Fe/male trouble: The unsettling place of lesbians in the self-images of Brazilian travesti prostitutes

Abstract

Transgendered prostitutes (travestis) in the Brazilian city of Salvador have strong opinions about lesbians. Although individual travestis maintain cordial relationships with individual lesbians, whenever they discuss lesbians among themselves, travestis are always dismissive and condemnatory. This paper discusses three reasons for that attitude: the contention among travestis that 'God made woman for man and man for woman'; the conviction that lesbians actively pursue travestis as objects of desire; and the idea that lesbians share a (very different kind of) transgendered project with travestis. This paper investigates what might be gained by examining the ways in which one group of transgendered individuals thinks about other individuals whom it also sees as transgendered. The argument is that this kind of enquiry allows a more nuanced understanding of some of the underlying configurations of gender and sexuality that travestis draw on and reproduce in their own practices and subjectivities. © 1998 SAGE Publications.