Brazilian Travesti Migrations is a multi-sited ethnography with Brazilian travesti sex workers carried out in Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona. In 2005, I participated in a research project together with the female (non-trans) sex workers in Barcelona. Although trans women sex workers were outside the scope of the research, they were very visible. Trans sex workers used to go to the local non-governmental organisation (NGO) Ămbit Dona, which collaborated with female and trans sex workers in the neighbourhood of the Raval, and where we also conducted the research interviews. We had the opportunity to meet many trans women sex workers with different nationalities, experiences, concerns, and ways of embodying femininity . Two years later, I participated in another research project with transsexual women activists in the emblematic Colectivo de Transexuales de Catalunya in Barcelona. I was interested in how they were positioned regarding the medical discourse and practices and how they related to the more global trans movement. Most of the participants were Spanish and presented a corporeal aesthetic quite different from the trans sex workers I met some years before and who, most of them, came from Latin America and self-identified as travestis.
Considering that there is no a single way of representing our gender identities and that trans experiences are diverse and can be very flexible, I became interested in the different ways transsexuals and travestis, migrant and local, sex workers and non-sex workers were producing and performing femininity . I then perceived trans embodiments as a privileged place for understanding how different cultural contexts can value certain ways of embodying femininity and privilege some forms of embodiment over others. Although at first I wanted to focus on a comparative analysis of Spanish and Latin American trans womenâs aesthetics, during my first approaches to the field in Barcelona I noticed that the Brazilian travestis were consideredâamong the Spaniards and other Latin American travestisâas the most âbeautifulâ and âfeminineâ ones. In this way, the Brazilian travestis were embodying the corporeal myths also assigned to Brazilian women (Edmonds 2010; JarrĂn 2017). I then wondered why did they stand out so much once in Spain . Why the Brazilians (and not the Ecuadorians, for example)? Was there any specificity in the ways Brazil was producing the so-called most beautiful travestis of the world? Was Brazil the âparadiseâ of sexual diversity which encouraged travesti identity expressions? I finally decided to focus exclusively on the Brazilian travestis and go to Brazil to understand why and how they were constructed with so much fame.
I also realised very soon that since the 1970s, a significant number of Brazilian travestis have migrated to Europe, initially to France, to enter the sex work market. Travestisâ flow between Brazil and Europe continues to this day, despite the fact that the âconqueredâ territories and the modalities of sex work have been reconfigured. However, little is known about them. They are considered as âmenâ who generally enter European territory to engage in prostitution .1 It is also common to identify travestis as âtransvestite gays,â stressing precisely that it is their sexuality that defines exclusively their gender expressions, whileâanecdotallyâthey cross-dress . Non-trans and trans activists often call them âtransgender ,â âtrans,â or even âtranssexuals,â invisibilising travestisâ particularities. The confusions and ignorance around travestisâ identities are common and rooted in a long sexological and medical tradition that has pathologised sexual and gender expressions outside heteronormativity .2
The German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1992 [1910]) used the term âtransvestite â for the first time in 1910 to refer to a new clinical category that names people who feel the compulsion to wear clothes of the âoppositeâ sex. It was thus claimed that âtransvestismâ was a variant of homosexuality, that is, it was understood as a âgender inversionâ until the nineteenth century. Some years later, the âtranssexual â medical category was developed in the United States to refer to clinical cases that required sex reassignment surgeries to adapt the body to the mind (Cauldwell 1949). The influential Harry Benjamin (1966) differentiated âtransvestismââwhere the sexual organs were a source of pleasureâfrom âtranssexualismââwhere the genitals became a source of disgust. In this way, transsexuality was constructed as a âproblemâ of (gender) identity, while âtransvestismâ was constructed as a sexual perversion. The medical paradigm then influenced the way to define and âtreatâ not only transsexuality but also pathologised transvestism. Currently, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)3 defines transsexuality as a gender dysphoria and the âtransvestic disorderâ as part of the paraphilias, that is, sexual deviations.
However, Brazilian travestis seem to be outside any medical classification. They do not only cross-dress as most of them modify their bodies in a permanent way to live all day as women. Moreover, they do not consider themselves transsexuals either because travestis do not believe they were born in the wrong body nor do they seek surgical transition to fully adapt their bodies to the desired gender, as is more conventionally expected. The term travesti originally derived from the verb transvestir (that is, cross-dress) but is currently employed (mostly in Latin America ) to refer to people who want to look and feel, as they say, like women, without giving up some of their male characteristics, such as their genitals. Within this premise, they are aware that they do not want to be women, but they mainly seek to resemble women through the construction of a constantly negotiated femininity. In other words, travestis are neither transsexuals nor transvestites, but travestis, the term they self-identify with and is used throughout the manuscript.4 Moreover, travestis also show that the transvestite /transsexual medical dichotomy fails since the boundaries between these categories are very fluid and cannot represent the great diversity of the gender expressions found in reality.
In spite of this gender diversity and fluidity, travestisâ identities are generally included and invisibilised under the category âtranssexual â in research conducted in Spain (GarcĂa and Oñate 2010; FernĂĄndez DĂĄvila and Morales 2011), since it is perceived politically more correct to name them as such. Nowadays in Spain, fruit of the powerful medical institutionalisation around transsexuality, to be called travesti is an act that discredits by its close link with prostitution . Though, more than 40 years ago, the Spanish term travestĂ (accentuating the last syllable) was popularly used to refer to a variety of people who were born with a body assigned as male but, temporarily or permanently, lived as women. In fact, the few Spaniards who self-defined as âtranssexuals,â who had undergone surgery abroad, were not widely accepted as they were seen as âcastrated personsâ by the travestĂs. During the Spanish transition to democracy, and after many years of obscurantism during the dictatorship, the travestĂs were able to be more visible as never beforeâas artists in many cabarets of the big cities. When these shows began to go out of style, prostitution became the main economic means of life for the vast majority.
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, and once the medical discourse on transsexuality was already hegemonic in Spain, transsexuals (no longer travestĂs) began to organise by creating political collectives . They argued for the institutionalisation of transsexuality in the health system in order to be able to modify their bodies with more guarantees and facilities to be integrated into society. They also wanted to break the stereotypes that associated them with HIV/AIDS and demanded the respect of their rights as citizens to move away from the environment of prostitution and supposed marginality. Yet, transsexuals (mainly, transsexual women) kept a distance...