Egymásra Nézve (1982; Károly Makk)

ANITA KURIMAY
Assistant Professor of History
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA

The first and only movie made in communist east-central

Europe to deal centrally with the topic of lesbianism.

The film Egymásra nézve (Another way) was the first and only movie in
communist Hungary and communist east-central Europe in which
lesbianism plays a central role. While there have been films that featured
lesbian characters, such as the Hungarian film Hangyaboly (1971; Anthill),
romantic love between women had, until 1982, never been a main theme in
Hungarian cinema or elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. Egymásra nézve
was based on the semiautographical novel Törvényen kívül és belül (1980;
Another Love [2007]) by the Hungarian lesbian novelist Erzsébet Galgóczi
(1930–1989) and was directed by Károly Makk (1925–2017). It tells a story
of a tragic love affair between two women in the repressive state-socialist
political system. In doing so, Makk, who was internationally recognized as
one of Hungary's most prominent filmmakers (Ház a sziklák alatt [1958],
Szerelem [1971], and MacskaMáték [1972]), created a movie that was
groundbreaking not only for representing a lesbian love affair but also for
challenging official narratives about state socialism. Egymásra nézve
reflects Makk's innovative style in his choices of milieu, humanistic
approach to his characters, and orthodox technique that produced firm story
lines and appealing characters (Burns 1996).

Plot Overview
Egymásra nézve begins with what is eventually revealed to be the ending of
the story: the recovery of the body of Éva Szalánczky, who was shot by
border guards at the Austrian-Hungarian border. The next scene shows
Livia Horváth in her hospital bed with a bandage around her neck, being
told by a doctor that she will never fully recover from the inMuries she
suffered when her husband shot her. The rest of the film sets out to explain
the prelude to the tragic ending, soon to be revealed as a love story. The
story takes place in 1958, two years following the Hungarian Revolution
that was crushed by Soviet forces. Éva, the charismatic main character,
moves from the countryside to Budapest and lands a Mob as a Mournalist at a
newspaper, where she falls in love with the married Livia. She pursues her,
and it is not long before Livia, whose husband is a military officer, also
begins to have feelings for Éva. When Livia confesses her love for Éva to
her husband, he shoots her.

Éva, played by Polish actress Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak (1951–), is a

taboo breaker in more than one way. Not only is she explicit about her
sexual orientation, but she is also openly critical of state socialism. As a
Mournalist, her desire to tell the truth about the bureaucratic corruption and
forced collectivization in a Hungarian town ends her Mournalistic career.
Éva's defiance in her reference to the 1956 Hungarian uprising as a
revolution rather than a counterrevolution (which was the official
interpretation until 1989) is a poignant reminder of the limits of personal
integrity in a dictatorship. Éva's unwillingness to compromise her principles
was more disturbing to contemporary critics than her openly lesbian
identity. Indeed, over the course of the film, Éva's lesbianism and her
ideological commitment to telling the truth and nothing but the truth serve
as metaphors for the political and cultural intolerance of state socialism not
only during the 1950s but also in the 1980s. Once lesbianism functions as a
representation of vulnerability (personal or political), it loses its particular
significance as a nonnormative sexual identity (Burns 1996).

The Hungarian Context

Although homosexuality had been decriminalized in Hungary in 1961,
lesbians and gay men were barely tolerated by the communist regime and
faced entrenched homophobia. Nothing more powerfully demonstrates the
depth of homophobia than the fact that neither of the actresses playing the
two main characters of the film were Hungarian. That it was too risky for
Hungarian actresses to play lesbian roles reveals the extent to which
homosexuality (both male and female) was understood by authorities and
the public alike as a medical and social pathology. Throughout state
socialism there was a collective silence around homosexuality that was as
true for state-run public discourse as it was for private discourse with
family and friends.

In this context, Egymásra nézve was transformative in providing a platform

for talking about homosexuality and, in particular, female homosexuality. In
the words of a contemporary lesbian, the film represented “a great
breakthrough” in public discourse about gayness (Borgos 2011, 49). Not
only was it the first time that same-sex love (male or female) was the
subMect of a movie, but Egymásra nézve also initiated the first public
discussion about lesbianism since the 1920s. To be sure, the discourse about
homosexuality and love between women on the radio, on television, and in
the printed press reflected the heteronormative and homophobic attitudes of
both the larger public and the commentators (all of whom were male) of the
state-censored media. People struggled to provide a definition for what
most agreed was a nonnormative and unfortunate phenomenon. Yet, there
were also some attempts to frame lesbianism not as a moral or medical
pathology but rather as a different kind of love that deserved to be tolerated
even if it was not entirely understood.

Significance for Hungarian Lesbians

For contemporary Hungarian lesbians, Egymásra nézve was an
unprecedented milestone. It served as a new foundation for the formation of
lesbian identity and subculture. The portrayal of a self-declared lesbian
character who had no shame about her sexual orientation was inspirational.
In reality, the idea of a proud and out lesbian could have been only a fantasy
for most lesbians at the time. By the 1980s, lesbians had a small clandestine
network located in Budapest. While known to the authorities, it remained
under the radar for most Hungarians and even to many lesbians. According
to interviews conducted with lesbians who saw the film, which “everyone
watched about thirty times,” Egymásra nézve was not simply empowering
personally, but it also opened a new avenue to connect lesbians with each
other and to expand the community (Borgos 2011, 187). The use of the
phrase “Egymásra nézve” in the personal advertisement sections of the
newspapers became an important code for lesbians to find potential love
interests and community.

That one of the protagonists was a married woman, moreover, had added
potency for contemporaries, many of whom were trapped within the
prescribed heteronormative ideas of state socialism: heterosexual marriage
and family. That Livia falls in love with Éva and leaves her husband was
both validating and encouraging for lesbians who had left their husbands or
were considering leaving them. The performance of Polish actress Grażyna
Szapołowska (1953–), who plays Livia, was well received not only among
Hungarian lesbians. Szapołowska's portrayal of the transformation of a
heterosexual woman living in a conventional marriage into a woman who
could desire another woman and contemplate divorce earned her the Best
Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982.

A Stereotypical yet Authentic Portrayal of

Lesbian Romance
In many ways, the representation of lesbian romance in the film reflects an
age-old stereotype of a butch-femme relationship. Éva has a masculine
appearance and acts as the active pursuer of the relationship; Livia's
appearance is unmistakably feminine, and she longs for a kind of personal
attention that she could never have gotten from her husband. The ending of
the women's relationship also fits into a long tradition of artistic Western
representations of romantic homosexual relationships (e.g., Radclyffe Hall's
The Well of Loneliness [1928]). Here, too, love ends in tragedy and the
death of one of the characters. Livia ultimately reMects Éva and her own
homosexual desire, while Éva intentionally lets herself be shot by the
border guards. That in the end Livia wants to be with her husband despite
being permanently damaged by him is an unmistakable sign of a return to
normalcy.

At the same time that the film conforms to a conventional treatment of

homosexual themes, the romantic relationship between the two women is
portrayed as authentically as any classical heterosexual love story. The
intimate moments between the two women in public spaces, their shy eye
contact, touching of hands, and eventual kissing are effective in portraying
the spark and fruition of love between them. The same moments also reveal
the power of the Hungarian state to encroach on one's personal life. For
instance, when the two women's kissing on a bench draws the attention of
policemen, Livia, as a married woman, is threatened with exposure to her
boss and husband. Éva, however, is taken to the police. And as she protests
her inhumane treatment, the policemen tell her, “We are not in America.” In
these moments, the film is unequivocal in exposing the patriarchal nature of
state socialism and its consequences for people whose love falls outside of
state-sanctioned heteronormativity. In the sex scene that takes place in the
confines of the home, the nakedness of the women and the sexual acts
between them are suggestive but not graphically depicted. While the
sensual moments between the women are aestheticized, the male-female
relationship is portrayed in a much more naturalistic manner (Feldmann
2015).

Egymásra nézve's depiction of lesbians and lesbian romance was an early

representative of more positive portrayal of gays and lesbians even within
the western European and American context. Considering that mainstream
east-central European cinema, with some notable exceptions, has avoided
and continues to avoid the subMect of homosexuality, the legacy of the film
is even more significant. Ongoing and even increased homophobia in
Hungary and the former Eastern bloc after 1989 mean that LGBTQ-themed
films remain a rarity and are mostly produced as independent films. Most
mainstream lesbian films—which tend to be rare even within LGBTQ-
themed films, such as Csókkal és körömmel (1994; Kisses and scratches) by
the Hungarian director György SzomMas or Diši duboko (2004; Take a deep
breath) by the Serbian director Dragan Marinković—continue to represent
lesbians and queer female sexuality as something to be pitied and tolerated
at best, and as something to be condemned at worst.

SEE ALSO Hena Maysara (2007; Khaled Youssef); Mädchen in Uniform

(1931; Leontine Sagan)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borgos, Anna, ed. Eltitkolt évek: Tizenhat leszbikus életút [Secret years:
Sixteen lesbian life Mourneys]. Budapest: Labrisz Leszbikus Egyesület,
2011.

Borgos, Anna. “Secret Years: Hungarian Lesbian Herstory, 1950s–2000s.”

Aspasia 9 (2015): 87–112.

Burns, Bryan. “Károly Makk.” In World Cinema: Hungary, 46–52.

Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Cunningham, John. “The 1970s and the 1980s: The Transitional Years.”
Chap. 8 in Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex. London:
Wallflower Press, 2004.

Feldmann, Fanni. “ElőbúMni a vasfüggöny mögül: A szexuális másság

ábrázolása a magyar filmben a rendszerváltás előtt és után” [Coming out
from behind the Iron Curtain: Representations of homosexuality in
Hungarian cinema before and after the regime change]. In Tér, hatalom
és
identitás viszonyai a magyar filmben [The Relationships of space, power
and identity in the Hungarian film], edited by Győri Zsolt and Kalmár
György, 183–201. Debrecen, Hungary: Debreceni Egyetemi Kiadó, 2015.

Gatto, Katherine Gyékényesi. “Sexual and Political Marginality in

Communist Hungary: Erzsébet Galgóczi's Törvényen belül (Within the
Law) and Károly Makk's Egymásra nézve (Another Way).” Anuario de
cine y literatura en español: An International Journal on Film and
Literature 2 (1996): 73–80.

Moss, Kevin. Review of Another Way, directed by Károly Makk. Slavic

Review 51, no. 3 (1992): 564–565.

Takács, Judit. “Queering Budapest.” In Queer Cities, Queer Cultures:

Europe since 1945, edited by Matt Cook and Jennifer V. Evans, 191–210.
London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Einayim Pkuhot (2009; Haim Tabakman)
YARON SHEMER
Associate Professor of Israel Cultural Studies, Department of Asian Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Israeli film depicting a homosexual relationship within the

ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jewish community.

Since the 1990s, Israeli cinema has shown a growing interest in the life of
the Jewish religious communities, especially the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox)
strand. The harbingers of this trend often conveyed a stereotypical,
demeaning, and even ludicrous depiction of the Haredi community (Peleg
2016). Conversely, the new wave of films made about this and other
religious communities in the early twenty-first century—albeit still
populated mostly by “outsiders” (secular filmmakers and actors)—renders
rich narratives and sensitive characters that the nonreligious viewer is apt to
be empathetic toward rather than scorn. Homosexual relationships in the
Haredi community may easily lend themselves to a voyeuristic and
overdramatized cinematic treatment. However, Haim Tabakman's debut
film Einayim Pkuhot (2009; Eyes wide open) delves into a story of
homosexual desire not to elicit a titillating effect but, by situating it in the
midst of communal engagements and family life, to patiently explore it
within the context of a particular socioreligious milieu.

Einayim Pkuhot is set in the Haredi community of Mea Shearim in

Jerusalem. After the death of his father, Aharon returns to his family's
butcher shop and assumes his father's duties there. A young man, Ezri,
appears at the shop's doorstep on the first day Aharon reopens it, and
Aharon later offers this odd young vagabond a Mob as his helper and an
available room over his butcher shop. Ezri, the viewer later learns, came to
Jerusalem to find a yeshiva young man who used to be his lover but is
avoiding him now. Ezri makes advances on Aharon, who initially resists the
temptation but then succumbs and finds himself all consumed in this love
affair to the point of compromising his reputation in this closely knit
community and his place as the head of the family with a wife, Rivka, and
four children. Eventually, pressure from the rabbi who urges him to send
Ezri away, the growing risk of becoming an outcast within his own
community, and the signs of the detrimental effects of his relationship with
Ezri on his family prove to be too onerous, and Aharon confesses to his
wife that he is ready to resume the life expected of a devoted man in the
Haredi community, the way it was before his love entanglement with that
young man. The film ends with the return of Aharon to the spring on the
outskirts of Jerusalem. As he did before when he accompanied Ezri to that
spring, Aharon removes his clothes and submerges in the water; this time,
however, he is not seen surfacing.

Body and Impurity

It is a truism in contemporary scholarship that knowledge is inscribed on
the body and that, in turn, the body generates knowledge. And yet, in
addressing the centrality and the agency of the bodies in Einayim Pkuhot,
the theologist Stefanie Knauss (2013) employs the term eigensinn, which in
this context she translates as “stubbornness” and the “will of their own.” It
is as if this film proffers a schism between the body and the volition of the
mind and eschews the possibility for symbiosis between the two. The
body/flesh, with its desires, emotions, pains, and Mouissance (physical
pleasure), defies asceticism, taboos, and conventions, and, ultimately, it
upsets the conscious will. In this film, unlike in most narrative films, none
of the characters gains raised understanding or consciousness as the result
of the narrative Munctures and developments. The title, Einayim Pkuhot
(Eyes Wide Open), is therefore deceiving; seemingly it suggests a work that
focuses on the ocular or, by extension, with regard to the topic at hand, on
cognition, awareness, and acceptance of the homosexual self. And yet,
Einayim Pkuhot is not a tale of “coming out of the closet.”

The body and flesh/meat (the Hebrew word basar stands for both and
makes no distinction between the two) are thematically and visually the
main motif in Einayim Pkuhot. Throughout the film, images of blood (e.g.,
Aharon cuts his finger as he uses the meat-grinding machine together with
Ezri) and the almost tactile presence of meat—slaughtered, cut, sold, eaten
—render the film's color scheme, where the redness or pinkness of the
meat/blood/flesh stands in contrast to the otherwise dull, at times almost
monochrome, color palette of the mise-en-scène. The film's first image is of
a locked butcher shop (recognized by the Hebrew sign Itliz) as Aharon is
trying to break into it. A poster on the shop's front announces the death of
Aharon's father—Menachem Fleischman (the surname meaning, literally,
“man of flesh/meat” in Yiddish and German). In a lengthy scene after he
breaks into the shop, Aharon throws away rotted meat that he finds in the
walk-in freezer. From the outset then, the film thrusts into center stage the
flesh/meat/body triad and imbues it with odious connotations.
 © ARCHIVES DU 7E ART/ALAMY
Ezri (left) and Aharon in the Butcher Shop. The tactile presence of body/meat/flesh
forms the main motif in Einayim Pkuhot (2009).

Jewish traditions, and specifically rabbinic texts referencing the body, do

not unequivocally shun the body, and, in contradistinction to various
religious doctrines, they do not proffer that the body should, ipso facto, be
equated with sin. And yet, the body, and particularly the functioning of its
orifices, is engaged in activities that are deemed shameful. In a 2013 article,
the philosopher Yakir Englander and the legal scholar Orit Kamir
demonstrate that for the Rabbis (Ḥazal) the body, created in the image of
God, “is not the abMect [serah odef] that one should minimize or even
eliminate altogether, rather, it is what constitutes us” (60; translation by
author). But then the rabbinical reference to the penis as mevushim, a
derivative of the word busha (shame), signifies an intrinsic connection
between the male sex organ and shame (Englander and Kamir 2013).

In consideration of shame and modesty, Haredi Jews are required to fully

cover their bodies in public. Men in the Haredi communities are black
frocked, and only the man's hands and bearded face are exposed. This is
precisely what makes the images of male nudity in the film so striking in
the sexual encounters between the two men, as when Ezri and Aharon (and,
at the film's end, Aharon by himself) submerge themselves totally naked in
the spring on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

In conventional Jewish texts, homosexuality (defined by the act and not

intent or desire) is couched in terms of abomination. Unlike the equivocal
treatment of the body in those texts, the act of sexual relations between men
in the Hebrew Bible is categorically a sin and, according to the book of
Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13), is punishable by death. The strands of odious
meat/flesh/body and of homosexuality converge in the film's various
registers—narrative, visuals, and dialogue. Immediately following the scene
where Aharon engages in the act of cleaning/purifying the shop, the good-
looking young Ezri appears at the shop's front door. Thematically then, the
removal of the rotted meat concurs with the appearance of a different
“nonkosher flesh”—that of the homosexual Ezri. Later in the film, when
members of the “modesty guards/patrols” visit the meat shop after rumors
of the forbidden relationship spread, their leader tells Aharon that if he does
not rid his place of Ezri they will make it public that he “feeds the people
with forbidden food.” Toward the film's end, a Haredi man reads aloud the
pashkevilim (broadside posters) that, without specifically referencing
Aharon and Ezri, warn against the newly revealed abomination in the midst
of the community and the risk involved—“Who knows what unholy meat is
being prepared in our butcheries?!” Then, a passerby mutters “trefa”—the
Hebrew word for meat that is ritually unfit for eating—toward Ezri and
Aharon, who walk behind him. Thus, once again, the film is making
explicit the connection between the meat/flesh/body (odious, rotted,
nonkosher) and homosexuality.

© ARCHIVES DU 7E ART/ALAMY
Aharon (left) and Ezri Bathe Naked in the Spring in Einayim Pkuhot (2009). The
scenes in the spring defy a facile association of water with purification or cleansing.

If water in Judaism, as in various other faiths, is often associated with

purification or cleansing (e.g., the mikveh—the Jewish ritual bath), in this
film water in its various forms—rain, water pipes, and the spring—is linked
to what is associated from the viewpoint of the Haredi community with
sinful and repugnant engagements or woeful occurrences. The film opens
with a prolonged pattering sound of rain over a dark screen; only later does
the viewer see Aharon attempting unsuccessfully to open the old lock of the
butcher shop with his key. Aharon's first act even before entering the shop
is to unpeel from the shop's front the poster announcing the death of his
father, which he then folds carefully, brings inside, unfolds again, and
spreads on a chair to let dry. This establishes early on the meeting of death
(rather than life and purification) and rain/water. The rain gradually gains
an uncanny presence as it accompanies the film almost throughout. Despite
the pouring rain when Ezri first appears at the shop's doorstep, strangely, he
is well lit by what looks like a sunray. Likewise, it can be gathered from a
comment Rivka makes to her husband, saying she is glad they reopened the
shop before the High Holidays, that the film is likely situated in late
summer (or possibly very early fall) when constant heavy rains are an
extreme rarity in Jerusalem. Yet again, this somewhat mythic and
unrealistic use of rain is not meant to suggest the cleansing of the soul but
to accompany the falling of the film's main character. An outdoor water
pipe bursts open when Ezri is attacked by his former gay lover and his
yeshiva friends. Likewise, the breaking of the water pipe in the narrow alley
is associated with disorder and violence—again, a far cry from the cathartic
meaning water usually has in various faiths.

Seemingly though, as suggested by Nir Cohen (2012), the act of Aharon's

submersion in the spring outside Jerusalem, once in response to Ezri's
urging and then by himself at the end of the film, signifies that Aharon is
experiencing a spiritual (rather than strictly religious) purification. A close
reading of the filmic text, however, challenges this facile interpretation.
This is most patent in the sequencing of the shots that includes an extended
close-up of wasps buzzing inside a clear ziplock bag. There is first an
establishing shot of Ezri with his back to the camera as he is taking off his
underwear before taking a dip in a spring. A cut to a close-up of Aharon
sitting away from the spring shows him following Ezri with his eyes and
then, possibly out of modesty or embarrassment, moving his head sideways
and looking down to realize that next to him is a bag with wasps. If
anything, this Muxtaposition of images exudes a sense of unease for both
Aharon and the viewer rather than a sacred or spiritual state. Likewise, if
the erotic encounter with Ezri in the spring is supposed to connote
purification, then Aharon's return to the spring by himself in the film's final
scene is puzzling because Aharon has Must put an end to his relationship
with Ezri and expressed his wish to Rivka to resume a normal life. Whether
the submersion at the film's end is interpreted as an attempt by Aharon to
relive the memories of bathing with Ezri before he commits to the mundane
traditional family life and a return to the Haredi community as a dutiful
member or, alternatively, because the film's last shot does not show him
resurfacing, as an act of committing suicide, these motivations and acts can
hardly be associated with spiritual purification.

The Father Figure: Authority and Substitutes

When Ezri enters Aharon's butcher shop immediately following the scene
depicting the trashing of the rotted meat, there are two contrasts being
made: not only the odious and the abMect with this young man's good looks
but also the death of the father with the promise of youth. Indeed, one of the
most significant and radical themes in this film is the place Ezri takes as a
substitute father. Initially, one would not deem Ezri a possible father-figure
role model in the context of the Jewish Haredi community: he is feminine
both in looks and comportment, free spirited, not a dedicated avrekh
(yeshiva student), a vagabond, and without family (although the film
reveals various stories from his past, there is no mention of Ezri's family).
Likewise, while Aharon's father was a respected member of this Haredi
community, Ezri is an oddball who manages to unnerve nearly everyone
who has an encounter with him, save for Aharon and his wife, Rivka. Yet,
considerations of scholarship on the construction of Jewish and Zionist
masculinity and of the film's particular Ezri/Menachem Fleischman pairing
offer a radically different view of Ezri's place in this film.

In his seminal work Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Homosexuality and the
Invention of the Jewish Man (1997), Daniel Boyarin argues that in
contradistinction to the Zionist rendering of the new Jew (and in
contradistinction to Sigmund Freud's construction of the male psyche and
sexuality) as one who is connected to the land, audacious, and, most
importantly, hypermasculine, in the Ashkenazi diasporic tradition the ideal
man was appreciated for his genteel comportment, his cerebral aptitude, and
his tenderness—and, generally, for what are now often associated with
feminine qualities. In Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism
in Israeli Cinema (2004), Raz Yosef attends to the highly constructed nature
of the idealized/idolized Zionist body. For Knauss (2013), Einayim Pkuhot
offers an alternative to this form of venerated masculinity.

Einayim Pkuhot points to a structural displacement/replacement of the

father by Ezri. Even before Ezri's first appearance in the store that coincides
with Aharon's putting the shop in order—clearing the freezer, picking up his
father's chair that is lying sideways on the floor, probably as a result of his
father's unexpected fall, and picking up the tallit (prayer shawl)—Ezri's
arrival is anticipated, as the obituary post for Aharon's father on the
storefront is replaced by the “help wanted” sign. Oddly, when Ezri enters
the shop, he touches the drying mourning poster that has the father's name
in bold letters. Taking the shop's helper Mob and accepting Aharon's
invitation to stay until he finds a place (which he never does or attempts to
do), Ezri makes himself at home in the father's room upstairs. Aharon
points out to Ezri that his father used to rest in this room. To Ezri's inquiry
whether he too rests here sometimes, Aharon responds, “Rest brings about
idleness and idleness brings about madness,” thus implicitly putting his
father and Ezri (who is in no hurry to Moin him in the shop downstairs) in
one odd category. When Aharon is startled to hear a thumping sound from
Ezri's/the father's room and he rushes upstairs, he finds his father's chair
lying sideways on the floor, possibly because of a kick or push by Ezri,
exactly as it was shown at the beginning of the film when Aharon first
enters the shop. Furthermore, the implied smoking habit of the father (a
cigarette box can be seen on the floor when Aharon enters the shop) is also
significant in the film's stratagem of replacement/displacement with regard
to Ezri/the father. Other than Ezri, no other person in this film is shown to
be smoking, as if to suggest that the ghost image of the father is incarnated
in the young helper.

In their bedroom, following Ezri's departure owing to his condemnation by

the community and the urging from Aharon, Rivka asks her husband,
“Where do you want to be?” He answers instantly, “I want to be here,” and
goes on to explain away the sin as something that was forced on him from
the outside: “It's not mine. It's not me. It's the evil urge [yetzer ha-ra]. It's
the evil urge that took over me. I didn't bring it into our home.” Aharon is
appealing at the end of this monologue—“Protect me.” Rivka moves him
closer to her, and the composition when Rivka embraces Aharon's languid
body and cradles him in her lap immediately conMures up the image of the
pietà (and a play on a previous scene when Aharon holds Ezri, who had Must
been beaten by his former gay lover and his friends). “Protect me” can be
read then as a plea for Rivka to protect him from the “evil urge” but also as
a suggestion on Aharon's part that he already lost the protection of his
biological father and now he has Must lost the father's replacement. In
Hebrew, ezri literally means “my help” and is often used in the Bible in the
context of a supplication before God. To borrow the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan's (1901–1981) concept of the “name of the father,” the
higher and compelling authority of God/father/Ezri are all intermixed in
Aharon's positionality toward this inexorable power.

The unique construction of Ezri as a displacing father figure coincides with

the film's unconventional rendering of gay sexual roles. Aharon seems to be
the more masculine and dominant figure in relation to Ezri, who also looks
at least half a generation his Munior. In all the intimate scenes with the two
characters together in bed, it is always Aharon who is atop Ezri. But again,
Einayim Pkuhot challenges these facile expectations of “top-bottom” sexual
roles. As it turns out, Ezri is the more dominant figure, and there is no
doubt he is the film's protagonist (i.e., the character who motivates the
narrative); this tale of homosexual relations unfolds as a result of his arrival
in the Haredi community of Mea Shearim and ends owing to his departure.
More importantly, in different scenes, the film employs an intriguing
composition to render the power imbalance between the two main
characters, which results in placing Ezri and not Aharon at the film's center
stage. The first time the viewer witnesses this is in an early conversation
between Ezri, with his back to the camera, and Aharon. Because he is
facing the front of the shop and the outside, Ezri is well lit and in full focus.
Aharon is reflected through the shop-front glass in the dim back of the
store, and his image is therefore rather grainy and out of focus. When
Aharon Moins Ezri on the roof's terrace (adMacent to Ezri's/the father's
upstairs room), one finds the same cinematic scheme—Aharon is in the
background, dimly lit and out of focus, while Ezri claims the frame's
foreground. The film employs this device a third time in the yeshiva, when
Ezri is slumbering in the brightly lit foreground and Aharon is seen in the
somewhat ill-defined background behind all the denizens as he is entering
the yeshiva.

In her analysis of Einayim Pkuhot, Knauss (2013) demonstrates astutely

that manhood is rendered in this film in contrast to its construction in both
secular Zionism and religious Judaism; the two leading characters clearly
do not fit the mold of either Zionism's new Jew or the old diasporic Jew.
Yet, notwithstanding the film's unique tale of a homosexual engagement in
the midst of the Haredi community of Jerusalem, it might be argued that the
film's most significant feat is to transcend the confines of a gay story and its
design to reiterate that one's self can never be reduced to sexuality and
sexual orientation. When Rabbi Vaisben visits Aharon in his shop and
shows the hooligans of the modesty guards out after they threaten Aharon, a
conversation ensues between the two. The rabbi seeks to hear from Aharon
why he has not driven Ezri out. Aharon calmly responds, “I feel alive. I
need him…. I was dead. Now I'm alive.” Clearly, his desperation for the
bond with Ezri is more than sexual. Ezri offers Aharon all that the
suffocating Haredi community shuns or cannot offer. Ezri is a free-spirited
and independent young man who is more passionate about drawing people's
profiles (to an extent, in defiance of the religious prohibition to create
figurative illustrations of humans as they are created in the image of God)
than about Torah and Talmud study. Ezri brings with him an air of
otherness. In an early scene when Ezri is calling his former lover from a
public phone, church bells can be heard. In a different scene, when Ezri is
alone on the roof, a muezzin's prayer is heard in the background mixed with
Jewish prayers from a synagogue or a yeshiva close by. These are part of
Jerusalem's sound space and definitely so in Mea Shearim, a neighborhood
abutting the old city. It is as if the film offers not an eerie homoerotic
fantasy that defies reality, but a reality that defies the oppressive boundaries
of the self and the place and to which, like Ezri, everyone should be
attuned.

SEE ALSO Anti-Semitism and Zionism; The Bubble (2006; Eytan

Fox); Religion and Same-Sex Behaviors: Judaism

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Homosexuality and the
Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997.

Cohen, Nir. Soldiers, Rebels, and Drifters: Gay Representation in Israeli

Cinema. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2012.

Englander, Yakir, and Orit Kamir. “‘Basar-Busha Sruḥa Rima’: Ha-Guf

veha-Busha be-Olamam shel Ḥazal” [Body and shame in the world of the
Tannaim and Amoraim]. Jewish Studies 49 (2013): 57–101.

Knauss, Stefanie. “Exploring Orthodox Jewish Masculinities with Eyes

Wide Open.” Journal of Religion and Film 17, no. 2, article 7 (2013).
http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/Mrf/vol17/iss2/7

Peleg, Yaron. Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli

Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.
Yosef, Raz. Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli
Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

FILMOGRAPHY

Tabakman, Haim, dir. Einayim Pkuhot (Eyes Wide Open). 2009. Film.
Elbe, Lili (1882–1931)
RAINER HERRN
Lecturer and Researcher, Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in
Medicine, Berlin University Hospital Charitè, Germany
Associate, Magnus Hirschfeld Society, Germany

ANNETTE F. TIMM
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Calgary, Canada

One of the first people to undergo surgical sexual transition, in

1930 and 1931, and how this example complicates assumptions
about the concept of “transgender.”

Lili Elbe was born as Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener on 28 December

1882 in VeMle, Jutland, Denmark. At the turn of the century, Wegener
began studying art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in
Copenhagen, where he met his future wife, Gerda Marie Frederikke
Gottlieb (1886–
1940), and where he was well integrated into the artists' milieu of the city.
While he became a successful painter of Danish landscapes, Gerda painted
Jugendstil (art nouveau) and art deco portraits. The Wegeners moved to
Paris in 1912, becoming part of a bohemian world famous for its
unconventional lifestyles. Einar had begun modeling female clothing for
Gerda's portraits, a practice that seemed in retrospect to have been a turning
point on the path to establishing a feminine identity. At first only in private
but later also in public, Einar began presenting as a woman and being
introduced as Einar's cousin.

Series of Transition Surgeries

The desire to become a woman led to visits to various Paris doctors, most of
whom either diagnosed psychopathological illnesses, such as hysteria, or
evaluated the wish to transition as a sign of homosexuality, which they
viewed as an illness. Appalled by these mischaracterizations, Wegener's
quest to harmonize body and psyche took a dramatic turn after a chance
meeting with the Dresden gynecologist Kurt Warnekros (1882–1949). In
1930 Wegener followed Warnekros's advice and visited Magnus
Hirschfeld's (1868–1935) Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for
Sexual Science) in Berlin for the purposes of physical and psychological
evaluation. The first step of this evaluation was a psychobiological
questionnaire, which Hirschfeld had been developing since 1899 in order to
determine the gender and sexual identities of his patients. Hirschfeld
established the existence of physical and psychological feminine traits,
which he confirmed with a blood test. A series of surgical interventions
followed: first surgical castration in Berlin and then, in Dresden, a penis
amputation and other surgeries to create a vagina. The last of these
surgeries, likely an ovarian transplantation, was conducted in 1931 and was
fatal, prompting much press speculation about the cause of death.

Even before her death, news reports about how Einar Wegener had become
Lili Elbe were circulating in the Danish and German press; they implied
that she was the first person to have undergone surgical sexual transition.
Yet Elbe's later role as a key figure in trans history is complicated by the
fact that she never understood herself to be a transvestite—the word used
for all trans people since Hirschfeld coined it in 1910. She insisted that she
had been born as a camouflaged female and believed that she had not
changed her sex but had simply found ways to allow her femininity to
express itself. She felt nothing but revulsion for transvestites, whom she
viewed as simply wearing costumes.

The Difficulty of Defining Sexual Transition

Despite Elbe's self-understanding, both scholarly and popular accounts of
her story have continued to portray her as the first transsexual and a pioneer
of a new trans movement. Her case thus raised the question of how sexual
transition should be defined. Does it mean a life spent living in the social
role of the “other” sex? Is it a desire for medical intervention to alter the
body? Or does it entail either the complete removal of the sexual organs of
the original sex or the construction of new genitals? Depending on the
answer, many individuals might be considered to be the first to transition,
and several individuals who underwent surgical procedures between 1910
and 1930 could lay claim to having been the first to undergo physical
transition. In other words, it is important to reMect the notion that only a
complete removal of all sexual traits of the original sex and the creation of
new genitals counts as a gender transition, while also taking seriously an
individual's stated wish to take advantage of any measures available at the
time. Even if surgical intervention is considered necessary to qualify as the
first transition, then it was not Elbe who was first but an anonymous
individual treated by the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld (1886–1941) and the
surgeon Richard Mühsam (1872–1938) in Berlin in 1920 and 1921.
However, despite having undergone castration, the creation of a vagina, and
the implantation of ovaries, this person has not seemed appropriate as a
pioneer or figure of identification because she returned Must a few months
later to have reconstructive surgery on the penis and lived thereafter as a
man.

These early trans histories are difficult to investigate because European

laws governing surgery and marriage created incentives to obscure the
details of the individuals' life stories. Despite the consent forms that Elbe
and others seeking genital surgery were asked to sign, surgeons knew that
castration could be classified as illegal bodily inMury under German law and
that even performing procedures classified as cosmetic surgery could open
them up to malpractice charges if the patient was unsatisfied. Those
involved had every reason to cover their tracks and to be vague about
medical details. As Sabine Meyer details in her meticulous 2015
investigation of Elbe's life, in order to establish a legally plausible
Mustification for the annulment of their marriage, Gerda Wegener had to
provide the Danish Ministry of Justice with a medical opinion from
Warnekros that Einar's physical limitations made it unlikely that the
marriage between the Wegeners had ever been consummated. Dissolving
the marriage was, after all, necessary to allow a legal name change from
Einar Wegener to Lili Elvenes—a last-minute change from “Elbe” for
which no explanation has been discovered—in November 1930. (The name
Elbe has been used in this entry to avoid confusion and because her legal
name was never made public.) The surgery itself was possible, because
German doctors had been conducting such procedures with the Mustification
that they were the only way to prevent self-mutilation and suicide, a
principle that was later enshrined in a 1931 law protecting German surgeons
from prosecution.

Representations and Misrepresentations of

Elbe's Life
But the most important cause of misunderstanding has been the various
ways that representations of Elbe's life escaped her individual control and
became sensationalized or instrumentalized for literary, media, and filmic
purposes and even as a side effect of her role as a figure of positive
identification for trans individuals. Constructing the story of her transition
is certainly complicated by the fact that her medical files were likely
destroyed in the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in May
1933 (and subsequent book burnings) and in the bombing of Dresden in
February 1945. Yet had they survived, these documents would also have
been read through the lens of the complex relationship between Elbe's
subMective desires and their medical interpretation, and they would not
change the fact that by the time of her death, Elbe's story had become a
media sensation with its own influence on the history of transsexuality.
 SOURCE: CARL REISSNER VERLAG DRESDEN Cover of the
German Edition of Lili Elbe's Posthumously Published Autobiography Ein
Mensch Wechselt das Geschlect (1932; Man into Woman [1933]). This cover of
Elbe's autobiography includes pictures of Elbe as both a man and a woman, along with
newspaper clippings of headlines sensationalizing her transformation, such as “A
Scientific Phenomenon” and “A Case of a True Hermaphrodite.”

In the last year of her life, Elbe sought the help of the Danish Mournalist,
author, and translator Ernst Harthern (1884–1969; also known as Ernst
Ludwig Harthern Jacobson) to compile her notes, letters, and reflections
into an autobiography. The book was still not quite complete when she died,
and Harthern published it in 1931 as a somewhat fictionalized biography
under the Danish title Fra mand til kvinde (From man to woman) using the
pseudonym Niels Hoyer. Gerda Wegener, Warnekros, and others also
contributed to the writing process, making this a book with multiple
authors. The later German (1932) and English (1933) versions were not
only translations but revised texts. Harthern added new passages and
rewrote many others in response to critiques and with the goal of
convincingly establishing that Elbe had undergone “the first sex change,” as
the 2004 English edition announces in its subtitle. Although Meyer has
established that Elbe did authorize the Danish version of the biography and
communicated extensively with Harthern about its form right up until the
time of her death, changes in the later versions mean that they cannot be
considered autobiographical. In sum, Elbe's legacy cannot be understood
without attention to this publication history and to its sensationalizing
features.

Despite their obvious sympathy for Elbe as a person, Harthern and his
literary agents had every incentive to paint her life story as unprecedented
and yet comprehensible to a European public likely to be shocked by any
blurring of gender boundaries and any kind of nonconforming sexual
activity. Fra mand til kvinde thus emphasizes Elbe's desire for children as
the reason for her last surgery, and it carefully negotiates the dilemma of
Elbe's pre-transition sexuality with statements that adamantly deny
preexisting homosexual desire. Even the twenty-first-century filmic
depiction of Elbe's life, The Danish Girl (2015), starring Eddie Redmayne
as Elbe, skirts the issue of sexual desire by failing to include a key scene
from the novel on which the film is based. In David Ebershoff's The Danish
Girl: A Novel (2000), Elbe's Parisian days include regular visits to peep
shows, culminating in her seduction by another male patron while they
watch a female performer. Although this scene might also be viewed as a
fetishization of trans women's bodies, and though it is likely apocryphal,
Ebershoff grants Elbe the sexual agency that other accounts deny her in
their insistence on describing her transition in strictly binary terms and as a
path to motherhood. Both film and novel also entirely ignore Elbe's fame,
obscuring how media representations and prevailing gender norms continue
to shape her story and influence trans lives. These issues aside, there is little
doubt that Elbe has remained a symbol of trans identification to this day
because of Harthern's sympathetic portrayal of her quest to become what
she knew herself to be.

SEE ALSO Institut für Sexualwissenschaft; Transvestites/Transsexuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caughie, Pamela L. “The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era
of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Einar Wegener's Man
into Woman.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (2013): 501–525.

Ebershoff, David. The Danish Girl: A Novel. New York: Viking,

2000. Herrn, Rainer. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus

und
Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft [Pattern of sex:
Transvestism and transsexuality in early sexology]. Giessen, Germany:
Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005.

Hoyer, Niels, ed. Lili Elbe: Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht; Eine
Lebensbeichte [Lili Elbe: A human changes his gender; A life confession].
Dresden, Germany: Carl Reissner Verlag, 1932.

Hoyer, Niels, ed. Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of

Sex. Translated by H. J. Stenning. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.

Hoyer, Niels, ed. Man into Woman: The First Sex Change, a Portrait of Lili
Elbe. Translated by H. J. Stenning. London: Blue Boat Books, 2004.

Meyer, Sabine. “Wie Lili zu einem richtigen Mädchen wurde”: Lili Elbe;
Zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht und Identität zwischen Medialisierung,
Regulierung und SubMektivierung [“How Lili became a real girl”: Lili Elbe;
On the construction of gender and identity between mediatization,
regulation, and subMectivation]. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag,
2015.

Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” In

The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen
Whittle, 221–235. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Weiss, Volker. “ … mit ärztlicher Hilfe zum richtigen Geschlecht?” Zur

Kritik der medizinischen Konstruktion der Transsexualität [“… with
medical help to the real sex?” On the criticism of the medical construction
of transsexuality]. Hamburg, Germany: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2009.

FILMOGRAPHY

Hooper, Tom, dir. The Danish Girl. Working Title Films and Pretty
Pictures, 2015. Film.
Erauso, Catalina de (1592–1650)
SHERRY VELASCO
Professor of Spanish and Gender Studies, Department of Latin American
and Iberian Cultures, Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies
University of Southern California, Los Angeles

A noblewoman who escaped life in a Spanish convent to live as

a man and a soldier in the New World during the sixteenth
century, popularly known as La MonMa Alférez (The Lieutenant
Nun).

La MonMa Alférez (The Lieutenant Nun) was the pseudonym given to

Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650), a Basque noblewoman who lived as a man
for most of her adult life. At age fifteen, she escaped from the convent in
San Sebastián, Spain, where she had lived since the age of four and used the
fabric of her novice's habit to sew an outfit appropriate for a young man.
Before leaving port for the New World, she adopted the name Francisco de
Loyola. Later, she became known as Alonso Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán as
well as Antonio de Erauso. The dizzying fluctuations of names, languages,
professions, garments, and personal conflicts were accompanied by a steady
itinerary of geographic relocations in Europe and the New World,
ultimately underscoring a fluidity of identities that resist any single fixed
designation.
 © ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
La Monja Alfórex (The Lieutenant Nun). Catalina de Erauso, known as La MonMa
Alférez, was a seventeenth-century Basque noblewoman who lived as a man and a
soldier for most of their adult life.

After nearly two decades laboring in various trades, serving as a soldier for
the Spanish Crown in Chile and Peru (achieving the rank of second
lieutenant, in part by massacring “hostile” indigenous peoples in the name
of the crown), and purportedly engaging in numerous brawls, violent
crimes, gambling, and romantic intrigues, Erauso confessed that she was a
woman to avoid prosecution for murder. Once Erauso submitted to a
physical examination to establish both her sexual anatomy and virginity, she
became the overnight sensation known as La MonMa Alférez. When it was
confirmed that she had not taken final vows to become a nun in San
Sebastián, Erauso traveled to Spain to present petitions and testimonies
documenting her military service to the Crown. The Spanish monarch
Philip IV (1605–1665) subsequently granted her a soldier's pension, and she
purportedly enMoyed dispensation from Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644) to
live as a man with the approbation of both church and state. In 1630 Erauso
returned to the New World and spent the last twenty years of his life in
Mexico working as a trader and mule driver, living as Antonio de Erauso
until his death in 1650.

Life Accounts and Historical Documentation

Many different versions of Erauso's life circulated during the seventeenth
century: legal petitions, testimonies, letters, three relaciones (news
pamphlets), a potentially apocryphal autobiography, literary and
iconographic portraits (such as a painting by Juan van der Hamen, produced
around 1626), a popular play, and an episode from a picaresque novel
(Alonso de Castillo Solórzano's Aventuras del Bachiller Trapaza [1637]).
These narratives reveal a variety of identities, including rebellious nun,
fearless soldier, deviant criminal, exemplary virgin, questionable
womanizer, and celebrity spectacle. Despite the historical evidence related
to the life of Catalina de Erauso confirming most of the military activities
recorded in the memoirs (primarily from official testimonies, certifications,
petitions, and letters filed on behalf of the Lieutenant Doña Catalina de
Erauso), considerable mystery continues to surround Erauso. Although
Erauso's autobiography was recorded as having been submitted to the
publisher Bernardino de Guzmán in 1625, no autograph or original copy of
this narrative has been found. The poet and author Cándido María Trigueros
(c. 1737–c. 1801) owned a copy of the manuscript, which was then
transcribed by the historian Juan Bautista Muñoz (1745–1799) in 1784.
Muñoz's draft of the autobiography, titled Vida i sucesos de la MonMa
Alférez, o Alférez Catarina, Doña Catarina de ArauMo [sic] doncella,
natural de San Sebastián, Provincia de Guipúzcoa. Escrita por ella misma
en 18 de Septiembre 1646 [sic], was, in turn, copied by others and later
edited by the Basque critic Joaquín María Ferrer (1777–1861) and
published for the first time in 1829 under the new title Historia de la MonMa
Alférez, Doña Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma (Lieutenant Nun:
Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World [1996]). After this first
publication, the autobiography was altered and translated into other
languages, such as French, German, English, and eventually Basque.

There has been much academic speculation about the authorship and
veracity of the autobiography. Some scholars believe that the Vida was
forged using the 1625 relaciones that describe Erauso's adventures, whereas
others have suggested the opposite—that the relaciones were
sensationalized adaptations of the original Vida attributed to Erauso. Others
have speculated whether Juan Pérez de Montalbán's 1626 play La MonMa
Alférez was the inspiration for the Vida. Given the absence of a verifiable
autograph copy of the original autobiography and the variety of imaginative
representations of Erauso produced during the seventeenth century,
interpreting her/his life demands a certain degree of conMecture.

Gender and Sexuality in the Spanish Empire

Erauso's nontraditional life, which both pushes against and conforms to
certain expectations for gender identity and expression, complicates the
present-day understanding of gender and sexuality in the early modern
Spanish world. Although there is no evidence from seventeenth-century
documents that Erauso was believed to possess any irregularities in primary
sexual characteristics, some witnesses described certain secondary sexual
traits as signaling masculinity. After a private meeting with Erauso, the
Italian aristocrat Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) wrote that she admitted to
having used a painful yet effective poultice to flatten her chest. Although
unsubstantiated, this invasive technique suggests Erauso's firm commitment
to live permanently as a man, which is confirmed by his final years living as
Antonio de Erauso. Consequently, Erauso's successful strategy of verifying
her female genitalia (and virginity) to avoid execution and then
documenting years of service as a male soldier demonstrate how both male
and female gender identities and expression could coexist in colonial Latin
America. Seventeenth-century documents predominantly use female gender
markers and thereby privilege sex-at-birth, except in some testimonies
written by men who knew Erauso only as the soldier Alonso Díaz Ramírez
de Guzmán. Nonetheless, despite this privileging of sex-at-birth, that
Erauso was able to secure acceptance to live openly as Antonio de Erauso
attests to a cultural understanding that the gender binary can be disrupted
and made flexible enough to accommodate exceptional cases.

Current studies on Erauso continue to reflect the instability of Erauso's

identity, as scholars and artists are still debating which gender markers and
pronouns to use when examining Erauso's life. Historians and critics in the
twenty-first century are divided; some use “she” to reflect early modern
treatments of the historical individual, others prefer “he” to respect Erauso's
transgender identity and expression, and others adopt “s/he” or alternate
“she” and “he” randomly or according to the context.

Erauso's sexuality has also been a much debated issue. After Erauso's
shocking revelation, the matrons who examined her body for confirmation
of her female anatomy (and her uncorrupted hymen) declared her to be an
“intact virgin,” thereby establishing the perception that Erauso refrained
from participating in penetrative heterosexual relations, and in doing so
retained her feminine sexual purity and “honor.” Many of the accounts of
Erauso's life—the 1617 letter by Agustín de CarvaMal, the bishop of
Guamanga, to whom Erauso confessed her female identity; the
autobiography; Juan Pérez de Montalbán's play La MonMa Alférez,
performed in 1626; and two of three news pamphlets (the first of the three,
published in 1625 in Madrid and Seville, the last, published in 1653 in
Mexico)—depict Erauso as consistently flirting with women in the New
World, including direct accounts of her preferences and desire to engage in
physical relationships with other women. Surely the tabloid-style anecdotes
from these narratives were circulating in the cultural imaginary. The
protagonist in the autobiography, for example, describes how “I had my
head in the folds of her skirt and she was combing my hair while I ran my
hand up and down between her legs” (Erauso 1996, 17). This instance of
explicit eroticism is not an isolated case; Erauso frequently expresses a
romantic interest in various women in the New World that occasionally
results in physical caresses (and unconsummated marriage proposals) but
apparently never leads to the discovery of Erauso's anatomical identity. This
pattern persisted well after Erauso's death, as the third news pamphlet,
which recounts the last two decades of Erauso's life (Última y tercera
relación, en que se haze verdadera del resto de la vida de la MonMa
Alférez, sus memorables virtudes, y exemplar muerte en estos Reynos de la
Nueva Fspaña [1653]) is predominantly focused on the open yet unrequited
love that Erauso felt for another woman.

Some critics have speculated that Erauso participated in same-sex flirtation

only to be convincing as a heterosexual man. Other scholars have
commented on how interested parties in the New World manipulated Erauso
into romantic attachments and engagements for their own social and
economic gain. Of course, these romantic liaisons intersected with issues of
race and class, because Erauso—as an educated white Basque aristocrat
who enMoyed the privilege and entitlement of her class and ethnicity—was
desirable to others, while her/his own preferences (as portrayed in the Vida)
reveal a racist disdain for racially mixed women in the New World.
Regardless of how Erauso's sexuality is represented (homoerotic, lesbian,
trans-male heterosexual, colonialist, virginal, allegorical, and so forth),
early modern representations of the MonMa Alférez's erotic desire indicate
the perception that s/he was a woman who chose to live as a man who
expressed attraction for other women but never for men.

The Monja Alférez in Film, Comics, and

Literature
Latin American, Spanish, and North American films, novels, plays, comics,
and stories for young adults have manipulated the Lieutenant Nun icon for
varying and, at times, opposing ideological purposes. The 1944 Mexican
film La MonMa Alférez, starring María Félix and directed by Emilio Gómez
Muriel, for example, portrays Erauso as a heterosexual femme fatale, cross-
dressing only to recover her inheritance and win back her fiancé. Forty year
later the Basque filmmaker Javier Aguirre interpreted Erauso's life as an ill-
fated lesbian love story in his 1986 film La MonMa Alférez, while a year
later the North American independent director Sheila McLaughlin released
the only cinematic version of Erauso's love life with a happily-ever-after
lesbian ending in She Must Be Seeing Things. Similarly, the “girl gets the
girl” at the conclusion of Odalys Nanin's 2008 lesbian play The Adventures
of the Lieutenant Nun.

Given the contradictions inherent in Erauso's life (as a transgendered

individual associated with colonial exploitation, racism, violent crimes,
same-sex desire, and seemingly conformist adherence to proscriptions for
female chastity), it is not surprising that the Lieutenant Nun can be upheld
as the hero or enemy of multiple and conflicting ideologies: Catholic,
transgender, lesbian, heterobiased, feminist, misogynist, colonial, racist,
classist, and nationalist (Spanish, Basque, or Latin American). In this way,
Erauso remains an ambivalent icon—a rebel and conformist, a hero and an
outlaw—to be used to represent multiple sides of any controversy,
depending on the particular identity assigned to him/her.

SEE ALSO Conquest and Sodomy in Latin America; Cross-Dressing in

the West; Sins against Nature in Colonial Latin America;
Transvestites/Transsexuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allan, Madera Gabriela. “‘Un hombre sin barbas’: The Transgender
Protagonist of La MonMa Alférez (1626).” Journal of Spanish Cultural
Studies 17, no. 2 (2016): 119–131.

Erauso, Catalina de. Vida i sucesos de la MonMa Alférez: Autobiografía

atribuida a Doña Catalina de Erauso. Edited by Rima de Vallbona.
Tempe:
Arizona State University, Center for Latin American Studies, 1992.

Erauso, Catalina de. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in

the New World. Translated by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996.

Erauso, Catalina de. Vida i sucesos de la MonMa Alférez: Autobiografía

atribuida a Doña Catalina de Erauso. 2nd ed. Edited by Rima de Vallbona.
San José, Costa Rica: Ediciones Perro Azul, 1999.

Goldmark, Matthew. “Reading Habits: Catalina de Erauso and the SubMects

of Early Modern Spanish Gender and Sexuality.” Colonial Latin American
Review 24, no. 2 (2015): 215–235.

Mendieta, Eva. In Search of Catalina de Erauso: The National and Sexual

Identity of the Lieutenant Nun. Translated by Angeles Prado. Reno: Center
for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2009.

Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.

Ochoa, Marcia. “Becoming a Man in Yndias: The Mediations of Catalina

de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun.” In Technofuturos: Critical Interventions
in Latina/o Studies, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Laó-
Montes, 53–76. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.

Pérez de Montalbán, Juan. La MonMa Alférez. Edited by Luzmila Camacho

Platero. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2007.

Perry, Mary Elizabeth. “From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and

Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain.” In Queer Iberia:
Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance, edited by Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, 394–
419. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Rubio Merino, Pedro, ed. La MonMa Alférez, Doña Catalina de Erauso: Dos
manuscritos inéditos de su autobiografía conservados en el Archivo de la
Santa Iglesia Catedral de Sevilla. Seville, Spain: Cabildo Metropolitano de
la Cathedral de Sevilla, 1995.

Velasco, Sherry. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and

Catalina de Erauso. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

FILMOGRAPHY

Aguirre, Javier, dir. La MonMa Alférez. 1986. Goya Films and Actual Films.
Film

Gómez Muriel, Emilio, dir. La MonMa Alférez. 1944. Clasa Films

Mundiales. Film

McLaughlin, Sheila, dir. She Must Be Seeing Things. 1987. First Run
Features. Film
Ethiopia
GETNET TADELE
Professor, Department of Sociology
Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

MARC EPPRECHT
Professor, Department of Global Development Studies
Queen's University, Canada

The history and current status of the LGBTI community in this

East African nation.

Ethiopia is the second-largest nation by population in Africa and, outside of

Egypt, the oldest with a continuous history of statehood. It is distinctive in
Africa in that its present borders arise not from European colonialism but
from its own period of empire building, mostly in the nineteenth century.
Except for a brief period of Italian rule, it remained independent, first as an
empire then as a republic, throughout the twentieth century. About a third of
the population professes Islam or traditional African religions, while the
maMority adhere to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. It has often been in the
name of these faiths that Ethiopia has produced some extreme expressions
of homophobia in the twenty-first century. In a rare show of ecumenism, for
example, the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches in 2009 Moined
with Muslim and other religious leaders to demand (unsuccessfully) that the
Ethiopian state explicitly prohibit same-sex marriage in the national
constitution. The patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox church has described
homosexuality as “the pinnacle of immorality,” and other spiritual groups
equate it with Western perversion, violence against children, and Satanism
(Aschalaw 2014).
Same-sex acts are punishable by up to fifteen years' imprisonment. Public
opinion registers some of the highest disapprovals of homosexuality in the
world (97%; Overs 2015). Whereas local advocates against homosexuality
are vocal and enMoy a great deal of support and public platforms, advocates
for LGBTI rights are hardly visible except in cyberspace (using
pseudonyms), which appears to be the only safe space. The strongest
support for the cause of sexual minorities in Ethiopia comes from external
actors. The health system is another domain where structural/institutional
norms mediate attitudes and the practices of policy makers, patients, and
health-care providers. The few studies conducted depict the grave
implications for health outcomes, above all by making same-sex sexual
practices escape the radar of HIV prevention and control efforts.

Historical Influences and Practices

In one sense this level of homophobia is not surprising. The missionaries
who converted the ancient Axumite Empire to Christianity came from
Egypt and Nubia, where a strong ascetic tradition defined itself in part as
oppositional to the sexual laxness of Egypt's foreign rulers. The monastic
tradition in Ethiopia generated its own sexual tensions that required
policing through, for example, prohibitions from as early as the fourth
century against bringing boys into monasteries and against any kind of
physical touching between monks that might compromise prayerful
meditation with carnal thoughts (Greenberg 1988). Over the centuries, its
theologians turned increasingly to Old Testament scripture to create a
popular, national religion. Those traditions became intimately linked to the
power of the “Solomonic” state of Abyssinia, which relied on Orthodox
monks to administer the far-flung regions. A male-dominated society with
rigidly enforced gender roles was thus not only Mustified by scripture but
very deeply associated with an Ethiopian national identity fighting invaders.

And yet there are also hints of acceptance of sexual and gender diversity
within those traditions. The historian Wendy Laura Belcher (2013, 2016),
for example, has found documents and artwork from the early Middle Ages
that allude to subtle interpretations of Christian doctrine (see also Belcher
and Kleiner 2015). Minority cultures within the Ethiopian Empire were
subsequently observed to acknowledge same-sex relationships or
transgender identities consonant with the ethnography from elsewhere in
Africa. Among the Maale of southern Ethiopia, ashtime (which Donald L.
Donham [1990] translates both as male “transvestites” and as a third
gender) performed domestic labor and ritual functions in the king's court.
The king, it appears, had to be shielded from pollution by female sexuality
at key moments in the ritual life of the nation. Men who approached the
king at such times thus had to abstain from sex with women or have sex
with an ashtime in order to protect the health of the nation. Donham's
informants (in 1975) noted that the numbers and the practice had much
declined since the nineteenth century under pressure from the church
(Donham 1990). Simon David Messing observed that “transvestites” and
“male-female” (wändagärad) individuals among the Amhara were
sometimes insulted but “more often pitied than blamed” and, as such,
“tolerated” (1957, 551–552). This reflected an understanding that the
condition was innate rather than a choice, as modern homosexuality is
generally conceptualized (and condemned) in Ethiopia.

In modern history, Ethiopia holds a special place in Pan-Africanist thought,

which characteristically asserts heteronormativity as a defining component
of African identity against European cultural colonialism. Ethiopia had
successfully withstood conquest during the partition of Africa in the
nineteenth century and suffered only five years of Italian misrule starting in
1935. When the emperor returned to power in 1942, he quickly restored the
Orthodox church as the state religion and de facto local authority in the
rural areas where the vast maMority of the population lived. Any slim hopes
of liberalization under US tutelage in the Cold War era were dashed by the
revolution of 1974. The new political leadership adopted a crude, repressive
form of Marxism-Leninism as state ideology that in many ways was even
worse from a human rights perspective, including a pro-natalist policy for
its “patriotic” wars against ethnic secessionists. When this regime in its turn
fell in 1991, the ostensibly democratic successors replicated much of the
old pattern, and at present, the social and political climate makes freedom
of speech—let alone freedom of association around sexuality—very
difficult.

Clandestinity and Signs of Change

Notwithstanding this harsh climate, a clandestine world of same-sex–
attracted people is known to exist in the capital city, Addis Ababa, and
likely in others (Tadele 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012; Tekleberhan 2011;
Overs
2015). Known to themselves as zegas (citizens) or booshtee (a derogatory
term used by the public), they reportedly include many male sex workers in
the capital city alone. Clandestinity may avert attention, but in a context of
extreme poverty and pervasive homophobia it also contributes to deeply
self-harming practices arising from abuse, exploitation, and internalized
homophobia. Yet Ethiopia's size, history of independence, booming
economic growth, and strategic importance all contribute to making foreign
donors reticent to challenge the Ethiopian government too aggressively on
this issue, leaving this hard-to-reach and “most-at-risk” population, along
with their wives and girlfriends, almost entirely unserved by HIV/AIDS
programming.

There are, nonetheless, signs that change may be happening. Research is

being conducted, and websites run from exile are getting word out about the
existence of and problems facing the Ethiopian LGBTI community. The
government has not responded to pressure from faith groups to increase
penalties and more actively police existing law. Indeed, following the state's
cancellation of a planned antigay rally by church groups in 2014, the
Associated Press reported that “Redwan Hussein, a government
spokesperson, said the anti-gay rally was on certain groups' agenda, but not
the government's. ‘It [homosexuality] is not a serious crime,’ he said.”
There is consequently very cautious optimism that public health arguments
and strengthening links with other African activist groups will open new
doors for Ethiopia's sexual minorities.

SEE ALSO Christianity in Africa: Anglican; Christianity in Africa: LGBT

Friendly; Christianity in Africa: Pentecostal and Charismatic; Christianity
in Africa: Roman Catholicism; Gender, Flexible Systems, in Africa

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aschalaw, Mihret. “The Addis Ababa Youth Forum Is Awaiting
Permission to Hold a Mass Government-Backed Anti-gay Demonstration.”
Rainbow- Ethiopia Health Rights Initiative, 2 March 2014.
https://rainbowethiopia1.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/addis-ababa-youth-
forum-requested-to-have-an-anti-gay-demonstration-in-addis-ababa/

Associated Press. “Ethiopian Government Cancels Anti-gay Rally.”

Guardian (London), 16 April 2014.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/16/ethiopian-government-
cancels-anti-gay-rally-homosexuality

Belcher, Wendy Laura. “Sisters Debating the Jesuits: The Role of African
Women in Defeating Portuguese Proto-colonialism in Seventeenth-Century
Abyssinia.” Northeast African Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 121–166.

Belcher, Wendy Laura. “Same-Sex Intimacies in the Early African Text

Gädlä Wälättä Peṭros (1672): Queer Reading an Ethiopian Female Saint.”
Research in African Literatures 47, no. 2 (2016): 20–45.

Belcher, Wendy Laura, and Michael Kleiner, trans. and eds. The Life
and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century
African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2015.
Donham, Donald L. History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in
Marxism and Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.

Gamst, Frederick C. The Qemant: A Pagan-Hebraic Peasantry of Ethiopia.

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Messing, Simon David. “The Highland-Plateau Amhara of Ethiopia.” PhD

diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1957.

Overs, Cheryl. “BOOSHTEE! Survival and Resilience in Ethiopia.”

Evidence Report 129, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK,
2015. http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/booshtee-survival-and-resilience-in-
ethiopia

Tadele, Getnet. “Surviving on the Streets: Sexuality and HIV/AIDS among

Male Street Youth in Dessie, Ethiopia.” CODESRIA Bulletin 2, 3 and 4
(2005): 98–106.

Tadele, Getnet. “‘Boundaries of Sexual Safety’: Men Who Have Sex with
Men (MSM) and HIV/AIDS in Addis Ababa.” Journal of HIV/AIDS and
Social Services 9, no. 3 (2010): 261–280.

Tadele, Getnet. “Heteronormativity and ‘Troubled’ Masculinities among

Men Who Have Sex with Men in Addis Ababa.” Culture, Health, and
Sexuality 13, no. 4 (2011): 457–469.

Tadele, Getnet. “Sexuality and Rights: Men Who Have Sex with Men in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” In African Responses to HIV/AIDS: Between
Speech and Action, edited by Segun Ige and Tim Quinlan, 177–208.
Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012.
Tekleberhan, Meron. “Revelation of Homosexual Life in Ethiopia.” Pts. 1
and 2. Ezega.com. 14 March 2011; 20 March 2011.
https://www.ezega.com/news/NewsDetails?Page=news&NewsID=2805;
https://www.ezega.com/News/NewsDetails?Page=news&NewsID=2814
Ethnopornography
PETE SIGAL
Professor, Department of History
Duke University, Durham, NC

An interpretation of indigenous intimate activities in which

such activities are framed according to Western sexual
categories.

In his 1897 study of the indigenous peoples of Queensland, Australia,

Walter E. Roth, an anthropologist and colonial administrator, coined the
term ethnopornography to describe subMects ranging from pregnancy to foul
language to defecation and sexual acts. In describing these things as
ethnopornographic, Roth separated them out from the rest of his study and
said that discussion of such things was “not suitable for perusal by the
general lay reader” (1897, 169). In his use of this term, Roth described a
sphere of intimate bodily behaviors that he determined to be too delicate,
and hence too pornographic, for the eyes of those nonprofessionals who
may read his book.

What Roth described is a broader category than what scholars today mean
when they describe ethnopornography as a way in which the Western
observer (at first primarily conquerors and priests, and later colonial
administrators, anthropologists, and travelers) views non-Western intimate
activities that the observer determines to be sexual. In doing so, that
observer misrepresents intimate indigenous relationships and bodies,
placing them within Western sexual categories. Western observers
recategorize indigenous intimacy for many reasons, and they develop
prurient, scientific, and bureaucratic rationales to excuse their
representations. Some describe what is now termed ethnopornography as an
Orientalist gaze, in which the Western official redefines non-Western
activities.

© BRY, THEODORE DE (1528–98)/BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE,

PARIS, FRANCE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Engraving by Theodore de Bry Showing the Dogs of Spanish Conquistador Vasco
Núñez de Balboa Killing Indians for Sodomy in 1513. Balboa's misinterpretation of
the activities of the indigenous peoples of the New World caused him to frame their
behavior in terms of Western concepts of sodomy, resulting in his meting out this
terrible punishment.
Historical Examples
Of course ethnopornography began long before Roth named it. In 1513 the
Spanish conquistador and explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519)
killed a group of indigenous putos (faggots) by feeding them to Spanish
dogs. One can detect ethnopornography in the descriptions of this incident,
including Theodor de Bry's (1528–1598) illustration of it. The indigenous
individuals depicted were killed because of Balboa's misreading of sodomy.
While the men may have engaged in sexual acts that their Spanish
conquerors would describe with the sign of sodomy, they had different
interpretations of those acts than did Europeans of the time. Thus
ethnopornography led to extreme violence.

Another example of ethnopornography comes from a founding figure in

professional anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942). In his Sex
and Repression in Savage Society (1927), Malinowski observes Trobriand
sexual ceremonies and states that “sexual acts would be carried out in
public on the central place; married people would participate in the orgy,
man or wife behaving without restraint, even though within hail of each
other” (258). While Malinowski attempts to analyze these ceremonies for
the details of their sexual meaning, he relates them to Western concepts of
monogamy, promiscuity, and sin, arguing that the indigenous peoples had
different visions of these things. In doing so, he promotes the openness of
Trobriand sexuality in comparison with that of the West—certainly a move
that he would have seen as working toward the liberation of sexuality. In his
work Malinowski promotes the exoticism of the Trobriand peoples, and he
does so in a manner that combines the pornographic and ethnographic.

In another example, the British scholar and explorer Richard Francis Burton
(1821–1890), in the terminal essay to his 1885 translation of The Arabian
Nights, describes the geography of homosexuality: “Within the Sotadic
Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere
peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined
practise it only sporadically.” By asserting the universal presence of
homosexuality in the Sotadic Zone, an area he argued included much of
Asia and the Americas, as well as the Mediterranean, Burton argues for a
geography of perversion (a term used later by Rudi C. Bleys [1995]).

In other examples, Jacobus X argues in his Untrodden Fields of

Anthropology ([1898] 1937) that sodomy is unknown among the peoples of
Africa south of the Sahara. Furthermore, he suggests that both African men
and women had large genitalia—arguing that nature has allowed for the
people to have pleasurable, rather than painful, (heterosexual) intercourse.
Similarly, Felix Bryk states that “the sense of decency among the blacks,
fundamentally normal in their sexual life, is repelled especially by
sodomitic acts, which are punished severely” (1964, 231).

Ethnopornography seems to have been endemic to European observations

of non-European peoples throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The technological advances of photography, in particular, led to
many photographs taken in which the photographer expressed particular
sexual desires toward the exotic, often naked, African, Asian, or Latin
American individual. These photographs, sold in various markets
throughout Europe and the United States, provided a very thin veil of
scientific interest, hiding more prurient goals. The launching of National
Geographic magazine in 1888 led to the further spread of such
ethnopornographic photography.

Contemporary Viewpoints
Ethnopornography continues to develop in the contemporary period, as can
be seen in a more recent controversy regarding Malek Alloula, whose 1986
book The Colonial Harem purports to engage in a postcolonial critique of
harem photography. (The French sent these photographs home as
postcards.) In doing so, Alloula reproduces many photographs of women in
harems, sometimes in clearly exploitative ways. He decontextualizes the
images and allows the reader to see them only in an overly simplistic
ethnopornographic light. Many scholars (most prominently, Mieke Bal
[1991]) have critiqued Alloula, arguing that he furthered ethnopornography
in his reproduction of these images. It is often unclear, unless he simply
wants to titillate his reader, why Alloula has included particular images.
Alloula closes his book with a telling statement that suggests one goal of
the ethnopornographer: “Voyeurism turns into an obsessive neurosis. The
great erotic dream, ebbing from the sad faces of the wage earners in the
poses, lets appear, in the flotsam perpetuated by the postcard, another
figure: that of impotence” (122). This suggestion of colonial impotence
makes Alloula's key point: the French male colonist has a fantasy of
penetrating Algerian women, a fantasy that he pictures through the
postcard, in which he has taken an image and sent it to a friend. One can
sense in this Alloula's challenge to Frenchmen: they are impotent, neurotic,
and, from his viewpoint, overly feminized. Alloula looks at the French
postcards from an Algerian nationalist perspective and, in some sense,
compares his own masculinity to the masculinity of the French. By doing
so, he produces an ethnopornography of the women in the harems.

Ethnopornography lives on today in some anthropology departments in

which ethnographers may be trained to dissect the sexual habits of the
people that they study, often without enough self-reflection as to the goal of
the anthropologist. Of course, professional anthropologists over the past
generation have become much more self-reflexive, but this does not change
the ethnopornography that continues to play a maMor role in the sexual
tourism industry and in many amateur ethnographies. For example, the
great desires that both gay and straight men express for youth from
Thailand is widely viewed as both exploitative and ethnopornographic.

SEE ALSO Anthropology in Africa South of the Sahara; Conquest and

Sodomy in Latin America; Gender, Flexible Systems, in Africa;
Marriage, Woman-Woman, in Africa
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Translated by Myrna Godzich and
Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Bal, Mieke. “The Politics of Citation.” Diacritics 21, no. 1 (1991): 25–45.

Bleys, Rudi C. The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual

Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750–1918.
Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1995.

Bryk, Felix. Voodoo-Eros: Ethnological Studies in the Sex-Life of the

African Aborigines. Translated by Mayne R. Sexton. New York: United
Book Guild, 1964.

Burton, Richard Francis. “‘Terminal Essay,’ from His Translation of

The Arabian Nights, 1885 Section D: Pederasty.”
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/burton-te.asp

Hansen, Christian, Catherine Needham, and Bill Nichols. “Skin Flicks:

Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power.” Discourse
11, no. 2 (1989): 64–79.

Jacobus X. Untrodden Fields of Anthropology. New York: Falstaff, 1937.

First published 1898 by Libraire de Médecine, Folklore et Anthropologie.

Kulick, Don, and Margaret Willson. Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic
SubMectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. London: Routledge, 1995.

Malinowski, Bronisław. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London:

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of

Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Qureshi, Sadiah. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and
Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011.

Roth, Walter E. Ethnological Studies among the North-West-

Central Queensland Aborigines. Brisbane, Australia: Edmund
Gregory, Government Printer, 1897.

Sigal, Pete, Zeb Tortorici, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. Ethnopornography:

Sexuality, Colonialism, and Anthropological/Archival Knowledge. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Ethnopsychiatry
TIFFANY FAWN JONES
Professor of African History
California State University, San Bernardino

The systemic psychological study of “non-Western”

peoples, particularly as it relates to Africans and
homosexuality.

Ethnopsychiatry is a term used to describe a type of psychological study of

“non-Western” peoples that emerged in the early twentieth century through
which Western-trained scholars sought to understand “the Other” and
determine the extent to which culture plays a role in shaping one's mental
state. Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis and anthropological studies,
ethnopsychiatry was generally a blending of psychiatric, psychological, and
anthropological understandings of deviance, mental development, and
normality. In the 1950s ethnopsychiatry also became known as transcultural
psychiatry or psychology. It is referred to as cross-cultural psychiatry as
well. Cross-cultural psychiatry, however, reflects a divergence that occurred
in the late 1960s when practitioners argued against a universalist application
of Western psychiatric categories. Cross-cultural supporters claimed that the
universalist idea that similar mental disorders existed in all societies was
problematic. Instead, cross-cultural psychiatrists suggested that culture
plays a much larger role in the way that madness manifests itself in
different societies. Despite these differences, all three terms are often used
interchangeably.

Although ethnopsychiatry can trace its roots to the beginnings of modern

psychiatry, it rose as a recognized field when such psychoanalyst theorists
as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Carl Jung (1875–1961), and Marie
Bonaparte (1882–1962) and their followers became interested in applying
their concepts to the so-called primitive races. They were particularly
concerned with symbols and believed in the universality of mental
manifestations. Anthropologists and ethnopsychiatrists interested in Asian,
Oceanic, and American societies such as George Devereux (1908–1985),
who is often ascribed as the architect of ethnopsychiatry, Emil Kraepelin
(1856–1926), Géza Róheim (1891–1953), Bronisław Malinowski (1884–
1942), Margaret Mead (1901–1978), and H. B. M. Murphy (1915–1987),
adapted ethnopsychiatric practices and debated the viability of a universalist
approach to psychopathology. Psychoanalytical ideas were also adopted and
adapted by practitioners in Africa such as R. Cunyngham Brown (1867–
1945), Antoine Porot (1876–1965), Wulf Sachs (1893–1949), B. J. F.
Laubscher (1897–1984), Octave Mannoni (c. 1899–1989), Henri Aubin
(1903–1987), J. C. Carothers (1903–1989), Henri Collomb (1913–1979)
and Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Today, ethnopsychiatry continues to be
practiced, although most recognize its problematic history.

Ethnopsychiatry and Colonialism

Ethnopsychiatry emerged in conMunction with the colonization of Africa,
and the two are intrinsically connected. While there were only a few
practicing psychotherapists on the continent, with only a small number of
those interested in their African patients, the theories of ethnopsychiatry
were often invoked when attempting to define notions of mental difference.
Because of its claim to apparent scientific and apolitical research, it became
a field in which theories of race and mentality became ensconced
(McCulloch 1993). Ethnopsychiatrists were concerned about defining
racial, ethnic, and cultural difference not only to Muxtapose these against
European or Western superiority but also to help shape a nationalist
discourse that was so integral to the colonial process. Most argued that there
were innate psychological differences between Europeans and those whom
they deemed “backward.” Africans were, according to their theories,
predisposed to a more “explosive nature” and closer to a “primitive”
mentality (Aubin 1939, 13, 17; translation by Tiffany Fawn Jones). The
cause of this primitive mindset, however, was up for debate.

Porot, who founded Algeria's first psychiatric hospital, for example, argued
that the Algerian brain was intrinsically primitive and had a propensity for
violence caused by a different evolutionary path (McCulloch 1993).
Similarly, H. L. Gordon (1934) suggested that, because of physiological
differences caused either by genetic or environmental factors, the African
brain never developed past the stage of puberty. In contrast, J. F. Ritchie
(1943), who worked as a teacher in Northern Rhodesia (present-day
Zambia) but wrote extensively about the psychopathology of Africans,
argued that it was African culture, not biological difference, that caused
African preponderance for failed intellectual development (McCulloch
1993). Influenced by Ritchie, and later to become one of the most
prominent ethnopsychiatrists in Africa, J. C. Carothers, who was the
superintendent at Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, and was
commissioned by the British government and later the World Health
Organization to write about the psychology of Africans, also believed that
African mentality was mainly shaped by cultural and environmental factors.
Carothers (1953) proclaimed that modern society negatively affected the
African psyche. Asserting that their regional-specific studies could be
applied to all Africans, these ethnopsychiatrists reinforced the colonial idea
that patriarchal approaches and indirect rule were best for Africans. Thus,
they generally claimed that African affairs were best left to “traditional”
institutions, albeit with considerable colonial oversight, as Africans were
not mentally equipped to adMust to “civilized” or “modern” society.

There was no massive undertaking by colonial governments to build mental

hospitals for Africans (Vaughan 1991). Even in those few cases, such as in
Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, where hospitals were built for Africans, the
colonialists used these institutions as a means to define the mad Other and
bolster their discipline in the metropole (Keller 2007).
Ethnopsychiatry and Sexuality
A key component of these psychoanalytical discussions involved concepts
of sexual difference. In the early twentieth century, such adoptees of
cultural psychology as Adolphe Louis Cureau (1864–1913), a French
colonial administrator who wrote Savage Man in Central Africa (1915), and
Thomas Duncan Greenlees (1859–1929), a superintendent at the
Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum in South Africa, argued that modernity
caused a breakdown in traditional African sexual norms (Epprecht 2008).
When Freudian psychoanalysis became even more popular in the 1930s and
1940s, their views were further elaborated. Freud argued that all individuals
were innately bisexual and that experiences with parents and others could
lead to an arrested stage of development in which one remained what he
called “sexually inverted.” The Oedipal complex was one of his most
controversial theories, yet it was commonly invoked when discussing
African sexuality. Freud asserted that during the phallic stage of
development that occurred between the ages of three and five, a child
developed sexual feelings for a parent and Mealousy of the same-sex parent.
Part of the resolution for these feelings was the manifestation of the
superego, an inner moral aptitude that was learned from parents and society.
Those who had not progressed beyond this stage could exhibit homosexual
tendencies.

Although not all ethnopsychiatrists fully ascribed to Freud's theories, his

ideas did lead to debates about their applicability in non-Western societies.
Ritchie (1943) and Carothers (1953) argued, for example, that abrupt
childhood weaning and unrestricted “sex play” in childhood among
Africans was common. They also believed that, although experimentation
was a normal part of development, Africans never progressed past
childhood in their mental development. This did not necessarily mean,
however, that Africans remained sexually inverted. Instead, Carothers
argued that the traditional initiation ceremonies that took place during
puberty generally put an end to these uninhibited sexual practices.
Ceremonies, therefore, played an important part in the subscription of
heterosexual desires and sexual rules, and in turn, “sex perversions, apart
from Muvenile experiments, seem[ed] to be uniformly rare” (Carothers 1953,
49).

Similarly, Laubscher, who was the head of psychiatry at the Queenstown

Mental Hospital in the Eastern Cape and the author of Sex, Custom, and
Psychopathology (1937), argued that homosexuality was infrequent among
Africans in rural areas, especially among men. Although Laubscher
acknowledged that “forms of overt homosexual behavior between women”
existed, among men it was “entirely unknown” ([1937] 1938, 31). But even
those women who exhibited what he perceived as “perverse homosexual
activities,” he deemed mentally unstable, claiming that the mythical
symbolic creatures that they invoked in their dreams were caused by “penis
envy” or “defective libido development,” which occurred at “a time of
dissolution of the Oedipus complex” (33). And in cases where homosexual
acts among men existed, it was usually because they were “segregated from
women” (258), or as a manifestation of a preexisting psychological
disorder. Thus, he was not surprised to find these tendencies in the mental
hospital in which he worked (Laubscher [1937] 1938; Epprecht 2008).

Even those African practitioners, such as Fanon, who disagreed with the
idea that the African mind was inferior to that of the European and wanted
to promote the worth of African culture, argued that homosexuality did not
exist among Africans. In his discussion of Martinicans, he argued that
although he saw “men dressed like women,” they portrayed all other regular
masculine tendencies, and he was “convinced that they lead normal sex
lives.” Fanon argued that the Oedipus complex never existed among them
and that those Martinicans who exhibited homosexual behavior in Europe
did so purely for “livelihood” reasons (1967, 139). Thus, ethnopsychiatrists
often explained the etiology of any sexual deviations from the supposed
heterosexual norm displayed among Africans as the advent of modern
pressures that disrupted traditional practices. For some, this meant a
stronger need for the preservation of traditional society. For others, such as
Sachs, who had studied under Freud and applied his theories to a study of a
Manyika traditional healer (1947), whom he gave the pseudonym John
Chavafambira, it meant changing the harsh practices of colonial authorities.
Sachs argued that the move to urban areas was a key component of the
healer's neurosis and sexual dysfunction and ascribed the neurosis not
merely to modern pressures but to the state's brutal treatment of those
moving into urban areas.

For most of these practitioners, their discussion about sexual difference was
meant to ascribe a systemic explanation for homosexuality, albeit often
through conMecture and limited evidence. Indeed, the generality and
absurdity of their statements was often outrageous. For example, Carothers
claimed that Africans' psychological peculiarity is evident at a glance. He
stated the following:

If one scans the faces of passers-by in any town in western

Europe it is clear that most of the people observed are impelled
by some continuing inner purpose and yet are also alert to the
events around them. If one leaves the ship for a moment at any
African port, it is equally clear that most of the faces observed
express either exclusive interest in some immediate affair or
complete apathy.

(1953, 108)

FRANTZ FANON (1925–1961)

Frantz Fanon, one of the most influential thinkers on anti-racist and

anti-colonialist movements, was born on 20 July 1925 in the French
colony of Martinique to middle-class parents of mixed-race lineage
(African, East Indian, and white Alsatian). At the age of eighteen,
young Fanon Moined the Caribbean Free French movement, and was
later recruited by the French army during World War II. While fighting
in France, Fanon was exposed to severe European antiblack racism,
despite being awarded the French Croix de Guerre for his bravery.
After the war he received a scholarship to study medicine and
psychiatry in Lyon and became acquainted with Freudian
psychoanalytical theory and the existentialist phenomenology of Jean-
Paul Sartre (1905–1980). When he completed his psychiatric training,
Fanon secured an appointment in a French hospital in colonial Algeria
and later devoted himself to the struggle of Algerian independence
from France.

Fanon's studies, as well as his own experience of racism and

colonialism, inspired his first book Peau noire, masques blancs (1952;
Black Skin, White Masks [1967]). He theorized race as an historical
construct mediated by a colonialist culture wherein blackness assumes
inferiority, and whiteness superiority—each racial signification
existing only in relation to the other. As a psychologist, he analyzed
the mental effects of colonialism and discovered that colonized
subMects tend to internalize inferiority complexes through their
encounters with white colonizers—a process he termed
“epidermalization” (Fanon 2008, 13). He asserted that “the black man
wants to be white” and “the white man slaves to reach a human
level”—in other words, both suffer the effects of alienation and
neurotic disorder (Fanon 2008, 11). Inspired by Aimé Césaire's virtues
of negritude, Fanon envisioned “the liberation of the man of color
from himself” through a decolonization of the mind—a subMect he
fully theorized in Les dames de la terre (1961; The Wretched of
the Earth [1965]).

Since Fanon's death in 1961, scholarly engagement with his work,

especially on sexuality, has attracted huge attention with varying
interpretations. Notwithstanding his liberationist and anti-racist
politics, Fanon has been criticized for a “preMudiced analysis” of
homosexuality in European colonial settings (Epprecht 2008, 86). He
attributed homosexuality to a “neurotic” disorder common in
“negrophobic” white males but foreign to Martinicans who led
“normal sex lives” and “became homosexuals” in Europe only as “a
means to a livelihood”—as in prostitution (Fanon 2008, 180). While
Fanon's tentative assumptions about male homosexuality may seem a
minor error in otherwise revolutionary writing, Kobena Mercer
maintains Fanon's comment is “homophobic” because it denies the
“political economy of masculinity in black liberationist discourse”
(1996, 125). For Terry Goldie, the homophobia in Fanon's work comes
from “his psychoanalytical model” that was influenced by Freudian
traditions (2005, 85). Lewis R. Gordon extended the critique of
Fanon's psychoanalytic theory, showing how it fostered the
“colonization of sex and sexuality” (2015, 67). These varying
interpretations of Fanon and sexuality complicate an assessment of his
liberationist mission, although his homophobia may be as personal as
his experiences of negrophobia.

In contemporary Africa, controversies about sexual minority rights

show no sign of disappearing, despite the apparent dematerialization of
homosexuality as a “nonissue” by some African leaders. The media
has consequently fuelled stereotypical images of a “homophobic
Africa” vis-à-vis a progressive West (Zimmerman 2013). Despite
Fanon's limitations, his strident call to evade an imitation of colonial-
racist impulses of human comparison, and its concomitant construction
of inferiority and superiority, may be relevant to addressing modern
expressions of homophobia. He cautions: “Humanity is waiting for
something from us other than such an imitation, which would be
almost an obscene caricature” (1965, 315)—a moral imperative to
chart a new course.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the

Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press;
Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press,
1965.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C. L.

Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 2008. First edition published
1967.

Goldie, Terry. “Saint Fanon and ‘Homosexual Territory.’” In Frantz

Fanon: Critical Perspectives, edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini, 87–
98. London: Routledge, 2005.

Gordon, Lewis R. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to

His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Mercer, Kobena. “Decolonization and Disappointment: Reading

Fanon's Sexual Politics.” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and
Visual Representation, edited by Alan Read, 114–130. London:
Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1996.

Zimmerman, Jonathan. “An African Epidemic of Homophobia.” Los

Angeles Times, 29 June 2013.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/Mun/29/opinion/la-oe-zimmerman-
africa-gays-20130630

James Kwateng-Yeboah
PhD candidate
Queen's University, Canada
He then extended this claim to speculate that Africans in urban areas all had
a “mental uniformity” that failed to develop in the same way as Europeans.
Carothers surmised that the failure of Africans to follow traditional
initiation ceremonies, which he thought aided in their social and mental
development, could in turn lead to failed relationships and sexual
dysfunction. Similar assumptions were common in many practitioners'
writings. However, because these practitioners were arguing that
homosexual behavior rarely occurred in traditional African societies, they
were also indirectly inferring that it was more common among the urban
white or European populations.

Thus, in discussing the advent of nonhetero practices among white men on

the African continent (they rarely discussed women's sexuality), the
practitioners' arguments were usually careful not to chastise or promote
criminalization for what they saw as a psychological disease. In a 1928
article, F. O. Stohr argued that “the only right way to treat perverts of every
kind is with pity, and if possible, with understanding. They are people
whose sexual life has somehow gone astray or remained undeveloped, who
are therefore shut out from the greatest happiness of life—marriage and
children” (459). Even in more totalitarian states, such as apartheid South
Africa, practitioners argued that homosexuality should not be demonized or
criminalized. In a government investigation into homosexuality during
apartheid South Africa in the 1960s, when psychiatrists were called in to
testify about the prevalence of homosexuality in Johannesburg, the Society
of Psychiatrists and Neurologists of South Africa argued that homosexual
practices were psychological afflictions that were fashioned by child-
rearing and parental practices outside of the person's control. Although
various practitioners presenting information disagreed on the cause and
treatment of homosexuality, all argued that homosexuality should not be
criminalized (Jones 2012).

Even though a few ethnographical studies—such as Pierre Hanry's Érotisme

africain (1970; African eroticism) and Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and
Goldy Parin-Matthèy's research (1980)—contradict the idea that
homosexuality was not prevalent in African societies, these have not been
acknowledged by practicing psychologists in Africa. African scholars still
adopt the idea that LGBT individuals are rare among traditional Africans.
These views have been perpetuated by some prominent African politicians,
including Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe. Mugabe's
personal physician for many years after 1980 was Michael Gelfand (1912–
1985), who was initially the physician in charge at the old Salisbury
Hospital in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe). He, too, argued that
homosexuality was virtually absent in “traditional” Shona society and
suggested that modern influences increased dysfunction (Gelfand 1979).
Thus, it should not be surprising that Mugabe declared that homosexuality
was an imported European scourge on the continent. The literature of denial
created by ethnopsychiatrists has served to substantiate these claims.

Although ethnopsychiatry claimed to offer some insight into the African

mind, it was loaded with racist inferences and conMecture about African
sexuality. Far from being an altruistic, systemic view of mental and sexual
health, it inserted itself into the colonial process under a pseudoscientific
veneer. The application of ethnopsychiatric beliefs has led to absurd
conclusions about normality and sexuality that have reinforced
heteropatriarchal European ideas of superiority. Ethnopsychiatry is,
therefore, an example of how a supposed scientific theory could be socially
constructed and extremely preMudicial.

SEE ALSO Anthropology in Africa South of the Sahara; Colonialism in

Africa South of the Sahara; South Africa

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aubin, Henri. “Introduction a l'étude de la psychiatrie chez les noirs”
[Introduction to the study of psychiatry among blacks]. Annales médico-
psychologiques 97, no. 1 (1939): 1–29.
Bidima, Jean-Godefroy. “Ethnopsychiatry and Its Reverses: Telling the
Fragility of the Other.” Diogenes 48, no. 1 (2000): 68–82.

Carothers, J. C. The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in

Ethnopsychiatry. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1953.

Cazanove, Frank. “Les conceptions magico-religieuses des indigènes de

l'Afrique Occidentale Française” [The magico-religious conceptions of the
natives of French West Africa]. Les grandes endémies tropicales 5 (1933):
38–48.

Cunyngham Brown, R. Report III on the Care and Treatment of Lunatics

in the British West African Colonies, Nigeria. Letch-worth, UK: Garden
City Press, 1938.

Cureau, Adolphe Louis. Savage Man in Central Africa: A Study of

Primitive Races in the French Congo. Translated by E. Andrews. London:
T. F. Unwin, 1915.

Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age
of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press;
Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam

Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated and

edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1962. First published in
German 1905.

Gelfand, Michael. “The Infrequency of Homosexuality in Traditional Shona

Society.” Central African Journal of Medicine 25, no. 9 (1979): 201–202.

Gordon, H. L. “The Mental Capacity of the African: A Paper Read before

the African Circle.” Journal of the Royal African Society 33, no. 132
(1934): 226–242.

Hanry, Pierre. Érotisme africain: Le comportement sexual des

adolescents guinéens [African eroticism: Sexual behavior of Guinean
adolescents]. Paris: Payot, 1970.

Jones, Tiffany Fawn. Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, and the Mad in

Apartheid South Africa. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Keller, Richard C. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Laubscher, B. J. F. Sex, Custom, and Psychopathology: A Study of South

African Pagan Natives. New York: R. M. McBride, 1938. First published
1937 by Routledge and Kegan Paul.

McCulloch, Jock. “The Empire's New Clothes: Ethnopsychiatry in Colonial

Africa.” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 2 (1993): 35–52.

Parin, Paul, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Goldy Parin-Matthèy. Fear Thy

Neighbor as Thyself: Psychoanalysis and Society among the Anyi of
West Africa. Translated by Patricia Klamerth. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980.

Ritchie, J. F. The African as Suckling and as Adult: A Psychological Study.

Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1943.

Sachs, Wulf. Black Hamlet. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947.

South Africa, Republic of. Report of the Select Committee on the

Immorality Amendment Bill. Pretoria, South Africa: Government Printer,
1968.

Stohr, F. O. “Homosexuality.” South African Medical Journal 2, no.

17 (1928): 455–460.
Vaughan, Megan. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991.
Eunuchs
GEORGE H. JUNNE JR. Professor,
Africana Studies Program University of
Northern Colorado, Greeley

The role of the castrated male in various cultures

throughout history.

Historically, a man who was castrated was called a eunuch in English.

According to Dorland's Medical Dictionary, the term eunuch is defined as
“a male deprived of the testes or external genitals, especially one castrated
before puberty so that male secondary sex characteristics fail to develop”
(2012, 653). The condition of being a eunuch is called eunuchism. The
castration of males is an ancient practice that began with animals and over
time has been used to punish conquered peoples, or men who have
committed certain crimes against society. There have been two types of
castration: the first is the removal of the testicles, and the second, also
called “shaving,” involves the complete emasculation of males, with all
external genitalia excised.

Eunuchs have been traced the world over, including in indigenous

populations in the Americas. Historically, scholars have identified three
primary types of eunuchs: castrati, who have had both the penis and
testicles removed; spadones, who have had only the testicles removed; and
thlibiae, whose testicles have been bruised or crushed. Research reveals at
least seven purposes for castration, historically:

1. to retain the supremacy of male elders, as when older males mutilated

the genitals of younger men to prevent challenges to their authority
and to possess more women;
 2. to demonstrate having vanquished an enemy and to gain a trophy, as
when, in the 1896 Battle of Aduwa, Ethiopian forces castrated 7,000
Italian soldiers;
3. to provide trusted guards for harems, as well as advisers for rulers;
4. as punishment for rape, adultery, and other sex-related crimes;
5. for religious purposes, such as self-castration to promote chaste living;
6. to preserve a boy's voice for singing; and
7. to “treat” certain conditions, such as leprosy, epilepsy, sexual
perversion, insanity, gout, priapism, excessive masturbation, cancer, or
an enlarged prostate, and other maladies.

Contrary to the modern use of eunuch as a derisive term to indicate a man's

powerlessness, history reveals that many eunuchs held high social and
political positions, exhibited formidable managerial and pedagogical skills,
were artists and scholars, and excelled in other areas. Not only were many
eunuchs not celibate or asexual, but they could be sexually active and seen
as desirable by men, women, or both. Eunuchs are primarily known for
their professional roles in religion, the legal system, and the military, as
well as in government bureaucracies. For instance, eunuchs in the city of
Medina, present-day Saudi Arabia, have guarded the tomb of the prophet
Muhammad since the twelfth century. In China, eunuchs held a high degree
of political power during twenty-three dynasties, and a few were military
leaders, such as Tong Guan of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), who
commanded 800,000 troops. In the Ottoman Empire, the sultan's chief black
eunuch (CBE) held the third most powerful position (Aucoin and
Wassersug 2006).

Although the sexuality of eunuchs has long been written about and
discussed, there has been little reliable information on the subMect until
almost the twentieth century, probably because of social and religious
censure of nonnormative sexualities. During the Ottoman Empire there
were accounts of eunuchs—castrati, spadones, and thlibiae—in
heterosexual relationships. Furthermore, there are hints that some eunuchs
were chaste and others probably engaged in homosexual activities, but
much of that lacks support. There is no reason to assume that eunuchs
would not have engaged in the array of sexual relationships, Must as other
men would.

An important power that eunuchs possessed was the ability to move

between men's spaces and women's spaces, particularly in societies that
secluded women. Eunuchs oversaw the administration of royal harems in
the Ottoman Empire, for instance, because they were perceived to be
immune to sexual temptation, by virtue of their physical condition. While
eunuchs policed the sexuality of the women in their care—which included
ensuring the women did not have sex with each other—some eunuchs did
engage in sexual activities with harem women.

Eunuchs in China
The first recorded use of eunuchs dates to the Chou dynasty (1122–250
BCE) in China, although there is some earlier evidence of eunuchs in
Mesopotamia as well. Eunuchism was practiced in China until the collapse
of the imperial government in 1911. Castrated males worked in imperial
palaces as chamberlains in the harems and in other areas. Enslaved captives
of war sometimes were castrated to serve in menial positions, and some free
men, desiring power and wealth, castrated themselves; these ambitious
eunuchs sought to attain power by demonstrating their undistracted
devotion to their emperors and guaranteeing that, since could not have
children, they would not establish a rival dynasty. Those who chose
castration carried their sex organs with them in a Mar of brine in accordance
with the Confucian belief that in order to enter the next world after death,
one's entire body must be buried together.

In her book Harem: The World behind the Veil (1989), Alev Lytle
Croutier related that in 1877, English soldier and traveler G. Carter Stent
published an article that described how the Chinese castrated their
eunuchs and,
furthermore, how they controlled hemorrhaging, which was a problem in
other areas of the world. The subMect was first bound with bandages around
the thighs and waist to staunch the flow of blood. Then, after the groin area
was bathed in hot pepper–water, an instrument shaped like a sickle was
used to cut off the testicles and penis and a pewter plug was pushed into the
urethral opening. The man or boy was held up and forced to walk around
for a couple hours and then placed in a horizontal position and not allowed
to drink anything for three days, suffering from pain and thirst. After the
third day, the bandages were removed along with the plug. If urine spurted
from the opening, the eunuch would probably recover; if no urine flowed,
or if it flowed slowly, he was likely to die from his wounds. Among the
Chinese, the death rate from castration was only about 4 to 5 percent (Stent
1877), compared to mortality rates as high as 90 percent in other parts of
the world.

The Chinese tradition of castrating foreign prisoners of war lasted more

than 3,000 years. The practice ended in China only in 1924, and the
numbers of eunuchs varied from Must a few hundred in the early years to
over 100,000 in 1624. However, it appears that only Chinese eunuchs were
employed in royal palaces of emperors and princes; this contrasts with the
Ottoman Empire, for instance, where the court employed eunuchs from
European and African countries.

Sometimes Chinese eunuchs in the inner court closest to the rulers

challenged government officials or bureaucracies that were primarily run by
Confucians, who had their own civil service examinations by the tenth
century. Despite challenges to their authority, the Confucians did not call
for the complete elimination of the practice of castration because they
believed that eunuchs provided important services, including protection of
the harem women. The Confucians did, however, move against individual
eunuchs for corruption, abuse of power, and other offenses.
Many Chinese eunuchs, like eunuchs in other societies, had families outside
the palace. Younger ones may have been permanently separated from
relatives when they were conscripted from faraway provinces. Older ones
who were married and had children before being made eunuchs sometimes
were able to maintain family life outside the palace. Powerful ones were
able to arrange the marriages of their children with important officials or
even members of the imperial family. Others married maids or other female
domestics of the palaces, or even managed to marry women from outside
the palace. A few had both wives and concubines.

Chinese eunuchs “constituted a distinct and powerful administrative cadre

for 2,000 years” (Balch 1985, 319) to check the “influence in politics of the
tenacious Chinese family system” (Coser 1964, 883), and this often incited
Mealousy that negatively focused on their unique physicality. For example,
the Chinese eunuch Chao Kao, who was recorded to have been the tutor of
Ha-hai, the younger son of the first emperor, Qui Shi Huang (r. 246–210
BCE), was described by one scholar as the first in a long line of eunuchs in
Chinese history, many of whom were also disreputable. In the Former Han
dynasty (c. 206 BCE–25 CE), eunuchs staffed government positions, but
only a few rose to significant positions of power. Depending on the politics
of the time, Chinese eunuchs, like those in other empires, had authority that
ranged from low-level administrative status to almost running the kingdom.

In BeiMing, in the Forbidden City that housed the Chinese court, eunuchs
protected the cloistered women. Approximately 1,000 eunuchs were in
BeiMing during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), but their numbers declined
to only 200 in service for the reign of the last emperor, Pu Yi (r. 1908–
1912). Many received good educations and held positions ranging from
singer to imperial administrator. In 1996 a Washington Post article
announced the death of ninety-three-year-old Sun Yaoting, the last eunuch
to have served in China's imperial court system.

Eunuchs in India
Like the thugs, a supposedly widespread gang of professional robbers and
murderers sanctioned by the goddess Kali and suppressed by the British,
eunuchs became implicated in Britain's empire-building proMect in India. In
the mid-nineteenth century British colonial officials in North India claimed
that the region was plagued by a criminal system of eunuchs who were
addicted to sodomy, worked as prostitutes, and forcibly castrated children
(Hinchy 2017). After the passage of Part 2 of the Criminal Tribes Act in
1871, police began to register eunuchs suspected of sodomy, kidnapping,
and castration. Particular targets were the region's hiMras, a rather fluid term,
but assumed to mean “male-bodied emasculates or ‘eunuchs by birth’ who
adopted feminine clothing and, in many cases, female names” (Hinchy
2017, 127). HiMras were thus implicated in the processes by which Indian
sexuality was typed as deviant; as AnMali Arondekar notes, it is crucial to
pay attention to the role that the “coupling of colonialism and sexuality”
plays in recent academic studies of them (Arondekar 2009, 90). HiMra
studies as an academic area has emerged only in recent decades, while
previously much of the disseminated information came from colonial
accounts.

In India, the term hiMra (a Hindu/Urdu word with Arabic roots) is laden with
controversy over who is included in the definition and who is excluded.
Some associate hiMras with homosexuality, others with transvestites
(zenana), and still others see hiMra as a transgendered identity involving
castration, genitalia defects, or impotency (sandha). Some include
hermaphrodites in their definition, whereas others include women and
“third-gender” individuals. Many hiMras stroll through public spaces and
earn a living by attending wedding ceremonies and singing and dancing for
the guests, singing at births, or through sex work. Although castration is
outlawed in India, some hiMras still undergo the procedure (Gannon 2009).

The eunuchs who served as guards and attendants in the Muslim sultanates
and Mughal Empire—who were also considered hiMras—have a history that
spans from early recorded history to modern times. Also known as khoMas,
they were employed in the palaces and harems of the queens and have been
featured in literature. Those who were selected to guard the harems
sometimes had their tongues cut out, probably to keep the intimate matters
of the harem confidential. Whenever the queen left the palace, as many as
400 eunuchs guarded her, while others served and cooked for the king.
Some eunuchs— for example, Malik Kafur, who dismissed the heir to the
throne of Alau-Din-KhiliMi (r. 1296–1316)—were able to attain considerable
power. Others became prosecutors, built towns and mosques, commanded
the police, and held other important positions. From 660 until 1955, they
commanded the inns that protected people traveling across India.

Eunuchs in the King James Bible

The Old and New Testaments of the King James version of the Bible
mention eunuchs over twenty times. The book of Deuteronomy states that
castrated eunuchs were not allowed to enter the temple according to Jewish
law (Deut. 23:1), probably because this was done to ban “outsiders” and
non-Jews. In the book of Matthew, Jesus distinguishes between three types
of eunuchs: those born with the condition, those who were made eunuchs,
and those who “have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's
sake” (Matt. 19:12). Although the first two forms of eunuchism are better
known, there were cases of men castrating themselves for religious or
political reasons. Philip, a disciple of Jesus, converted a eunuch who was a
highly ranked official serving Queen Candice of Ethiopia. As told in the
book of Acts, Philip baptized him in a river, making him the first recorded
eunuch member of the early Christian church (Acts 8:26–40). Later
Christian churches forbade marriages between women and eunuchs.

Following in the wake of liberation theology, some scholars looked to the

biblical representation of eunuchs when interpreting contemporary queer
identities and reinterpreting sacred books such as the Bible in more liberal
ways. Sean D. Burke, for instance, points to the ways that eunuchs—both
those castrated prior to puberty and those castrated later—“troubled the
multiple discourses of gender, sexuality, social status, and race that
produced ancient constructions of masculinity” (Burke 2011, 181). He
concludes his analysis with the hope that “members of Christian
communities will consider the implications of the role of queering in early
Christian discourse for the lives of contemporary persons who could be
identified as flesh-and-blood queering figures, including lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgendered persons” (Burke 2011, 187). In a related vein,
Manuel Villalobos sees the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–40
as challenging the way Israel understood masculinity, gender, and the body
(Villalobos 2011). Reading this episode through the lens of queer Chicana
theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Villalobos argues that bodies in borderlands—
such as the Ethiopian eunuch and queer, undocumented, and poor persons—
offer new ways to envision being human.

Eunuchs in the Middle East

During Iran's Safavid dynasty of the sixteenth century, eunuchs guarded the
inner gate of the royal harem's three gates. This was a position of respect
and honor for those who also regulated the sexual practices of the women,
escorted guests inside the harem area, and alerted women so they could
conceal themselves when strangers arrived. The eunuchs also accompanied
and guarded the women when they left the harem. A few of them did obtain
high government positions, such as the Georgian eunuch Khusra Khan
GurMi, who was governor of the Iranian provinces of Yazd and Isfahan, as
well as Kurdistan and other regions. Eunuchs in the QaMar dynasty (1785–
1925) also had maMor roles as overseers and administrators.

Egyptologist Piotr O. Scholz (2001) has traced castration in Egypt back to

prehistoric times and has noted that it was designated as punishment in the
Code of Hammurabi (1728–1686 BCE). He further detailed that early
Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim ascetics performed self-castration to
secure their chastity and to satisfy their quest for redemption. Additionally,
castration was used to punish sex crimes and as a medical treatment for
hernias and transsexuality. Scholz notes that castration was an ancient
custom and that hundreds, or even thousands of eunuchs were employed in
the courts of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, and Kush.

Castrati
From the end of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth century,
particularly in Italy, castrati singers in churches and opera were very
popular. The castrati were prepubescent boys who were castrated before
puberty caused their vocal cords to lengthen, deepening their voices.
Observers described the singers as having smooth and pale skin, no beard,
and a tendency to be overweight. The Church of Rome provided the
impetus for producing castrati; the first one sang in the church's choir,
probably in 1553. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V (1521–1590) issued a papal bull
supporting the inclusion of four eunuchs in the choir of St. Peter's Rome.
Although bodily amputations were against canon law, the castrations were
deemed acceptable because the castrated boys were used in music that
honored God. Previously, boys and adult males had sung in falsetto, but the
voices of the adult males were unsatisfactorily deep and the boys' voices did
not have enough power. Furthermore, at that time there was a papal
inMunction against women singing in public.

It was the new Italian musical entertainment of the early seventeenth

century, opera, that prompted the rise of the castrati. Although some
professional castrati moved to opera from church choirs, the popularity of
opera, which catered not only to the upper classes but also to the general
citizenry, produced greater demand for singers. The treatise “Eunuchism
Displayed,” published in 1718, describes operations on boys between the
ages of seven and nine. The operations almost always took place in Italy
and in secret, and it has been estimated that their numbers were as high as
4,000 a year; castration, however, could not confer a talent for singing, and
many boys underwent the process needlessly.
As opera spread to many European cities, some castrati, such as Giovanni
Manzuoli (1722–1782), became very famous and wealthy. Carlo Broschi
(1705–1782), known as Farinelli, had a voice that spanned three octaves
and reportedly could hold a note for a full minute. Giusto Tenducci (1735–
1790) moved from Italy to London and became a friend of composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791); he (like some other castrati)
maintained his libido and married. Giovanni Velluti (1781–1861) was
probably the last of the famous castrati singers. Castrati continued to be part
of the Sistine Chapel choir until 1808, when Napoleon ruled the Papal
States; after his removal in 1815, they returned and continued singing in the
choir until 1902. The last Vatican castrato was Alessandro Moreschi, who
died in 1922; he was recorded by gramophone in 1902 and 1904, and
although the quality is not optimal, his voice is discernable.

Jean D. Wilson and Claus Roehrborn (1999) note that although there was a
long association between singing and castration in Italy, there is none in the
histories of the Chinese, Ottoman, and Skoptsi eunuchs. Furthermore, they
assert that some of the castrati were actually cross-dressing women posing
as castrated men, men with diminished functioning testes (hypogonadism),
and men who were physically intact but had natural countertenor or falsetto
singing voices.

Skoptsi
During the reign of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) and through the
Stalinist era, a community of Christians in Russia practiced self-castration
in their quest for both spiritual pureness and eternal life. The Skoptsi (also
transliterated as Skoptsy, Skoptzy, Skoptzi, or Skopzi) secret sect of Central
Russia, founded in 1757, may have numbered more than 10 million at its
height. The castrations of its adherents took two forms. In the first, called
the minor seal, the scrotum was sliced open and the testicles removed as the
practitioner called out “Christ is risen”; in the second, the maMor seal, which
conferred higher purity, the penis was also removed. Because of the threat
of prosecution, Skoptsi would claim that an unidentified stranger, or
someone who had since died had made them eunuchs.

The Skoptsi, also known as the White Doves, believed that Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden were sexless, and that after the Fall caused by eating
the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, portions of the forbidden fruit were
transplanted onto them as genitalia and breasts. In order to regain the
prelapsarian chaste state, the Skoptsi castrated and emasculated themselves
with knives, razor-sharp stones, pieces of glass, or red-hot pokers. Women's
breasts and external genitalia were sometimes mutilated. The Skoptsi
believed that the second coming of Christ would occur only when their
numbers reached 144,000, the number of the elect according to the book of
Revelation; although they no longer have the number of adherents they
once had, they still have a few followers.

Historically, it appears that many regarded eunuchs as messengers of God,

and some have argued that images of angels were modeled on pre-Christian
concepts of eunuchs (Taylor 2002). Religious art from the Byzantine era,
for instance, depicts angels as genderless or even mortal. They were
supposed to serve as “trusted guardians, celestial protectors, and advisors to
the Lord,” fulfilling a role similar to that of eunuchs serving earthly rulers
(Aucoin and Wassersug 2006, 3166). That explains why some sects, such as
the Skoptsi, extolled eunuchism as a path to heaven, and why others refused
to engage in sexual activity.

Byzantine Empire (330–1453)

During the rule of Irene of Athens (r. 780–802) in the Byzantine Empire,
eunuchs reportedly formed a swarm like bees around her in the palace
(Guilland 1943). Another ruler was given 300 slaves, 100 of whom were
eunuchs. Theobald I, when marquis of Spoleto (r. 929–936), captured Greek
soldiers and made them eunuchs. Although the Byzantines had laws that
prohibited eunuchism, they seemed to have ignored them.
Justinian I (r. 527–565) specifically banned eunuchism after learning that
out of ninety men who underwent the operation, only three survived. Those
caught creating eunuchs had their property seized and were sent to work the
mines—if they survived the retaliatory operation. Furthermore, all enslaved
eunuchs were emancipated. However, the practice did not end, and when
Leo VI ascended the throne (r. 886–912), he significantly rolled back the
penalties to fines and whippings.

Until the Council of Nicaea (325), the Byzantine Christian church did not
reMect eunuchs, many of whom held clerical positions as patriarchs,
metropolitans, bishops, and monks. Others, including Narses, a general
under Justinian I, served with distinction in the military, or in civilian
service, even managing the state on occasion. Still, eunuchs were criticized
and even reviled, as revealed in a saying that dates to the Byzantine era: “If
you have a eunuch, kill him; if you do not have one, buy one and kill him”
(quoted in Guilland 1943, 234).

Ottoman Empire (1453–1923)

It is in the Ottoman Empire that one finds some of the most complete
histories of eunuchs, via a system inherited from the Byzantines, whom
they conquered. The Ottomans kept very detailed records for over 500
years; these have been supplemented with travelogues, photographs, letters,
newspaper articles, court records, and diaries. In 1893 and 1903 the sultan
had an official compile detailed registers of eunuchs of the royal family,
which included brief biographies, positions held, and dates of service.
Previously, historians had mostly focused on the sultans, including some
information about important court eunuchs and their roles.

The Ottomans, like others, took slaves from populations they conquered
and also participated in slave trades. Many of their captives were made
eunuchs, and many from the slave trade arrived as eunuchs. At the
beginning of the empire, eunuchs mostly from Europe worked in the
harems of the royal palaces, but also in the harems of rich men who had
multiple wives and concubines. From the early 1500s, European eunuchs—
Hungarians, Slavs, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, and Circassians—
virtually ran the daily operations of the palace under the direction of the
Babussada Aga (Kapi Aga, or chief white eunuch [CWE]), who wielded
immense power. Penzer (1956) notes that palace eunuchs held the following
important positions:

1. Kapi Aga: as head of the inner service and confidant to the sultan,
palace gatekeeper, and head of the infirmary, he controlled all
messages, petitions, and state documents for the sultan, and could
speak to the sultan in person;
2. Hazinedar-basi: as head of the treasury and head of the corps of pages,
he was responsible for the royal treasure and kept the financial records;
3. KilerMi-bashi: as head of the kitchen staff, he supervised the sultan's
food;
4. Serai Aga: he supervised the harem and headed the palace school.

Because it was contrary to Islam to castrate a man, the operations took place
outside Constantinople. Although some Muslims ignored the ban, most
traders got eunuchs from “eunuch factories” located in Verdun (France),
Samarkand, and Coptic Christian communities in Egypt, Bukhara, Prague,
and Kharazon. Centers in Africa included Damagaram (in present- day
Niger), Bornu (in present-day Nigeria), and Baghirmi (in present-day
Chad). Because many African captives were neither Christian nor Muslim,
some felt that it was acceptable to castrate them.

Six of the Ottoman governors-general of Egypt in the sixteenth century

were white eunuchs who had previously served in the imperial palace. Until
the late sixteenth century, all eunuchs, African and white, were under the
authority of the CWE, the palace's officer-in-chief. When the royal family
and the harem was relocated to the new Topkapi Palace, which was
completed in 1465, a separation became necessary, and the black eunuchs
were placed in charge of the harem. White eunuchs were no longer in
charge of the black eunuchs, and a division of labor based on race came into
effect, with white eunuchs assigned to the male areas of the palace and the
blacks to the harem, which put them in close contact with the sultans.

A maMor change in the Ottoman system occurred under the reign of Sultan
Murad III (r. 1574–1595), after the death of the powerful CWE Gazanfer
Aga, a powerbroker who had on occasion challenged the sultan. Other
white eunuchs also created their own centers of power and challenged the
sultans, but after Gazanfer's death by beheading in 1603, the power of the
CBE expanded substantially as he was able to develop his own political
networks. He was also head of the religious foundations, educated and
managed the harem women, established a foundation that funded the holy
mosques in Mecca and Medina, mediated between the sultans and their
courts, endowed religious institutions, built public fountains to supply clean
water, set up endowments for mosques throughout the empire, supervised
the publication of books and collected books, was a witness at sultans'
marriages and other ceremonies, held councils meetings of his own,
participated in political decisions, supervised the guarding of the palace,
and in a couple of cases, assisted in eliminating a sultan. From the late
1500s until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century,
the CBE was the third most powerful person in the empire.

There was only one CBE at a time, and at times he supervised over 200
other eunuchs, plus other personnel. Some of the CBEs died in office, some
were executed if they ran afoul of the sultan, and others retired or were
forcibly retired to Egypt, leaving behind their horses, some of their personal
slaves, mansions, and many of their personal belongings. In Egypt, the
retired CBEs received a salary and supervised the sultan's investments in
the flax trade and other areas. Some were appointed guardians of the
Prophet's tomb in Medina and the Kaʿba in Mecca until recent years. One,
Abbas Aga, amassed twenty-seven books, commercial properties in seven
regions, shops, storage rooms, a dye house, linen works, homes, lands,
storehouses, coffeehouses, and more. It is quite clear that in today's money,
the CBEs would have been millionaires, or close to it.

El-HaMM Beshir Aga was the longest serving CBE, from 1703 to 1730. He
was born in Abyssinia around 1655, castrated as a boy, and eventually
received increasingly powerful appointments from the sultan. He presided
over important building proMects, including a hostel in Medina, educational
institutions in Medina and present-day Turkey and Bulgaria, various public
fountains, and a mosque complex in Istanbul.

The last two Ottoman CBEs each served for only a month; Nadir Aga (d.
1962) served in March 1909, and Fahreddin Aga served during April and
May of the same year. Following the end of the Ottoman Empire, Nadir
Aga purchased over three dozen head of cattle and sold milk. He and other
palace eunuchs remained in Istanbul and, along with other members of the
former sultans' household, formed a retirement association by pooling their
resources. Others found positions in various parts of the Arab world that
still used eunuchs in harems and households. Into the 1970s, one could see
the last of the palace eunuchs walking around Istanbul.

Croutier, whose grandmother and grandaunt were in the harem of a wealthy

man, grew up in a house with servants and odalisques who sometimes
revealed to her details of harem life. According to them, some eunuchs
were familiar with aphrodisiacs and erotic paraphernalia, and because they
could leave the harem, “they were able to obtain a variety of sex toys,
including artificial phalli and other kinds of erotic succedanea” (Croutier
1989, 135). Furthermore, they were so skilled at oral sex that women who
married after leaving the harem were dissatisfied with their husbands, and
their marriages sometimes ended in divorce when the wives told their
husbands that eunuchs were better lovers.

Modern Castration
In the period following World War II, chemical castration began to be used
in certain instances to “treat” homosexuality, which was illegal in many
parts of the world. Chemical castration has also been used and continues to
be used on sex offenders in cases of pedophilia and rape in many parts of
the world.

In North America, about 40,000 men a year begin androgen-deprivation

therapy, either through surgery or chemicals, as a treatment for prostate
cancer (Aucoin and Wassersug 2006). Side effects include gynecomastia
(breast development), erectile dysfunction, and reduced libido that may
affect a man's self-identity and sexuality. According to Gary Taylor (2002),
the operation to create a eunuch should not be confused with gender-
confirmation surgery. Trans people transfer from one gender category to
another to achieve a desired gender position through surgery or hormonal
therapy. Eunuchs, by contrast, are socially produced through procedures
and, therefore, biologically altered, but they do not change gender category.
Yet, many scholars and trans people themselves find this distinction
problematic, seeing it as a reductive way of thinking about the complex
gender positions of eunuchs both historically and in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.

There are other men who undergo, or desire to undergo castration, including
fetishists, for reasons as diverse as libido reduction, gender dysmorphia, and
masochism. In 2007 Richard J. Wassersug and Thomas W. Johnson
published a study of eunuchs and “wannabes” (men who express the wish
to be castrated) based on a survey they conducted with members of the
Eunuch Archive, an internet community of more than 3,500 members who
reported fascination with castration and/or castration paraphilia (sexual
interest in the idea of being castrated). Responses from wannabes far
outnumbered those of “voluntary eunuchs.” Wassersug and Johnson
compared “castrated cancer patients” with “voluntary eunuchs,” and
concluded that “the biological impact of castration can vary greatly
depending on one's desire and expectation” (2007, 553).
Representing and Theorizing Eunuchs in the
Contemporary World
Whether or not eunuchs embodied queer identities and sexualities in the
historical past and whether or not being castrated was traditionally seen as
emasculating and leading to a loss of authority and power, both
suppositions constitute important ways of thinking about eunuchs in the
contemporary era. In the second half of the twentieth century, feminist and
queer scholars began to unpack the idea that the organizational principle for
society revolved around the possession of a penis, or phallus (a situation
sometimes called phallocentrism). Phallocentrism was central to the
theories of the influential psychoanalyst and critic Jacques Lacan (1901–
1981). Particularly under the microscope were claims by psychologists,
beginning with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), that women's sexuality is
grounded in a notion of lack; that is, because women do not have a phallus,
they suffer from what is popularly termed “penis envy.” Also challenged
were psychological models of homosexual men that relied on notions of an
“arrested development” akin, in many ways, to emasculation and to the
status of women vis-à-vis their perceived “lack.” In 1970 Australian
feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer (1939–) published The Female
Eunuch, arguing that traditionalist social structures had made women into
eunuchs and reMecting assumptions about women's supposedly innate lack
of sexual desire. Greer critiqued the definition of femininity “as meaning
without libido, and therefore incomplete, subhuman, a cultural reduction of
human possibilities”; to become feminine, according to Greer, is to be
castrated (Greer [1970] 2012, 79).

That same year, French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

published S/Z, a structuralist analysis of Honoré de Balzac's novella
Sarrasine (1830), about the castrato Zambinella. S/Z anticipated many of
the insights of 1980s and 1990s queer theory; since its publication, queer
theorists have mined literary and social texts to argue that the eunuch is a
figure who destabilizes gender norms—and one who highlights the
performative nature of gender. In her 1989 book Chaucer's Sexual Poetics,
Carolyn Dinshaw proposed a “eunuch hermeneutics” in her reading of the
“Pardoner's Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387). Dinshaw
argued that as “not-man, not-woman,” the Pardoner foregrounds an ideal for
a Christian society not bound by the norms of the male/female gender
binary (1989, 184). The figure of the castrato stands as a representation of
the queering of vocalization in The Queen's Throat: Opera,
Homosexuality, and the Myth of Desire (1993), in which Wayne
Kostenbaum draws connections between “the castrato's scandalous vocal
plenitude” ([1993]
2001, 159), repressive discourses around sexuality, and coming out as a
kind of voicing.

Outside the European context, Howard Chiang's After Eunuchs: Science,

Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018) charts a
genealogy in Chinese culture from the eunuch's historical role as an
exceptional figure on the margins of gender categories to the emergence of
trans and queer identities in the twentieth century. Chiang also considers
China's metaphorical portrayal as a “castrated civilization” in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside perceptions of eunuchs
as a demasculinized “third sex.” Chiang is one of a number of scholars who
implicate eunuchs in a long global queer history of sex and gender,
particularly around Western imperial expansion into Asia. Frank Proschan
(2002) analyzes French colonial interest in the “capons” (literally, castrated
roosters) or “eunuch mandarins” who served in the imperial court in Annam
(now Vietnam). Claire Lowrie describes how white British and Australian
men viewed their Chinese “houseboys” in Singapore and Darwin,
respectively, as “eunuch-like, feminised, servile and cunning creatures”
(Lowrie 2016, 72).

This queering of eunuchs is also found in literature, film, art, and television.
Since 2011, eunuch characters have featured in the television program
Game of Thrones. As Brooke Askey argues, Game of Thrones uses eunuchs
to subvert the notion that the penis or phallus is the root of power and, thus,
to subvert heteronormativity. “Castrated men and women characters from
the HBO series Game of Thrones challenge the patriarchal ideas of who is
able to have power,” Askey writes, noting that these characters also
challenge the relationship between anatomy, power, and gender norms
(2018, 65). Acclaimed writer and activist Arundhati Roy's 2017 novel The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which revolves around the character AnMum
(born Aftab), a Shiʿa Muslim who becomes a hiMra, signals one of the ways
various cultural conceptions of eunuchs circulate today. As the
contemporary era's understanding of gender and sexuality continues to
evolve, it is certain that the ways we look back at and reinterpret eunuchs
from the historical past will also continue to change.

SEE ALSOAsexuality; HiMras; Sex Reassignment Surgery in Asia; Zheng He

(1371–1433)

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Eurovision Song Contest
RALPH J. POOLE
Professor, Department of English and American Studies
University of Salzburg, Austria

The popularity of this Europe-based, international singing

competition and its unofficial status as a queer institution.

From its inception in 1956, the annual Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was
conceived as a European institution but has become increasingly queer, not
only delineating an understanding of the European community but also
bringing together fans across nations, thus forging a transnational
community. The event with its original seven participating countries has
steadily grown alongside the evolution of what is “European,” a concept
that goes beyond borders and the political definition of the European Union
(EU). Starting in 1993, former Warsaw Pact countries began entering the
contest, increasing the list of participants to twenty-five that year alone; and
by 2017, forty-two countries participated in the event hosted in Kiev by the
preceding year's winning nation, Ukraine. The increasing scope of the ESC
has resulted in the decision in 2008 to divide the original one-night event
into two separate semifinals and a finale so that every nation has the
opportunity to have its contestant broadcast at least once. The ESC has
made it its policy to include countries not considered European in political
or geographical contexts, such as Israel (participating since 1973) and
Turkey (since 1975), and even Australia entered the contest in 2015. This
development has been seen as an indicator of pro-Europeanness because
many of the countries being added to the list of contestants have, in many
cases (but certainly not all), become members of the EU later on.
Although the ESC rules explicitly state that no lyrics, speeches, or gestures
of a political nature are permitted, the intermingling of music and politics
has drastically increased since the late 1990s. Especially with regard to
gender and sexuality, the avowedly apolitical ESC agenda has become a
hotly debated political arena. Turkey, for instance, has been bidding for EU
membership for years and for the longest time was without luck in the ESC
contest. Therefore, the victory of Sertab Erener in 2003 was seen as a
historical moment, turning the frustratingly slow movement toward the
Turkish EU membership into a feasible goal. Turkey's sudden success after
years of spectacular failure has been a cause for debate. Certainly, Erener's
song “Everyway That I Can” proMected a Euro-friendly Turkishness with its
hybrid musical aesthetics mixing Euro-hip-hop-pop with Middle Eastern
belly-dancing rhythms. Yet, in addition, the Turkish government's decision
at the time to oppose the US effort to set up a military base in Turkey to
provide an invasion route into Iraq garnered Turkey much sympathy across
a Europe displaying increasingly antiwar sentiment and may have sparked
extra support for Turkey's ESC participation. What seems evident, though,
is that this success boosted the confidence of an increasingly visible gay
community in Turkey and especially in the country's “gay capital,” Istanbul,
a boost that climaxed toward the end of the decade and has since
diminished as a result of the government's conservative turn to re-Islamized
politics. As in Turkey, the ESC has a great appeal for LGBT audiences all
over Europe and beyond and there are celebratory parties hosted in bars and
clubs across all participating nations akin to gay pride and gay Olympics
festivities. While this suggests a queerness transcending national borders,
the contrary may be true if looking at developments since the turn of the
twenty-first century.

Camp Politics
The ESC has been hailed—and chastised—for its campiness. Indeed,
Eurovision fandom can be read as a secret code for being gay. While
traditionally camp is known for its exaggerated style, surface entertainment,
gay sensibility, and, above all, apolitical stance, the various instances of
camp performance on the ESC stage have repeatedly been understood as
sending clandestinely political messages and thus moving beyond a
commodified notion of camp that has become all too accessible and
nonthreatening in its willingness to suit the (straight) masses. Ultimately,
camp is a mode of deconstructive reading from a queer perspective
mocking hetero assumptions about gender, desire, and identity. Camp thus
produces a dialogue between performers and spectators with the assumption
that the latter have a sensibility to decipher the formers' ironic undertakings
(Babuscio 1993; Ross 1988). In contrast to camp performances in gay
clubs, at gay pageants, or during gay pride events, where there is a
recognized confluence of queer actors and queer audiences, the ESC
campiness relies on a covert acknowledgment that large parts of the
audience have a queer enough eye to successfully indulge in the guilty
pleasure of enMoying the carnivalesque transgressions of the performances.
Because the contest is about nations competing against each other, notions
of nationality may very well be the butt of any campy Moke.

Verka Serduchka's second-place performance in 2007 representing Ukraine

can be seen as an instance of camp that has the potential for both aesthetic
disruption and political subversion. Such camp taps into archival resources
of the past and produces new perspectives on familiar material. Serduchka's
song and drag show “Dancing Lasha Tumbai,” through her glittery and
futuristic costume, played with notions of the ESC's status as “gay
Christmas” (or “gay Passover” in Israel)—a “national holiday” for the
LGBT community as important as gay pride—and the drag tradition of
staged feminine hypersexuality, while the lyrics and score were ambiguous.
“Lasha tumbai” was variously understood as meaning either “Russia
goodbye” or “whipped cream” or making no sense at all, and the music had
resonances to marches and waltzes, thus referring to various musical
traditions of “old” Europe, such as military parades and ballroom dancing.
Serduchka as representing the emerging “new” eastern Europe was holding
up a self-reflective queer mirror for the celebratory claim of a unified
Europe moving in a synchronized beat and forging a coherent transnational
body out of disparate anonymous crowds. Other performances have also
used camp to point toward future events not yet known. Among the
performances arguably perceived as camp were the Russian (faux) lesbian
girl-group t.A.T.u. in 2003 and the Norwegian monster rockers Lordi in
2006. These performances may convey a multitude of prospects, including
above all utopian notions of an imagined queer transnational community.

© JOHANNES SIMON/GETTY IMAGES

Verka Serduchka Performs “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” during the Eurovision Song
Contest Finals in Helsinki, Finland, 2007. Serduchka's second-place performance of
her song and drag show, with its glittery, futuristic costumes and staged feminine
hypersexuality in accordance with drag tradition, is an instance of camp with the
potential for both aesthetic disruption and political subversion.

Queer Nationality after 2014

Such utopian longings notwithstanding, developments since the late 1990s
have opened up new gaps between queerness and national identities.
Starting in 1997 with the high camp performances of the first openly gay
contestant, Páll Óskar (Iceland), and the following year with the first trans
woman, Dana International, representing Israel with her contest-winning
song “Diva,” Eurovision entered its acknowledged phase of visible LGBT
politics. At the same time, Dana International's victory was discussed both
as symbolizing Israel's membership in a sexually liberal West and as
diverting through “pinkwashing,” a sort of publicity campaign to
consolidate Israel's proclaimed democratic reputation and paper over the
country's continuing discrimination of Palestinians and its internal
homophobia; reproach for the latter was repeated years later when
AzerbaiMan hosted the ESC in 2012 despite accusations of ongoing human
rights violations and repression of LGBT people. The phase of visibility
continued in the twenty-first century with the lesbian Serbian winner MariMa
Šerifović (2007) and Krista Siegfrids from Finland (2013) with her song
“Marry Me,” which covertly critiqued the Finnish parliament's decision not
to vote on equal marriage legislation and ended in a stage kiss between two
female performers. The trend furthermore included Slovenia's 2002 trans
group Sestre and culminated in Conchita Wurst's victory for Austria in 2014
with her anthem “Rise Like a Phoenix.”

Controversies about Conchita's performance already surfaced prior to the

contest and escalated after. Russia, along with Belarus and Armenia, called
for a ban on the broadcast of the ESC in 2014 because of the participation
of Conchita and to replace the event with an alternative “Voice of Eurasia”
contest, which would have revived the short-lived Intervision Song Contest,
the equivalent of the ESC created for the countries of the Warsaw Pact and
held from 1977 to 1980, with a single follow-up contest in Sochi in 2008
featuring eleven post-Soviet countries. The various discussions did not so
much concern the openly gay singer Thomas Neuwirth but rather his choice
of the bearded drag persona Conchita Wurst (later Must Conchita), and they
were as diverse as hailing her as an ambassador for diversity (a role she
herself adapted later on in her visits to the European Parliament and the
United Nations) and as denouncing her as a harbinger of moral decay.
Clearly, with a gay man appearing as a woman sporting a full beard,
Conchita's performance challenged a gender system based on
heteronormativity.

Initial homophobic and transphobic media reaction from Austria and other
European countries gave way to a more streamlined narrative that lauds a
progressive queer-friendly western Europe against a backward homophobic
eastern Europe. While there is no denying the extreme homophobic
statements, especially those of several Russian politicians, this cannot be
taken to represent millions of eastern European people making up a largely
enthusiastic ESC audience. Indeed, contrary to the often assumed West-
versus-East bloc-voting, Eurovision voting revealed that while the expert
Muries of all the excommunist states voted significantly lower than all the
other competing countries in favor of Conchita, the public televotes varied
far less.

Given that the official policies in Russia and some other countries
participating in the ESC have run counter to the overall tendency in Europe
to ensure LGBT equal rights protection and have involved the enforcement
of legislation that de facto encourages discrimination against queers, the
pro-queer voting behavior in these very countries gives reasons for hope.
The increasingly queer discernibility of the ESC, however, has so far not
expanded to include visible and outspoken bi- and intersexuals, queer
Muslims and Roma, or LGBT people of color. Time will tell whether the
call for an all-encompassing queer politics, so dear to LGBT devotees from
all nations, will reach a truly transnational ESC vision.

SEE ALSO Anti-gender Movement in Europe; Anti-Semitism and

Zionism; Camp; Sexual Revolution in Europe

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Babuscio, Jack. “Camp and the Gay Sensibility.” In Camp Grounds: Style
and Homosexuality, edited by David Bergman, 19–38. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Fricker, Karen, and MiliMa Gluhovic, eds. Performing the “New” Europe:
Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Georgiou, Myria, and Cornel Sandvoss, eds. “Euro Visions: Culture,

Identity, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest.” Special issue,
Popular Communication 6, no. 3 (2008).

Raykoff, Ivan, and Robert Deam Tobin, eds. A Song for Europe:
Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2007.

Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (1988):

1–24.

Tuhkanen, Mikko, and Annamari Vänskä, eds. “Queer Eurovision.” Special

issue, SQS-lehti 2, no. 2 (2007).
Family Law in Asia
SRIMATI BASU
Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
University of Kentucky, Lexington

YI ZHANG
Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
University of Kentucky, Lexington

The legacy of colonialism on laws governing marriage,

property, and families in Asian countries, and its impact
on Asian LGBTQ individuals.

Marriage equality has been at the forefront of media attention for some time
now, with rights to marriage linked to “love rights” and to the entitlements
of equal citizenship by LGBTQ groups. Following the legalization of same-
sex marriage in the Netherlands in 2000, many countries have enacted
versions of the same, and several countries in Asia have either succeeded in
doing so or are in political ferment over the issue. This entry examines such
attempts as part of global and national aspirations for rights and resources,
while also remaining cognizant of the disproportionate attention given to
claims of love-associated rights (e.g., marriage) of certain groups by appeal
to sovereign powers in certain times/spaces. The framework of marriage
ironically validates a powerful model of heteronormative belonging and
marginalizes alternative forms of kinship and belonging. Mindful of the
impossibility of providing a panoramic view of the divergent practices of
love, family, and law in the different histories, cultures, and geopolitical
localities that loosely constitute “Asia,” this essay foregrounds the tangled
and uneven relationships between family law and broader structures of
political economies, ideologies, and cultures. It argues for possibilities of
queering legal heteronormativity and decolonizing marriage equality as a
form of aspirational Western modernity by highlighting some strategies of
sexual minorities in Asia for negotiating love, marriage, and law.

Although “Asia” often features in the Western imagination as an exemplar

of overweening patriarchal culture and associated violent practices, it is a
continent with uneven histories of colonization (European and/or intra-
Asian), different types of states (from Global North capitalist to socialist to
the underdeveloped Global South and much in-between), a variety of
religions, class and caste hierarchies, and kinship systems (including several
matrilineal and polyandrous groups), as well as divergent traditions of
gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality, correspondingly, do not line up
neatly along axes of heterosexuality versus homosexuality or as straight
versus LGBTQ as characterized in Western reckonings. They are better
understood through discourses of embodiment, gender, and sex as “a global
process of transformation whereby a variety of non-procreative, same-sex
behaviors become homogenized under the rubric ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” with
“these new identities … merged into local histories and contexts” (Phillips
2000, 18) or generating new hybrid forms (Kang 2014).

Forms of Kinship and Belonging

Intimate relationships and legal systems of marriage do not line up neatly.
Asian subMects, like their counterparts elsewhere, seek rights, entitlements,
and recognition through engaging the state as well as by drawing on
transnational discourses of liberal subMectivity and sexual human rights.
Instead of uncritically celebrating legalization of same-sex marriages in
Asian nations as necessarily “progressive” and “emancipatory,” we might
contextualize these moves within the broader political economy and
ideology. At the same time, we cannot discount other groups' persistent
efforts to pursue their intimate and affective life outside/beyond the radar of
the state. For instance, instead of seeking formal conMugal relationships or
“coming out,” many gay men and lesbians in China choose to “bring in”
their partners as close friends to live with their parents, a practice of kinship
and family alternative to the legalistic form of marriage (Chou 2000).

Queer theorists have argued that “family law” is arguably heteronormative

to its core, grounded in the mapping of property, rights, and responsibilities
in terms of kinship, following “sex-gender” systems (Rubin 1975; Butler
2002). Kinship formally functions through the traffic of marriage, with
heterosex being the technology that constitutes the validity of marriage (and
thereby the route to accessing entitlements of labor, property, children),
with “consummation finaliz[ing] the performative utterances of wedding,
… very precisely articulated in law as a particular corporeal practice”
(Brook 2000, 140). Same-sex marriage can thus pose a threat to “the
heterosexual logic of the conMugal body politic” (Brook 2000, 147). When
states do adopt marriage equality they may do so in dissonant ways, such as
by extending the scope of the formal marriage contract to same-sex couples
as a form of equity, while not reconceptualizing the reproductive logic of
family law (Robcis 2004), in effect “extend[ing] rights of contract while in
no way disrupting the patrilineal assumptions of kinship or the proMect of
the unified nation that it supports” (Butler 2002, 16–17). Such legalization
of intimate relationships of sexual minorities follows a teleological lineage
of incorporating new categories that reinforces rather than unsettles the
underlying reproductive logic of marriage, and excludes groups that might
not be willing to follow this route.

Colonial Codification of Heteronormative

Patriarchy
Marriage and its variant legal forms have always been at the center of
ideological and geopolitical maneuvering in the Asian context. In some
parts of Asia under direct European colonialism, such as British governance
of India, there was allegedly minimal intervention in “personal laws”
(largely overlapping with “family law”). The colonial authorities claimed to
cede authority in this domain to families and communities, but thereby
often encoded the practices of select hegemonic patrilineal communities
into law, marginalizing matrilineality, plural marriage, other customary
practices favoring women, or customs sheltering kin who were unmarried
or widowed. Postcolonial laws typically retained these practices favoring
the new ruling regimes.

In other Asian regions that allegedly maintained an “independent” status

both before and throughout the two world wars, European colonizers also
effectively spread their influence and solidified their de facto control
through the manipulation of the systems of marriage, family, gender, and
sexuality. For instance, as early as the late nineteenth century, King
Chulalongkorn (1853–1910), the fifth monarch of the Chakri dynasty in
Siam, started the modernizing process of the country through the adoption
of Western military and agricultural technologies. While the British
government did not establish a direct colonial control in the region during
the process, it did disseminate its hegemonic influence over the Siamese
government through the imposition of its monogamous marriage system
and heteronormative gender codes as “civilized” and “superior.”
Chulalongkorn's successor, King VaMiravudh (1880–1925), succumbed to
colonial pressure and adopted the Western monogamous marriage system
and gender norms (Atkins 2012). During the MeiMi era in Japan (1868–
1912), the posturing and showcasing of the Victorian nuclear family style
and gender relationships in the public space became one of the central
conduits for the reformist camp to articulate their political stance and
successfully rally support from the general public, which turned out to be a
watershed moment in Japanese history (Karlin 2002). Likewise, in China at
the dawn of the twentieth century, the Nationalist government relied upon
the reform of families to articulate and legitimize its vision of building a
new nation. The intellectuals involved in the New Culture Movement
proposed the replacement of the authoritarian, patriarchal, extended family
structure with a more egalitarian conMugal family as the key to national
salvation and state-building (Glosser 2003).
Postcolonial Marriage Reforms
After World War II, the reform of marriage systems and family law was key
to decolonizing/independence movements across Asia. Since the foundation
of the People's Republic of China in 1949, marriage has been utilized as a
key biopolitical tool to consolidate and further the so-called socialist
construction (Friedman 2006). For instance, state-imposed “marriage
reform” targeting ethnic minorities was foregrounded as one of the central
moves to symbolize and circulate the narrative that the party-state
“salvaged” minority groups, such as Tibetans, from their “barbaric”
practices of kinship, sexuality, and gender relationships, and catapulted
them into “civilized” socialist society. In the meantime, the state
restructured the legal system of family and marriage in ways to allow
women more room to claim their own rights (particularly that of divorce)
and independence, which was in turn used to indicate socialist China's
moral superiority over the “decayed” capitalist camp (Wang 1999). In
postcolonial Singapore, the state has instituted a draconian homophobic law
that originated but was never practiced in Britain, and meanwhile has been
promoting the bourgeois nuclear family as one of the core social values to
increase the fertility rate and produce more “high-quality” (read here as
native, middle-class, and well-educated) populations to engineer and sustain
the city-state's global hub status (Atkins 2012).

More recently, many contemporary nation-states, decolonized or otherwise,

have instituted laws of marriage and property that bring increased equity
along gender lines, in the wake of transnational treaties such as the 1979
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW). Many LGBTQ movements have also sought inclusion
within family law, given the place that marriage and family occupy as proxy
for some of the most substantive entitlements through the state, including
health care, rights to children, or economic support. But rather than seeing
these reforms toward gender equality or rights for sexual minorities as
welcome hallmarks of modernity, we might notice that the reforms often
signal a nation's political maneuvers as much as a triumph of LGBTQ
organizing. The newly elected Taiwanese government utilizes its legislative
move toward marriage equality not only to demonstrate its own liberal
stance over social issues vis-à-vis its predecessor but also to highlight its
alignment with the liberal West and to garner more moral leverage in
geopolitical competition, especially with China's drastic return to an
authoritarian stance under the presidency of Xi Jinping after 2013 (Shi and
Sung 2017).

© SAM YEH/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Taiwan's First Same-Sex Buddhist Wedding, 2012. Activists hoped that the marriage
ceremony between You Ya-ting (left) and her partner Fish Huang (right) would help in
the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage on the island.

In 2015 the Vietnamese government abolished the ban on same-sex

marriage—a sharp departure that not only distinguishes it from other
communist/postsocialist states, such as China and Russia that have
tightened their control over LGBTQ issues recently but also marks it as the
first country in the region to legalize conMugal relationships between same-
sex couples (Lewis 2016). By contrast, its close neighbor Thailand has
tightened the policing of extramarital sexual relationships, particularly
commercial sex work, which is defined by the law as “illegal” but not
usually punished by the state in practice.

This move is a sign that the Thai government, under a military regime, is
trying to move away from the Western liberal governance it has long
embraced, and toward Chinese-style authoritarianism (Pawakapan 2015). In
the meantime, while widely known for its LGBTQ scenes and once seen as
the first Asian country that might legalize same-sex marriage, Thailand now
lags behind Taiwan and might take up the cause again at some point. In
other performances, nation-states signal modernity by highlighting
heterosexual conMugality as the core of citizenship. For instance, the Hong
Kong municipal government not only uses heteronormative kinship as the
discursive basis of citizenship defining belonging and exclusion but, more
importantly, to also Mustify ethnicity (being born as Chinese) as the legal
foundation to decide citizenship (Yam 2018).

Queering Legal Heteronormativity

Since heterosexual marriage has been a crucial means of access to
livelihoods, inheritance/maintenance, and lineage rituals, many LGBTQ
groups seek to carve out an alternative space of survival and living within
the normative forms of marriage, such as “cooperative marriage” among
gay men and lesbians to satisfy their respective families in China recently
(Kam 2013; Engebretsen 2014), or marriages of convenience among South
Asians. These may be arranged by the individuals marrying, but are deemed
in the United Kingdom to fall under forced marriage practices among
Asians (Amara 2014). As Amy Brainer's ethnography points out, strategic
marriages by gay men and lesbians in Taiwan are embedded in the logic of
patrilineal kinship, property, and labor, such that lesbians have no access to
natal, affinal, or matrimonial resources when they adopt the common
practice of living in “separation without divorce,” assume the bulk of
reproductive labor in households in line with their assigned gender, and are
cast out of ritual recognition. Trans men and women have been newly able
to navigate laws with some fluidity, retaining property rights of the gender
assigned to them at birth or gaining new ritual recognition under their
newly adopted gender, but Brainer's argument is that these forms of
embodiment still highlight the norms of patriarchal property transmission
(2014). Like Brainer, Wah-shan Chou (2000) also suggests that family-
kinship, instead of sexuality, constitutes the basis of individual identity, and
thus a homosexual intimate relationship practiced along with/within kinship
relationships reinforces rather than unsettles the patrilineal and reproductive
logic of the family system in Chinese societies.

While these strategies have social and material advantages, they also
illustrate the categorical violence of family law, both in the coercion of
living within marriage as a form of survival, and in the dangers of exposure
in countries where homosexuality is criminalized. Tanaz Eshaghian's
poignant film Be Like Others (2008) follows gay men in Iran, where
homosexuality is criminalized but sex-reassignment surgery is sanctioned
and encouraged as a remedy for a medical condition: men ambivalently
seek surgery as a way to marry their partners and satisfy their families about
gender and marriage, but often end up losing kin connections and
livelihoods anyway. Transsexuality has been constituted as a space of
livability in Iran, inhabited strategically by queer people even as it serves as
a disciplining discourse (NaMmabadi 2013). Marriage equality may also be
part of civic recognition sought by cosmopolitan, class-privileged groups,
and may purposefully shun associations with sexual minorities marginalized
by class, livelihood, and region, compounding structural violence (Datta
and Roy 2014; Kang 2014).
Often, the authority assigned to patriarchal norms in families means that
transgressions in family law are also imbricated with a variety of criminal
penalties; gender is flexibly manipulated in legal pluralism for peculiarly
punitive effects. A recent case in Bangladesh exemplifies the impunity of
criminal law deployed simultaneously with family law, in which the father
of a Muslim woman who had a customary form of marriage with her female
Hindu partner had the partner arrested on charges of kidnapping and
abduction (a common use of these criminal laws by parents to curb their
children's marriage choices), then forced his daughter into marriage before
that case was resolved (Pelham 2016). Vaibhav Saria (2015) highlights a
legal case that emphasizes the constant state of exception for those in
liminal legal categories: Shamseri, a hiMra (a specific religio-cultural
community of trans women in India), agreed to marry her brother's mistress
as a cover for the mistress's pregnancy, only to be brought up on criminal
and civil charges for domestic violence and alimony when her brother tried
to end the relationship.

Asia's varied kinship systems also provide a useful reminder that patrilineal
patrilocal marriage is not the universal currency of kin entitlements.
Through kin networks, people have usufructuary, or use rights, to
maintenance and property that may capaciously incorporate gender
flexibility or alternative lines of descent. Unni Wikan (1977) describes the
Xanith/Khanith of Oman as a third gender, adopting female clothing and
activities and inhabiting female space while having the same access to legal
property rights as Muslim men. HiMra communities in India fall under legal
precedent that property is transmitted within lineages of gurus and disciples
rather than through their biological kin, a right in danger of being forfeited
through upper/middle-class marriage equality initiatives where
conMugality is placed center stage (Suresh 2011; Manayath 2015).

Beyond Legal Governance It is such alternative reckonings that provide

possibilities for queering family law beyond calls for state recognition
through marriage equality. While LGBTQ demands for marriage are
politically prominent negotiations, others have identified templates of
practices of queer communities that provide a way to rethink the logic of
family law. One way is to restructure kinship and religion based on practice,
such that the legal realm is not the only place where rights are granted: Ruth
Vanita (2011) uses the case of the marriage of a lesbian couple solemnized
in a Hindu temple to posit a path for creating new “customary” practices
that then set precedents to be incorporated into family law. Another is to
rethink the “family” in law: for example, the Delhi-based organization
Partners for Law in Development has long argued for economic rights and
rights of social recognition for a number of different kinds of conMugal and
marital arrangements that are customarily accepted and durable, as
“relationships in the nature of marriage.” These include economic rights for
polygamous families, second wives who have no legal rights, short-term
sexual-social contracts such as visiting husbands and maitri karar (short-
term contracts that may include sex, labor, etc.), same-sex partners, and
third-gender partners whose “husbands” may be also married to women
(Partners for Law in Development 2010). Such imaginings dislocate the
Western nuclear unit as the archetypal subMect of family law, and invite us
into Judith Butler's vision for “radical proMects” that rethink the governance
of kinship (2002, 17).

SEE ALSO Marriage, Same-Sex, in Latin America; Marriage, Same-Sex,

in Taiwan; Marriage, Universal, in Europe; Marriage Migration in Asia;
Parenting Rights in North America; Section 377 in South Asia

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Chou, Wah-shan. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese

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Datta, Aniruddha, and Raina Roy. “Decolonizing Transgender in India:

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Karlin, Jason G. “The Gender of Nationalism: Competing Masculinities in

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Wang, Zheng. Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual

Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Wikan, Unni. “Man Becomes Woman: Transsexualism in Oman as a Key to

Gender Roles.” Man (n.s.) 12, no. 2 (1977): 304–319.
Yam, Shui-yin Sharon. “Citizenship Discourse in Hong Kong: The Limits
of Familial Tropes.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 1 (2018): 1–21.
Female Husband
EMILY SKIDMORE
Associate Professor, Department of History
Texas Tech University, Lubbock

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term used to refer to an

individual assigned female at birth who posed as a husband to
a woman.

The British writer Henry Fielding (1707–1754) coined the term female
husband in the mid-eighteenth century. Fielding used the term as the title of
a criminal biography he wrote in 1746 that was based on newspaper
accounts he had read earlier that year. After the publication of Fielding's
work, the term female husband went on to appear with relative frequency in
the British and US press, most often to describe women who lived as men,
or who partnered with other women and took on “masculine” occupations.
Of course, this phenomenon most likely predated Fielding's pamphlet, but
with the publication of The Female Husband, the Anglo-American world
had a label one could assign to this pattern of behavior, and its meaning
gained coherence.

Fielding's Creation of the Female Husband

Character
Fielding's pamphlet was inspired by newspaper stories about Mary/Charles
Hamilton that had been published in England in 1746. These stories
reported that Hamilton was an individual assigned female at birth but who
had been living as a male since the age of fourteen. In July 1746 Hamilton
married Mary Price in Wells, England, although the marriage was short
lived. Indeed, after two months, Mary complained to authorities that her
husband was biologically female, and Hamilton was subsequently arrested
and placed in prison to await trial, during which he was sentenced to six
months of hard labor. When Fielding encountered the newspaper stories
about Hamilton, he apparently thought they would serve as the basis of an
entertaining narrative, so he fictionalized the account and published a
pamphlet titled The Female Husband several months later.

Significantly, in fictionalizing the stories that he had encountered, Fielding

created a character (the “female husband”) that would go on to have
salience across the Atlantic world, including in the United States. In The
Female Husband, Charles Hamilton married not only one woman but a
series of women, whom she/he subsequently abandoned. Hamilton's
masquerade was ended only once she/he was discovered by authorities and
flogged. Fielding wrote this pamphlet in a tone of repeated disbelief, with
frequent use of the term surprising.

Perhaps on account of its tone, the pamphlet was an instant hit and sold out
two runs of 1,000 copies each in November 1746. This pamphlet had a
wider circulation than the newspaper accounts of Hamilton's life, and as
such, it served to introduce many throughout Britain and the Americas to
the idea of a female husband. The term quickly gained traction, and soon
Mournalists on both sides of the Atlantic were using the term to refer to
individuals who were assigned female at birth and who lived as husbands to
women, but it was also occasionally used to refer to individuals who simply
took on traditionally masculine occupations. Importantly, the tone Fielding
used to describe Hamilton carried on as well; as Rachel Hope Cleves has
written, female husbands were often perceived as “obMects of bemusement
rather than existential threats to the gender order” (2015, 1064). In this
sense, the term female husband was often used to poke fun at its subMect—
to ridicule him/her as absurd or ridiculous.
Indeed, the term appealed to many Mournalists in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries because it seemed, on the surface, to be an oxymoron.
At that time in the Anglo-American world, women were defined through
their status of dependency either on their father (in childhood) or on their
husband (in adulthood). The figure of the husband was seen as the caretaker
of dependents, and therefore the phrase “female husband” drew attention to
itself as being a formulation clearly outside the boundaries of normative
gender expectations (Clayton 2010). To audiences, however, the term might
have suggested things beyond what Fielding and others intended: that
gender is elastic and that some individuals assigned female at birth might
want to live as men and/or marry women.

Although it is unclear how audiences interpreted the term female husband,

it is clear that the term was used with relative frequency in the Anglo-
American press from its first use in 1746 until the late nineteenth century.
Indeed, while most stories about female husbands characterized their
subMects as wholly unique, by the nineteenth century most newspaper
readers in Anglo-America would have recognized this figure as a common
character. For example, in 1838 the Barre (Massachusetts) Weekly
Gazette published a story under the headline “Another Female Husband,”
suggesting that the editors understood that this was not the first story of a
female husband that their readers had ever encountered.

Historical Insights on Gender and Sexuality

The term female husband proposes two overlapping insights into the history
of gender and sexuality. First, it reveals that in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries there were many recorded cases of individuals who
were assigned female at birth but who lived, for at least some time, as men.
While it is impossible to determine what motivated this movement away
from the sex assigned at birth—and no doubt there was a range of different
motivations among female husbands—this phenomenon nonetheless serves
as a reminder that gender transgression has a long and storied past. Second,
it is likely that some of the individuals referred to as female husbands
would, if they were alive today, identify has transgender.

Of course, it is also likely that some individuals labeled female husbands

did not identify as men, but rather posed as men in order to live out their
romantic and/or sexual desire for other women. The existence of a category
of “female husband” suggested to women in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries that a range of types of marriages are possible,
including marriages between two women. As Cleves has written, “The
diversity and longevity of stories about female husbands leads to the
conclusion that this form of same-sex union, in particular, had cultural
legibility within American society…. Many women believed it possible,
and found it possible, to form marriages with other women” (2015, 1067).

Additionally, there is evidence that some female husbands and their wives
were able to find tolerance of their queer relationships in early America.
Charity Bryant, for example, was a woman who lived in New England in
the nineteenth century. Although she did not pass as a man, she served the
role of husband to her female partner, Sylvia Drake, and the townspeople of
Weybridge, Vermont, and family members accepted them as a married
couple. Indeed, this acceptance is commemorated in the headstone that the
couple share, buried side by side, Must like the other married couples in the
village (Cleves 2014, 2015).

By the end of the nineteenth century, use of the term female husband in US
newspapers began to wane. The individual who has the dubious distinction
of being the last person referred to in the mass circulation press as a female
husband is Frank Dubois, who gained national attention in 1883. Dubois
had been assigned female at birth and had married and given birth to two
children before he ran away from his family and began living as a man,
starting a new life in the small town of Waupun, Wisconsin. In Waupun,
Dubois gained a reputation for being a hardworking individual, and he met
and married a young woman named Gertrude Fuller. Everything proceeded
happily until Samuel Hudson, Dubois's former husband, came to Waupun
looking for him—at which point Dubois and Fuller went on the lam,
running from Hudson, the authorities, and Mournalists who scrambled
through the Wisconsin countryside looking for the couple. The manhunt
was covered in newspapers nationwide, and Dubois was referred to as a
female husband, along with other terms, such as insane freak (Grand Forks
[North Dakota] Daily Herald, 30 October 1883).

Dubois's tenure in the press placed him and Fuller in the spotlight along
with the term female husband. This prompted many Americans to consider
the term, its implications, and the possibility of such queer relationships.
For example, the New York Times, on 4 November 1883, published a
satirical editorial wherein the author poked fun at the idea of women
performing the role of husband, writing, “What more could a New England
spinster desire than a husband who never smokes, swears, or slams the
door; who keeps his clothes in order, and does not stay out of the house
until late at night, and who reads Emerson, understands the nature of
women, and can discuss feminine dress with intelligence and appreciation?”
This editorial was designed to poke fun at the idea of a woman serving as
husband, but of course it was written in such a way that individuals who
desired (or who were participating in) a queer relationship might have
found it validating. As such, this editorial highlights how multivalent the
term female husband was; it was at once a sensational and singular term,
but it was used to describe a fairly widespread phenomenon throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Skidmore 2017).

Waning Use of the Term

However, the late nineteenth century gave rise to sexology, the medical
science devoted to studying human gender and sexuality. Early sexologists
were very interested in understanding sexual and gender deviance, and they
defined a new category that soon supplanted the notion of female husbands
in the popular press: the female sexual invert. According to the sexological
theory of sexual inversion, homosexuality was the result of an inborn
reversal of one's gender characteristics, and thereby masculine women
“naturally” desired women. By the 1890s the figure of the female sexual
invert had become an identifiable figure in the mass-circulation press,
particularly within sensational newspapers published in large metropolitan
areas (Duggan 2000). Importantly, the female sexual invert was defined in
the press as a pathological figure, one that threatened the stability of
heterosexual relationships because her sexual obMect of choice was the
“normal” woman. In this context, the term female husband fell out of favor,
because the mainstream mass-circulation press was increasingly interested
in portraying nonnormative relationships as clearly deviant. Even though
the term female husband had the potential to be interpreted in a positive
light, after the 1880s, that was something many newspaper editors were
seemingly uninterested in.

Overall, the term female husband was used in the Anglo-American press for
about 150 years. While Fielding's coinage of the term may have been with
the intent to ridicule the idea of individuals assigned female at birth serving
as husbands, the term quickly gained salience as a social formation that
conveyed the possibility of queer relationships. Even though the term has
fallen out of favor, examining its history reveals to modern audiences a
queer past wherein individuals moved from one gender to another, and
wherein queer relationships could, at times, be tolerated.

SEE ALSO Barbin, Herculine (1838–1868); Boston Marriage and

Women's RomanticFriendships; Cross-DressingintheWest;
FemmesandButches; Marriage, Woman-Woman, in Africa

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barre (MA) Weekly Gazette. “Another Female Husband.” 6 August 1838.

Clayton, Susan. “Can Two and a Half Centuries of Female Husbands

Inform (Trans)Gender History?” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14, no. 4
(2010): 288–302.

Cleves, Rachel Hope. Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early

America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Cleves, Rachel Hope. “‘What, Another Female Husband?’: The Prehistory

of Same-Sex Marriage in America.” Journal of American History 101, no. 4
(2015): 1055–1081.

Duggan, Lisa. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Fielding, Henry. The Female Husband; or, The Surprising History of Mrs.
Mary, Alias Mr. George Hamilton, Who Was Convicted of Having
Married a Young Woman of Wells and Lived with Her as Her Husband.
Taken from Her Own Mouth since Her Confinement. London: M. Cooper,
1746.

Grand Forks (ND) Daily Herald. “An Insane Freak.” 30 October 1883.

New York Times. “Female Husbands.” 4 November 1883.

Skidmore, Emily. True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2017.
Feminism, African
JANE BENNETT
Associate Professor, School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology
and Linguistics
University of Cape Town, South Africa

The ways African feminists have intersected with queer theory

and activism.

There is a very long history of Africa-based women, in diverse national

contexts, who have organized against oppression. Consider, for example,
the 1929 Igbo Women's War, which took on British colonial policy in
Nigeria, and individuals such as Wangari Maathai in Kenya, who drove
forward a powerful popular movement known as the green belt movement
around issues of land, poverty, and agriculture. It is important to recognize
the depth and resonance of this history, but it is also useful to understand
that the term African feminism is best applied to theorists and activists who
used the term themselves to describe their work. Obioma Nnaemeka, for
example, is one of several Africa-based feminists who have contributed to
vigorous debate during the last three decades of the twentieth century on the
meaning of African feminism as an umbrella concept. She has argued that
“there is a pluralism of … [African feminisms] that captures the fluidity and
dynamism of the different cultural imperatives, historical forces, and
localized realities conditioning women's activism/movements in Africa …
[that] underscores the heterogeneity of African feminist thinking and
engagement as manifested in strategies and approaches that are sometimes
complementary and supportive, and sometimes competing and adversarial”
(Nnaemeka 1998, 5). Nnaemeka's reMection of a homogenizing narrative on
African feminism refuses to dislocate theoretical work from grounded,
complex, and often mutually unintelligible contexts. Such an approach
works well as an introduction to a critical discussion of African feminist
theories' and activisms' engagement with continental and global queer
theory and sexualities studies.

This entry is structured in three sections, the first of which presents some of
the dominant ideas in African feminist theory since the 1970s. Such theory
emerged from critical activism and thought concerning the meaning of
decolonization and pan-Africanism after the 1960s wave of independence
from colonial governances. Located in movement building, research spaces,
and cross-country networks, such feminisms took inequities in gender
dynamics very seriously, theorizing these as responsible for maMor inMustices
in terms of access to political space and the meaning of gender-based
violence, and overall for the perpetuation of colonial regimes of gender and
race. Although there are serious debates among these voices, there are also
some points of consensus, and it is possible to foreground particular voices
as key to understanding contemporary feminist organizing and thought on
the continent. The second section explores the iterative relationship
between African feminisms and queer and LGBTI activism and theory on
the continent. It concludes with the argument that even though particular
African feminists (such as Sylvia Tamale of Uganda and Elizabeth Khaxas
of Namibia) and sexual and reproductive Mustice organizations (such as the
Sexual and Reproductive Rights Coalition in South Africa and the
International Centre for Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights in Nigeria)
have played critical roles in African queer work, the work of African-based
LGBTI and queer activists, artists, and writers has influenced African
feminism more effectively than the other way around. The final section
looks very briefly at the influence of African-generated LGBTI and queer
work on the meaning of contemporary African feminisms, but the
overarching argument is that there remains an ongoing tension for feminists
and/or queer theoreticians and activists between working on the continent
and working globally (Ocholla 2010).
Defining African Feminism
Following Nnaemeka's caution about simplistic readings of continentally
generated theory, Jane Bennett goes further:

[What is] critical to recognize is that it is

impossible to speak of Africa as a generalization
without erasing complexity, nuance, and
difference. The continent is vast, and its
civilizations, peoples, languages, and histories are
extremely rich…. In a very real way, there is no
such thing as Africa, except as such a space is
highlighted and debated
in opposition to the discourses that stereotype the
continent as undeveloped, its peoples as incapable
of self-governance or poor, and its cultures as
primitive. Such discourses abound, even in the
twenty-first century, and when we seek to
understand questions of African-based activism in
the area of … sexualities it is important to try to do
so in a way that respects the depth and complexity
of the political, social, and historical realities of the
continent.

(BENNETT 2011, 80)

Despite the recognition of the dangers of homogenization, there are several

arguments within feminist theory and activism that are explicitly named as
“African.” Such arguments wrestle for prioritization and perspective, as is
to be expected in robust and resilient political thought.
Many of the arguments are positioned in direct, and proactive, response to
—and reMection of—feminisms developed by middle-class and white
feminist writers, particularly those in the United States and United
Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion that “sisterhood is global”
(sloganized by US feminist Robin Morgan) is understood here as a form of
colonialism, and in addition, a weakly theorized understanding of the
production of gendered forms of power. Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí in The
Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses (1997) argues strongly that Western feminism focuses on the
meaning of the body in a way utterly foreign to the Yoruba ontological
frameworks for conceptualizing the “human.” Her position refuses the
notion of a “womanhood” separable as a class from “manhood,” and draws
on the Yoruba language and Yoruba patterns of community hierarchy to
theorize Western concepts of gender as irrelevant to African epistemologies.
Ife Amadiume takes on a similar task. In Male Daughters, Female
Husbands (1987) Amadiume theorizes matriarchal systems of economic
and political formation in Nnobi, Nigeria, stressing that gender is only one
of many interlocking influences on the operation of power, access to
resources, and symbolic meaning. Amadiume takes cultural ritual,
particularly around issues of fertility and sexuality, very seriously as
processes of enormous power for women at specific stages of their lives.

A second argument, loosely allied to the work of African feminism, comes

from the adoption of new terminologies for an African-generated feminism.
Mary Kolawole, for example, in Womanism and African Consciousness
refutes the impotence of women living on the continent. She defines
womanism as the “totality of feminine self-expression, self-retrieval, and
self-assertion in positive cultural ways” (Kolawole 1997, 31). With
Nnaemeka, Kolawole supports a womanism that advocates for negotiation
(“nego-feminism”) between the cultural power of womanhood and men's
forms of authority, so that any inequalities between men and women can be
resolved. In some ways, this womanism resonates with African American
writer Alice Walker's definition of womanism in that Walker, explicitly
conscious of the roles of racism and class oppression in the lives of men of
color in the United States, reMects any blanket relegation of men to the status
of the privileged. Walker's embrace of ordinary (poor, and usually black)
women's art and weaving work as versions of feminist theorizing is not too
distant from Kolawole's celebration of African women's “ways of being,”
but the concepts are separated by political and contextual roots.

A 1997 collection of essays titled Engendering Social Sciences in Africa,

edited by Ayesha Imam, Amina Mama, and Fatou Sow and published by the
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
(CODESRIA), bears witness to a very different thread in African feminist
theory. The collection explicitly takes on the decolonial but androcentric
epistemologies of some of the leading African scholars of the 1970s to the
1990s, including Thandika Mkandawire, Archie MafeMe, and Mamadou
Diouf. Structured through engagement with diverse disciplines, such as
history, psychology, education, theories of culture, agricultural studies, and
economics, the volume analyzes late twentieth-century theory that purports
to effect revolutionary change in the production of African knowledges and
finds it gender-blind, even antifeminist. The writers, all of whom
galvanized significant feminist proMects of policy making, movement
building, and research in their own national contexts, are some of the
leading names in contemporary African feminist organizing and thought on
the continent. Collectively, this traMectory of African feminist thought takes
the postdemocratic African state very seriously as a site founded on both
the unfinished work of decolonization and the operation of patriarchal and
militaristic forces, and it demands epistemological transformation of the
ways in which knowledges, and hence strategies, are created. In this way,
feminist analysis of gender dynamics informs every layer of institutional,
organizational, and personal work toward African-centered sociopolitical
change. Takyiwaa Manuh, Sylvia Tamale, Amina Mama, Ayesha Imam,
Dzodzi Tsikata, MarMorie Mbilinyi, Charmaine Pereira, Ruth Meena, Fatou
Sow, Rudo Gaidzanwa, Hope Chigudu, Elaine Salo, Pumla Gqola, and
Desiree Lewis constitute a transnational network of African feminist
theorists and researchers allied within this thread of African feminism
despite their very different country contexts.

While it is possible to see glimpses of liberal feminism in, for example, the
election of women to high political office (such as Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson's
election as president of Liberia in 2006) and ongoing developmental
organizations' concern with gender mainstreaming, popular African
feminisms owe much to their predecessors' theorizations of land, class, race,
and sexuality. Yet, they have taken up an African feminism deeply engaged
in grounded movement building that is also fluent in the language of social
media. This thread of African feminism is young, and in a country such as
South Africa, strongly attuned to the politics of race and land dispossession,
fueling student movements, and impatient with earlier generations' concern
with the quantification of women politicians in terms of quota policies or
concerns about the ratio of women to men in political office. Blogs such as
those by MsAfropolitan, Dr T. (Tlaleng Mofokeng), Sokari Ekine, and Nana
Sekyiamah reflect on both the politics of the body and the meaning of
histories that have, globally, deployed race and gender to build exploitative
economies.

A final thread that must be included in this brief introductory survey of

African feminisms is Islamic feminism in Africa. As Shirin Edwin points
out, Islamic feminism is often neglected in discussions of African
feminisms that otherwise recognize the continent's diversity and
complexity. Edwin argues that some African feminists stereotype Islam, but
that “Ayesha Imam's work on the seclusion of Muslim women (kulle) and
on the history of Islam in northern Nigeria offers a deeper and more
obMective understanding of the role Islam has played in the lives of women
in northern Nigeria from the fifteenth century through independence from
British rule” (Edwin 2006, 142). In addition to Imam, Nawal El Saadawi,
an Egyptian feminist, is one of several voices speaking about the complex
relationship between reMection of Islamophobia and passionate and
informed advocacy for Muslim women's power; Fatou Sow, Fatima
Mernissi, and Fatima Seedat also address this issue.

The diversity of African feminisms animates a continent-wide engagement

with the dynamics of gender as these have arisen historically and
contextually. While there are clear conversations with feminisms borne out
of struggles on other continents (particularly those with legacies of slavery
and colonial rule), African feminisms are at their most influential in
dialogue with one another. The website of the African Feminist Forum, for
example, profiles dozens of activists and writers, and a drilldown into
biographies, leaderships, theories, and experiences bears witness to both the
strength and the range of “African feminisms.”

African Feminisms and the Politics of

Sexualities
It could be argued that all threads of African feminism speak, in different
ways, to the politics of sexualities. However, such an argument would
conceive of sexualities very broadly, encompassing the examination of
Islamic texts' construction of sexuality, the meaning of very diverse
heterosexual cultures and norms, the political economy of unpaid “domestic
labor,” the robust engagement between legal reform and questions of
reproductive and sexual health, the political economy of sex work, and the
ongoing negotiation between medical- and social science–oriented debates
about the prevention and management of HIV/AIDS. The terrain is rich and
dominated by two overarching concerns: the meaning of complex and
changing sexualities and the need to challenge stereotypic and stigmatizing
Western discourses on “African sexuality” (Tamale 2011). Overall, though,
until very recently, African feminisms have been slow to theorize
sexualities and genders beyond the borders of heteronormative
epistemology. A bird's-eye view suggests that it has been African lesbian,
gay, transgender, intersex, and queer activists and writers (often living in
contexts where their counterheteronormativity is criminalized) who have
influenced African feminisms, rather than the other way around.

There are two spaces in which the influence of African feminism on queer
activism and theory can be articulated. The first arises from African
feminist organizations' and policy makers' challenges of early discourses on
the prevention of HIV/AIDS. When the HIV/AIDS virus spread very
rapidly across Africa south of the Sahara in the late 1990s, state responses
to the devastating epidemic included public sex-education campaigns that
demanded that populations “abstain, be faithful, condomize” (ABC).
Sociomedical research simultaneously constructed groups “at risk”—long-
distance truck drivers, sex workers, and young female partners of “sugar
daddies”—and advocated for special campaigns focused on these groups'
vulnerability. It took feminist organizing and writing to challenge the
narrowness of the state approach to what constitutes “sex” and “violence”
(Muthien 2004) and to demand new approaches to possibilities for sexual
partnership. Feminist demands to consider gender-based violence, to take
the complexity of sexual lives seriously, and to acknowledge diversities of
sexual life, community, and culture changed many approaches to
understanding the epidemic (Horn 2013.

The second space involves the persistent work of particular African

feminists and organizations that—as feminist partnerships—have stood
their ground against both state homophobia and progressive civil society
networks to insist on the rights of lesbian, gay, and transgender people.
Sylvia Tamale of Uganda is one such African feminist. In 2003 Tamale,
then associate professor of law at Makerere University (where she later
became dean of the faculty of law) was pilloried by a leading newspaper,
the New Nation, as one of the “worst women in the world.” The reason was
her political support for lesbian, gay, and transgender people as “minorities”
for the purposes of new draft equity legislation. Tamale's position as a well-
known feminist stimulated open and virulent homophobia as well as
feminist engagement in eastern Africa around the need to name the violence
and advocate for protection of LGBTI people. From 2004 to 2005 Urgent
Action, a feminist organization fighting for women's rights based in
Nairobi, Kenya, directed at that time by Kaarai Betty Murungi, initiated a
series of research proMects and workshops that sought to better understand
the discrimination suffered by East African LGBTI people and activists.
Some of the most influential activists in the region, including Victor
Mukasa, Frank Mugisha, David Kato, and Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera,
participated in discussions, and the networks created lent strategic support
to a number of fledgling LGBTI organizations. Freedom and Roam Uganda
(FARUG) and Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), for example, grew to
become leading advocacy voices in the battle against the recriminalization
of lesbian and gay people in Uganda beginning in 2009.

Sylvia Tamale remains a well-known feminist ally in LGBTI activism, and

her colleague Stella Nyanzi proactively researches questions of queer
community in Uganda. Similar connections between African feminists and
LGBTI activism can be found in other contexts. In Namibia, the feminist
organization Sister Namibia produced a regular and influential newsletter
run by Liz Frank and Elizabeth Khaxas, and wove questions of LGBTI
knowledge making into its programs on feminist issues from its earliest
instantiation. In Nigeria, Dorothy Aken'ova, a feminist working with civil
rights, spearheaded a 2006 protest against the newly proposed
recriminalization of lesbian and gay people (Aken'ova 2011). More
recently, in 2017, Charmaine Pereira and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, both
influential feminists working in Nigeria, completed research on gender and
sexual diversity for the Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERS), an organization
committed to documenting discrimination against LGBTI people in Nigeria.
Pereira and Bakare-Yusuf's engagement with the research is typical of the
way African feminisms have contributed to LGBTI and queer African-
based work—that is, it is driven largely by their own politics and vision
rather than as part of an organizational strategy linking the theorization of
feminism to the meaning of queer Mustice.
In South Africa (one of only two countries on the continent that has
removed colonial-era legislation against homosexual behavior, as of 2018),
the interaction between feminists and LGBTI activism has been complex.
Although several leading LGBTI knowledge creators and activists are
outspokenly feminist—including Sibongile Ndashe, Zanele Muholi, Funeka
Soldaat, Mary Hames, Dawn Cavanagh, Liesl Theron, and Sally Gross—
and bring diverse principles of feminist work to LGBTI strategizing,
debates within South African feminisms have concentrated more
intensively on the theorization of race, class, and the meaning of
“womanhood” under the South African state than on the priorities of queer
thinking. That said, it is worth noting that South Africa's leading feminist
Mournal, Agenda, has published several special issues on queer theory and
the politics of counterheteronormative activism (Matebeni 2014), and that
the Sexual and Reproductive Justice Coalition encompasses feminist and
queer advocacy and theory as mutually enriching activisms.

LGBTI, Queer Theory, and African Feminisms

Since 2000, the growth of African-rooted LGBTI and queer work has been
expansive, diverse, and—despite the legal and sociopolitical hostility of
country contexts—highly influential in debates within African feminisms,
particularly those driven by younger voices interested in the politics of
performance and the power of social media to affect change. Some
conversations, especially those focused on the legally guaranteed human
rights of lesbian, gay, intersex, and transgender people, led by organizations
such as the Coalition of African Lesbians and the Initiative for Strategic
Litigation in Africa, require specialist knowledge of the international legal
terrain, and are rarely glossed in popular African feminist e-debate. Others,
however—such as those concerning the meaning of violence, the power of
the visual, decriminalization of sex work, and the need to challenge the
legacies of colonial borders of many types—are very strongly driven by the
work of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex writers, artists,
activists, and strategists.
Queer African Reader (2016), a collection of essays coedited by Sokari
Ekine and Hakima Abbas, exemplifies the range of continental queer
theorization on space, solidarity, religion, and culture, and the politics of
movement building. The collection has been widely distributed
internationally, placing African queer debate squarely within global
discussions. In a similar way, the visual activism, or photography, of Zanele
Muholi, representing the “face and phases” of black Southern African
lesbians and transgender people, has travelled the world's museums and
galleries. In 2004 Muholi was also the first South African to write about the
rapes and murders that target black South African lesbians. Her influence
on the theorization of black embodiment in a twenty-first-century global
and African context is monumental. Alongside Kasha Jacqueline
Nabagesera of Uganda, whose LGBTI activism put her on the cover of Time
magazine (5 August 2015), and Binyavanga Wainaina of Kenya, who won
the Caine Prize for African Literature in 2002 and was named one of Time's
most influential 100 people in the world in 2014, Muholi stands as a maMor
African figure of queer Africanity. These voices, together with others, carry
debate into conversation with African feminisms and beyond.

Despite the success of particular queer theorists and artists coming from and
working both within African contexts and further afield, divisions remain
between historical legacies of some African feminisms and new LGBTI and
queer agendas that refuse any reification of the body. Akinyi Ocholla
captures this in autoethnographic research exploring her experiences
working as a feminist, Kenyan, lesbian, and international queer activist; she
points out the tensions in navigating the meaning of African struggles with
US-dominant global ideas of queer vision (Ocholla 2010) alongside the
need to understand the multiplicity of African feminist understandings of
gender dynamics.

SEE ALSO Activism in Africa South of the Sahara; Gender, Flexible

Systems, in Africa; Queer Theory, African; Sports, Women in, Africa;
Transfeminism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aken'ova, Dorothy. “International Centre for Sexual Health and
Reproductive Rights (INCRESE), Nigeria: Battling the Proposed Bill on the
Prohibition of Sexual Relationships and Marriage between People of the
Same Sex, 2006.” Feminist Africa 15 (2011): 135–148.

Amadiume, Ife. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an

African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987.

Bennett, Jane. “Subversion and Resistance: Activist Initiatives.” In African

Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia Tamale, 77–100. Oxford:
Pambazuka Press, 2011.

Edwin, Shirin. “We Belong Here, Too: Accommodating African Muslim

Feminism in African Feminist Theory via Zaynab Alkali's The Virtuous
Woman and The Cobwebs and Other Stories.” Frontiers: A Journal of
Women Studies 27, no. 3 (2006): 140–156.

Ekine, Sokari, and Hakima Abbas, eds. Queer African Reader. Oxford:
Pambazuka Press, 2013.

Horn, Jessica. “Gender and Social Movements: Overview Report.” The

Hague, Netherlands: Institute of Development Studies, 2013.

Imam, Ayesha, Amina Mama, and Fatou Sow, eds. Engendering Social
Sciences in Africa. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA Press, 1998.

Kolawole, Mary. Womanism and African Consciousness. Trenton,

NJ: African World Press 1997.

Matebeni, Zethu, ed. Reclaiming Afrika: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and

Gender Identities. Cape Town, South Africa: ModMaMi Press, 2014.
Muholi, Zanele. “Thinking through Lesbian Rape.” Agenda 18, no. 61
(2004): 116–125.

Muholi, Zanele. Faces and Phases. New York: Prestel, 2010.

Muthien, Bernadette. “Strategic Interventions; Intersections between

Gender-Based Violence and HIV/AIDS.” Agenda 18, no. 59 (2004): 93–99.

Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to

the Diaspora. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998.

Ocholla, Akinyi. “Thoughts on LGBTI Activism, Race, and Gender in a

Kenyan Context.” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 4, no.
1 (Autumn 2010): 123–131.

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónké. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense

of
Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997.

Tamale, Sylvia. “Researching and Theorizing Sexualities in Africa.” In

African Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia Tamale, 11–36. Oxford:
Pambazuka Press, 2011.
Femmes and Butches
CHELSEA DEL RIO
Assistant Professor of History, Social Science Department, LaGuardia
Community College, Queens, NY
Governing Board Member, Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender History

An identification of lesbian use of masculinity (butch) and

femininity (femme) to shape sexual desire, gender identity,
and community.

Femmes and butches occupy a central, if contested, position in lesbian

history. The terms butch and femme defy easy definition as women have
adopted and adapted these identifiers in diverse ways to reflect queer
identities and desires since they emerged as foundational concepts of public
lesbianism in the 1940s. For the next few decades, these women were the
only visible figures of queer womanhood. Commonly understood in relation
to one another (stylized in a variety of ways, such as “butch/femme” or
“butch-fem”), lesbians developed these concepts to make their sexual desire
visible and to create a social system through which to build community. The
growth of the queer community and the evolution of social, cultural, and
political beliefs about sexuality created a number of challenges to the utility
and legitimacy of femme and butch identities, yet they continue to function
as significant ways of making meaning among queer women.

Background
Until the late nineteenth century, Americans generally understood same-sex
sexual engagements as standalone acts or behaviors rather than an
indication that participants were inherently different. Industrialization,
urbanization, and large-scale movement of peoples around the country
created new conditions that facilitated the growth of queer identity and
subculture by the onset of the twentieth century. Women found that these
changes provided new opportunities for employment that translated into
greater independence from family and gender norms. These changes also
came with more time spent in homosocial spaces and greater access to
leisure activity. At the same time, there was an increased recognition of
women's sexual agency. An understanding of women's sexuality
independent of men opened up opportunities for women to understand their
desires and marked women as sexually available to one another. Medical
inquiry into gender and sexuality coincided with subcultures developing
around homosexual activity, the two helping along the transition from
homosexual practice to identity. Initially, these sexologists interpreted
same-sex sex as gender inversion. They asserted that a woman desiring
another woman actually experienced these feelings because she understood
herself as masculine rather than feminine. Sexologists moved rather quickly
from ideas of inversion to defining those people who engaged in same-sex
sex as a category of people: “homosexuals.” The idea of gender inversion
lingered well into the twentieth century, however, especially for women
(Rupp 1999; Stein 2012).
 © BARBARA ALPER/GETTV IMAGES
A Butch/Femme Lesbian Couple at the 1982 Gay Pride Day Celebration in New
York City. Lesbians developed the concept of butch/femme to make their sexual desire
visible and to create a social system through which to build community, starting with
the onset of World War II. During the 1970s, some militant lesbian feminists began to
argue that this gendered representation of lesbians actually promoted the oppression of
lesbians of all types.

Prior to these developments, history offers glimpses of “passing women”

who presented themselves as men. The restrictions placed on women's lives
before the twentieth century make it complicated to determine the
influences of gender identity, sexual desire, and a drive for independence in
interpreting the motives of passing women. Passing women held Mobs that
would have been otherwise off limits, such as soldiers, laborers, and
politicians. These roles provided independence and adventure, attractive to
those women who described childhoods chafing under the restrictiveness of
femininity. This life also frequently included female companionship, with
many passing women taking wives. Romantic friendships provided a model
for female intimacy, although the absence of gender roles may have
complicated sexual unions in such partnerships. These women were
important predecessors to butch women inasmuch as they situate the
ongoing struggles of women to find ways in which to locate a gender
identity that is something other than feminine, to express sexual desire for
other women, and to reMect the gendered barriers to employment and
independence (Katz 1992).

The mannish lesbian marked an important transition from the passing

woman to the butch; she represented lesbian sexual desire and the ongoing
connection between queer womanhood and the subversion of gender norms.
The scholar Esther Newton defines the mannish lesbian as a woman whose
lesbianism is visible through “behavior or dress” that “manifests elements
designated as exclusively masculine” (2000, 177). While this mannish
figure emerged in the early twentieth century as a public expression of
queer female desire, lesbian community continued to develop primarily
outside of public attention. By the 1920s a small number of lesbian
subcultures developed as a result of early twentieth-century social changes,
exposure to Freudian theories, and bohemian reMections of Victorianism.
This included working-class lesbians who began to gather in public houses.
Even among mainstream society, increasing numbers of women began to
explore sexual desire for other women (Faderman 1991). In spite of rapid
change, most women continued to have less access to spaces for public
gathering and had to mind cultural values in order to maintain economic
and social stability. It took a radical transformation of American society in
the coming decades to make public lesbian communities possible.

Rise of Butch-Femme Community

The onset of World War II (1939–1945) made possible the creation of
public lesbian community. Men mobilized for military service, necessitating
women's accelerated entry into the workforce and thus creating
opportunities for independence and homosociality. They migrated around
the country to power wartime industries and Moin the military and in so
doing found new opportunities to live, work, and socialize with one another.
In this new world, lesbians also found financial freedom, distance from the
watchful eyes of family, and refuge in the wartime flexibility of gender
norms. The paucity of men normalized women moving about in public
without the company of men. The upsurge of working women in
nontraditional fields normalized a greater range of women's clothing,
including pants. Lesbians became less conspicuous, facing fewer dangers as
they traversed public spaces and finding greater opportunity to build
subcultures. Under these conditions lesbian community flourished in bars.
Most public spaces would not accept overt displays of lesbian activities or
were not safe for women to do so. Bars, especially those “in areas known
for moral permissiveness,” provided the only consistent option for lesbian
socializing (Kennedy and Davis 1993, 31).

“Butch” and “femme” materialized in the 1940s as varied configurations of

lesbian gender and sexuality, identity and practice, independent character,
and reciprocal role. The simplest definition is that butches appeared and
behaved masculine, whereas femmes appeared and behaved feminine. In
this conceptualization, the femme identity relied heavily on attraction and
attachment to the butch in order to be legible. Butches adopted the clothing
of working-class men and styled their hair short, whereas femmes
maintained conventional fashions for women of the period. Commonly
replicating the gender roles of heterosexual couples, the butch was the
dominant partner and sexual aggressor with the femme yielding to and
caring for her butch. In the early twentieth century there were few other
partnership models, so it is not surprising that lesbians looked to
heterosexual roles in order to make sense of their desire. Butch/femme roles
further provided a means of structuring community relationships. Given
that butch/butch and femme/femme relationships were taboo, the gender
norms of these roles guided social interactions and expressions of sexual
desire. Yet butch/femme partners were hardly naive copies of husband and
wife. Rather than a form of imitation, femmes and butches transformed
gender roles to suit their needs and even understood the butch/femme
relationship as a political act of subverting the norms of the period.
Subsequent generations of lesbians challenged the legitimacy of
butch/femme identities but have been unsuccessful in challenging their
importance to queer women's community.

These identities filled a number of needs among women who felt in some
way limited by existing sex and gender roles. Identifying as butch required
a more overt deviation from traditional gender norms and grew out of an
internalized sense of difference. Presenting as butch was, for some, a
natural expression of female masculinity. For those who felt misgendered as
women, living as butches was the closest option to living as men. In this
case the butch role functioned more as a gender identity than as a sexual
one. In addition to any gendered meanings, distinguishing oneself as butch
was a means of declaring sexual interest in (femme) women. Making this
desire public was an act of reMecting gender norms and claiming privileges
typically reserved for men. Butches made visible the fact that women could
be active sexual agents. Femmes typically were not visible on their own
even as they understood this role functioned as an identity that shaped the
ways they went about their daily lives. While femmes seemingly did not
transgress traditional gender norms, they reMected what was arguably the
most important tenet of womanhood: being sexually available for men.
Some femmes understood this identity as a form of lesbianism, whereas
others felt that partnering with butches left their (hetero)sexuality
unchanged. Her presentation meant that she could pass when on her own,
but with her butch she demonstrated that women were capable of living free
from the support or control of men. So while the relationship appeared a
facsimile of heterosexuals, by marking themselves as butch and femme,
queer women claimed sexual agency, flouting gender norms and reMecting a
social structure that defined women as obMects for male desire (Kennedy
and Davis 1993).

Not all women who loved women embraced these roles with equal
enthusiasm; some reMected it outright. Wealthy and middle-class women
were not inclined to frequent bars. They were reticent to enter the
neighborhoods where these bars were located, and they feared the exposure
possible when entering an establishment associated with deviant sexuality.
Upper-class women had resources that allowed them to build social
networks elsewhere, and professional women relied on private gatherings
rather than risk being found out and losing their Mobs or risking familial
ostracism. African American lesbians were also reticent to take part in this
bar culture. The racism they found there made them feel uncomfortable,
even unsafe, and ensured they were not likely to find other black lesbians
there with whom to socialize. Black lesbians created their own semipublic
social communities through house parties. While removed from the bar
scene, they too developed gendered dynamics with masculine “studs” and
their femme ladies. This dynamic is an important indication that
butch/femme roles had utility for lesbians outside of bar culture. Even
among those who were willing to frequent bars, not all found the
butch/femme roles natural or appealing. Those anxious to belong to lesbian
community adopted whichever of the two felt most fitting or the least
obMectionable. They otherwise risked being labeled a “kiki,” the derogatory
term for those women who identified as neither role and thus did not fit into
the structure of the butch/femme world. In spite of these concerns and
limitations, butch/femme culture was a vitally important political
phenomenon. By making lesbianism visible, this culture helped queer
women understand their desires and find safe spaces in which to explore
their feelings, develop friendships, and find lovers. Femmes and butches
functioned as the primary figures of lesbianism through the 1960s. They did
not disappear after this date; instead, new options slowly opened to queer
women.
Homophile Movement
Lesbians in search of alternatives to bars or the butch/femme system created
a new vehicle for political activity. A small number of gay men and lesbians
mobilized in the 1950s to advocate for social acceptance of homosexuals.
Known as the homophile movement, this group of people evolved toward
greater political advocacy in the 1960s. Lesbians created a women-only
group, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), in 1955. Founders initially hoped to
create a social alternative to the bar scene, but the group quickly evolved
into a political organization with extensive programming and its own
publication, the Ladder. The DOB advocated assimilation as a means of
achieving acceptance within mainstream society. This meant
accommodating traditional gender norms. Their argument that lesbians
were no different from straight women other than in whom they loved
silenced those women for whom lesbianism was an expression not only of
sexual desire but also of gender nonconformity. Leaders called on
participants to wear traditionally feminine clothing at events, and the
Ladder published indictments of butch lesbians. Some held a genuine belief
that roles were unnatural and that all lesbians (all women) should embrace
their femininity. These women interpreted butch/femme presentation as a
phase through which lesbians tried to make sense of their sexuality. More
commonly, however, homophile women reMected femmes and butches
because they understood their visibility as a barrier to the political
expediency of assimilation. The DOB succeeded in offering an alternative
to butch/femme culture, but in so doing it established similarly rigid
boundaries to inclusion.

Yet this position is only one part of a more complex story. While reMecting
butch/femme identities as problematic role-playing that prohibited lesbian
acceptance, members commonly expressed leanings toward masculinity or
femininity. The DOB's presidential message in the second issue of the
Ladder emphasized that members were “women first” but went on to state
that they were “butch or fem secondly” (Griffin 1956, 3). Founders Del
Martin and Phyllis Lyon explained that early in their relationship they had a
“butch-femme relationship” and later viewed their early selves as
“caricatures in a heterosexual marriage” (1991, 72). They came to reMect
their various preferences as markers of masculine or feminine identities.
Homophile activists were predominantly middle-class women, often
professionals who relied on feminine respectability for Mob security. Yet the
DOB's own research indicates that a butch/femme spectrum was also
important to self-understanding among middle-class women as well. In
1958 the DOB circulated a survey via the Ladder. It sent out over 500
questionnaires that included questions about “sex roles,” asking how
lesbians identified in their relationships. Of the 157 responses it received,
37.6 percent identified as masculine, 36.3 percent as neither, and 21.2
percent as feminine, with 5.1 percent declining to answer (Lyon 1959).
Respondents, the maMority of whom earned an above-average income,
worked to qualify their answers by commenting that their identification was
fluid depending on their partner or that they held both masculine and
feminine traits. These responses and comments indicate that homophile
obMection to butch/femme culture may have been more an issue of obMecting
to association with working-class lesbian culture than it was a reMection of
gendered experiences of their sexuality. While the DOB worked to present
themselves as “normal” women and change public perceptions of lesbians,
it was the feminist interpretations of queer womanhood that finally
supplanted femmes and butches on social perceptions.

Lesbian Feminism
In the 1970s the militant lesbian feminist became the new lesbian
stereotype. Femmes and butches did not disappear; instead, the social and
political shifts of the day diversified the types of lesbianism open to
women, and media coverage of the new social movements propelled a new
lesbian figure into the spotlight. In the latter part of the 1960s young lesbian
activists found that the women's liberation movement was resistant to
addressing the political aspects of queer sexuality and that gay men failed to
take seriously the gendered nature of lesbian oppression. Queer women
responded with the creation of an independent lesbian feminist movement
primarily aligned with the goals of the women's movement but organized
around ideas of lesbian separatism. Early theorizing introduced the concept
of the “woman-identified woman” or the “woman-loving woman,” which
asserted that lesbians were those women who directed all their energy
toward one another, rather than toward men. They reMected existing
definitions of women's roles and sexualities as concepts that had been used
to keep women oppressed. In this framework, any behaviors that seemed to
replicate traditional heterosexual relationships, such as the butch/femme
dyad, propped up the patriarchy. Lesbian feminists commonly adopted
androgynous dress meant to reMect a gender binary and contrasted this to the
“role-playing” of bar lesbians.

Though using a different line of reasoning, lesbian feminists Moined the

DOB in arguing that femmes and butches harmed rather than aided social
and political progress for queer women. And as with homophile activists,
the members of this new movement set about creating social and political
alternatives to what they saw to be the restrictive limitations of the bar
culture. This included liberation groups, women's centers, bookstores, and
music festivals, among much else. These were spaces designed for the
celebration of womanhood and thus had no room for those who identified
with or were attracted to any practices associated with the trappings of
masculinity. Through much of the 1970s, new lesbians continued to find the
bar scene the most visible entry into community, although increasingly
women's spaces offered an alternative. This speaks both to the desire for
greater variety in models of lesbianism and to the longevity of butch/femme
culture (the bar). Lesbian feminists' reMection of butch/femme culture
functioned as a stated reMection of bar culture, even as they continued to
turn to lesbian bars as a site of lesbian socializing. This brought lesbian
feminists and butch/femme lesbians into contact and conflict. That lesbian
feminists had this option demonstrates that their emergence did not replace
butch/femme culture. While much of it was maintained by older women
who found their lesbianism prior to the new political moment, young,
primarily working-class women continued to Moin their ranks, although
possibly at lower numbers given that the women's and gay movements
represented new alternatives for young queers.

Beginning in the 1980s, the adoption of butch/femme culture by activists

and scholars further expanded its possibilities. Butches and femmes gained
visibility within lesbian feminism in the early 1980s through the feminist
debates over sex and power known as the sex wars. While fought primarily
around the issues of pornography and sex work, the larger issue of the place
of power in sex drew all manner of practices into the conversation. By
engaging this issue, those lesbians who were butch/femme-identified and
those who found pleasure in consensual power play newly articulated the
political implications of this culture and expanded the settings in which it
was visible. Queer theory emerged by the onset of the 1990s, further
recasting interpretations and practices of femme and butch. Theorists
challenged the idea of fixed identities, reframing gender and sexuality as
something people do rather than something people are. In this context
butches and femmes were celebrated as a form of performance that exposed
and subverted gender as a social construct. These ideas brought a greater
range of participants into the butch/femme world. Contemporary emphasis
on the fluidity of gender and sexuality means that a host of new concepts
have Moined “butch” and “femme” to aid individuals in more accurately
voicing their identities. With all that is available, however, femme and
butch remain centrally important ideas in understanding lesbian community.

SEE ALSO Boston Marriage and Women's Romantic Friendships;

Daughters of Bilitis; Female Husband; Lesbian Feminist Encuentros of
Latin America and the Caribbean; Lesbian Lands, Women's Lands, and
Separatist Communes

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990.

Coyote, Ivan E., and Zena Sharman, eds. Persistence: All Ways Butch and
Femme. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011.

Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian

Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press,
1991.

Griffin, D. “The President's Message.” Ladder 1, no. 2 (November 1956):

2–3.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1998.

Hollibaugh, Amber, and Cherrie Moraga. “What We're Rollin Around in

Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism.” In Powers of Desire: The Politics
of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon
Thompson, 394–405. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the
U.S.A. Rev. ed. New York: Meridian, 1992.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of

Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New
York: Routledge, 1993.

Lyon, Phyllis. “DOB Questionnaire Reveals Some Facts about Lesbians.”

Ladder 3, no. 12 (September 1959): 4–26.

Martin, Del, and Phyllis Lyon. Lesbian/Woman. Rev. ed. Volcano,

CA: Volcano Press, 1991.
Moore, Mignon R. “Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender
Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities.” Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society 32, no. 1 (2006): 113–139.

Nestle, Joan, ed. The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Boston:

Alyson Publications, 1992.

Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the
New Woman.” In Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays,
Public Ideas, 176–188. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Rubin, Gayle S. “Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender,

and Boundaries.” In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, 241–253. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Rupp, Leila J. A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in

America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Stein, Marc. Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement. New York:
Routledge, 2012.

Thorpe, Rochella. “‘A House Where Queers Go’: African-American

Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940–1975.” In Inventing Lesbian Cultures in
America, edited by Ellen Lewin, 40–61. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
Film Festivals
RAGAN RHYNE
Independent scholar
Brooklyn, NY

A historical and contemporary look at festivals devoted to

LGBTQ-themed films.

When the first gay and lesbian film festival was founded in San Francisco
in 1977, few could predict that it would become the model for hundreds of
festivals around the world (White 1999). Over the next four decades,
LGBTQ+ film festivals grew from small, grassroots events to multimillion-
dollar nonprofit organizations with ties to the commercial film and
television industry. From London to Istanbul, Houston to Uganda, the
international network of LGBTQ+ film festivals today makes up the single-
largest institutionalization of queer cultural production.

Critical writing about the development of the LGBTQ+ festival network has
primarily focused on issues of visibility and access to production,
distribution, and exhibition. Debates about multiculturalism, corporate
influence, funding structures, and cultural policy have occurred alongside
discussions about programming strategies, globalization, community
building, and political protest. This entry touches on many of these debates
while sketching a brief history of the growth of the LGBTQ+ film festival
network from its founding to the present day.

A Brief History of Film Festivals

LGBTQ+ film festivals must be understood in the context of film festivals
more broadly, which began as a national showcase for film and propaganda
in Fascist Italy before World War II (1939–1945). After the war, film
festivals proliferated among resort towns in an effort to extend tourist
seasons into the autumn months. They spread across Europe over the next
thirty years as tourist attractions until the 1960s, when they began to spring
up in global cities such as London, New York, and Berlin. Other cities, such
as Moscow, established annual festivals in an effort to reconnect with the
West after a period of isolation. (The Moscow festival got its start as early
as 1935 but did not become a regular event until 1959.) Most often, these
festivals programmed a combination of international art cinema and maMor
studio releases, both of which took on increasingly politicized connotations
in the wake of decolonization and at the beginning of a new wave of
economic globalization (Stringer 2001).

The rise of the urban film festival accompanied the birth of community-
based film festivals during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the
growth of museum film archives, all vying for screening venues. This trend
corresponded not only to the mobilization of new social movements—the
women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay and lesbian
liberation movement, and others—but also to the development of portable
video as an accessible and affordable medium. Film festivals offered a
forum in which to share work among newly formed communities. The early
1970s also saw the rise of erotic film festivals in New York and San
Francisco, which connected the message of sexual liberation with artistic
innovation and European sensibility.

By the 1990s the schedule of the international festival circuit had become a
fixture in the lives of most film industry executives. The New York Film
Festival, Toronto, Cannes, Telluride, Sundance, Tribeca, and Berlin are
today the places to launch Hollywood's fall and winter lineup.

LGBTQ+ film festivals grew out of the gay liberation movement of the
1970s and other social Mustice movements. From the beginning, these
community media practices were deeply invested in the discourse of
democratic participation but at the same time were decidedly anticapitalist
and in defiance of state-sanctioned homophobia. LGBTQ+ film festivals
came out of a movement to deploy media in the building of social
movements but would develop into a loosely structured global network of
radically diverse organizations.

Origins
Most histories of LGBTQ+ film festivals trace their roots to a modest film
series in London. In 1977 the English scholar Richard Dyer curated a
survey of gay and lesbian film that screened at the National Film Theatre. It
would be nearly a decade before a yearly festival would launch in London,
but in San Francisco an ad-hoc screening that launched that same year
would immediately become an annual event. Outfest was launched in Los
Angeles Must a few years later, in 1982. In 1984 the LMublMana Gay and
Lesbian Film Festival, the first in Europe, was founded in the midst of a
small but growing gay and lesbian movement in Yugoslavia (KaMinic 2008).
In 1986 London and Turin launched festivals, and Amsterdam hosted the
International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. (The latter would not become
a yearly festival until 1996, as the Roze Filmdagen Amsterdam.)

In the beginning, festivals were informal events and primarily relied on

earned-income activities such as ticket sales to cover their small operating
budgets. But over the next decade, organized festivals would crop up in
Manitoba, Copenhagen, New York City, Atlanta, Vancouver, Hong Kong,
and Honolulu. These festivals were increasingly financed through arts
subsidies and grants (for example, the British Film Institute sponsorship of
the London festival), funds donated by foreign cultural ministries (most
often linked to the screening of a particular film), and sponsorship by
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and philanthropic foundations.
George Soros's Open Society Institute, for example, granted funds to the
LMublMana event as part of a program to grant funds to arts organizations
working in eastern Europe and Central Asia (Rhyne 2007).
Culture Wars
Festivals in the United States would not begin to access government
funding until the late 1980s. As festivals grew in size and scope, their
earned-income strategies could no longer support the organizations,
especially as community resources were diverted to respond to the growing
AIDS crisis. Simultaneously, government arts grants began to open up to
gay and lesbian organizations; in a shift from its underground origins,
festivals began to invest time and resources in accessing federal funding.

The festival network in the United States began to grow with the help of
these federal and state arts grants, but in the late 1980s these granting
agencies, such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National
Endowment for the Humanities, came under attack by the Far Right for
supporting gay and lesbian artists and cultural organizations. Gay and
lesbian film festivals were systematically cut off from federal funding.
These “culture wars” were famously part of a larger national debate in the
United States regarding the role of the federal government in facilitating
artistic production. Festivals began to restructure their fund-raising
strategies in order to find alternative funding sources. Many turned to the
commercial sector and private funding.

Founded in 1988, the New Festival is a prime example of this shift. The
New Festival arose from the ashes of the New York Gay and Lesbian Film
Festival, which had collapsed as a result of funding concerns the previous
year as ticket sales could no longer support the event. Susan Horowitz, the
founder of a lesbian-owned printing company, provided financing to
restructure the festival as a mission-driven business. According to Joshua
Gamson, conveying Horowitz's vision, “The original impetus of the festival
… was to Moin grassroots community politics and film art: to bring lesbians
and gays together in another public space, to increase lesbian and gay
visibility, to demonstrate the pluralism of that community, and to raise
lesbian and gay consciousness” (1996, 242). Whereas Frameline (the San
Francisco festival launched in 1977) began as a sort of artists' collective and
venue for experimental works, the New Festival—founded a decade later—
was built on the politics of identity and visibility that had by then grown to
characterize gay and lesbian organizational strategy in the United States
(White 1999).

Soviet Stonewall
As the 1990s began, the festival network became more deeply connected to
international networks of NGOs, particularly those investing in human
rights and post–Cold War democracy building. In the wake of state
censorship, festivals began to see themselves as part of a global movement
to connect LGBTQ+ people across national borders through a sort of
grassroots cultural diplomacy. In 1991, for example, Frameline received
funding to produce the first gay and lesbian film festival in the Soviet
Union. Dubbed “the Soviet Stonewall” (named for the 1969 Stonewall riots
in New York City that catalyzed a movement of gay rights activism), the
festival was held in conMunction with a gay and lesbian rights conference
organized by the San Francisco–based International Gay and Lesbian
Human Rights Commission.

FRAMELINE: THE WORLD'S FIRST LGBTQ FILM

FESTIVAL

On a February night in 1977, 200 people crowded into a San Francisco

loft for what would become the first and longest-running LGBTQ film
festival in the world. That night, nine gay filmmakers proMected their
Super-8 films onto a sheet hung from the wall. Cofounder Marc
Huestis described the founding members of Frameline as “a ragtag
band of hippie fags” and artists who frequented Harvey Milk's Castro
Street camera store (quoted in Guthmann 1994). The festival was
conceived as an artists' collective for independent and experimental
gay filmmakers whose work had no other distribution outlet. To the
surprise of its founders, the first screening of their films was such a
success that it reran a month later at a larger venue.

In 1981 Frameline, the producing organization for the festival, founded

a distribution arm through which video rentals raised the most
significant portion of its revenue, a response to the limited availability
of gay and lesbian film in the United States—particularly of gay and
lesbian foreign film. Frameline distribution became a critical resource
for new festivals that were emerging in cities such as Boston, Seattle,
Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Frameline incorporated as a nonprofit in 1982 and received its first

federal arts grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in
1988. By 1990 Frameline's primary income sources—generating
nearly 70 percent of its revenue—were film and video rental, ticket
sales, and special events. The remainder was raised from government
grants, private foundations, and individual contributions. But with the
introduction of the Helms Amendment in 1991, Frameline came under
attack by conservative groups as being in violation of federal decency
regulations for its gay and lesbian themes and sexual content.
Frameline's NEA funding was soon withdrawn. These famous “culture
wars” meant the loss of dollars, but it energized the festival's base.
Attendance doubled at the 1992 festival compared to the previous year
and would continue to grow over the next decade.

In 1990 Frameline deepened its connection to the filmmaking

community, launching the Frameline Completion Fund, which
continues to award grants for the final stages of editing work.
Prominent LGBTQ filmmakers have received support through the
fund, including Barbara Hammer, Cheryl Dunye, and Rose Troche.

By 2005 Frameline had developed a sufficiently robust network of

supporters that it launched a campaign to raise funds to expand its
programming efforts and improve distribution access to global media
 markets. Its growth ambitions were stalled, however, with the 2008
financial crisis, which hit midsized nonprofits such as Frameline
particularly hard in the United States.

Nonetheless, the festival produced by Frameline remains the largest of

its kind in the world. In 2017 it screened 147 films from nineteen
countries to more than 60,000 people, with total organizational
revenue of around $2 million, dramatic growth forty years in the
making.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guthmann, Edward. “A Heyday for Lesbian and Gay Films.” San

Francisco Chronicle, 9 June 1994.

Rhyne, Ragan. “Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the
Economy of Visibility.” PhD diss., New York University, 2007.
Ragan Rhyne Independent scholar Brooklyn, NY

Ragan Rhyne
Independent scholar
Brooklyn, NY

The films programmed at the 1991 Moscow festival included both

mainstream American releases such as Desert Hearts (1985; directed by
Donna Deitch) and independent documentaries such as The Times of
Harvey Milk (1984; directed by Rob Epstein) and Tongues Untied (1989;
directed by Marlon Riggs). It also included the British feature My Beautiful
Laundrette (1985; directed by Stephen Frears), produced by Channel 4, and
the East German film Coming Out (1989; directed by Heiner Carow).
Following the Soviet Union's political and cultural isolation from western
Europe and North America, the programming of the Moscow festival
presented a postwar, Euro-American gay history with resonance beyond
national boundaries.

New Queer Cinema

Also in 1991, gay and lesbian films took center stage at mainstream film
festivals, including Sundance, Toronto, and Berlin (Rich 1992). This
commercial interest was as significant as the films themselves, including
Todd Haynes's Poison (1991), Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990),
Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (1991), and Derek Jarman's Edward II
(1991). Soon after, LGBTQ+ film festivals cropped up in the new global
marketplaces of East Asia, eastern Europe, postapartheid South Africa, and
South America. Festivals in the United States began to define themselves as
the center of an international marketplace for gay and lesbian film,
particularly as commercial distributors expanded their markets overseas.

By 1994 LGBTQ+ festivals had begun to be framed in dramatically new

terms—not only as significant organizations within the growing network of
the gay and lesbian community but also as part of a quasi-commercial
complement to the film industry, where Hollywood and independent
distributors were finding product, talent, and new markets. Frameline, for
example, responded to this new industrial interest with an assertive plan to
host the “world's first lesbian and gay film market.” Frameline's
marketplace was most certainly developed with the explicit intent to
elaborate on the festival's already robust distribution program, which had
generated the bulk of the organization's revenue until the early 1990s, but
following the death of the festival's art director, the organization suspended
the effort.

Festivals located a new source of funding in the form of corporate sponsors

and commercial film distributors interested in marketing to the newly
defined gay and lesbian consumer demographic. But almost immediately,
festivalgoers, scholars, filmmakers, and activists began to identify this
moment as one characterized by the intrusion of corporate interest into
community institutions. Corporate sponsors were highly visible through
festival marketing and promotions, but in reality they provided only a small
portion of the festivals' growing budgets. Festival growth was instead
subsidized by a newly cultivated sense of philanthropic responsibility
among individual donors that accompanied the articulation of a gay and
lesbian consumer identity during the early 1990s.

In North America the growing skepticism regarding the ability of

community-based festivals to remain independent from the market and the
state particularly coalesced around questions of multiculturalism.
Filmmakers, especially, questioned the terms on which women and people
of color would have access to the new economic opportunities presented by
the festivals, particularly as higher-budget, narrative features by white gay
men received increasing attention from the commercial film industry. These
debates colored much of the critical discussion around LGBTQ+ festivals
following the debut of New Queer Cinema and inspired a wave of festivals
devoted to underrepresented groups within the community.

BFI FLARE: LONDON'S FIRST LGBTQ FILM FESTIVAL

In the summer of 1977, the English scholar Richard Dyer screened

thirty-five gay films at the National Film Theatre, a cinema operated
by the British Film Institute (BFI) and located in the London cultural
district known as South Bank. Although this was a one-off event, it is
widely considered the world's first gay and lesbian film program and
the origin of gay and lesbian film festivals. Certainly, it launched the
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, one of the largest and longest-
running LGBTQ+ festivals in the world.

It would be another nine years, however, before the festival was

officially launched. In 1986, a former student of Dyer's, Mark Finch,
persuaded the BFI to fund a gay film series. Finch and Tyneside
Cinema's Peter Packer launched a selection of nine films in a program
called “Gay's Own Pictures” at the Tyneside in Newcastle before
bringing it to London. Films screened over the seven-day short season
included Parting Glances (1986; directed by Bill Sherwood), Desert
Hearts (1985; directed by Donna Deitch), and Buddies (1985; directed
by Arthur J. Bressan Jr.).

The festival debuted during the height of the AIDS crisis, which had
hit gay communities in urban centers such as London particularly hard.
It also coincided with a national movement to squelch public support
for gays and lesbians. Beginning in London, it traveled to maMor cities
across the United Kingdom in defiance of the Margaret Thatcher–era
Section 28, enacted in 1988, which prohibited local authorities from
“intentionally promoting homosexuality.” While members of
Parliament questioned the government's role in supporting these
screenings, the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (as it became
officially known in 1988) would nonetheless become an annual event
sponsored by the BFI (and thus through tax money). Section 28 would
remain on the books until 2003.

The festival grew from a seven-day event to a full two weeks of

programming, drawing audiences from all over the United Kingdom,
other European countries, and the world. In 2011, as the festival
prepared to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary (and with the
Conservative Party back in government), the BFI suffered broad
budget cuts, and the festival was cut down to half its previous length.
These austerity measures proved a boon for the festival, however, as
the scarcity of tickets brought audiences out in new force. By 2016,
five years later, the festival had expanded to an eleven-day program at
BFI Southbank (the renamed National Film Theatre, where Dyer
presented his original series), with larger audiences than ever before.
The festival's programming has expanded beyond the festival itself,
with monthly screenings, talks and lectures, a traveling program, and a
streaming service through BFI Player. The BFI generally streams free
shorts around the festival dates. The festival also established an
ongoing relationship with the UK distributor Peccadillo Pictures.
Peccadillo is one of the sponsors of the festival and regularly includes
titles in its program. The festival's relationship with Peccadillo
illustrates the role of the London festival—and that of LGBTQ+
festivals around the world—in the circulation of LGBTQ+ film.
Festivals are primary markets for independent filmmakers and
producers to find distribution in the commercial marketplace.

In 2014 the festival was officially rebranded as BFI Flare: London

LGBT Film Festival in an effort to reflect the diversity of the festival's
program and its audiences, which continue to grow. In addition to
support through the BFI, Flare has received corporate sponsorship over
the years—support that has strengthened with changing attitudes
toward LGBTQ+ people.

Corporations such as longtime sponsor Renault, American Airlines,

easyJet, Accenture, London's May Fair Hotel, and Sky, the London-
based media and telecommunications company, have sponsored
festivals. Indeed, attendance at the 2016 festival exceeded 25,000
people, up nearly 10 percent from the previous record-breaking year,
so it remains an effective tool for corporations to reach this niche
market. In 2018 the Pureland Foundation, founded by the producer and
philanthropist Bruno Wang, made a three-year grant to the festival,
becoming its most significant supporter. Like BFI Flare, LGBTQ+ film
festivals around the world have begun to depend more heavily on
private philanthropy, particularly in the wake of the 2008 global
recession.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Brown, Mark. “London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Becomes BFI
Flare.” Guardian (London), 19 February 2014.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/19/bfi-flare-london-
lesbian-gay-film-festival-rename

Straayer, Chris, and Thomas Waugh, eds. “Queer Film and Video
Festival Forum, Take One: Curators Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 579–603.

Ragan Rhyne
Independent scholar
Brooklyn, NY

Tranny Fest (now the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival) was
launched in 1997 to present the work of gender-variant filmmakers—the
first and longest-running festival of its kind. Since then, a dozen trans and
gender-variant festivals and film programs have been hosted around the
world, including in India, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada, as well as
the biggest trans film festival, Translations (held in Seattle and programmed
by the same organization that stages TWIST: Seattle Queer Film Festival).
These festivals continue to struggle for funding, particularly in markets with
more broadly framed LGBTQ+ festivals. The transgender festival in
Amsterdam, for instance, has gone through several iterations since its
launch in 2003, primarily because of funding concerns (Steinbock 2013).

Second Wave
More than 150 LGBTQ+ festivals could be counted at the end of the 1990s,
and critics were declaring the next Gay New Wave as an international
phenomenon. Festivals were programming content from the breadth of
production prompted by the New Queer Cinema movement and a
subsequent increase in financing for gay and lesbian film outside the United
States, particularly in western Europe but also in Australia, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Brazil, the former Soviet republics, Japan, and Israel, as well as to
a lesser extent Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Indeed, this second wave of queer cinema produced a number of

internationally recognized films, especially from gay filmmakers located
outside Europe and North America, but US-produced films still
overwhelmingly dominated the screens at most festivals. The proliferation
of LGBTQ+ film festivals did not necessarily correspond to new production
infrastructures during the 1990s, despite the growth in the network
precipitated by a growing market for LGBTQ+ film.

Corporate and Government Funding

By the first years of the twenty-first century, production of gay and lesbian
film in the United States had stalled, and the growth of festivals along with
it. Indeed, of the hundred or so festivals that were founded in the 1990s,
most did not last more than two or three seasons. Those that did survive
during this period found financial support primarily through government
subsidies and corporate investment, but access to these funds varied
dramatically by country.

The São Paulo–based Mix Brasil, launched in 1993, grew out of André
Fischer's 1992 program “Brazilian Sexualities” at the New York Lesbian
and Gay Experimental Film Festival. Mix Brasil, launched as a proMect of
the Cinema Department of the Museu da Imagem e do Som (Museum of
Image and Sound), received most of its funding from the public sector, a
large portion of which was from health departments. But the festival also
attracted commercial sponsors, including Banco do Brasil and the oil
company Petrobras, which was a large funder of the Brazilian film industry
and the country's festival network; government initiatives focused on gays
and lesbians encouraged corporate investment, but this was unevenly spread
across the network (Rhyne 2007).
The Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival was launched in 1989 and
ran intermittently until 1998, when the festival lost its funding during a
recession and government defunding of cultural programs with the
handover of Hong Kong to China the previous year. It was resurrected in
1999 as a commercial enterprise connected to Fortissimo Films, a film
promotion, distribution, and production company known for its relationship
to high-profile Asian directors. The festival leveraged these connections to
secure donations from local businesses and other pools of government and
NGO monies, notably those connected to HIV/AIDS prevention. The
festival incorporated as a nonprofit in 2000 (Rhyne 2011).

Other festivals found support in the growing sector of gay and lesbian
tourism and travel, which was reflected in the programming of festivals.
The Manchester gay and lesbian film festival, a program of the
queerupnorth arts festival (formerly It's Queer Up North), for example, was
supported by the now-defunct British Midland Airways. Manchester's
international exposure as the setting for the Channel 4 television series
Queer as Folk (1999–2000) certainly contributed to its growing popularity
among tourists, and sponsors hoped to capitalize on this new tourist
demographic. The positioning of the United Kingdom as an international
gay destination was marketed in the United States as well. The 2003 New
Festival (New York) was sponsored, in part, by VisitBritain, a UK tourist
board.

Home Distribution
By the turn of the millennium, the distribution companies that had seen
mainstream commercial opportunity in queer film had turned their attention
elsewhere, and they were overtaken by gay- and lesbian-owned production
and distribution companies developing content on a smaller scale (Straayer
and Waugh 2005). Cable, digital, premium, and pay-per-view television
became significant buyers for gay and lesbian media, surpassing theatrical
release as the primary exhibition venue for LGBTQ+ film. These outlets
also became key sponsors of festivals, investing in cause-related marketing
initiatives to publicize their gay and lesbian programming. HBO and
Showtime, in particular, “branded” festivals, using organizations such as the
New Festival and Outfest to premiere films and television dramas already
picked up for rotation.

In 2006, in conMunction with its thirtieth annual festival, Frameline

introduced its home video line, in partnership with Strand Releasing. The
festival framed the initiative in terms of its transition from the education
and festival markets that had sustained it over the previous two decades to
the direct-to-consumer market. Frameline's home video marketing
positioned the brand as a mediator of taste—a trusted guide for authentic
LGBTQ+ media for the consumer market. While the nonprofit structure of
the festival-as-event has previously been held up as the most effective
strategy for ensuring this kind of diversity of programming, Frameline
began to look directly toward the consumer market to fulfill its mission.

Financial Crisis
Following the 2008 global recession, LGBTQ+ festivals lost significant
revenue along with much of the nonprofit sector around the world. Many
small festivals closed entirely; others were forced to reorganize their
structures and fundraising strategies as they struggled to recover amid a
rapidly changing media landscape and changing political status in many
countries. In the United States, for example, New York's New Festival
merged with Los Angeles's Outfest; San Francisco's Frameline laid off
significant numbers of its staff as its budget shrank by nearly 30 percent
over the next several years. South Africa's Out in Africa festival closed in
2015 after twenty-one years of programming because of fund-raising
challenges.

But festivals are exploring new revenue sources, new distribution strategies,
new networks, and new technologies. The strategy launched as early as
2002 with Here TV, a pay-per-view service. Viacom launched Logo, a
cable channel, in 2005. Both drew on the content and format of LGBTQ+
film festivals. Since then, the ubiquity of streaming video services, in
particular, is changing the landscape, programming strategies, and
institutional priorities of LGBTQ+ film festivals. In 2018, for example,
Amazon announced that it would offer more than sixty films featured in
Outfest festivals, a strategy Amazon has employed with other festivals,
including Frameline, Sundance, Tribeca, and Toronto. BFI Flare, the
London LGBTQ+ film festival run by the British Film Institute (BFI),
offers its
titles on its own streaming service, BFI Player. The wide availability of
LGBTQ+ independent film through streaming services such as YouTube,
Vimeo, and Viddsee (in Southeast Asia) may in fact be creating new
markets for theatrical screenings; the POUTFest in the United Kingdom, for
example, is a traveling festival launched by the distributor Peccadillo
Pictures and funded through the BFI to develop new audiences for
LGBTQ+ film. Indeed, developing new audiences through educational
outreach has also become an important part of the mission of several
festivals and distributors. Frameline's Youth in Motion program, for
example, provides free LGBTQ+ films and curricula to youth and educators
in schools around the United States. Vancouver's Out on Screen launched an
education program in 2004 that serves 60,000 students in British Columbia.

In conclusion, LGBTQ+ film festivals are particularly productive sites for

inquiry because they have been one of the primary spaces for the public
exhibition of queer images since the late 1970s and further because their
relationship to the global circulation of film makes them uniquely situated
at the intersection of the market, the state, and civil society. Moreover, as
exhibitors (and, in some cases, distributors) of media, LGBTQ+ film
festivals have been particularly enmeshed with debates about visibility
politics, multiculturalism, and globalization in the international queer
community (Loist 2016).
LGBTQ+ film festivals also reveal a great deal about how queer people
understand their own relationship to the state and the economy in various
national contexts. The history of development, expansion, collapse, and
stabilization of festivals demonstrates how crucial material concerns are to
the formation of LGBTQ+ collectivities and how organizational
sustainability informs the scope of possibility for effective political strategy.
LGBTQ+ film festivals offer an ideal case study through which to examine
how structures of governance—nonprofit administration, state censorship,
cultural policy, and commercial marketing strategies, to name a few—have
influenced the size, shape, and scope of what is now a global institution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bao, Hongwei. “Queer as Catachresis: The BeiMing Queer Film Festival in
Cultural Translation.” In Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation,
edited by Chris Berry and Luke Robinson, 79–100. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017.

Gamson, Joshua. “The Organizational Shaping of Collective Identity: The

Case of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals in New York.” Sociological Forum
11, no. 2 (1996): 231–261.

KaMinic, SanMa. “The Queer Zagreb Festival and Its Intersectional

Manifestos.” In New SubMectivities: Negotiating Citizenship in the Context
of Migration and Diversity, edited by Dorota Golañska and Aleksandra M.
Różalska, 187–202. Łódz, Poland: Łódz University Press, 2008.

Loist, Skadi. “Crossover Dreams: Global Circulation of Queer Film on the

Film Festival Circuits.” Diogenes. Published electronically 7 November
2016. doi:10.1177/0392192115667014.

Peach, Ricardo. “Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and

Australia.” PhD diss., University of Technology Sydney, 2005.
Rhyne, Ragan. “Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the
Economy of Visibility.” PhD diss., New York University, 2007.

Rhyne, Ragan. “Comrades and Citizens: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in
China.” In Film Festival Yearbook 3: Film Festivals and East Asia, edited
by Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung, 110–124. St. Andrews, UK: St
Andrews Film Studies, 2011.

Rich, B. Ruby. “A Queer Sensation.” Village Voice, 24 March 1992, 41–

44. Richards, Stuart James. The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Schoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. Queer Cinema in the World. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Steinbock, Eliza. “Trans* Film Festivals: An Interview with Eliza

Steinbock.” By Skadi Loist and MariMke de Valck. NECSUS:
European Journal of Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 579–588.

Straayer, Chris, and Thomas Waugh, eds. “Queer Film and Video
Festival Forum, Take One: Curators Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 579–603.

Straayer, Chris, and Thomas Waugh, eds. “Queer Film and Video Festival
Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599–625.

Straayer, Chris, and Thomas Waugh, eds. “Queer Film and Video
Festival Forum, Take Three: Artists Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 1 (2008): 121–137.

Stringer, Julian. “Global Cities and the International Film Festival

Economy.” In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global
Context, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 134–144. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001.

White, Patricia, ed. “Queer Publicity: A Dossier on Lesbian and Gay Film
Festivals.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 1 (1999): 73–
93.

FILMOGRAPHY

Carow, Heiner, dir. Coming Out. Deutsche Film, 1989. Film.

Deitch, Donna, dir. Desert Hearts. Desert Heart Productions and Samuel
Goldwyn Company, 1985. Film.

Epstein, Rob, dir. The Times of Harvey Milk. Black Sand Productions and
Pacific Arts, 1984. Documentary.

Frears, Stephen, dir. My Beautiful Laundrette. Working Title Films and

SAF Productions, 1985. Film.

Haynes, Todd, dir. Poison. Bronze Eye Productions and Killer Films, 1991.
Film.

Jarman, Derek, dir. Edward II. Working Title Films, 1991. Film.

Julien, Isaac, dir. Young Soul Rebels. British Film Institute, 1991. Film.

Livingston, Jennie, dir. Paris Is Burning. Off White Productions, 1990.

Documentary.

Riggs, Marlon, dir. Tongues Untied. Signifyin' Works, 1989. Documentary.

Fin de Siècle Sexuality
JOSEPH M. PIERCE
Assistant Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY

A positivist approach to the study of sexuality in Latin America

in the fin de siècle period (c. 1880–1920) in which practices
determined to be deviant were subMect to reform in the name of
national progress.

In Latin America, the decades between 1880 and 1920 represent a period of
dramatic demographic, cultural, and political change. It was during this
time that technological advances along with increased investment in
infrastructure and communication led many nations to enMoy unprecedented
economic growth. But this growth was often uneven, benefiting the
traditional landed elite and entrenching divisions between the rich and the
poor. Issues such as the (over)exploitation of natural resources, poor
working conditions, and rapid urbanization affected vast swaths of the
population. At the same time, the growing middle class sought greater
political representation in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Brazil,
while indigenous movements in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico sought to gain a
voice in national affairs. Socialist organizations were formed to advocate
for better working conditions for disenfranchised populations, while
anarchist groups sought to completely restructure social and economic
relations. The Spanish-American War (1898) marked a paradigm shift in
regional power dynamics, with the United States exerting ever-greater
influence. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) sought a redistribution of
land for peasants and indigenous communities. In this context, the notion of
“progress” for Latin American nations became central to cultural, political,
and economic policies. This ideology of progress was buoyed by a shift
toward positivist science and increased interest in managing diverse and
growing populations.

The study of sexuality in the fin de siècle period should be understood in

relation to the aspiration, held by most Latin American nations, to control
population growth. Leading politicians argued that for nations to modernize
they had to know the precise makeup of their populations in addition to
their sexual habits. Across Latin America, but particularly in countries with
large immigrant communities such as Brazil, Argentina, and Chile,
demographic control was aimed at “whitening” the national population.
Intellectual leaders often conflated the behaviors that were attributed to
white European immigrants, such as industry, work ethic, and morality, with
whiteness itself. Latin American nations sponsored new methods of
scientific inquiry, such as demography, social psychology, criminology, and
public hygiene (known as hygienics), not only to promote a whiter and thus
more “modern” populace but also to discover and potentially cure what was
called at the time “sexual perversion.” Any form of sexuality (such as
homosexuality) or gender variance (such as transvestism) that was thought
to detract from the overarching goal of promoting the national cause was
seen as pathological and dangerous, and nations sought to reform these
“deviant” practices in the name of progress. While the influence and
application of scientific approaches (known as positivism) to sexual
difference was ubiquitous across cultural and political lines, not all spheres
of society engaged with this difference in the same way. The following
sections describe maMor conceptual debates in fin de siècle Latin America
around the role that sexuality should play in science, politics, literature, art,
and culture.

Positivism and Sexuality

At its core, positivism can be understood as a set of beliefs meant to
promote a country's social, political, and economic advancement by
privileging the scientific method. As a philosophy, positivism discounts as
unknowable anything that an individual is unable to observe in the natural
world. Scientific principles were applied to politics and economics, as well
as to social relations and art, all of which had profound implications for the
politics of gender and sexuality. In Latin America, intellectuals such as
Justo Sierra (Mexico), José María Samper (Colombia), and José Ingenieros
(Argentina) adapted ideas from the prominent European philosophers
Auguste Comte, Gustave Le Bon, and Herbert Spencer to develop models
of education and public policy that privileged scientific observation over
metaphysics or religious doctrine. In particular, the concept of social
evolution came to bear on how these intellectuals sought to promote the
development of Latin American nations.

Variations existed across Latin America, but as a whole, these new theories
of scientific inquiry allowed the intellectual elite to Mustify attempts to retain
control of land, politics, and economics, as well as to promote a
heterosexual citizenry. Positivism became a way to determine which types
of sexual practices would promote progress and which would lead to
“degeneracy.” The fear of social and ethnic regression—degeneracy—was
inspired by the work of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and
focused on populations that did not fit the normative model of social and
sexual identity. In this way, homosexuality, cross-dressing, and gender
variance all became crucial obMects of study for social pathologists and
criminologists. Detailed case studies, reform programs, and invasive
therapeutic techniques became commonplace across Latin America during
this period. Given the interest of national leaders in managing local
populations, positivist science came to represent the central tool in
identifying those who might diverge from the heterosexual norm.

Case Study: Argentina

In Argentina at the turn of the century the central concern of government
officials was how to incorporate into a cohesive national culture the
massive influx of largely European immigrants that arrived during this
period. Rapid economic expansion, based particularly on bovine and grain
exports, had turned Argentina into one of the wealthiest countries in the
region. Leading politicians such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan
Bautista Alberdi argued that immigrants were needed to populate land
expropriated from indigenous communities and to provide labor for
developing industrial economies. By 1914, 30 percent of the national
population was foreign born, most coming from Italy and Spain. The
capital, Buenos Aires, became a cosmopolitan city with a burgeoning
middle class. Despite this economic growth, however, social tensions
persisted between recent immigrants and those of generations past.

In both the social sciences and literature this tension was consistently
attributed to recent immigrants and their supposed unwillingness to adapt to
the Argentine culture. Sexual deviance was one of the principal
characteristics attributed to many of these immigrants, and criminologists,
social pathologists, writers, and politicians sought to construct a detailed
taxonomy of the various forms of sexuality that might prove detrimental to
the future of the country. Politicians feared the inversion of gender roles, as
well as the possibility that the existing class structure, which concentrated
power and wealth in the hands of a small group of traditional landholding
families, would be upended. Key social scientists of this period include the
physician José María Ramos MeMía (1849–1914), the forensic psychiatrist
Francisco de Veyga (1866–1948), the psychiatrist José Ingenieros (1877–
1925), and the sociologist Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875–1918), whose work
focused on explaining supposedly abnormal behavior—both sexual and
cultural—so that it might be purged from the national body. This
preoccupation with cultural assimilation and sexual deviance led to the
invention and scrutiny of figures such as the invertido (sexual invert),
uranista (homosexual), pederasta (pederast), tribadista (tribadist; what
today would be called a lesbian), and tercer sexo (third sex). It is important
to note that in Argentina in the first decade of the twentieth century neither
cross-dressing nor homosexual erotic practices were prohibited by civil or
criminal codes. However, physicians and psychiatrists would often appeal
to police in an effort to “prevent” public scandal or a crime yet to be
committed by sexual “deviants,” who would be arrested preemptively and
turned over to positivist scientists for examination. The resulting case
studies were published in prestigious Mournals such as Archivos de
psiquiatría, criminología y ciencias afines (Archives of psychiatry,
criminology, and like sciences) and Revista argentina de ciencias políticas
(Argentine Mournal of political science) and were often sponsored by the
Argentine government, giving criminologists of the period a significant role
in the process of shaping and reforming the national population.

In the case of men, these studies did not necessarily stigmatize homoerotic
practices per se, but rather the particular role in sexual activity that was
adopted by an individual. The distinction between “active” (insertive) and
“passive” (receptive) sexual activity in men was crucial. Thus, in Argentina
what most worried social scientists was the betrayal of the stereotypical role
of men as active partners in sexual relations. The adoption of the passive
role, called “sexual inversion,” particularly when accompanied by a shift in
gender presentation or cross-dressing, was especially vexing for the
Argentine elite. For example, de Veyga's 1903 study of Aurora, a
transvestite and “professional invert” (prostitute), describes the subMect as
having a long criminal history, and notes that in fact “it is frequent, or better
yet the rule, that a professional invert be a criminal in the same way as
‘Aurora’” (199; translated by Joseph M. Pierce). This sexual abnormality,
for de Veyga, was the product of mental weakness and economic need
rather than genetics. Aurora's “inversion” was attributed to an insalubrious
lifestyle, a lack of intellectual development, and a tendency toward
criminality.

In the case of women, physicians and criminologists used the term third sex
as a sexual category to refer to those who entered the labor force and
became economically independent from men. The early feminist movement
in the region had to negotiate long-standing political and social opposition
to women's freedom and rights, and only in the early years of the twentieth
century did questions of gender relations and women's rights come to the
fore. On the one hand, socialist politics found room in its platform to
advocate for labor reforms and the Muridical emancipation of women. On the
other, middle- and upper-class women invested in the feminist cause often
relied on conservative appeals to maternity and liberal notions of civic
equality under the law. The development of Argentina's education system—
in particular the escuelas normales (normal schools) that trained young
teachers (they are usually called teachers colleges in English)—led to more
opportunities for women. However, these educational centers were often
regarded as dangerous for their potential to incite women to homosexuality.
Enclosed spaces such as the convent and the normal school—spaces in
which women exercised a modicum of independence from men—became
suspicious in the eyes of social pathologists, whose interest in maintaining
traditional gender roles led them to criticize early feminism and to associate
outspoken women with anarchism and social decay.

In Argentina, the central question for social scientists was whether sexual
deviance was congenital (innate) or acquired (environmental). Most tended
to blame circumstance or economic need. (As noted above, some inverts
were described as “professional,” supporting themselves through
prostitution.) Physicians and psychiatrists thought that early detection and
strong (i.e., traditional) educational programs could prevent or reverse
acquired sexual deviance. This approach contrasted with that taken toward
congenital homosexuality, which, following European sexology, was seen
as incurable. In this way, criminologists and social pathologists worked in
tandem with national educators to identify what they deemed to be the
dangerous but preventable social phenomenon of acquired homosexuality.
Ramos MeMía, de Veyga, and Ingenieros championed the cause of reform in
both men and women, which they consistently attributed to the influence of
foreign ideas and people (immigrants). In his 1899 study Las multitudes
argentinas (The Argentine multitudes), for example, Ramos MeMía
described recent immigrants (guarangos [the uncouth]) as biologically
underdeveloped, adding that they “are like the inverts of sexual instinct who
reveal their dubious potential for the bilious manifestation of appetites”
([1899] 1977, 214; translated by Joseph M. Pierce). Thus, positivist
discourse in Argentina linked foreignness to the potential for both sexual
and cultural inversion, and social scientists sought to incarcerate and
reeducate those deemed to have acquired “deviant” behaviors.

Case Study: Mexico

The issue of homosexuality came to the fore in Mexico in November 1901
when forty-one men were surprised and arrested by the police at a private
home where they were holding a drag ball. Some were dressed as women,
wearing elegant gowns, wigs, and makeup, whereas others wore typically
masculine suits. They were tried quickly and sentenced to work with the
military on the Yucatan Peninsula in order to be “rehabilitated.” This
scandalous episode came to be known as El Baile de los 41 (The Dance of
the 41). Newspaper reports of the incident ranged from discreet to
sensationalist, and the famed artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913)
produced a series of etchings depicting the event and its aftermath.

INVERTIDO AND FEDERASTA

In Latin America during the fin de siècle period, two key figures
emerged as obMects of scientific study for criminologists and social
psychologists: the pederasta (pederast) and the invertido (invert).
Replacing earlier terms such as sodomita (sodomite) or uranista
(uranian), which were adapted from European sexology, pederasta and
invertido preceded the contemporary use of “homosexual” and were
deployed in similar though not identical ways. While scientists
distinguished between active (insertive) and passive (receptive)
pederasty, they did not always connect these sexual acts to a particular
gender identity. Invertido, in contrast, referred to what scientists saw as
a form of sexual and mental inversion that typically involved a cross-
dressed (male-to-female) subMect, often associated with prostitution.
Criminologists stigmatized both as morally corrupt, but the invertido
was seen as particularly dangerous because he feminized—that is,
inverted—his physical appearance, dress, and mode of speech, thus
transgressing his biological sex in the eyes of the scientific community.
The central question that scientists asked was whether these subMects
were products of the surrounding environment or the result of some
“corrupt” genetic trait.

For example, the Cuban physician and anthropologist Luis Montané

(1849–1936) published a study in El progreso médico in 1890
analyzing the mental and physical characteristics of twenty-one
pederastas who had been arrested by the Cuban police. He first made a
distinction between “aficionados”—that is, those who sought sexual
satisfaction with men and paid for that service—and “prostituidos”
(prostituted), which were those who made a living by selling their
bodies as pederastas. Montané describes the mental state of the
prostituidos as nervous and narcissistic and cites the French medical
doctor and forensic scientist Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (1818–1879)
to characterize their appearance as “strange, repugnant, and
suspicious” (62; translated by Joseph M. Pierce). The Cuban
differentiated between active and passive pederasty, concluding that
there is no definitive correlation between passive sexual activity and
an outwardly feminine gender presentation. However, following the
work of the European sexologists Armand Goubaux, François Carlier,
and M. Henri Marx, he did find that passive pederasts can be identified
by examining the dilation and shape of the anus, something he calls of
great value for the scientific community. For active pederasts, Montané
examined the volume and appearance of the penis, finding no clearly
identifiable marker in those subMects. Thus, the search for scientific
certainty regarding sexual deviance often involved invasive
examinations that yielded unsatisfying and ambiguous results.
Another example was published by the Argentine physician Francisco
de Veyga (1866–1948) in 1903 in Archivos de psiquiatría,
criminología y ciencias afines (Archives of psychiatry, criminology,
and like sciences). He describes a case of inversión sexual adquirida
(acquired sexual inversion) in which, according to de Veyga, a wealthy
Argentine man suffered a mental breakdown and because of this is
shunned by his friends and family. He spent his days in local brothels
where eventually, according to de Veyga, a marica (faggot), defined
by the physician as a paranóico invertido (paranoid invert), invited
him to a party (207). There he found the attention that he had been
lacking at home among the attending invertidos, and he eventually
decided that
he would like to become one. He abandoned his previous family and
began a new life with a man who fell in love with him as an invertido.
Even more alarming for de Veyga, however, this subMect did not shy
away from society but rather, as he notes, “flaunted his life, becoming
a notable figure in his/her special milieu” (de Veyga 1903, 207;
translated by Joseph M. Pierce). On the one hand, for de Veyga this
case study represents the possibility that sexual inversion may remain
dormant as a genetic disposition and become activated after a psychic
or social trauma. On the other, it recalls certain tropes that would
continue to be associated with homosexuality over the course of the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first, such as uncleanliness, a
desire for ostentation, gender nonconformity, and deceptiveness. For
the Latin American elite, this type of sexual practice represented a
pathological threat to reproductive sexuality, one that should be closely
monitored and, if possible, cured.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

de Veyga, Francisco. “La inversión sexual adquirida: Tipo de invertido

profesional. Tipo de invertido por sugestión. Tipo de invertido por
causa de decaimiento mental” [Acquired sexual inversion: The
professional invert type. The invert by suggestion type. The invert by
 mental decay type]. Archivos de psiquiatría, criminología y ciencias
afines 2 (1903): 193–208.

Montané, Luis. “La pederastia en Cuba” [Pederasty in Cuba]. In Mapa

calleMero: Crónicas sobre lo gay desde América Latina [Street map:
Chronicles about being gay from Latin America], edited by José
Quiroga, 52–69. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2010. First
published in 1890 in El progreso médico.

Joseph M. Pierce
Assistant Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY

The case of the 41 should be understood within the particular context of

Mexico's political regime at the turn of the century. Known as El Porfiriato,
the reign of Porfirio Díaz as president (from 1876 to 1911) was
characterized by strong-arm policies, election fraud, and the repression of
dissent, but also national investment in modernizing the country under the
auspices of scientific investigation. “Order and Progress” became the motto
of a regime that saw sexual deviance as not simply a hindrance to
modernization but rather the cancerous product of lax cultural attitudes
toward pleasure and intimacy. Again, cross-dressing was particularly
stigmatized, a practice that challenged social and cultural norms, as well as
conservative ideas of sexuality. In this context, the homosexual as
transvestite or effeminate man (maricón) again serves as a cultural marker
for the breakdown of order and the potential for social regression.

In contrast with the Argentine case, however, El Baile de los 41 as a

cultural phenomenon was not necessarily attributed to outside influences or
immigration but rather to what was seen as the moral decay of Mexican
society from within. In particular, Posada's art associates transvestism with
the emasculated fashion sense of upper-class (ostensibly heterosexual) men,
known as lagartiMos (literally, “lizards”; figuratively, “fops”). The scandal
disrupted not only social conventions based on heterosexual norms but also
divisions of class, age, and gender. Instead of the schematic rendering of
sexuality by Argentine social scientists, at least in Mexico's popular
newspapers, the event was seen through the lens of sexual libertinage.
Upper-class men of El Porfiriato were criticized as affected and overly
influenced by the artifice of modernity.

This contrast can also be seen by comparing the novel Los cuarenta y uno:
Novela crítico-social (1906; The forty-one: A socio-critical novel), signed
with the pseudonym Eduardo A. CastreMón, which leans on the
carnivalesque tradition in Mexico to explain cross-dressing, to Argentine
José González Castillo's (1885–1937) play Los invertidos (1914; The
inverts/faggots), which portrayed foreign influences such as socialism,
anarchism, and homosexual activism as a collective disease that was
corrupting Argentine youth. In Mexico, the fear of sexual excess was
eloquently described in CastreMón's novel, which locates the decline of
society in the figure of the homosexual: “And into that insatiable vortex of
brutal pleasures they have fallen, never to get up. The fallen young men, at
the height of stupidity and prostituted degradation, contribute to the
bastardization of the human race, committing grave harm against Nature”
(quoted and translated in Sifuentes-Jáuregui 2002, 46). Evidently, positivist
discourse was not limited to the sciences; it also found expression in
literature and art, as with Posada's drawings and CastreMón's Los cuarenta y
uno. In many cases, literary re-creations of scandalous events, disruptive
figures, or pressing social problems provided a more engaging platform for
public consumption. The following section turns to the literature of the turn
of the century in order to expand on its role in defining sexual identities and
practices in Latin America.

In Literature: Naturalismo and Modernismo

Two maMor literary currents dominated fin de siècle Latin America:
naturalismo (naturalism) and modernismo (modernism). Naturalismo relied
on the realistic depiction of social ills, a treatment that privileged scientific
terminology and a tendency to pathologize characters deemed to be racially,
culturally, or sexually abhorrent. Inspired by the French author Émile Zola,
naturalist writers such as Julián Martel, Eugenio Cambaceres, and Manuel
Podestá (all from Argentina), Aluísio de Azevedo and Joaquim Maria
Machado de Assis (both from Brazil), Clorinda Matto de Turner
(Argentina/Peru), Alcides Arguedas (Bolivia), and Federico Gamboa
(Mexico) took aim at Latin America's history of racial mixing and supposed
cultural backwardness vis-à-vis Europe and the United States. Their work
often took the form of a diagnostic appraisal of a nation's history and
contemporary social problems. In particular, emasculated male characters
came to represent the failure of a country to maintain order in this
contradictory period. Of note in this regard is a novel from Brazil, Adolfo
Ferreira Caminha's (1867–1897) Bom-Crioulo (1895; Bom-Crioulo: The
Black Man and the Cabin Boy [1982]). Bom-Crioulo describes a
homosexual relationship between an escaped black slave (slavery was
abolished in Brazil in 1888) working as a sailor in the Brazilian navy who
falls in love with a young cabin boy, Aleixo. The novel is remarkable for its
ambiguous treatment of this relationship, eschewing the moralizing view
taken by most naturalist writers. Same-sex desire is the primary engine of
this novel, which is structured as a classical tragedy, with Bom-Crioulo
killing Aleixo in a fit of Mealousy at the end. Typically, however, sexually
ambiguous or deviant characters in this period suffer tormented lives and
deaths, as in Cuban José Martí's 1885 novel Lucía Jerez (also known as
Amistad funesta [Fatal friendship]) and Chilean Augusto d'Halmar's 1924
novel La pasión y muerte del Cura Deusto (The passion and death of Father
Deusto). If in psychiatry the homosexual had to be “cured” through
education and therapy, in literature he or she almost always meets a violent
end.
Modernismo, in contrast, was a philosophical and aesthetic movement
based on strangeness (rareza), formal renovation, preciousness of style, and
escapist imagery. Modernismo was perhaps the most important literary
movement to come from Latin America, and modernistas such as José
Martí (1853–1895; Cuba), Rubén Darío (1867–1916; Nicaragua), and José
Enrique Rodó (1871–1917; Uruguay) revolutionized the way sensuality was
understood in the region. On the one hand, these writers were inspired by
French decadentistas (the decadent movement), who posited the body as a
site of pleasure and perversion, and on the other, such an open transgression
of decorum was met with skepticism in Latin America. For example,
Darío's Los raros (The strange/queer ones), published in 1896, is a series of
personality sketches, primarily of French symbolists, that at once celebrates
their aesthetic sensibilities and reproduces homophobic discourses around
sensuality and eroticism. Latin American modernismo looked to figures
such as Walt Whitman, Paul Verlaine, and Oscar Wilde in a complex
framework of admiration and reticence. While never identified specifically
as homosexual, the strangeness of these raros served to highlight Darío's
modernity. Still, their sexual ambiguity and the sensuality of their work was
grounds for censure by Latin American critics.

The most prominent example of this contradictory position is Rodó's 1900

essay Ariel, which attempts to provide a corrective to what the author
believed to be the overly sensual poetics of modernismo at the turn of the
century. Rodó proposes a spiritual and anti-utilitarian reformation of Latin
American aesthetics, one more in keeping with a conservative vein of
intellectualism in the region. Nevertheless, homoeroticism and corporeal
sensuality would resurface in Latin American letters, such as in the work of
Julián del Casal (Cuba), José Asunción Silva (Colombia), Delmira Agustini
(Uruguay), and Salvador Novo (Mexico), as aesthetic trends moved toward
the avant-garde after World War I (1914–1918).

As noted earlier in the case of the lagartiMo, these aesthetics were also
applied to the bodies, dress, and attitudes of those producers of literary
texts. As with the lagartiMo, the figure of the dandy came to represent the
modernization and cultural acumen of bourgeois men (but also some
women), as well as the potential excesses of artifice. The adornment of
men's bodies, their preoccupation with style, and the unpredictable nature of
their speech and gestures led to contradictory understandings of gender as
performative, as a pose. The dandy was a nonconformist—a provocateur—
interested in beauty, elegance, and eccentricity in a period marked by the
gradual decline of the elite and the relative homogenization of culture.
Thus, for artists interested in standing out in the ever-growing and always
mistrusted crowd, dandyism represented a shift toward individual style and
ostentation. This shift was controversial in many of the same ways as
modernismo: by pushing the limits of aesthetic propriety, both forms of
representation were revising the way gender and sexuality were understood
as relative and relational rather than as biologically determined.

Across Latin America in the fin de siècle period, the rapid pace of
modernization led to massive shifts in demographics, politics, and modes of
life. Social anxiety—especially on the part of Latin American elites—over
the future of Latin American nations found expression in the scientific
community, which used positivism to Mustify the examination of sexual
pathologies in an effort to explain the supposed decadence of groups such
as immigrants, the working class, homosexuals, and transvestites. Social
scientists adapted European models to local populations and attempted to
“correct” deviant identities and practices in the name of order and progress.
However, a close examination of the period reveals how the interrelated
spheres of science, art, and culture did not universally reMect sexual
difference and gender variance. Instead, for members of the elite, the
contradictions of modernity reflected a simultaneous fascination with
individual expression, fear of cultural decadence, and disdain for populist
rhetoric. The supposed obMectivity of positivist science allowed upper-class
politicians to attempt to control the future of Latin American populations.
Yet in looking to Europe for inspiration, many of those same politicians
(writers and artists) became enamored with stylistic innovations that were
seen by critics as overly sensual or even queer (raro). Modernity implied
simultaneously seeking to promote a specific cultural identity and adapting
to new and at times revolutionary ideas. In literature and art as in science
and politics, the Latin American fin de siècle staged the negotiation of
contradictory ideologies, people, and desires. This complicated period
underscores the paradox of control and repression, liberalism and the
expansion of individual freedoms—issues that continue to inform Latin
American politics to this day.

SEE ALSO El Baile de los 41; Bom-Crioulo (1895; Adolfo Ferreira

Caminha)

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Bazán, Osvaldo. Historia de la homosexualidad en la Argentina: De la

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