Travesti (gender identity)
The word "travesti", originally pejorative in nature, was reappropriated by Peruvian, Brazilian and Argentine activists, as it has a regional specificity that combines a generalized condition of social vulnerability, an association with sex work, the exclusion of basic rights and its recognition as a non-binary and political identity.
[note 1] Notable travesti rights activists include Argentines Lohana Berkins, Claudia Pía Baudracco, Diana Sacayán, Marlene Wayar and Susy Shock; Erika Hilton from Brazil and Yren Rotela from Paraguay.
[28] The term transgender was popularized by American activist Virginia Prince in the late 1960s to designate those who transgressed gender norms but did not identify with the travesti or transsexual categories, and by the 1980s its widespread use in core countries was established.
[34] Originally used colloquially as a pejorative term, the travesti category has been reappropriated by Brazilian,[33] Peruvian and especially Argentine activists since the 1990s,[35][36][37] as it has a regional specificity that combines a generalized condition of social vulnerability, an association with sex work, the exclusion of basic rights and its recognition as a non-binary[38] and political identity.
[39][24] As they are excluded from the educational and labor system, stigmatized and reified as objects of theoretical criticism or media consumption, one of the main struggles of travesti activism since its emergence in the 1990s was the creation of their own political subjectivities.
"[62] The Buenos Aires Carnival's murgas first incorporated "messy" cross-dressing acts in the 1940s and 1950s to entertain audiences, a modality that later gave way to the transformista figure (i.e. drag queens)—defined as "the luxuriously dressed maricón"—[note 1]becoming an attraction for the public.
[63] This little-documented phenomenon known as the "travesti carnival movement" marked a milestone in the parades of the 1960s and 1970s, and had the participation of make-up artists, costume designers and choreographers from Buenos Aires' revue theatrical scene, all of them maricones.
(...) The culture of the puto artist,[note 1] all of them were already walking around with cotton stuffing to make their breasts, and they were already going out to sing, to dance..."[27] The stage became the only place where travestis could publicly dress as women, as it was forbidden to do so on the streets.
"[59] The feminine beauty ideal put forward by American television also included small and pointed noses but, as surgeries were too expensive, most travestis settled for temporary arrangements, resorting to the use of glue and objects that could emulate a prosthesis.
[59] María Belén Correa argues that the emergence of travesti stage performers such Vanessa Show, Jorge Perez Evelyn, Brigitte Gambini and Ana Lupe Chaparro in the 1960s and 1970s constituted "another way of activism".
[60] According to Jorge Perez Evelyn, the first people to popularize transformismo in the theater scene—the "first travestis to appear in Buenos Aires" were a group called Les Girls in 1972, followed by Vanessa Show and Ana Lupez.
[79] In the late 2010s, the travesti community of Buenos Aires and its surroundings has gained recognition for its creative and artistic contributions, inserting itself in the "queer countercultural scene", a circuit of theaters, bars and cultural centers such as Casa Brandon, Tierra Violeta, MU Trinchera Boutique and, more recently, Feliza and Maricafé.
[83] However, Sosa Villada has denied that the book was conceived as an act of activism or visibility, claiming that focusing discussions about travestis around marginality and sex work silences their current cultural contributions to society.
"[89] Anthropologist Don Kulick noted that: "Travestis appear to exist throughout Latin America, but in no other country are they as numerous and well known as in Brazil, where they occupy a strikingly visible place in both social space and the cultural imaginary.
[91] One of the most prominent travestis in the Brazilian cultural imaginary of the late 20th century was Roberta Close, who became a household name in the mid-1980s and was "widely acclaimed to be the most beautiful woman in Brazil," posing in Playboy and regularly appearing in television and several other publications.
[96] A 14-year-old teenager, Mario Luis Palmieri, had been found murdered and the hypothesis handled by the police was that of a homosexual crime of passion, unleashing one of the most famous persecutions of LGBT identities in the history of Paraguay.
[2][9] According to Argentine researcher María Soledad Cutuli, the most recent travesti ethnographies fall under five main axes of analysis: "gender identity", "corporeality and subjectivity", "health and sexuality", "prostitution and sociability" and, to a lesser extent, "political organization".
[2][108][109] A very wide range of anthropological studies has investigated travestis based on a hypothesis that states that they should be interpreted as an expression of a third gender or sex,[5][110] in the same manner of the berdaches of North America,[111] the hijras of India, the muxes of Mexico,[112] the kathoey of Thailand, the māhū of Tahiti, the fa'afafine of Samoa and the xanith of Oman, among other identities.
[116] Among the research based on participant observation, French anthropologist Annick Prieur has been considered a pioneer for her 1998 ethnography on the travesti community from the suburbs of Mexico City, in which she argued that they reproduce their society's gender binarism.
[5] Fellow researcher María Fernanda Guerrero Zavala noted that: "Faced with other theorizations that call for the disembodiment of identities and queer and transgender activism, Vartabedian structures a "body" based on the most carnal experiences of transvestites".
[24] He defined travesti as "a politics of refusal", as it "disavows coherence and is an always already racialized and classed geopolitical identification that gestures toward the inseparability of indigeneity, blackness, material precarity, sex work, HIV status, and uneven relationships to diverse state formations.
"[91] According to a 2017 research published by the Ministry of Defense of Argentina titled La revolución de las mariposas, 74.6% of trans women and travestis in Buenos Aires said they had suffered some type of violence, a high number, although lower than that registered in 2005, which was 91.9%.
[131] Lohana Berkins reflected in 2015: "Reaching old age is for a travesti like belonging to an exclusive club, because the mishaps that accompany marginal life—which lead to a death that is always considered premature in terms of population statistics—are the perennial consequences of a persecuted identity.
"[125] In recent times, the concept of "travesticide" (Spanish: travesticidio)—along with "transfemicide" or "trans femicide"—[37][132] has been extended to refer to the hate crime understood as the murder of a travesti due to her gender condition.
[40] In her pioneering 2004 research book Cuerpos desobedientes, Josefina Fernández found that most of the travestis surveyed had been victims of child sexual abuse, although she noted: "I must clarify, however, that it is a topic that I approached with great caution (...), in order to avoid any 'adventurous' readings that might associate rape with travestism in terms of cause-consequence.
[40] As their living conditions are marked by exclusion from the formal educational system and the labor market, prostitution is constituted as their "only source of income, the most widespread survival strategy and one of the very few spaces for recognition of the travesti identity as a possibility of being in the world".
[3] Their contact with local feminism during the mid-1990s is regarded as a key moment in the development of the Argentine travesti rights movement, as it directed their concerns towards the concept of gender identity,[3] and marked the beginning of transfeminism in the country.
[153] Berkins' ALITT group objected to this definition on the grounds that it undermined the fight for their identity, while ATTTA, on the other hand, requested and managed resources to finance prevention projects focused on MSM.
[178] In a 1996 speech, Lair Guerra de Macedo Rodrigues—former Director of Brazil's National Program on Sexually Transmissible Diseases and AIDS—asserted: "The organization of travesti groups, especially following the advent of AIDS, is evidence of the beginning of the arduous task of defending citizenship.
[186] Uruguayan travesti activism emerged in the 1990s, during the neoliberal presidencies of Luis Alberto Lacalle and Julio María Sanguinetti, which "promoted a subordinate integration model of sexual dissidence anchored in the notion of toleration".
