256-260; 1996:131-139) identifies shame as the “missing psychological link” (1996:135) that allows us to understand how economic privation or social repression can motivate people to engage in political struggle. Shame, in other words, explains how a subject can be moved from suffering to action. Honneth argues that shame is raised when one's interactional partners refuse to grant one the respect to which one believes oneself entitled. When this occurs, the disrespected subject is brutally brought up against the normally unreflected-upon fact that it is dependent on the recognition of others for its own sense of self. The affronted realization that the other's view of the self is, in Honneth's terms, “distorted”, constitutes the motivational impetus to identify specific others as the source of oppression, and, hence, as the target of political struggle. In Honneth's framework, shame is thus the psychological bedrock of political action. And the psychological goal of political struggle is the elimination of shame.

          Sedgwick's view is different. Like Honneth, Sedgwick argues that shame in the self is conferred by others, and that the experience of shame is a constitutive dimension of the identities of oppressed people. Unlike Honneth, however, Sedgwick stresses that shame is a crucial component in all identity formation. “[O]ne of the things that anyone's character or personality is”, she insists, “is a record of the highly individual histories by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted far more durable, structural changes in one's relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others” (1993: 12-13). This implies that forms of shame cannot be considered as “distinct 'toxic' parts of groups or individual identity that can be excised” through consciousness raising or recognition struggles (1993: 13). Instead, shame is integral to the very processes by which identity itself is formed; which means that the extinction of shame would be, in effect, the extinction of identity itself. Therefore, instead of fantasizing about the end of shame, Sedgwick proposes that shame be acknowledged, embraced, and put to transformative political use. In this framework, the goal is not the end of shame. The goal is the refiguration of shame as “a near inexhaustible source of transformational energy” (1993: 4), and its creative deployment in political struggles.

          This creative deployment can occur in a variety of registers, many of them, Sedgwick speculates, as yet unimagined. But travestis certainly hit on one of them when they began to claim shame as a place from which they might speak and hail others, asserting power to resignify those others, and compelling them to respond in wished-for ways. In scandals, what gets redesignated are the public (and sometimes perhaps also the privately-felt) identities of a number of individual men. For a long time it seems that this was enough for travestis. Nowadays, though, some travestis have decided that they have bigger fish to fry. Instead of contenting themselves with redefining the public perceptions of a few men who pay them for sex, these travestis are turning their attention to redefining the public perceptions of more consequential entities, such as the concept of Brazilian citizenship and the nature of human rights. These are the targets that get focalized in travestis' more recognizably activist modes of political activism, and it is to these forms of political struggle that I now briefly turn.

Travesti political activism

In order to understand this level of travesti political activism, it is crucial to understand the relationship between travesti organizations and the funding provided by the Brazilian Ministry of Health to educate Brazilians about the AIDS epidemic and carry out programs that disseminate ideas and practices of safer sex. A few years ago, Jovana Baby, the president of the travesti organization Grupo Astral (Associação de Travestis e Liberados de Rio de Janeiro) whom I mentioned earlier, and who is without doubt the single most visible travesti spokesperson in Brazil, told me that travesti activism has “ridden on the back of AIDS”. By that she meant partly that it was only in the wake of the AIDS epidemic that travestis began to organize politically. But more importantly, what Jovana Baby was drawing attention to by saying that travesti activism has “ridden on the back of AIDS” was that travesti groups who receive any kind of funding for staff, programs or venues receive that funding because of AIDS.

          Money distributed to educate the public about safer sex represents a major -- in an enormous number of cases the major -- source of funding for a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations, and community based organizations like those run by and directed towards Afro-Brazilians, male homosexuals, and travestis. To contextualize: in 1993, Brazil received a loan of 160 million dollars from the World Bank to develop and implement a comprehensive National AIDS program. To receive this loan, the Brazilian federal government was required to allocate an additional ninety million dollars, thus bring the total to 250 million dollars. Since 1993, over two hundred community based organizations working on AIDS-related issues have received extensive financing from the Brazilian Ministry of Health (there are over four hundred AIDS-NGOs in Brazil, and those that do not receive funding the Ministry of Health are supported largely by church groups and foreign development projects).

          Today there are approximately twenty travesti organizations throughout Brazil. To the extent that those groups do any kind of organized outreach work, that work is financed by AIDS money from the Ministry of Health, and it is concerned with the distribution of condoms and with safer-sex education. Since 1993, the Ministry of Health has also underwritten an annual national conference called the “National Meeting of Travestis and Open-Minded People who Work with AIDS” (Encontro National de Travestis e Liberados que Trabalham com AIDS). These meetings usually gather together about two hundred participants, and they have developed into crucial arenas for politically conscious travestis to meet one another and discuss strategy and demands. However, even though travestis are thematically foregrounded at these annual conferences, they are numerically far outnumbered (three to one) by the “open-minded people” who work with AIDS; many of whom have little contact with travestis in their day-to-day work, and who seem to attend the conference simply because it is gives them a break from their regular work, and because it is one of the AIDS-circuit conferences that occur throughout Brazil every year. In addition to resulting in travestis being outnumbered at these conferences, the focus on AIDS also has a constraining effect on which topics can be discussed. A recurring complaint from travestis is that too much time is spent discussing condom use and safer-sex programs, and too little time is devoted to other issues that are of great importance to travestis, for example police violence or the construction and maintenance of travesti in-group solidarity.

          One of the effects of conferences like the “National Meeting of Travestis and Open-Minded People who Work with AIDS” is that they cement an association in the public mind between travestis and AIDS. This association is an old one, and it dates back from the very start of public awareness of the epidemic. One of the very first published reports about AIDS in Brazil, in July 1982, for example, reported the research of a Brazilian clinician who claimed that the recently discovered epidemic could be traced to the injection of female hormones and “infected” silicone by travestis (Daniel 1993:33). So an already well-established connection between travestis and AIDS is reinforced every time a travesti group receives government funding, since this funding is inevitably tied to HIV-prevention work. In political activist contexts, this continually foregrounded link between travestis and AIDS is restricting in some ways, as the travestis who want to talk about issues like police violence at the annual conference regularly point out. However, the fact that travesti demands are channeled and heard through a discourse on AIDS also gives those demands a particular character and potential.

          To understand this, it is necessary to digress for a moment and say a few words about an activist group in Brazil called Grupo Pela VIDDA (Group for LIFE -- for the Affirmation, Integration and Dignity of People with HIV/AIDS). Pela ViDDA was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 by Herbert Daniel, a gay Brazilian writer and activist who discovered that same year that he was hiv+.

          Pela VIDDA represented an epistemological break with previous Brazilian approaches to HIV & AIDS. Unlike other organizations that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pela VIDDA did not provide direct services to people with HIV or focus on developing educational materials and activities. Instead, under Daniel's leadership, Pela VIDDA articulated a political project that emphasized citizenship and solidarity in the face of what Daniel called the “civil death” (morte civil) of people living with AIDS.

          A significant dimension of this political project was to openly assume the “shame” of AIDS, and use it to formulate political goals. From the position of a person living with the stigma of HIV, Daniel asserted that everyone in Brazil was living with AIDS. This argument is not a new one -- it had been powerfully formulated by gay groups in the United States as soon as the magnitude of the epidemic -- and also the magnitude of government inaction -- became evident. What is important about the argument, however, is that it reterritorializes shame, relocating it not so much in individual bodies, as in the political structure of society. It also importantly refigures people associated with AIDS – either because they are hiv+, or because they are symbolically linked to the epidemic in the popular imagination – it reconfigures such individuals as active articulators, rather than passive recipients, of shame. In other words, arguments like those deployed by Daniel and Pela VIDDA fashioned shame as a powerful position from which individuals could speak and demand hearing.

          Speaking from a position of shame is the political strategy that travesti activism has taken. Whenever travestis organize a protest march, which they do at the conclusion of every “National Meeting of Travestis and Open-Minded People who Work with AIDS”, and which local groups occasionally do in their home cities to protest police brutality, many of the protesters take care to wear their most outrageous attire -- revealing lingerie-style clothing that they would normally only display while working the street late at night. In other words, in these contexts, travestis play up, rather than down, their difference from others, and they fill public space with their most scandalous avatars. Just like a scandal turns space inside out by making the most intimate interactions public, travestis walking down a city’s main street in broad daylight in tight bodices and miniscule shorts resignify that space and saturate it with an intimacy that refuses to be contained by normative, oppressive notions of privacy. This kind of public manifestation of normally concealed persons and intimacies is a striking example of what sociologist Steven Seidman calls queer politics. “Queer politics is scandalous politics”, Seidman argues, speaking generally, but in language that is highly felicitous for my own argument. “[Q]ueers materialize”, he says, “as the dreaded homosexual other imagined by straight society that had invisibly and silently shaped straight life but now do so openly, loudly, and unapologetically”.

          In travesti protest marches, this loud unapologetic body of the homosexual other is significantly juxtaposed with a particular kind of linguistic form. What is interestingly absent from travesti demonstrations of this kind is language and placards asserting things like “Travesti Pride” or “Proud to be a travesti”. On the contrary, on the surface of things, the language of travesti public protests is not particularly outrageous: “Travestis are human beings” a placard might propose, modestly. “Travestis are citizens”, a chant might proclaim. Nothing especially scandalous there, one might think. However, the scandal in this case lies precisely in the very straightforwardness and simplicity of the message. For if travestis are human beings, they deserve to be accorded respect and human rights, like other human beings. And if they are citizens, then the very concept of citizenship has been revised. Linguistically, what gets foregrounded in these activist manifestations is sameness with non-travestis. Non-linguistically, however, stark difference from non-travestis is conveyed through dress, demeanor, and the sheer fact that so many travestis gather together in one place at one time. So what is happening here is that at their most different, their most shameless, travestis assert that they are most like everyone else.[4]

          Once again, this brings us back to scandals. In the same way they do when they challenge the ontological difference between their clients and themselves by shouting that the client is just as abject as they are, travesti political activism refuses what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative” demands for redress – that is, it refuses to build upon and enhance existing group differentiation in order to claim additional recognition. Instead, travesti demands work to destabilize group differentiation (between normal, upstanding citizens, and low-life, perverse travestis) by declaring sameness from a position of difference, thereby challenging the generative structures that produce particular configurations of hierarchically ranked differentiation in the first place.

Conclusion

          The question I’m sure you all want to know the answer to, of course, is whether this strategy is a politically effective one. Are travesti assertions of shared  politically transformative? Do they work?

          That, alas, I cannot say. Travesti political activism is still nascent in Brazil, and it is still far too bound up with the initiatives and actions of charismatic individuals like Jovana Baby to constitute anything even approaching a political movement. The overwhelming majority of travestis have little political consciousness, and they are much more concerned with being beautiful, earning money, and travelling to Italy than they are in participating in activist protest marches. Furthermore, despite a truly impressive and often positive visibility accorded them in the Brazilian press, travestis continue to face grave  discrimination from gay men and lesbians  who think that travestis give homosexuals a bad name, from politicians like the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, who is of the opinion, you will remember, that travestis are confused cowards who dress in women’s clothes only to be accepted by society, and, of course, from the Church, and from massive segments of the Brazilian population.

          Despite all this, though, there is some indication that travesti political activism might be making some headway, at least in some contexts and in some circles. Lair Guerra de Macedo Rodrigues, director of Brazil's National Program on Sexually Transmissible Diseases and AIDS is one influential  individual who seems to have gotten and appreciated the message that travesti political actions strive to convey. In a speech delivered in 1996, Director Rodrigues referred to travestis as model citizens. “Our society is one that can no longer live with fears and taboos that certainly only serve to impede our objectives”, the Director asserted,

(We must) involve ourselves in this ceaseless battle against discrimination and violence. Even if it means that we must fight against the intolerance of more conservative juridical and religious postures. The organization of travesti groups, especially following the advent of AIDS, is evidence of the beginning of the arduous task of defending citizenship (quoted in Larvie 1999:539).

          Just as Brazil is one of the few countries in the world where a travesti could be declared to be the country’s most beautiful woman, so it is perhaps the only one where travestis could be held forth as beacons of civic responsibility that other citizens ought to follow. In the eyes of those who don’t like travestis and wish they would just shut up and disappear, that, perhaps, is the biggest scandal of  them all.

References

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Browning, Barbara 1996. The closed body. Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 8(2): 1-18.

Daniel, Herbert 1993.The bankruptcy of models: myths and realities of AIDS in Brazil. In Sexuality, politics and AIDS in Brazil: in another world?, Herbert Daniel & Richard Parker. London & Washington D.C.: The Falmer Press. 33-47.

Darwin, Charles 1985. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freud, Sigmund 1950. Totem and Taboo. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co.

Fraser, Nancy 1997. Justice Interruptus: critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. London & New York: Routledge.

Honneth, Axel 1995. The fragmented world of the social: essays in social and political philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.

_________,1996. The struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Klein, Charles H. 1998.  From One “battle” to another: the making of a travesti political movement in a Brazilian city.  Sexualities 1 (3): 329-343.

Kulick, Don 1998. Travesti: sex, gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lancaster, Roger 1998. Transgenderism in Latin America: some critical introductory remarks on identities and practices. Sexualities 1 (3): 261-274.

Larvie, Patrick Sean 1999. Queerness and the specter of Brazilian national ruin. GLQ 5 (4): 527-558.

Rito, Lucia 1998. Muito prazer, Roberta Close. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rosa dos tempos.

Scott, James 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky 1993. Queer performativity: Henry James’s ‘Art of the novel’. GLQ 1(1): 1-16.

Seidman, Steven 1997. Difference troubles: queering social theory and sexual politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles 1992. Multiculturalism and the “politics of recognition”. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[1] Profesor Stockholm University, Sweden. Autor de “Travesti: sex, gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes”, University of Chicago Press, 1998. This is part of a larger paper, the final version of which is being co-authored with Charles Klein. The latter part of the paper builds largely on data gathered and discussed by Klein (see e.g. Klein 1998), and I thank him for continuing discussion on the topic of travesti political activism.

[2] Besides ambivalence - or rather, another dimension to ambivalence that makes it possible for travestis to interfere in the identity constructions of others is the fact that they are taboo, in the Freudian sense of being rejected and prohibited by ideology, and, at the same time, therefore, desired. As Freud discusses, anyone who has violated a taboo becomes taboo himself “because he possesses the dangerous quality of tempting others to follow his example: why should he be allowed to do what is forbidden to others? Thus he is truly contagious in that every example encourages imitation” (Freud 1950: 42; first emphasis in original, second added). Georges Bataille's (1986) development of Freud's thoughts on taboo can also be mentioned here, since according  to Bataille, and with clear relevance for the dynamics of travesti scandals, the shame associated with the breaking of sexual taboos is engendered as female.

[3] As Darwin noted in his discussion of shame and guilt, shame is raised not by one's sense of guilt, but, rather, by “the thought that others think or know us to be guilty” (1965:332).

[4] I am indebted to Roger Lancaster’s formulation of a similar point in his discussion of this ethnographic data, which comes from Klein 1998 (Lancaster 1998:270). I have augmented Lancaster’s observations with my own to foreground the notion of shame.