The Hyperwomen – an indigenous re-reading of gender and sex

Mariana Ruggieri – University of São Paulo

It seems fitting to start by asking whether it is appropriate for someone who is

not by any means an anthropologist or an indigenous person herself to speak of an
indigenous re-reading of gender and sex. My method, as we are about to see, consists
of no empirical data and relies solely on a reading – which is to say a re-writing – of the
movie (and one wonders if it would be accurate to say that it is a Brazilian movie) The
Hyperwomen and the myth it reenacts. Researchers in literary theory certainly feel that
anything can be read as literature, since the boundaries of language are inexact, and to
this extent such researchers are always at risk, even as they struggle to break free from
it, of reenacting some form of epistemological violence1. However, the decision made
by the Kuikuro to produce a feature film should be taken seriously in that it is an
invitation for dialogue on a counter imagining of their own narrative (and not only that,
this anthropological encounter, meadiated through film, is a chance to learn from others
that which we do not know about ourselves). The Kuikuro’s were not immediately keen
on the idea of making a movie about their ritual, as one of the directors, Takuma
Kuikuro, a Kuikuro man, related to some of the women involved in the ritual, says in an
interview. Initial negotiations determined that the movie could only be made if the film
crew committed to registering other rituals and myth recountings for the sake of the
construction of a cosmological archive, a repository of dances, songs and storytelling. If
the need for registering what has been passed on orally for centuries on the one hand
may seem to indicate that these oral traditions are at peril, registering is also an

1. This reminds me that an indigenous graduate student in anthropology at the Federal University of
Amazonas recently defended a thesis according to which fish are not human – a reaction to anthropologist
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s proposal of Amerindian perspectivism, according to which fish and other
beings regarded as non-human, can at any given moment, become human through what he calls
multinaturalism – in opposition to Western multiculturalism.

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opportune moment for bringing these traditions to life, as each and every one of them
need to be remembered and reenacted for the camera. Myths, like language itself, are
only alive if kept open to re-readings. The film is part of a larger project, called Vídeo nas
Aldeias, founded by anthropologist Vincent Carelli in 1986. Initially the movies were
made by non-indigenous crew and then exhibited to the community who could then, in
turn, suggest forms of editing. Currently, members of the communities have been
trained for all aspects of production – from filming to editing – and regularly produce all
sorts of moving images, from short movies to feature films, documentary and fiction.
The Hyperwomen, made in 2012, is one the few movies to have come out of the project
which have succeeded in not having their circulation restricted to specialized film
festivals and the internet.

String Figures are, for Donna Haraway, a form of Speculative Fabulation, potent
signs, at the same time material and semiotic, in short: a creation model of a world, a
cosmological performance where what matters is which knots knot knots. In the movie
The Hyperwomen, at the same time a documentary and a fiction where characters play
the part of themselves, the women in a Kuikuro village in the Xingu region of Brazil, are
determined to rescue the songs of the Jamurikumalu ritual. These songs are learned
through the metric inscribed in knots on strings made of a local palm tree called buriti
(although it is also important to say that these strings coexist with the inscriptions on
audiocassette tapes from a previously performed ritual, in the 1980s). It is through the
realization of this exclusively female ritual that these women become spirits and it is
through their images on film that “we will not die anymore; we will survive, all the time”.
After a thirty year hiatus, Taihu's husband asks her nephew2 to prepare the

2
It is interesting that the myth that is ritualized has the female figure at its

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Jamurikumalu ritual so that she can sing for a last time before she dies – her explanation
is simple: “it’s that I have a great desire to sing.” The verb “to sing” animates the most
of the chatter in the village before singing properly ensues in the second half of the
movie. A young girl warns another: “this afternoon I need to sing; they have called me
to sing.” Kanu, who alongside her mother Ajahi is the only one who knows the songs, is
ill – putting the ritual at risk – and perplexed, she says: “ I was feeling just fine”, to which
another woman says: “it’s true, you were even singing”. In another moment, Ajahi,
certain that her daughter is under some form of evil spell, commiserates: “we could be
singing together”, because to sing, in the terms of the Kuikuro women, is not an activity
that can be done alone, (this becomes very clear in the movie as they are seen singing
alone in many moments however this does not count as singing), but of an intensive
quality of a singing that is collectively performed in a ritual. The act of singing is only
fully carried out if it is in the company of other women.
It seems to me that there are two narratives that are intertwined in the film,
ocasionally running parallel each other and at ocasionally crossing each other: on the
one hand the story of the recovery and registry of this cultural archive that is spread out
under the debris of the end of the world - as experienced by indigenous populations in
witnessing the end of their world – but resists and does not stop resurfacing (a girl says
of her father, a song master: “the songs keep coming back to the insides of my dad”;
Ajahi to a girl: “when we wake up at night remembering the song, that’s when we
learn”). On the other hand the narrative of the Jamurikumalu myth that is acted out in
the ritual, where women overcome men, not so as to secure female homogeneity, but
so as to incorporate, literally, masculine elements that are interdicted to women outside
the ritualistic space, thereby blurring the divisions between masculine and feminine.
With regards to the first narrative, because it is in a way self-evident, I will limit myself

center, but it is a man who sponsors, directs, “owns” – in their words – the festivity,
who is in charge of accumulating a great amount of food and bringing over guests from
other parts of the Xingu region.

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to say that the final scene of the movie summarizes the revival of certain cultural
practices. Kanu is laying on a hammock as she hums the melody together with a very
young girl who is still impregnated from the recently performed ritual, the girl is focused,
paying very close attention to the lips of the older woman; a scene that contrasts the
beginning of the movie when Kanu is bedridden and it is a father (the song master) who
teaches some of the Jamurikumalu songs to his daughter. In a making of footage of the
movie, Kanu points to her mother’s belly: “This is where the songs are, look there. If we
ask about the songs, her belly empties out and passes the songs to ours”. The Kuikuro
women, therefore, take back knowledge of their own songs, actualizing their stories and
their worlds. The high-pitched voice of the young Kuikuro girl at the end, singing with,
learning with the knots, announces that there may be a future and that this future
cannot exist without the active participation of women, that their string figures must act
as devices for the world to come.
But there is also another future at play, the future that is glimpsed through the
origins of the Jamurikumalu myth, which tells the story of the transformation of women
into Itaõ Kuẽgü, the hyperwomen, extraordinary beings. The ritual remembers and
actualizes within the ceremonial parenthesis an imagined possibility, which is to say an
alternative to the present. The myth reads as follows3: After the iponhy ceremony (a
male rite of passage) of the son of chief Magija, the men decide to leave the village to
go fishing in order to find food for their children. They were to spend five days in the
middle of the jungle. Many days passed, the women waited in vain at home. They were
in the jungle transforming into hyperboars, fur on their bodies, huge teeth in their
mouths. Agijakuma, Magija’s wife sent her son Kamatahirari to the river to see what was
happening. He saw the men transforming into hyperboars. The boar-men called to him
and wanted to feed him with fish, he kept the fish in a flute and took it back to the village.

3
Myth transcribed by Bruna Franchetto, in the previous reenacting of the ritual
in 1982.

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At night, upon arrival, he told his mother what he had found. Agijakuma cooked the fish
and took it to the middle of the village, calling all her sisters. “Our men are busy
transforming into hyperboars, they are monsters, while we wait for them. They shared
and ate the fish in the middle of the village, at the place designated to the men e then
screamed: We shall dance, we shall come into festivity, we do not want our men anymore
and they do not want us. While they sang through the night, they transformed
themselves into Hyperwomen. At dawn they were already Hyperwomen, they ate leaves
and insects, they stung their clitoris with poisonous ants, the labia of their vagina
protruded and were visible between their legs. They sang the Jamurikumalu songs. The
men heard it all, perplexed, from the jungle. The Hyperwomen sang from the ceiling of
the kawatu, the house of men, and played the kagutu, the forbidden flute. The boar-men
decided to make their way back to the village. They approached the village through the
main path, where they came across their women, who were aggressive and clad with
male ornaments (earrings, kneepads, bracelets and belts). With the teeth of dog-fish
they attacked the men, and with their clitoris tied with red strings they danced along the
circle between the houses. Finally, after having transformed the only man left in the
village, the young Kamatahirari, into an armadillo, they followed him under the earth.
On the surface, the men could still hear their songs. The Hyperwomen walked through
underground paths, came up occasionally to the surface, appearing in other villages,
enchanting other women. Despite the despair of the men, who attempted to hold them
back, many of them joined the Jamurikumalu. At the edge of the river, they threw their
male sons in the water, transforming them into fish. They took only their daughter. They
rubbed their bodies with pequi shells and became covered with thorns. They moved ever
further, crossing rivers, the plains, dancing where there were no more people, much
beyond the world of the white men. Finally they settled in a place surrounded by water,
where no man could reach them. “Let us leave our husbands waiting! Let’s eat what is
forbidden!” There they remained, playing the kagutu flutes.
When Kuikuro women chant Jamurikumalu songs, they configure a sort of

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resonance field with these itseke (spirits). Kanu, after leading the ritual says: “I have
already become a spirit.” The men who watch the ritual also agree: “Itseke! It really is
the painting of a Hyperwomen. Look there, it really is itseke!” To become a spirit does
not mean to represent a spirit, but to dwell in its perspective, in the point of view of the
Hyperwomen. And it might suffice to say that this point of view is the point of view of a
female utopia where what is at stake is the inversion of a social order, in which women
appropriate themselves of all the features that characterize manhood – their
ornaments, their tools, their space, their fights – excluding them from their daily lives,
utilizing them only for reproductive purposes, only to kill them afterwards. This,
however, would be an oversimplication of a narrative that speaks of the end of a certain
world – and it would then also be necessary to reflect upon inversion as a good enough
tool for the arrival of a new world, or, better yet, if operating an exchange between the
signs of power would ensure the possibility of surviving to the end of the world.
More than highlighting sexual differences – which are highlighted at many times
in everyday Kuikuro life – the Hyperwomen seem to blur the established boundaries
between the sexes (would it be appropriate to speak here of gender? And wouldn’t
separating gender and sex to resolve our theoretical problems reinscribe the separation
between nature and culture? let us not forget that "gender" was a term coined by a
pedo-psychiatrist (John Money), differentiating it from the traditional term "sex" to
define an individual's inclusion in a culturally recognized grupo of 'masculine' or
'feminine' behaviour and physical expression. Money famously affirms that it is possible
to 'change the gender of any baby up to 18 months" or in other words that in intersex
cases (these unclassifiable bodies) he was able to accomodate gender to overlap with
sex designation.) and to undo the ontological premise that separates men from women.
It is interesting to note that the myth does not acccount for possibility of the coming
about of hypermen, i.e., men do not exist as extraordinary beings that inhabit the place
of becoming, which also means to say that it is not possible, as a man, to differ from
himself. Quite the opposite, these men become hyperboars. Women, however, are pure

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difference, never identical to themselves, and to be a woman, more than anything else,
means to incorporate this difference, which is why they may enter into the cosmological
sphere of the hyper mode. This does not mean, however, that they become more
feminine, but casts light on a reading which, from the point of view of the Hyperwomen,
has it that masculinity is no more than a prosthetic construction, that an ant bite is
enough for a clitoris to become a penis.
However it is always necessary not to reinforce ontological categories – women
as pure difference is also a result of biopolitical discourse. If the woman is not (Lacan),
she lives outside the tautological circuit, in other words, there is no “is” that defines her
a priori, no “is” that conditions her existence, the woman, as such, does not exist;
woman is a possible becoming, but only from a perspective of a masculine zero degree
in relation to which women constitute themselves as difference. Within this logical
equation, tripping one one’s own feet is inevitable, especially if the same efforts are not
directed towards the founding premises of man-as-subject. It is not uncommon that
women be situated (curiously enough this happens frequently within some feminist
theories) in an analogous relation to nature, her body laid bare to masculine
intervention, which has technology under its dominion. But this leads us to retrocede
on our own claim, because the result is femininity as an artificial result of a series of
technological proceedings of construction, while masculinity, which apparently is not
submitted to its own technological power, appears now as paradoxically natural.
Masculinity would therefore result in a permanent state of nature, while femininity
would be submitted to an incessant process of construction and modification. I would
argue that the biggest effort made by gender/sex technologies is not the transformation
of women, but the organic fixation of certain differences.
During the period in which they have their existence determined by the action
and the time of the ritual, the Kuikuro women are not imitating the hyperwomen, who
in turn are not imitating men – turning into men – but etching a zone of indiscernibility.
More than searching for the concreteness of form, these women who sing become the

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visual and audible indicator of these imagined possibilities, which are the Hyperwomen
and their invisible and silent universe, but in some form contiguous to a very material
universe, where sexual difference loses its clearly drawn lines. This new other world
founded by the Hyperwomen, actualized and realized in every Jamurikumalu ritual in
the world we see, rewrites the body – sex – as a set of practices and techniques upon
which it is possible to intervene because what is presented as a given is always already
an intervention. I will finish with an indigenous saying: what happened once may come
to happen again.

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