GENDER REVERSALS AND

GENDER CULTURES

The theme of gender reversals has occurred in all societies since the beginning
of recorded history. This volume explores some of the vast historical and
cultural range of experience of the phenomenon: from the gender crossing of
early Christian martyrs to Hindu and Buddhist beliefs in salvation through
gender modification; from the mutating gender of actors in Chinese theatre
to sacred genders in Siberia; from gender variance in North American Indian
cultures to the androgynous beings of the cultural imagination of the Bimin-
Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea.

These original essays are written from a broad mix of perspectives. Their
common focus is the complex relation of gender reversals to taboo, and what
this tells us about particular cultures.

Sabrina Petra Ramet is Professor of International Studies at the University of

Washington. She is the author of several books, including Nationalism and
Federalism in Yugoslavia 1962–1991 (1992) and Social Currents in Eastern
Europe (1995).
GENDER REVERSALS
AND
GENDER CULTURES
Anthropological and historical
perspectives

Edited by
Sabrina Petra Ramet

London and New York

 First published 1996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1996 Selection and editorial matter, Sabrina Petra Ramet;
individual chapters, © 1996 the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gender reversals and gender cultures: anthropological and historical
perspectives/edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sex role. 2. Gender identity. 3. Transvestism.
4. Transsexualism. 5. Taboo. 6. Androgyny (Psychology)
GN484.35.G46 1996 95–26198
305.3–dc20 CIP
ISBN 0-203-42893-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-73717-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-11482-9 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-11483-7 (pbk)
 To all who question
society’s rules,
To all who place Natural Law
above all else,
To all who accept Rosa Luxemburg’s principle:
Freedom means nothing unless it is
the freedom to think differently.
And to Chris,
who has always had the courage
to think differently.
 CONTENTS

Notes on contributors ix
Preface xii
1 GENDER REVERSALS AND GENDER CULTURES
An Introduction 1
Sabrina Petra Ramet
2 TRAVERSING GENDER 22
Cultural context and gender practices
Anne Bolin
3 SUMER 52
Gender, gender roles, gender role reversals
Judith Ochshorn
4 CROSS-DRESSING AND CROSS-PURPOSES 66
Gender possibilities in the Acts of Thecla
J.L.Welch
5 MARTYRS, ASCETICS, AND GNOSTICS 79
Gender-crossing in early Christianity
Karen Jo Torjesen
6 CROSS-DRESSING, GENDER ERRORS, AND SEXUAL
TABOOS IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE 92
Winfried Schleiner
7 ELENA ALIAS ELENO 105
Genders, sexualities, and “race” in the mirror of natural history
in sixteenth-century Spain
Israel Burshatin
8 BECOMING MALE 123
Salvation through gender modification in Hinduism and
Buddhism
Cynthia Ann Humes

vii
 CONTENTS

9 GENDER, POWER, AND SPECTACLE IN LATE-

IMPERIAL CHINESE THEATER 138
Sophie Volpp
10 EROTICISM, SEXUALITY, AND GENDER REVERSAL IN
HUNGARIAN CULTURE 148
László Kürti
11 SACRED GENDERS IN SIBERIA 164
Shamans, bear festivals, and androgyny
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer
12 THERE IS MORE THAN JUST WOMEN AND MEN 183
Gender variance in North American Indian cultures
Sabine Lang
13 THE PROCREATIVE AND RITUAL CONSTITUTION OF
FEMALE, MALE, AND OTHER 197
Androgynous beings in the cultural imagination of the
Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea
Fitz John Porter Poole

Index 219

viii
 NOTES ON
CONTRIBUTORS

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (Ph.D., 1979) teaches in the Sociology and

Russian Area Studies departments of Georgetown University. She is editor of
the journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, and of the books
Shamanism: Soviet Studies of Traditional Religion in Siberia and Central
Asia (1990); Russian Traditional Culture (1992); and Culture Incarnate:
Native Anthropology from Russia (1995). Using data from several years of
fieldwork focused on Siberia, she has written on gender, religion, and
nationalism for American Anthropologist, Slavic Review, Arctic Anthropology,
Shaman, and other journals. She is currently finishing the following books:
The Tenacity of Ethnicity and Siberian Women’s Lives: Autobiographies from
the Sakha Republic (Yakutia).
Anne Bolin received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University
of Colorado. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Elon College.
Her book, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage (1988), received a
Choice Magazine Award for an Outstanding Academic Book for 1988–9.
She has co-authored a textbook on the anthropology of human sexuality,
Biocultural Perspectives in Human Sexuality (1996, in press). She is co-editor
of Athletic Intruders: Women, Culture, and Exercise (1996, forthcoming).
Her current ethnographic research is with competitive women bodybuilders
for a book entitled Elegant Ironworkers: Beauties and Beasts in Bodybuilding.
She is an active competitor in amateur women’s bodybuilding and continues
her research with the transgender community.
Israel Burshatin is a Professor of Spanish at Haverford College. He has
published numerous studies on the discourse of Orientalism in early modern
Spain, including “The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem and Silence,” in
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), “Race,” Writing and Difference (1986), “Power,
Discourse and Metaphor in the Abencerraje,” in MLN (1984); and “Playing
the Moor: Parody and Performance in Lope de Vega’s El primer Fajardo,” in
PMLA (May 1992). He is currently working on a book-length study of the
trial of Eleno de Cespedes.

ix
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Cynthia Ann Humes is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at

Claremont McKenna College. Her publications concern contemporary use
of Sanskrit literature, modern ritual in North Indian goddess worship, political
and economic dimensions in Hinduism, and issues of gender in world religions.
She is the author of Goddess of Blood, Goddess of Love: Divinity and Power
in the Devi Mahatmya and Vindhyachal Temple (forthcoming from SUNY
Press). She is also co-editor of Living Banaras: Hindu Religion in Cultural
Context (SUNY Press, 1993).
László Kürti is a cultural anthropologist who has been conducting research
on Hungarian culture for the past fifteen years. His publications have appeared
in professional journals including Anthropology Today, East European
Quarterly, East European Politics and Societies, and Anthropological
Quarterly. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of
Ethnography and Folklore at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
Sabine Lang was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1958, and studied social
anthropology, European prehistory (Vor- and Frühgeschichte), and ancient
Mesoamerican cultures and languages (Altamerikanistik) at the Universities
of Tübingen (1978–0) and Hamburg (1980–0). She obtained her M.A. degree
in 1984 and her Ph.D. in 1990, writing a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Männer
als Frauen—Frauen als Männer” [Men as Women, Women as Men], which
deals with multiple genders in Native American cultures. Lang has done
fieldwork in Mexico (1982) and in urban and rural Native American
communities in the United States (1992–3), her recent fieldwork centering
around gender variance and homosexual identities. She works as an
independent scholar, living in Hamburg, Germany.
Judith Ochshorn was a Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of
South Florida, co-founded the department twenty-four years ago, and headed
it for nine years. Working in the areas of women’s history, feminist spirituality,
and feminist theory-building, she was the author of The Female Experience
and the Nature of the Divine, co-edited (in 1995) Women’s Spirituality,
Women’s Lives, and published a number of essays on goddess traditions and
rituals in antiquity, gender roles in the ancient Near East, mother-daughter
relationships in ancient Near Eastern and biblical literature, and the witch
hunts in early modern Europe. Professor Ochshorn passed away during the
production of this book.
Fitz John Porter Poole is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He has previously
taught in Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Rochester.
He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology and Social Psychology from
Cornell University. On the basis of field research among the Bimin-Kuskusmin
of Papua New Guinea, he has published numerous articles on ethnopsychology,
gender, myth and ritual, selfhood and personhood, socialization and

x
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

enculturation, and aspects of the cultural contours of imagination.He is

completing a monograph on The Rites and Passages of Childhood among
the Bimin-Kuskusmin.
Sabrina Petra Ramet is a Professor of International Studies at the University
of Washington in Seattle. Born in London, England, she received her Ph.D.
from UCLA in 1981. She is the author of five books, three of which have
been published in expanded second editions. These are: Nationalism and
Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991, 2nd edn (Indiana University Press,
1992); Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of
the Great Transformation, 2nd edn (Duke University Press, 1995); and Balkan
Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic
War, 2nd edn (Westview Press, 1996). She is also the editor or co-editor of
ten previous books.
Winfried Schleiner, Professor of English at the University of California, Davis,
has published three books: Medical Ethics in the Renaissance (Georgetown
University Press, 1995), Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance
(Otto Harrassowitz, 1991), and The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons
(Brown University Press, 1970), as well as articles on English and Comparative
Literature, gender relations, and the history of medicine.
Karen Jo Torjesen holds the Margo L.Goldsmith Chair of Women’s Studies
in Religion at the Claremont Graduate School. She has taught Patristic
Theology at the Georg August University in Göttingen, Germany, the History
of Christianity at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and
now teaches Women’s Studies and Early Christianity at Claremont Graduate
School in Claremont, California. She has published extensively on women’s
roles in the formation of Christianity. Her most recent book is: When Women
Were Priests: The Role of Women in the Early Church and the Scandal of
Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (Harper-SanFrancisco, 1995).
S ophie Volpp is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature
at Smith College. Her publications include: “The Discourse on Male Marriage:
Li Yu’s ‘A Male Mencius’s Mother’,”, in positions: east asia cultures critiques
(Summer 1994), translations and critical biographies of twelfth- and
thirteenth-century poets in An Anthology of Chinese Women Poets from
Ancient Times to 1911, edited by Kang-I Sun Zhang; and “Second-hand
Emotions: Thought and Feeling in Zhou Bangyan’s Song Lyrics,” in Papers
on Chinese Literature (Spring 1993). She is currently engaged in research on
seventeenth-century Chinese theater.
J.L.Welch, a freelance writer and horticulturist who lives and works in Seattle,
Washington, is co-author of Religious America (McGraw-Hill, 1974), which
was nominated for a National Book Award.

xi
 PREFACE

The theme of gender reversals has occurred in all societies since the beginning
of recorded history. Many societies in the past institutionalized procedures
for permanent or temporary gender reversal or gender change; other societies,
such as the Aztec system and sections of modern Protestant America have
endeavored to enforce a rigid gender system in which nothing may ever change
and in which no boundaries may be crossed. The fixation on maintaining
fixed boundaries and on suppressing gender change is as much a clue as the
prevalence of such change across history to the centrality of this theme in
human culture.
Why gender reversal? Gender lies at the core of an individual’s self-
definition. We establish our identities through work and friends, through
nationality and religious affiliation, but underlying all of these, as a kind of
foundation upon which any individual builds, is gender. One might say (with
apologies to Descartes), “I am a woman [or a man]; therefore, I am.” Human
existence without gender identity is inconceivable. One can live without a
sense of nationality, without a religion, without a job or career, even (although
with much more difficulty) without friends; but without a concept of one’s
gender identity, existence itself is thrown into question. It is for this reason
that changing gender is associated with intense energy, with magic, with
miracle, even (as amply demonstrated in ancient religious rituals of gender
transformation, explored in Judith Ochshorn’s chapter) with the supernatural.
Inevitably, the theme of gender reversals has occupied a salient position in
religion, in literature, in drama, and in folk traditions.
Gender reversals also appear in another guise, viz., as a route to individual
career advancement (examples provided in chapters 1 and 7) and as a
mechanism through which a community assures stability and harmony (as
suggested in the chapters by Sabine Lang and Fitz John Porter Poole in this
collection).
There is a growing literature dealing with gender reversals. A pioneering
book by Will Roscoe investigated gender traditions among American Indian
tribes and was, for many, the first time that the theme of gender reversal
occupied center stage. Previous books by Marjorie Garber, Lesley Ferris, and

xii
 CONTENTS

Vern and Bonnie Bullough have focused primarily on transvestism, although

each of these books also included some discussion that moved beyond this
sphere. Kim Elizabeth Stuart and Anne Bolin have separately produced
important studies of transsexualism that have enabled non-specialist
audiences to obtain a basic grasp of the issues. And a recent collection edited
by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, while highly variable in quality,
brought together some fine historical studies, including magnificent studies
by Elizabeth Castelli and Gary Kates. This volume most closely resembles
Gilbert Herdt’s 1994 collection, Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
Dimorphism in Culture and History. Like Herdt’s book, the present study
brings together works of anthropology and history. Where I hope that this
book makes a unique contribution is in the range of its coverage, the
attention paid to non-Western societies, and the blend of ancient, medieval,
early modern, and contemporary subjects.
I am grateful to Gary Kates and Kristina Straub for their most helpful
comments on the original manuscript, and to Claire L’Enfant, my publisher
at Routledge, for her wise counsel and hard work in moving this manuscript
along. I am also most grateful to my spouse Chris Hassenstab, for her
unflagging interest in my work and for her detailed comments on earlier
drafts of my introduction.
Sabrina Petra Ramet
Seattle, Washington

xiii
 1

GENDER REVERSALS AND

GENDER CULTURES
An introduction
Sabrina Petra Ramet

The ancient Greeks told of a certain Teiresias, a legendary blind seer, born a
man, who was miraculously transformed into a woman, returning to his
male form only after having lived eight years as a woman. Later, according
to the story, the divine royal couple, Zeus and Hera, turned to Teiresias to
help them settle an argument. Each of them, it seemed, claimed that the other
derived more pleasure from sex. Since Teiresias had the benefit of experience
in both sexes, they asked him his opinion. Without a moment’s hesitation,
Teiresias answered that the woman obtained far more pleasure from sexual
relations than did the man. Hera was angered at this disclosure and punished
Teiresias by blinding him; but Zeus compensated Teiresias by imparting the
power of prophecy and by granting Teiresias a life lasting seven generations.1
For the Greeks, Teiresias’ sex change was, quite apart from Zeus’ intervention,
the clue to his miraculous gifts and in time, he came to be described as “the
greatest of the mythical seers.”2
The story of Teiresias is not an isolated example, however.3 On the contrary,
the theme of gender reversal frequently occurs in ancient religion and
mythology, as well as in ancient rituals, and has recurred in diverse societies
in every era. But the significance attached to gender reversal varies greatly,
depending on the context, the specific form of the reversal, and the given
gender culture.
The concept of gender culture is crucial to an understanding of the
phenomenon of gender reversal, because the latter arises within the parameters
set by a gender culture and because it is a society’s culture that informs its
members as to the meanings of specific forms of individual and collective
behavior. This concept of “gender culture” is derived from the growing
literature on the social construction of gender. In brief, this literature is
concerned with how societies generate and enforce standards for expected
gender-linked behavior, and socialize their members to abide by those
standards.4 This literature is thus concerned also with issues of social control.
Gordene MacKenzie probably speaks for most adherents of this approach
when she writes that

1
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

Gender is…one of the most effective means of social control. From

birth we are enculturated into a dual gender system, reinforced by all
the major institutions.5

MacKenzie uses the terms “gender code” and “gender ideology” to refer to
the relevant standards of behavior, warning that they are enforced by
institutions which act as “gender police.”6 Martine Rothblatt uses the
expression “gender dictates” to refer to the same standards, thus implying
that they are dictatorial in character.7 Social constructionists are, accordingly,
interested in the socialization processes which assure gender conformity,
but there is no inherent requirement that a social constructionist deny the
existence of innate psychological differences between the sexes (although
some writers do so).
For the purposes of this book, I have elected to use the expression gender
culture rather than one of the alternatives identified above. The advantages
of this term are that it is nonjudgmental and that it links the concerns of this
book with anthropological studies of culture and socialization, as well as
with political culture theories, to which it is related, both by analogy and by
parallel logic. For the sake of definitional clarity, let us take it that by gender
culture is meant a society’s understanding of what is possible, proper, and
perverse in gender-linked behavior, and more specifically, that set of values,
mores, and assumptions which establishes which behaviors are to be seen as
gender-linked, with which gender or genders they are to be seen as linked,
what is the society’s understanding of gender in the first place, and,
consequently, how many genders there are. Thus, among certain Indian
nations of the Pacific Northwest, for example, there were (until the latter
part of the nineteenth century) four or more genders; the possibility of
having more than two genders was opened up by divorcing gender from
sexual morphology and by associating gender rather, indeed primarily, with
social role and labor tasks.8 Gender reversal may be understood to be any
change, whether “total” or partial, in social behavior, work, clothing,
mannerisms, speech, self-designation, or ideology,9 which brings a person
closer to the other (or, in polygender systems, another) gender. Gender
reversal need not involve an effort to blot out any memory of the person’s
pretransformative past; indeed, except for twentieth-century transsexuals,
many of whom create fictitious histories in the hope of concealing their
gender transformation, most male-to-female gender reversals have been
open and explicit. (Since women historically often tried to pass as men in
order to breach career barriers, the opaqueness of their disguise was of the
essence.) Among the Plains tribes in the nineteenth century, not only was
cross-gender status explicit, but it was also most often partial. In fact, among
the aforementioned nations, cross-gender status did not necessarily involve
cross-dressing, and some cross-gender females continued to wear female
clothes even though they were engaged exclusively in male tasks and took

2
 INTRODUCTION

wives to take care of household tasks associated with females.10 Sexual

behavior, however, is not considered directly relevant to the subject of gender
reversal. Not only is same-sex sexuality a separate topic not to be confused
with gender reversal, but in two-gender systems, in particular, it becomes
semantically treacherous to speak of “same-sex” and “heterosexual”
liaisons on the part of a cross-gendered individual. The confusion which can
arise from these terms can be discerned in the disagreement among those
therapists attempting to describe male-to-female transsexuals who are
attracted to women; for some therapists, such transsexuals are
“heterosexual,” for others, “homosexual.” When antonyms can be
understood to mean the same thing, it is time to look for alternative
vocabulary.
Gender cultures also define the limits of social tolerance and, in this regard,
may be seen within the scope of the overarching cultural system as a whole.
Cross-dressing, thus, while nowadays narrowly construed to refer but to
dressing across gender lines, was at one time a much broader concept, referring
to any breach across the rigid regulations governing attire. These regulations,
found in all ancient societies including the Aztec and Inca, as well as in
European society as late as the seventeenth century,11 were designed to keep
people in their assigned places, and included often precise prescriptions relating
to class, trade, and lineage, as well as gender. Often specific colors were off
limits to certain groups: in the Ottoman Empire, for example, only Muslims
were permitted to wear green, while in Tudor England purple cloth was
reserved for persons of noble extraction.
But the scope of such regulations has been steadily narrowed, so that
there are only three sectors in which attire is still strictly regulated: gender;
certain occupations (such as clergy, nurses, policemen); and certain religious
groups (for example, the specific clothing regulations of the Amish and,
affecting also the level of gender, the requirement in some Muslim societies
that women wear a veil). Violations of regulations of attire in these spheres
are sensitive matters, and no one is surprised that the offense of
impersonating a police officer is vigorously punished or that religious groups
take seriously deviations from codes regulating attire. But the vast, all-
encompassing regulation of all attire in society is largely a thing of the past.
And as the purview of such regulations has narrowed, the meaning attributed
to the act of donning the attire of the opposite sex has necessarily changed.
Perhaps the single most important development which affected the way in
which such cross-dressing has been understood was the decay of the old
polytheist religions and the spread of new moral codes, as advanced first by
the Orphics and later by the Christians.
Much as gender cultures vary over space and change over time, so too
do the functions played by gender reversals. And it is this theme of the
functions of gender reversals which will occupy my attention for the
remainder of this introduction.

3
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

THE FUNCTIONS OF GENDER REVERSALS IN

RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY AND RITUAL
The theme of gender reversal occupies a prominent place in the ancient cult
of Inanna, in the Olympian religion of the ancient Greeks (most specifically
in the cult of Dionysos), in Mahayana Buddhism, in Hinduism, and even in
medieval Christianity. In its earliest incarnations, the capacity of the deities
to change their gender at will and to project both female and male avatars
was a natural corollary of the belief of the ancients in their deities’ capacity
to adopt any form at will. Among the Aztecs, for instance, Quetzalcoatl, the
sky god, was sometimes represented as a dragon, covered with feathers, over
a serpent-like body; at other times, he was portrayed as a bicephalic
amphibean.12 The Aztec god Xolotl, himself an avatar of Quetzalcoatl, had
his own subsidiary avatars, including any of a number of animal forms, that
of a dog being his most usual choice.13 Again, in Hindu mythology, Krishna,
an avatar of the god Vishnu, transforms himself into a beautiful woman in
order to destroy the demon Araka.14 Zeus, the supreme god of the Greek
pantheon, is said to have assumed the form of a bull on at least one occasion,
while Artemis was sometimes called the “bear-goddess”.15 And, of course,
the ancient Greek deities had the power to cast spells changing humans into
any of a number of animals or plants. In other words, gender reversals in
certain polytheist religions are situated within the context of a wide array of
transformations of form and presentation, none of which, however, imply a
change of essence.
It was quite consistent with this notion that the adherents of certain cults
would emulate their deities by donning animal masks and skins, or by cross-
dressing. The ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna (also called Ishtar) is a good
example of both gender ambiguity and gender reversal. She was described
variously as the goddess of love and of war, and was said to live the life of a
young man, engaging in warfare and avariciously seeking ever more lovers.16
In the ritual surrounding Inanna, she was said to turn men into women, and
women into men, and at cultic celebrations of her glory each sex donned the
garb of the other sex.17 In the Dionysian rites of ancient Greece, which endured
as late as the seventeenth century CE, women dressed as men and men as
women in celebration of a male deity renowned for his effeminacy.
Philostratus, a third century writer, justified the practices, noting, “In the
revel it is permitted women to dress like men and men to put on a woman’s
dress and walk like a woman.”18 In these religions, cross-dressing assumes
the role of emulation and celebration of the cross-gendered deity, and perhaps
of lifting the participant out of his or her normal persona, by creating a
special altered state for the religious rite.
In some religious traditions, gender reversal seems to hint at an earlier
matriarchal system. In traditional Japan, for example, Amatarasu-no-
Omikami, the sun goddess, is still the most important deity in the Shinto

4
 INTRODUCTION

pantheon. And when a new emperor is enthroned, he must take part in the
daijosai enthronement ceremony, in which he is ritually dressed as a female,
as a symbolic incarnation of the goddess, Amatarasu.19
Cross-dressing may also be associated with purification and with elevation
to a higher state. In some Tantric sects of Hinduism, for example, “… male
transvestism is used as a way of transcending one’s own sex, a prerequisite to
achieving salvation.”20 Mahayana Buddhism shows evidence of similar
thinking. As Cynthia Humes relates, in her chapter for this book, the theme
of gender reversal emerges in Mahayana Buddhism in the belief that “…it is
not only one’s female physical appearance that must change, but also one’s
‘women’s thoughts’, that is, her woman’s nature and mental attitude.”
The same motif appeared in Christianity at an early stage. The apocryphal
Gospel of Thomas closed with the admonition:

Simon Peter said to them [the other disciples], “Let Mary leave us,
because women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “Behold, I myself
shall lead her so as to make her male, that she too may become a living
spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male will
enter the kingdom of heaven.21

From the start, Christian women viewed their bodies as encumbrances to

salvation, and inevitably, in the course of the medieval period, holy
women cast off their female garb and assumed male attire. These were the
so-called “transvestite saints”, among whom were Pelagia (also known as
Pelagius), Marina (later known as Marinus), Athanasia (Athanasius),
Wilgefortis (also Uncumber), Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, and
Margery Kempe, to mention just a few of the better known.22 Ironically,
while young girls were raised on stories of female transvestite saints and
taught to believe that the route to God ran through somehow “becoming
male,” the very symbology of gender in the Western tradition, as Caroline
Bynum has pointed out,

…suggested that men—powerful, clerical, authoritative, rational,

“divine” men—needed to become weak and human, yet spiritual,
“women” in order to proceed toward God.23

Gender is perhaps the most fundamental level of individual identity, the

touchstone of one’s personhood. In identifying a person, it is natural that
among those signifiers we mention first is some clue as to the person’s sex.
Yet many religions aspire to that level of centrality and primacy—for can
God be satisfied with being secondary in importance to bodily form? Thus,
it is not surprising that religious systems have often seen the transformation
of gender as linked with the process of coming closer to the Godhead,
however it is construed.

5
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

THE FUNCTIONS OF GENDER

REVERSALS IN DRAMA
Theatrical cross-dressing was known to the ancient Greeks—indeed, Plato
condemned the practice of men playing the role of women, lest they become
feminized.24 Later, in Christian Europe, the Church’s ban on women
performing in public had the inevitable effect of promoting young boys to
act women’s parts on stage and of encouraging the castration of young
boys so that they could sing the soprano parts in choral and solo vocal
performances. As Lesley Ferris records, they were often greeted, at their
performances, with shouts of “Long live the knife!”25 Later, in seventeenth-
century England, women started to break into theater and eventually were
not only acting the parts of women but increasingly taking men’s roles. At
one level, as Kristina Straub observes, “the obvious reason for dressing
actresses in men’s clothes at the end of the seventeenth century is virtually
the same as one of the reasons for putting women on the stage at all:
conventionally attractive female bodies sell tickets.”26 But something more
was involved, something of a psychological or even ideological nature: if
women were “supposed” to be meek and subservient to men but were
allowed to play the roles of men on stage, then the stage could become the
arena for fundamental challenges to the sex/gender system.
Indeed, it was understood as such, and already in the polemics surrounding
cross-dressing in England in the years 1580–1633, preachers and pamphleteers
inveighed against cross-dressing. The ensuing controversy came to a head in
1620, when, under pressure from conservative forces, King James I ordered
the clergy to devote themselves to condemning the practice of women wearing
men’s clothes in public. Indeed, women were repeatedly donning men’s clothes
as a prelude to participating in food riots, demonstrations against enclosures,
and other lower-class protests.27 Thus, the association of female cross-dressing,
whether on the stage or in the streets, with threats to the gender and class
system and even with social upheaval, was clear enough. But Puritans also
worried about cross-dressing among males. Some Puritan moralists28 thus
expressed concern that men and boys wearing female garb on-stage might
take to wearing female garb off-stage—a practice which the Puritans
considered especially heinous.
Beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century, a reversal occurred
within Shakespearean theater. Where boys had once been used to play women’s
roles in Shakespeare’s plays, now women were being cast to play Hamlet or
even Romeo. Erika Munk has dismissed the Hamlet role as not particularly
liberating since, in her view, Prince Hamlet could be characterized as “a
waffling neurotic prone to violent fits”29—a characterization that accords all
too well with some stereotypes of women. But in 1990, two separate
productions of King Lear cast a woman in the title role; one of these, staged
in Atlanta, made some adjustments, placing the action in 1950s Georgia,

6
 INTRODUCTION

with Lear depicted as “a southern matriarchal figure with three sons.”30 Ruth
Maleczech, who played Lear in the New York City production that same
year, highlighted the same theme that had troubled English preachers in the
early seventeenth century: “When a man has power, we take it for granted.
But when a woman has power, we’re forced to look at the nature of power
itself.”31 Casting a woman in the role of King Lear or Hamlet tantalizes the
audience with veiled allusions to female gender culture, and prompts questions
about the gender ambiguity of behavior. We are enabled to ask, would a
woman in fact behave in this way, speak in this way, or are our assumptions
of differences often largely arbitrary conventions? Sally Potter, the English
writer who directed the 1993 film Orlando, which cast Quentin Crisp as
Queen Elizabeth I and Tilda Swinton as Orlando, tried to explain the double
gender reversal of the film in these words:
One of the things we’re saying here is that men and women have far
more in common than we’ve imagined, that the differences between us
have been grossly exaggerated and made the basis for huge pain, grief
and misery. Women have difficult lives, but men have difficult lives too.32
But there is more to it than that, of course. The steady flow of films which
include elements of cross-dressing is clue enough. These films have included
the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show; the haunting tale of neo-
pagan rituals, Wickerman; Roman Polanski’s The Apartment; Julie Andrews’
Victor/ Victoria (itself based on a German film of 1933, Viktor/Viktoria); the
Gore Vidal character Myra Breckinridge; Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie; Robin
Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire; Paris is Burning; and two films of 1994—Priscilla
Queen of the Desert and Just Like a Woman—as well as The Birdcage (1996).
One may also think of certain recent television shows which have offered
sympathetic portrayals of cross-dressing, such as Twin Peaks and Picket
Fences, as well as Bosom Buddies, which offers a neutral view of cross-
dressing, making use of the unlikely vehicle of two men cross-dressing in
order to obtain low-cost women-only housing. Going back a little in time,
one might also recall Marlene Dietrich’s famous performance in the cabaret
scene in Morocco (1930), in which she wore a top hat and tails and flirted
with a woman in the cabaret audience, and, for that matter, the 1934 British
production, Girls Will be Boys, which cast Dolly Haas in “male drag” to
sing to piano accompaniment.33 Few people go to these films in search of
philosophical enlightenment, any more than audiences attending drag shows
expect mind-broadening experiences. RuPaul, the alias of Andre Charles,
who soared to fame after 1991 with dragqueen rock videos and a self-
presentation that exults in sheer camp, has been described by one of his oldest
friends as “a six-foot-seven monster-model-woman thing.”34 RuPaul highlights
the feeling of magic associated with drag. Watching beautiful women sing
and dance is a delightful experience, but watching beautiful women who are
really men sing and dance necessarily evokes additional feelings. In RuPaul’s

7
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

words: “A drag queen is like a priest or a spirit familiar. We represent the

myths, the duality of the universe. We’re like little microcosms of the world.”35
Part of the magic is the realization that
Beneath the volutes and tendrils of his many platinum-blond hairpieces,
he is an ageless…and unquestionable beauty. Out of drag, RuPaul is
just a pleasant-looking freckled bald man with an earnest smile.36

THE FUNCTIONS OF GENDER REVERSALS IN

SOCIAL ORDER AND SOCIAL MOBILITY
Gender reversal has also figured in maintaining social order and as a subtheme
of social mobility. Taking up social order first: in traditional societies (especially
rural ones), it is often a matter of great consequence that there be male
offspring, whether to carry on the name or to assume responsibility for carrying
out tasks associated with males. In contemporary China, where families have
been limited in the number of children they might raise, adults have addressed
these concerns by drowning female babies. The Balkan people, like many
Indian nations of North America, found “adaptive” alternatives. In the
Balkans, the practice of raising biological females as males became accepted
among Serbs, Montenegrins, and Ghegs, in families which were unable to
give birth to a biological male. Known as musškobanje (the plural of
musškobanja), these cross-gendered individuals assumed a male social identity
and performed work associated with men. They were not allowed to take
either sex for a spouse, but were sworn to virginity. They were often highly
respected in their communities, and at least one such musškobanja (in late
nineteenth-century Montenegro) was allowed to vote in parliamentary
elections, even though female suffrage had not yet been introduced.37 This
practice was the subject of Srdjan Karanovics 1991 film, Virgina.38
Among various Indian nations of North America, similar practices survived
until the latter part of the nineteenth century. By contrast with the Balkan
peoples, the Indians allowed their cross-gendered persons to marry, although
they were expected to marry persons whose gender was in some sense “opposite”
to their own. In practice, this meant that a cross-gender “female,” insofar as he
was recognized as a social male, was expected to marry a traditional female,
while a cross-gender “male” was expected to marry a traditional male. At
issue was the preservation of a clear, gender-based division of labor within the
household—something that would have broken down if social females (or males)
had married each other. While some cross-gendered persons were self-selected
(their dreams often serving a legitimating function in this regard),
among the Kaska, a family that had all female children and desired a
son to hunt for them would select a daughter (probably the one who
showed the most inclination) to be “like a man”. When she was five,
the parents tied the dried ovaries of a bear to her belt to wear for life as

8
 INTRODUCTION

protection against conception. Though in different tribes the socializing

processes varied, girls achieved the cross-gender role in each instance
through accepted cultural channels.39
Both Balkan peoples and the Indians thus created an institutionalized cross-
gender role which would permit persons of one gender to live as members of
the other. Among the Balkan peoples, only the female-to-male transformation
was without shame. But among the Indians, transformations in both directions
were possible, and such persons were often highly respected within their
nations. Such transformations served to assure that gender-associated tasks
were performed without violating the gender system, and thus served to
preserve and protect the gender division of labor prescribed by their culture.
It thus further served to preserve social stability and social order by containing
at least some potential pressures for social change.40
Social mobility, the second subtheme of this section, pertains largely, if not
exclusively, to women seeking careers reserved for men. One such case is
recounted by Israel Burshatin in his chapter for this book, concerning the
case of Eleno/Elena. The most notorious cases of cross-dressing may well be
those involving pirates, since, as it turned out, a number of eighteenth-century
women who fancied a life of adventure as a swashbuckling buccaneer coped
with sexual prejudice by donning false beards and moustaches and passing
themselves off as men. In one such case, riddled with irony, a certain pirate,
whose real name was Anne Bonny, cross-dressed as a male and fell in love
with a handsome, bearded pirate, only to find out that this pirate was herself
a cross-dressed female by the name of Mary Read.41
The “golden age” of female cross-dressing in Europe, according to Dutch
social historians Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, was the period
running from the late sixteenth century until sometime in the nineteenth
century.42 In a comprehensive study of this period, they documented and
researched one hundred and nineteen cases of female transvestism in the
Netherlands alone, but found evidence of female cross-dressers across
Europe, with an especially large concentration in northwestern Europe, but
with cases also in Spain and Italy as well. Some of these women adopted
male disguise in order to enlist in the army, such as Catalina de Erauso (b.
1592), the so-called “nun-ensign,” who ran away from a convent in
northern Spain in order to join the Spanish army. She served for several years
before being discovered. She was subsequently granted a license by Philip IV
of Spain, which authorized her to wear men’s clothes.43 Christian Davis,
alias Christopher Welsh, an Irish woman (b. 1667), took to a life of soldiery
for what were, at first, romantic reasons: her husband had enlisted in the
English army (which was at the time fighting the French in Flanders) and
since she had not heard from him, she took a male disguise in order to gain
entry into that same army. Eventually she became convinced that her
husband had died in battle, but she reenlisted in the dragoons. When her true
sex was finally discovered, her commander summoned Welsh, who had long

9
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

been known as the “pretty dragoon,” discharged her, but ordered the
continuance of her pay.44 Others came to less fortunate ends. There is the
example of Catherine Rosenbrock, who served as a Dutch sailor and soldier
for twelve years, only to be imprisoned at age forty-two, by her own mother,
for the “negation of her feminine sex,” or the case of Maria van Antwerpen
(b. in Breda in 1719) who succeeded in passing for thirteen years only to end
with a nervous breakdown.45
Of course, not all women who cross-dressed wanted to be soldiers or pirates.
Some wanted to sign on board a ship bound for the Dutch East Indies, and
make their fortune there; others cross-dressed in order to engage in a life of
crime, or alternatively, in order to elude the police, who might be searching
for a female offender.46
Some of these female transvestites even took wives, at least some of whom
claimed to have been fooled, at least for a time. One example here is Catharina
Lincken, a German woman, who was brought to trial in 1721. According to
the court records, she had succeeded in passing as a man
…even in her married life, as she made use of “a leather-covered horn
through which she urinated and [which she kept] fastened against her
nude body.”47
Inevitably, such stories became the subject of popular songs, such as the case of
Barbara Adriaens and Hilletje Jans, whose marriage inspired a song in 1632:
For when the bride made free
To feel if there might be
Cock and balls, said she,
“T’is most rare
I perceive them not, yea, nothing there,”
How may I then assay
My heat with thee to allay
In the nuptial bed where we two lay?48
Perhaps the most famous female cross-dressers of all time are Joan of Arc
(1412–31), the legendary military leader who led a French army against
the English and won a remarkable battle at Orléans, and Georges Sand
(1804–76), the French novelist, who shocked and tantalized Europe with
her love affairs with composer Frederic Chopin, poet Alfred de Musset,
and many others.49

THE FUNCTIONS OF GENDER REVERSALS IN

FANTASY PLAY
Cross-dressing is a common feature in sexual fantasy play, or, more
specifically, sado-masochism, and bondage and discipline. These forms are
often confused and some clarification may be of help. Sado-masochism,

10
 INTRODUCTION

strictly speaking, is a consensual activity in which one person inflicts

physical pain on another for the purpose of giving the recipient pleasure.
Bondage and discipline is a consensual activity involving physical restraint,
light physical punishment purely for purposes of humiliation (such as
spanking), verbal abuse, scolding, training, and humiliation. In such fantasy
play, there is always a “top,” the person who takes charge and administers
punishments, and a “bottom,” who is required to follow orders and who is
the recipient of the punishments. Cross-dressing commonly figures in these
forms of play, especially in the case of male “bottoms.” Females rarely adopt
male personae in such play. Although either sex may be the “top,” and either
the “bottom,” in heterosexual fantasy play, it is far more common for
females to take the role of “top” and for males to assume the role of the
subservient “bottom”. The term “dominatrix” reflects this division of
“labor;” there is no equivalent word which refers exclusively to a male top in
the scene. The rarity of male domination in fantasy play is readily explained.
The whole point of such play is to create a world of fantasy through which
one might escape the realities of one’s life; in a patriarchal society, men are
already on “top,” and replicating that in sexual play would constitute
neither fantasy nor escape. As Angela Carter puts it, “[the submissive’s] pain
is in the nature of a holiday from his life.”50
The Urvater of sado-masochism were the Marquis Donatien-Alphonse-
François de Sade (1740–1814), a Parisian novelist, and Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch (1835–95), a Professor of History in Lemberg (Lvov). De Sade, who
advanced an argument for female equality in his La Philosophie dans le
boudoir, “…denounced the existing sexual order as one based upon a
monopolistic conception of property [in persons].”51 While conceiving all
sexuality in terms of domination, de Sade nonetheless sketched a “true
republic,” in which sexual liaisons would be “…but temporary contractual
engagements for pleasure, without loyalty or moral involvement beyond the
moment of enjoyment.”52 And he went further, and defended the validity of
the sheer “diversity of individual psychic needs.”53 In this way, de Sade laid
the basis for consensual fantasy play that dispenses with considerations of
what is “normal” or “proper” and orients itself only to what is “pleasurable”
and what is “therapeutic.”54
While de Sade seems content with fleeting episodes of intense play, Sacher-
Masoch conjures up a world of prolonged submission, with formal contracts
and fixed roles. In his classic semi-autobiographical novel, Venus in Furs, he
describes quite explicitly the fascination that submission holds for him:

“Yes, you have brought my dearest fantasies

to life”, I exclaimed. “They have lain dormant
too long.”
“And what are they?” She put her hand on
the nape of my neck.

11
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

A sweet dizziness came over me on feeling the

warmth of her little hand, and on meeting the
tender, searching gaze that she let fall on me
through half-closed eyes.
“To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful
woman whom I love and worship.”
“And who in return ill-treats you!” laughed
Wanda.
“Yes, who fetters me, whips me and kicks
me…”55

The focus is on the abnegation of one’s own power and the surrender of
one’s will to another—a retreat from responsibility and rationality to a world
of, despite occational spankings, complete safety and predictability. Anne
Rice’s novel, Beauty’s Punishment, makes the same point:
If I was saying something silent it was, “You are my Mistress. You own
me. And I will not look away until you tell me to. I will look into what
you are and what you do.” And she seemed to hear this and to be
fascinated.56

In the early 1970s, Martha Stein conducted a study of more than 1,200 men
who visited call girls. Setting up camp behind see-through mirrors, she
observed their behavior and analyzed trends. Of her sample, one hundred and
fifty-six were submissives (“slaves,” in her terminology). Of this number,
twenty-four liked to be “forced” to dress in female clothing, whether as
“punishment” or to serve their Mistress as her maids.57 At first sight, this
would appear to be profoundly paradoxical. After all, insofar as the session
presumes and celebrates an ideology of female superiority, female clothing
ought to be a badge of superiority, not a source of humiliation and degradation.
But the role of cross-dressing in sexual fantasy is, in fact, independent of this
ideology of female superiority, and reflects instead an exploitation of the taboo
of men wearing women’s clothing (which is to say, that this fetish is culture-
bound). Anyone who has seen heterosexual men accompanying their wives to
shop for lingerie cannot but have noticed how embarrassed such men typically
are, as if they were frightened for dear life lest anyone think they had any
interest in the merchandise. This fear, itself a product of the omnipotent taboo,
becomes the source of sweet humiliation in domination scenes involving cross-
dressing. But for a transvestite, this taboo exerts its influence at best as a
memory of what is “forbidden” and, in his case, it is not so much the act of
wearing female clothing that is humiliating; it is the fact of being compelled to
do so. Or, in fantasy play, it is the illusion of being so compelled.58
Cross-dressing may, thus, serve as a key to unleash a flood of intense
psychological pleasure, but the pleasure depends on the dominant’s striking
the right balance between mock humiliation and supportive reinforcement.

12
 INTRODUCTION

Reflecting on this dynamic, one professional dominatrix commented, “The

Superior helps the [submissive] transvestite realize how reasonable his fantasy
is, how tame and commonplace compared to others.”59 And in this way, the
submissive finds reassurance.60
One final note about the functions of female domination and cross-dressing
in fantasy play: many authors depict such games as if they were merely the
reverse of what they seemed, thus as if femaleness were still devalued. But, as
Terence Sellers has pointed out, the reality is much more complex and while
some so-called submissives are really dominants who want to “top from the
bottom,” for most of the submissives involved in cross-dressing scenes, “…
the Mistress helps the [submissive] transvestite build up a good positive image
of himself as a woman,…[and] make[s] a strong effort to treat the transsexual
and transvestite in all respects as a woman—and to impress upon her that to
be female is good.”61
Social scientists have largely shied away from any serious analysis of
domination/submission, as if the phenomenon had no conceivable connection
with the rest of culture, or, to put it differently, as if it did not reflect, in
distortion, the values and behavioral norms of society. On the contrary, the
behavioral norms embedded in the gender culture of a given society underlie
every aspect of fantasy play—but with this difference: in domination/
submission, the rules of that gender culture are reversed, exaggerated, or
mimicked in the spirit of play. In the scripts of fantasy play are revealed the
stresses of “normal” life. Infantilism, for example, tends to attract judges,
corporate executives, and other men in positions of responsibility and
authority; their desire to return to the cradle in fantasy play provides a clue
as to the psychological overload they experience in their careers.
The inclusion of cross-dressing in fantasy play figures on several levels.
First, gender reversal is an efficient way, arguably the most total way, in which
a person may shed his or her identity and assume a new persona; moreover, by
assuming a new persona, the cross-dresser creates a buffer that can absorb
any psychological pain that might otherwise be associated with the attendant
humiliations. This, in turn, provides an interesting commentary on the
prevailing gender culture, under which individuals are expected to maintain
the same gender identity and the same persona at all times (a notion recently
called into question by Martine Rothblatt, as we shall see in the next section).
Second, the energizing character of cross-dressing as a violation of the
great taboo alerts one simultaneously to the intensity of the widespread fear
that men have of being viewed as “sissies” and to the intense pleasure that
may lie at the very core of that fear and in the very act of violating the taboo.
And third, male cross-dressing behavior in fantasy play reflects the strains
associated with “achieving” maleness. As Nancy Chodorow points out,

In some sense “feminine identity” is more easily and surely attainable

than “masculine identity”. Margaret Mead claims that from the time of

13
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

birth, girls can begin to take on feminine identity through identification

with their mothers, while for little boys, masculine identification comes
through a process of differentiation, because what would be his
“natural” identification—identification with the person he is closest to
and most dependent upon—is according to cultural values “unnatural”,
[and] this works against his attainment of stable masculine identity.62
Male cross-dressing in fantasy play, in short, is a clue to the greater difficulties
created by Western gender culture for the achievement of “manliness”, by
comparison with “womanliness”.

TRANSGENDERISM
In the course of the 1980s, a grass-roots movement emerged in the United
States and Western Europe. Identifying itself as “transgenderist”, this
movement has been characterized by a consensus that the existing gender
culture, or, if one prefers, gender system, is oppressive. As Rothblatt puts it,
“the guiding principle of this movement is [the notion] that people should be
free to change, either temporarily or permanently, the sex type to which they
were assigned since infancy.”63 Self-designated transgenderists share the
conviction that the existing dyadic gender culture constitutes “an apartheid of
sex” into which people are “brainwashed.”64 Rothblatt claims that the entire
notion of identifiable male and female “natures” amounts to pure mythology,
and offers, in place of the existing two-gender system, the proposition that
“there are five billion people in the world and five billion unique sexual
identities.” 65 MacKenzie takes up the same theme, in consequence
characterizing transsexualism as “…a symptom of the cultural illness brought
on by a rigid bipolar gender system, whose cure may only be effected by the
radical transformation of the current gender system.”66 MacKenzie concludes
her book with an exhortation “…to dismantle the current one-nation-under-
gender-divided-and-unequal and recognize the transgender nation. Only when
this becomes a possibility, can there occur a true Gender Revolution.”67
Kate Bornstein, born in 1948 with male anatomy, is one of the most
articulate advocates of transgenderism. Describing herself, she put it this way
in her 1994 book, Gender Outlaw:
Gender identity is assumed by many to be “natural”; that is someone
can feel “like a man”, or “like a woman”. When I first started giving
talks about gender, this was the one question that would keep coming
up: “Do you feel like a woman now?” “Did you ever feel like a man?”
“How did you know what a woman would feel like?”
I’ve no idea what “a woman” feels like. I never did feel like a girl or
a woman; rather, it was my unshakable conviction that I was not a boy
or a man. It was the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that
convinced me to change my gender.68

14
 INTRODUCTION

Bornstein’s choice, thus, was not to opt for mindless conformity to the
gender prescriptions of the dominant social ideology, but rather to switch
from “variations on a theme of male” to “variations on a theme of female.”
Her book serves, hence, as a reminder that we are all (or almost all of us)
doing “variations” on one of these themes, or, as one wit once put it, we
are all “passing”.
And this furnishes, in turn, a more than adequate rejoinder to those
transophobic critics such as Judith Shapiro and Thomas Kando who
attack transsexuals for gender conformism (!) and lack of originality (!).69
One wonders why originality (and in the eyes of the beholder, at that)
should be seen by some as the precondition of authenticity, and whether,
for that matter, they see themselves as “original” in gender terms. Quite
apart from the fact that the enormous variety that one finds among
members of the species is fully replicated among members of the
transsexual population, rendering any generalizations about the allegedly
“conformist” predilections of transsexuals as utterly simplistic,
transophobes who find male-to-female transsexuals too feminine for their
tastes might ask themselves if what they really want is to force the objects
of their gaze to remain male, thus conforming to the Western static-binary
gender system.70 Far from being the conformists that some writers (such as
Shapiro and Kando) would make of them, transsexuals and
transgenderists overthrow the rigid gender system which occupies such a
central position in lands touched by Protestantism, not only by rejecting
the right wing’s favored doctrine of the unchangeability of sex but also, in
enough cases to be significant, by blending the clothing of each sex and
often by taking on a mixture of household tasks, blending some of the
stereotypical “female” tasks with some of the stereotypical “male” tasks.
For right-wingers, all of this strikes at the very heart of the system of rigid
conformity that they wish to impose on society. Far from being
conformists or “Uncle Toms,” as Thomas Kando put it in a strangely
acerbic attack, transsexuals could, with justice, be described as the most
authentic dissidents in liberal society.

CONCLUSION
Gender reversals, cross-dressing, and gender innovations have been found
in all historical epochs. Cross-dressers have included Hatshepsut (an
Egyptian ruler of the fifteenth century BCE), Roman Emperor Elagabalus,
Rudolf Valentino, J.Edgar Hoover, and British pop star Boy George.71
The sixteenth-century King of France Henri III habitually wore female
attire and even asked of his courtiers that they refer to him as “Her
Majesty.”72 Similarly, in eighteenth-century Russia, Empress Elizabeth
regularly wore men’s clothing when riding on her steed, and in 1744 started
holding regular “metamorphosis” balls in which all the guests were

15
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

expected to cross-dress. Elizabeth herself liked to come to these events

dressed variously as a cossack, as a French carpenter, or as a Dutch sailor
with the twice-dubious name Mikhailova.73 In this century, film-maker
Ed Wood was a heterosexual transvestite and, according to legend, wore
women’s silk underwear beneath his combat fatigues when he landed in
the South Pacific during World War Two.74
Transsexual cases have been documented not only in the US and Britain,
contrary to what transophobes sometimes claim, but also in many other
countries from Russia75 and Poland,76 to Spain,77 Germany,78 Japan,79 Egypt,
Brazil,80 and Mexico. In most states of the European Community, transsexuals
are able to obtain at least partial refunds for relevant surgery and, in 1989,
the European Parliament issued a call for an end to discrimination against
transsexuals whether at the workplace or elsewhere.81 Where Asia is
concerned, transsexualism is likewise gaining increased public acceptance,
and, in autumn 1994, New Delhi played host to an international transsexual
congress.82 Transsexualism and other forms of cross-gender behavior are
worldwide phenomena.
This book is an endeavor to record some of the diversity surrounding this
theme, and to contribute both toward an appreciation of the universality of
gender reversals across cultures and history and toward an understanding of
the contexts and functions of gender reversals.

NOTES
1 P.M.C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990, pp. 162–3.
2 Ibid., p. 168.
3 Even among the Greeks, there were other such stories, including the tale of Kaineus,
transformed from female to male, and Atalanta, a female reincarnated as a male
athlete. See Ibid., pp. 155–62.
4 See Betty Yorburg, Sexual Identity: Sex Roles and Social Change, New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 1974, pp. 1–2; Gerda Siann, Gender, Sex and Sexuality:
Contemporary Psychological Perspectives, London: Taylor & Francis, 1994, pp.
3, 125; Herbert Barry III, Margaret K.Bacon, and Irvin L.Child, “A Cross-Cultural
Survey of Some Sex Differences in Socialization”, in Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology, vol. 55, No. 3 (November 1957); Nancy Chodorow, “Being
and Doing: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Socialization of Males and
Females”, in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K.Moran (eds), Woman in Sexist Society:
Studies in Power and Powerlessness, New York: Mentor Books, 1971; Heidi
Dahles, “Performing Manliness: On the Meaning of Poaching in Dutch Society”,
in Ethnologia Europaea: Journal of European Ethnology (Copenhagen), vol. 21
(1991), No. 1; Andrea G.Hunter and James Earl Davis, “Constructing Gender:
An Exploration of Afro-American Men’s Conceptualization of Manhood”, in
Gender & Society, vol. 6, No. 3 (September 1992); and James A.Geschwender,
“Ethnicity and the Social Construction of Gender in the Chinese Diaspora”, in
Gender & Society, vol. 6, No. 3 (September 1992). Margaret Mead and Michel
Foucault have also contributed to developing theories of the social construction
of gender.

16
 INTRODUCTION

5 Gordene Olga MacKenzie, Transgender Nation, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling

Green State University Popular Press, 1994, p. 1.
6 Ibid., pp. 13–14, 62, 95.
7 Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender,
New York: Crown Publishers, 1995, p. 43.
8 Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes:
The Case of Cross-Gender Female”, in Signs, vol. 10, No. 11 (Autumn 1984),
pp. 28, 31, 35–6.
9 I am thinking here of the way in which many male-to-female transsexuals who,
while they may have been strongly sympathetic to feminism even prior to crossing
over, become fiercely feminist, occasionally even being attracted by lesbian
separatism.
10 Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender”, p. 37.
11 Jean E.Howard, “Cross-dressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early
Modern England”, in Lesley Ferris (ed.), Crossing the Stage: Controversies on
Cross-Dressing, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 22–3.
12 Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl
and the Sky Religion, Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982, pp.
20, 25.
13 Ibid., p. 197.
14 Serena Nanda, “Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India”, in Gilbert
Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture
and History, New York: Zone Books, 1994, p. 376.
15 Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myth, pp. 45, 66.
16 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the
Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth, New York: Free Press, 1992, pp. 25, 27.
17 Ibid., p. 29.
18 Quoted in Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of
Dionysos, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988, p. 20.
19 Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, & Sex in Contemporary Japan,
New York: Pocket Books, 1991, p. 436.
20 Nanda, “Hijras: An Alternative Sex”, p. 376.
21 Quoted in Elizabeth Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and
Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity”, in Julia Epstein
and Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender
Ambiguity, New York and London: Routledge, 1991, p. 30. Cf. (for Islam) Farid
al-Din ‘Attar: “A woman on the path of God becomes a man, she cannot be
called a woman.” Quoted in Richard Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society:
Social Factors in the Explanation of Religious Change in the Roman Empire”, in
Sabrina Petra Ramet and Donald W.Treadgold (eds), Render unto Caesar: The
Religious Sphere in World Politics, Washington D.C.: American University Press,
1995, p. 121n.
22 Vern L.Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 51–5; and Caroline
Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food
to Medieval Women, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1987, p. 291.
23 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 287.
24 Lesley Ferris, “Introduction: Current Crossings”, in Ferris (ed.), Crossing the
Stage, p. 9.
25 Ibid., p. 15.
26 Kristina Straub, “The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and

17
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke”, in Epstein and Straub (eds), Body

Guards, p. 143.
27 Howard, “Cross-dressing, the Theater”, p. 29.
28 E.g. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, London, 1633, as cited
in B.R.Burg, “Ho Hum, Another Work of the Devil: Buggery and Sodomy in
Early Stuart England”, in Salvatore J.Licata and Robert P.Petersen (eds), Historical
Perspectives on Homosexuality, New York: Howarth Press and Stein & Day,
1981, p. 76.
29 Quoted in Ferris, “Introduction”, p. 2.
30 Ibid., p. 3.
31 Quoted in Ibid., p. 3.
32 Quoted in New York Times (15 February 1993), p. B1.
33 Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film, New York: Penguin Books,
1992, pp. 33, 44–5.
34 Quoted in Guy Trebay, “Cross-Dresser Dreams”, in New Yorker (22 March
1993), p. 49.
35 Quoted in Ibid., p. 50.
36 Ibid., p. 51.
37 René Gremaux, “Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans”, in Herdt (ed.), Third
Sex, Third Gender, p. 250.
38 Reviewed in New York Times (27 March 1993), p. 12.
39 Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender”, p. 30.
40 A similar phenomenon is found in Omani society, where the xanith, a biological
male, is permitted a socially defined role which is intermediate between female
and male, mixing elements of each. For details and discussion, see Marjorie Garber,
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York and London:
Routledge, 1992, pp. 348–52. For further discussion of cross-gender roles in
Indian society, see Will Roscoe, “We’wha and Klah: The American Indian Berdache
as Artist and Priest”, in American Indian Quarterly, vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 1988);
and Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1991.
41 Tony Horwitz, “Scholars Plunder Myths About Pirates, and It’s Such a Drag”, in
Wall Street Journal (23 April 1992), p. A10. For a brief review of a book on this
subject by Julie Wheelwright, see The Sunday Times (London), 1 April 1990.
42 Rudolf M.Dekker and Lotte C.van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism
in Early Modern Europe, trans. from Dutch by Judy Marcure and Lotte van de
Pol, London: Macmillan, 1989, p. 2.
43 Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 127–8.
44 Bullough and Bullough, Cross Dressing, pp. 101–3.
45 Dekker and van de Pol, Female Transvestism, pp. 3, 19, 23–4.
46 Ibid., pp. 32, 34–6.
47 Ibid., p. 16.
48 Quoted in Bullough and Bullough, Cross Dressing, p. 100.
49 Her given name was Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin. For an especially fine
treatment of Sand, see Paul G.Blount, Georges Sand and the Victorian World,
Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1979.
50 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 21.
51 Frank E.Manuel and Fritzie P.Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World,
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 545.
52 Ibid., p. 546.
53 Ibid., p. 547.

18
 INTRODUCTION

54 As Martha L.Stein concludes, in her study of 156 submissive men, “the Slave
scenes…appeared to function therapeutically by allowing clients to enjoy various
sexual practices without guilt, to relieve anxieties by a symbolic retreat into
childhood, to compensate for [assertive] or domineering behavior in other areas
of their life, to act out self-destructive impulses in a controlled context that
channeled the impulses toward a pleasurable end. The sessions certainly enabled
the men to relieve sexual tensions by acting out fairly strong desires they would
otherwise have [had] to suppress.”—Martha L.Stein, Lovers, Friends, Slaves…,
New York: Berkley Medallion, 1974, p. 302.
55 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870), in Masochism: Coldness and
Cruelty: Venus in Furs, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 180.
56 Anne Rice, writing as A.N.Roquelaure, Beauty’s Punishment, New York: Plume,
1984, p. 154.
57 Stein, Lovers, Friends, Slaves, pp. 279, 286.
58 On this point, see Anne McClintock, “Confessions of a Psycho-Mistress: An
Interview with Mistress Vena”, in Social Text, no. 37 (Winter 1993), pp. 65–6.
59 Terence Sellers, The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern, Brighton: Temple
Press, 1992, p. 99.
60 See also Robert J.Stoller, Pain & Passion: A Psychoanalyst Explores the World of
S&M, New York: Plenum Press, 1991, pp. 80–1, 85, and passim.
61 Sellers, The Correct Sadist, p. 98.
62 Chodorow, “Being and Doing,” p. 271.
63 Rothblatt, Apartheid of Sex, p. 16.
64 Ibid., p. 19.
65 Ibid., p. xiii.
66 MacKenzie, Transgender Nation, p. 114.
67 Ibid., p. 172.
68 Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, New
York and London: Routledge, 1994, p. 24.
69 Shapiro writes: “While transsexuals may be deviants in terms of cultural norms
about how one arrives at being a man or a woman, they are, for the most part,
highly conformist about what to do once you get there.” See Judith Shapiro,
“Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of
Sex,” in Epstein and Straub (eds), Body Guards, p. 253. Kando condemns
transsexuals even more explicitly: “Unlike various liberated groups, transsexuals
are reactionary, moving back toward the core-culture rather than away from it.
They are the Uncle Toms of the sexual revolution. With these individuals, the
dialectic of social change comes full circle and the position of greatest deviance
becomes that of the greatest conformity.”—Thomas Kando, Sex Change: The
Achievement of Gender Identity among Feminized Transsexuals, Springfield, Ill.:
Charles C.Thomas Publ., 1973, p. 145, as quoted in Shapiro, “Transsexualism:
Reflections,” p. 255. This sweeping generalization about an entire group smacks
of the most simple-minded thinking, bordering on schizoid paranoia. If someone
were to write that all heterosexuals were conformists or that all Scotsmen were
fanatics, it would be readily apparent that the writer of such generalizations had
lost hold of his senses. Such sweeping generalizations about transsexuals have
precisely the same order of validity.
Some transophobes literally foam at the mouth when discussing sex change.
Take, for example, Julie Burchill who, in a column for The Times of London,
equates transsexuals with “third sex” transgenderists, as if there were no
difference between the aspiration to be a woman or a man and the aspiration to
fashion some original gender, and blasts both groups as “extremely reactionary

19
 SABRINA PETRA RAMET

… because they really do seem to believe…that gender is actually more important

than anything else.” I, for one, have never met a transsexual or transvestite who
believed that gender was “more important than anything else.” Indeed, this
hateful endeavor to portray transsexuals as monomaniacs void of any sense of
the importance of love, family, career, art, truth, justice, and loyalty reveals the
fundamental bigotry intrinsic not only to Julie Burchill’s transophobia but to all
politicized transophobia. Interestingly enough, Burchill’s remonstration against
transsexuals’ alleged reactionary conformism was run under the aggressively
conformist headline “Two sexes are plenty thank you.” (The Times, 11 June
1995), on Nexis.
Regrettably, the charge of “conformism” recurs throughout the literature,
especially in sources based on minimal or nonexistent fieldwork. Even Anne
Bolin, an otherwise quite sophisticated observer, offers the following
generalization about all male-to-female transsexuals: “Transsexuals consciously
and deliberately alter the way they walk, taking smaller steps and keeping the
arms close to the body… They consciously use weaker expletives choosing to be
generally more polite than males.” Anne Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual
Rites of Passage, Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1988, p. 134. In my own
contacts, I have seen sufficient variety—vast variety in fact—to convince me that
such generalizations are, at best, total obfuscations, myths. For example, in my
own case, in making the transition from male to female, I became convinced that
it was imperative to avoid giving any signal that would suggest weakness to
simple minds. I have therefore avoided frilly or delicate clothing, have avoided
making any adjustment whatsoever in my gait, have made a point of being firm in
statements where firmness seems to me appropriate, and have gone out of my
way to spread myself out (physically) at meetings with colleagues, thus using
body language to communicate power. Why anyone should think that people
change sex in order to conform to specifically the most demeaning stereotypes is
quite beyond me. Why anyone would presume to generalize about “all
transsexuals” as if we were some sort of disciplined military unit is, again,
beyond me.
70 The best works on the subject of transsexualism are: Bolin, In Search of Eve
(despite occasional lapses); and Kim Elizabeth Stuart, The Uninvited Dilemma,
Portland, Oregon: Metamorphous Press, 1981. Also interesting is: Robert J. Stoller,
Presentations of Gender, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985,
especially chapters 2–4.
71 Bullough and Bullough, Cross Dressing, pp. 23–4,39; and Garber, Vested Interests,
p. 360.
72 MacKenzie, Transgender Nation, p. 31.
73 Tamara Talbot Rice, Elizabeth—Empress of Russia, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1970, pp. 33, 90, 136.
74 Irish Times (Dublin), 6 May 1995, p. 5.
75 For discussion, see Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role
Socialization in the USSR, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990,
especially ch. 5.
76 See Stanislaw Dulko, “Sexual Activity and Temperament in Polish Transsexuals”,
in Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 17, No. 2 (1988).
77 MacKenzie, Transgender Nation, p. 64. See also Newsweek (5 December 1988),
p. 88; The Jerusalem Post (24 February 1989), on Nexis; Evening Standard (17
July 1992), p. 29; and The Guardian (10 November 1993), on Nexis. Male-to-
female sex reassignment surgery has been performed in Spain since at least 1960.
See Daily Telegraph (London), 9 January 1992, p. 19.

20
 INTRODUCTION

78 Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), 16 August 1994, 24 November 1994, and 11

February 1995—all on Nexis.
79 The Independent (London), 30 July 1994, p. 48.
80 Scotland on Sunday (27 June 1993), on Nexis.
81 Reuters (12 September 1989), on Nexis.
82 Neue Zürcker Zeitung (28 November 1994), on Nexis.

21
 2

TRAVERSING GENDER
Cultural context and gender practices
Anne Bolin

Hermaphroditic genders, two-spirit traditions (formally referred to as

Berdache1), cross-gendered roles such as the North Piegan manly-hearted
women, woman-marriage, boy-marriage, and rituals in which cross-dressing
and/or other cross-gendered behaviors are institutionalized demonstrate five
forms of gender variance found on a global scale.2 While there are undoubtedly
many other ways to classify gender variant identities and behaviors offered
by the ethnographic record, this classification scheme represents a pilot
endeavor to create a typology. The goal of this typology is to foster
comparisons and locate commonalities among gender variant phenomenon
not usually found sharing the same pages. Mildred Dickemann states this far
more eloquently in the following:
…good science involves the movement of thought, both analytic and
intuitive, back and forth between more abstract, generalizing levels of
theory and hypotheses and more particular levels of description and
classification. (All description is of course low level generalization.)
Description and classification, in the curious mind, provoke theory,
because they provoke questions about the nature of relationships.3
This five-form model was inspired by Gilbert Herdt’s 1988 “Cross-Cultural
Forms of Homosexuality and the Concept Gay.”4 In this work Herdt presented
a fourfold model of homosexual practices found historically and cross-
culturally.5 My typology is an incipient effort to encourage the kind of analysis
that moves beyond the classic and modern approaches to gender as
transformed statuses.6 I have tried to illustrate this in my title through the
term “traversing.” It was suggested to me by a collaborator from the
transgendered community that my previous use of the word “transcending,”
in an article on transgenderism, implied moving from one social position to
another.7 This terminology did not seem to denote the experience of many in
the North American transgendered community who were actively engaged
in the creation of a new “genderness”—a process of gender construction.
Traversing is defined by Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1974) as
“1: something that crosses or lies across.” This article will investigate the

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 CULTURAL CONTEXT AND GENDER PRACTICES

cross-cultural expressions of gender variance in terms of cross/alternative/

additional genders; cross-gendered roles, rituals in which cross-gendered
behavior occurs as well as data collected recently from members of the
emergent North American transgendered community. Consequently, I hope
the term “traverse” captures something of the gestalt of this article and is
satisfactory to the transgendered community and academic audiences alike.8
The working image of traverse implies crossing as well as interpenetrating
and shifting aspects of gendered symbols.
The intent of this article is a modest one. First, I will present the five-
form gender variance typology through selected examples from the
ethnographic literature. These examples will illustrate each of five identified
forms of gender variance: 1) hermaphroditic genders; 2) two-spirit traditions;
3) cross-gendered roles as in the manly-heart types of traditions; 4) woman-
marriage; and 5) cross-gendered rituals. Each type will be discussed in terms
of the contributions of the cultural constructionist orientation emphasizing
the social context of the form9 and offering comments about relevant debates.
The theoretical focus will be placed on the “symbolic load” of gender
variance, that is, on sets of embedded gender relations given symbolic
expression.10 While the emphasis is on gender, not sexual behavior, data on
sexuality will be incorporated to illustrate that sexuality is not an essential
characteristic but is socially constructed in relation to existing gender
categories/social gender identities.11
The presentation of the five types will be followed by a discussion of the
implications these diverse forms of gender variance have for deconstructing
the contemporary North American gender paradigm.12 Despite the apples
and oranges of comparing institutions, statuses, roles, and ceremony, all five
forms involve the cultural manipulation and reassortment of gendered
attributes. These categories of gender variance represent a collage of either
the conflation of and/or disassembling and realignment of physiological or
bodily insignias and behavioral traits that are culturally assigned as gendered.
These forms problematize our Western biocentric paradigm of gender as
bipolar and biologically unequivocal. Each category will be examined in terms
of its cultural context including interpretive suggestions for understanding
gender as practiced.
Not only does the cross-cultural record have implications for decanting
the Euro-American gender paradigm, but this knowledge has the potential to
impact and infiltrate as well. I found this to be true for at least one population.
The anthropological literature and constructionist/interpretivist theories have
had a receptive audience among many who identify themselves as members
of the transgendered community. The cross-gendered evidence from ethnology
has been one factor in the cultural changes that have occurred in the emergence
of a transgendered community from local transsexual and transvestite groups.
This research is specific to those who have identified as male-to-female
transsexuals, male cross-dressers, and transvestites.13

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 ANNE BOLIN

CONCEPTUAL ORIENTATION
Before continuing, it is necessary to include working definitions for terms
and concepts used throughout this work. The term gender variance
includes reference to gender-based Western scientific concepts of status
and role. A status is defined as a position or office in a society that
includes rights and duties. A role is a set of socially expected behaviors
associated with a status.14 While gender variant statuses such as two-spirit
institutions are prominent in anthropological literature, it is important to
note that gender variant statuses are only one kind of gender variation as
represented by this five- form model.
Components of the North American/Western gender paradigm include
sex and gender. Sex typically refers to biological components including “…
chromosomes, external genitals, gonads, internal sexual apparatuses,
hormonal states, secondary sexual characteristics and even the brain”
according to Stoller.15 It generally includes genitals and other physiological
features ascribed to males and females.16
Gender is defined here as the psychological, social, and cultural domain of
being male or female. Gender is a social construction and system of meanings
with multiple dimensions including gender identity, both personal and social.
Gender identity is interpreted as including components of both personal
identity and social identity, that is to say, the self as both individual and
cultural.17 Gender identity has been defined as “[t]he sameness, unity, and
persistence of one’s individuality as a male or female (or ambivalent), in
greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and
behavior.”18 However, given anthropological and social-historical investigation
of gender variation, this definition needs revision to include the possibility of
third and/or supernumerary (additional) gender identities as personal and
social constructions.19
Gender identity incorporates the private experience of personal identity
or one’s self concept, while social identity refers to the sociocultural
recognition or categorization of gendered identities. It includes status or
position in society as a gender that is, as a woman, man, girl, boy, and role
concomitants such as appearance, demeanor, and behaviors. In Western
culture, this includes social concepts of femininity and masculinity.20
Gender identity and social identity may or may not converge in the
individual’s life or in a particular interaction.
Because contemporary societies understand sex as signifying gender, what
are regarded as the quintessential insignias of sex have little stability historically
and comparatively. This has implications for understanding how gender
variant identities are contextually situated within a broader system of meanings
associated with femaleness and maleness cross-culturally and in North
America. My theoretical moorings consist of influences from symbolic and
interpretive anthropology21 and social history22 conjoined with post-modern

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 CULTURAL CONTEXT AND GENDER PRACTICES

discourse analysis.23 Recognition of the importance of the individual’s

experience and meanings within the cultural context follows works by Herdt24
and Nanda25 on gender variance and the importance of polyvocality.

THE FIVE-FORM MODEL OF GENDER VARIANCE

1 Hermaphroditic Genders
Pseudohermaphroditism is of interest as this phenomenon reveals cultural
classification systems of physiological variation. The prefix pseudo “was
once used to denote the fact that the gonads were not hermaphroditically
mixed (ovarian plus testicular tissue) as in true hermaphroditism, but were
either testicular (male pseudohermaphroditism) or ovarian (female
pseudoherm-aphroditism).26 For brevity the term hermaphrodite is used and
defined as “a congenital condition of ambiguity of the reproductive structures
so that the sex of the individual is not clearly defined as exclusively male or
exclusively female.”27
The Navajo provide an example of a culture in which a hermaphrodite
status is highly valued, although this is not to suggest a universal ethnographic
trend as cultural responses to genital ambiguity vary.28 For example, Edgerton’s
study 29 of the Pokot of Kenya investigates the sererr, a recognized
hermaphrodite status that is demarcated as neither male nor female. Among
the Pokot, the essential insignias of status as a man or a woman are pre-
pubertal and adolescent sex play, ritual circumcision of both genders, and
reproduction. But because of the serrers’ incomplete genital development,
they cannot assume the appropriate sexual and reproductive roles, nor can
their undeveloped genitals be circumcised because of the nature of their
development. The words of one Pokot are indicative: “A sererr cannot be a
real person. To be a real Pokot, you must be very skilful at sex. You do this
sex or you cannot think well of yourself and no one will think well of you
either.”30 They are denied status as women or men and occupy a netherworld
of genderlessness if they are not killed at birth.31
The Navajo recognize three physical sexes: hermaphrodites, males, and
females,32 and at least three or more gender statuses: men (boys), women
(girls), and nadle. There are three kinds of nadles: real nadle and nadle
pretenders who may be genital men (males) and women (females). It is not
clear whether the genital male and female nadle pretenders are regarded as
nadle or yet another category. The nadle are assigned their position on the
basis of ambiguous genitals. They assume occupational tasks and behaviors
associated with women but they also have special rights not shared by other
Navajo.33 nadle sex partners may include women or men but not other nadle
or nadle pretenders. Women may therefore select as sexual partners men,
nadle, or nadle pretenders, and men may choose as partners women, nadle,
or nadle pretenders. Homosexuality, defined as intercourse between partners

25
 ANNE BOLIN

of the same gender, is not permitted. This serves to illustrate problems of

interpretation cross-culturally. If the nadle is a third gender status, then the
term homosexual is meaningless and illustrates that Western concepts of sexual
orientation and behavior are linked to the polarity of that gender schema.
Such partnerships cannot be classified within our Western schema based on
heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality. In fact, heterosexism
decomposes in the face of this evidence. The permutations become even more
interesting in the case of the nadle pretender who is recognized as a nadle but
whose genitals are not hermaphroditic. The paradox in the nadle status is
that while the hermaphroditic genitals define the position, they do not prevent
those who are not hermaphrodites from acquiring the status—hermaphroditic
genitals define but do not limit participation as a nadle.
While this is not an exhaustive review, Serena Nanda’s study of the Hijras
of India warrants mention. The Hijra are a recognized third gender composed
ideally of hermaphroditic impotent men who undergo a ritualized surgical
emasculation in which the genitals are removed.34 However, the Hijra’s social
identity may be similar to the nadle in that it also provides opportunities for
“pretenders.” As a variant third gender, the Hijra community
…attracts different kinds of persons, most of whom join voluntarily as
teenagers or adults. It appears to be a magnet for persons with a wide
range of cross-gender characteristics arising from either a psychological
or organic condition. The Hijra role accommodates different
personalities, sexual needs [including either sex with males or the ideal
of an ascetic sexless life], and gender identities without completely losing
its cultural meaning.35
Sagarin’s reanalysis36 of the Imperato-McGinley37 1974 report of eighteen
pseudohermaphroditic males, known in the study site of Santo Domingo as
guevedoce, provides additional insight into the question of gender identity,
status, and role. The guevedoce has been discussed from the clinical perspective
of Imperato-McGinley as an example of the primacy of hormonal factors
over socialization factors in determining gender identity and psychosexual
orientation. The guevedoce, due to a recessive gene expressed through in-
breeding, were at birth genitally ambiguous. They were reared as girls until
puberty when radical virilization occurred, their gender identity changed,
their behavior became masculine, and they chose females as their sexual
objects. Imperato-McGinley attributes this change to the impact of testosterone
in utero and at puberty.
In contrast, Sagarin proposed an emic or “insider” interpretation of the
pseudohermaphrodites’ seemingly remarkable gender reversal. He noted they
were not raised as girls but as members of a special indigenous category of
children with female characteristics who will become males at puberty.38 By
understanding the guevedoce as a folk classification, Sagarin has offered a
sociocultural explanation which challenged the Imperato-McGinley view that

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 CULTURAL CONTEXT AND GENDER PRACTICES

testosterone accounted for the reversal of gender identity, role behavior, and
female sexual partner choice. Thus, according to Sagarin, the guevedoce was
not someone who had a cross-sex identity problem that needed reversing,
but rather was someone who was expected to become a male at twelve.
Sagarin’s early sociological critique was on the cutting edge of anthropological
contributions to the study of gender as a cultural construction. While the
discourse on third and alternative genders was not well developed until the
1990s, Sagarin offered a rudimentary critique that began to explore the subject
of gender categorization. Subsequently, numerous other critiques have
followed addressing flaws in the methodology and procedures of the Imperato-
McGinley research.39
Studies by Herdt40 and Herdt and Davidson41 of five alpha-reductase
deficiencies among the Sambia directly bear on the Imperato-McGinley42
biocentric empire of hormonal determinism. Herdt and Davidson note the
presence of a third gender category for which nine Sambian male
pseudohermaphrodites were identified, known as kwolu-aatmwol, “male
thing-transforming-into-female thing” or in Neo-Melanisan Pidgin “turnim-
man” emphasizing turning into a man. They were raised with the stigmatized
status of kwolu-aatmwol males: “persons more male-like than female-like,
known to be hermaphroditic.”43 They are reared as male-like because they
undergo some masculinization of the genitals at puberty. Interestingly, in a
situation similar to Money and Ehrhardt’s matched pairs of hermaphrodites,44
an additional five were accidentally assigned as women, only to have their
status reversed subsequently as adults. Apparently, these women only
reluctantly changed to the ambiguous status, contradicting the Imperato-
McGinley notion of hormone-induced gender identity change.45

2 Two-spirit Traditions
The classic anthropological literature on two-spirit traditions is biased heavily
toward examples of presumed genetic/genital males. However, women also
occupied these positions.46 Whether female two-spirit forms are similar to
male forms is unclear. It may be argued convincingly that, because gender
statuses are structured differently for women and men globally, gender variant
statuses for women may not be expected to be mirror images of men’s gender
variance.47 Two-spirit persons have been defined as embodying the following
characteristics: (1) a culturally recognized position as gender transformed
and/or as an additional status that includes dressing partially or completely
as the other gender; (2) adopting the behaviors and demeanors associated
with the other gender or a unique combination of men’s and women’s
behaviors (that is, a blended status);48 and (3) in some cases choosing a partner
of the same physiological sex although this is debated and seems culture
specific.49 The ethnographic record argues strongly that gender identity is
prior to and/or independent of sexual behavior.

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 ANNE BOLIN

Two-spirit traditions reported on ethnographically offer a diversity of

characteristics enmeshed within the structure of the gender system including:
recognition of the status at an early age, status occupancy in adulthood,
intermittent occupancy, and shaman complexes among other expressions.
Two examples from an extensive literature are offered briefly for discussion.
Two-spirits may be identified at an early age. Among the Pima, if a boy
gave indication of interest in female tasks he was put through a test. A bow
and a basket were placed near him in a hut. The hut was set on fire, and if
he grabbed for the basket in fear, then he was wi-kovat, a Berdache (two-
spirit) of marginal status.50 This form has direct bearing on the issue of
gender ascription. In this case, genitalia are not the essential insignias of a
gender. Gender is literally chosen by those who demonstrate potential career
interest. For some societies gender dichotomous behaviors in terms of work
tasks are the core features of gender.51 In this regard, Harriet Whitehead
has asserted that:
Two dimensions of personal identity stood out as central to North
American Indians’ notions of gender. On the one hand, there was one’s
sexual anatomy and physiology, on the other, one’s participation in the
sexual division of labor and—somewhat less salient—one’s public
appearance (dress, demeanor)… When not reinforced by the
quintessentially manly activities of hunting and warfare, and at the
same time contradicted by stereotypical feminine tasks, the male identity
that emerged was that of the “part-man, part-woman” the berdache
[two-spirit personage]52
The indigenous form of the Polynesian mahu was a gender variant status for
males in old Polynesia that included “homosexual” practices. The position
seems to be a combination of a life span tradition in which the mahu began
cross-gendered tasks and dressing at a young age53 with an option for
intermittency—one need not remain mahu throughout one’s life.54 Levy55
regards the Tahitian mahu as an example of a role variant for men’s gender
rather than as a third gender, although his discussion is suggestive of an
alternative gender. For Levy the mahu is an embodiment and visible
representation of gender dichotomies in a society with low gender disparity.
The essence of the mahu position is that it functions to highlight gender
differences so that men can see how to avoid non-manly behaviors. Besnier56
shies away from regarding the mahu of Polynesia as a third gender and adopts
the term gender liminality in reference to the mahu, conceptualizing the identity
as an intermediate category.
According to Levy,57 the mahu tradition has continued from precontact
times, although attributes of the status have changed somewhat today so
that while the mahu still performs work activities that are considered
traditionally women’s work, they no longer cross-dress in Tahiti. The mahu
are regarded as being “natural” although one does not have to occupy mahu

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status throughout one’s life. In addition, there is a conception of “femininity”

associated with the mahu. One can also be “mahuish” without being a mahu.
The mahu are not stigmatized for their status or their homosexual behavior.
In Tahiti, each village could have only one mahu. Apparently the mahu
engaged in fellatio with non-cross-gendered male partners. The homosexual
aspects of the mahu were not central to the social identity, but rather it was
the cross-gendered aspects of dress and behaviors that were key signifiers of
the status. This is suggested by several lines of evidence according to Besnier
who concludes that “[in] ‘traditional’ Polynesian contexts, partaking in
homosexual activities is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for gender-
liminal status…[consequently] sexual relations with men are seen as an
optional consequence of gender liminality, rather than its determinant,
prerequisite or primary attribute (as Charles Callender and Lee M.Kochems
show, this pattern is cross-culturally widespread).58 Levy59 argues that “a
mahu is seen as a substitute female.”
Kirkpatrick’s report60 of Marquesan mahus, in contrast to his report about
the Tahitian status, notes that it is an ambiguous or disvalued status. According
to Kirkpatrick, homosexual behavior is not the salient attribute for the
Marquesan gender variant, but rather occupation and peer relations (as in
Tahiti). The Marquesan mahu are not considered women, but rather men
who want to act as women.61
The case of the mahu is suggestive in terms of how indigenous systems of
gender variant forms may be reinvigorated by Western types of gender variance
associated with gay culture; for example, gay transvestite traditions of
theatrical performance and sex work. Chanteau and Spiegel62 conducted
serological studies of risk for LAV/HTLV-III infection among Tahitian
homosexual populations who frequented hotels, bars, restaurants, and night
clubs. These studies included cross-dressing (“transvestite”) homosexuals.
They also noted that some of this population had had plastic surgery and
female hormone therapy. This argues there are a number of possible gendered
identities in such a population. It is impossible to assess from their reports
the nature of these identities or how cross-dressing and homosexuality figure
in the genderscape. Are these mahu expressions influenced by Western gay
cross-dressing, or it a postmodern synthesis of both patterns, or yet some
other genesis or blend of multiple identities?
Two-spirit traditions may also be intermittent, that is an individual may
temporarily take on two-spirit status, thereby challenging our Western notion
of gender as immutable. Such individuals may adopt and shed a given gender
status several times throughout their lives.
Wikan63 has provided a powerful example of an intermittent two-spirit
tradition among the Omani. Her research examined the Omani xanith, a
third gender option. The xanith does not cross-dress, but belts the man’s
tunic like women belt their garb. This gendered status includes an economic
component in terms of occupational specialization and homosexual

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prostitution. According to Wikan this third gender functions as an

“inexpensive sexual outlet” to preserve women’s purity as well as providing
economic opportunity and upward mobility for men. The status can be
shed and the xanith can resume his position as a man, including marriage
and a family. The xanith carries no negative stigma upon repositioning as a
man. Wikan estimates that one in fifty men choose this option. The
implication is that the xanith is a safety-net gender for men who fall upon
hard times economically. The role of being an insertee in penile intercourse
is a salient feature. Among the Omani recipients of penile intercourse are
either women or xanith.
The two-spirit traditions in all their many genders demonstrate that the
Western dual gender classification system is just one of many, itself a cultural
system of gender. The research in the field suggests that the two-spirit tradition
may well be a third gender category separate from male and female; for the
two-spirited tells us that man and woman, male and female are not the only
universal categories for gender.

3 Cross-gendered roles
Cross-gender roles are distinguished from various gender transformed statuses.
This is a subtle distinction that may be more evident through example than
explanation. However, the categories themselves are problematic since their
discreetness may be a by-product of the process of Western scientific
categorization. It is very likely that this distinction is an artifact and that
other liminal or alternative gender forms may not disengage into status and
role; after all the social scientific literature often conflates the two.64 This
pilot model invites further scrutiny. For now it represents the dilemma of
moving from modernist reports into postmodern interpretations. But, for the
purposes of this inquiry, I will hypothetically argue that there may indeed
exist a cross-gendered role that is not a transformed or alternative gender.
The gender may be unchanged but the occupant’s demeanor and behavior
include attributes usually associated with the other gender (in situations where
there are only two). Reports of this form are limited in the literature and are
relegated to female variance. Two examples of female gender role variance
are illustrative: the North Piegan manly-hearts and the Marquesan mako
shark woman.
The North Piegan are a high sex role disparate culture in which men are
aggressive while women are submissive. The manly-hearts are “macho”
women characterized by “…aggression, independence, boldness and sexuality,
all traits associated with men’s role behaviors. But to be a manly-heart also
requires that one be wealthy and married.”65 The manly-hearts gender is not
transformed, although they “act like men.”66 While some consider the manly-
heart a blended gender status,67 it is perhaps more reasonable to regard it as an
alternative role for women, in something like the vein of the Western tomboy.

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Unlike tomboyism, which is age-restricted, this may become a permanent role

for the manly-hearts. Nor is it a stigmatized role, in contrast to Western culture
when women adopt behaviors typically associated with males.
Among the Marquesan Islanders, Kirkpatrick68 has described the vehine
mako or shark woman. This gender category is unlike the mahu in that it is
not based on relational or occupational criteria, but seems from my reading
more akin to the manly-heart than the mahu. The shark woman is
characterized by an aggressive and vigorous sexuality. The defining feature
of the vehine mako woman is that she is the sexual (heterosexual) initiator,
an activity relegated to the masculine/manly domain. This form of gender
variance is ripe for further analysis. It would be interesting to consider whether
there may be a pattern or formula to be found that will explain why in one
situation gender variant behaviors (and which ones for that matter—dress,
demeanor, or action) yield role variants while in other cultural contexts fully-
fledged alternative third genders are formed.69 Lang70 argues that the Piegan
manly-hearts inscribes the privileging of masculinity for both males and
females, while women’s pursuits were valued in females only.

4 Woman-Marriage and Boy-Marriage

Woman-marriage is a predominantly African institution where one woman
marries another. There are a number of types of woman-marriage, but debates
occur over the kinds of sexual practices associated with this form of marriage
and/or whether a woman-husband is a transformed status. Blackwood71 argues
that lesbian behavior cannot be ruled out while others consider woman-
marriage a non-sexual institution.72 Evans-Pritchard’s73 study notes that
woman-marriage occurs among the Nuer in situations where a female is
barren. The barren woman will take a wife, hence becoming a cultural man,
and also arrange for a progenitor for the wife so that “she” becomes a father.
This functions as a kin recruitment strategy.74
Among the Nandi, women-husbands engage in male work tasks of
cultivating and herding.75 Blackwood76 maintains that woman-marriage was
not a cross-gender institution, although Oboler77 reports that the woman-
husband was considered a man. The meaning of what it is to be a woman-
husband in this institution is not resolved, nor is it clear whether lesbian
relations occurred within it. And indeed if the woman-husband is regarded
as a man, then the term lesbian is ethnocentric. Blackwood proposes that
woman-marriage presents a “model of relations between women within the
gender system” rather than a cross-gender role.78
Evans-Pritchard’s study of “Sexual Inversion among the Azande”79
focuses on “homosexual” relations among young warriors and boys,
reflecting the theoretical discourse of the times. Evans-Pritchard has
documented a form of temporary marriage between bachelor youths and
boys (aged anywhere from twelve to twenty years old) that occurred among

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the Azande of the Sudan. In this institution, youthful men were organized
into bachelor military-work companies. “It was the custom for members…to
take boy wives.”80 Evans-Pritchard explained this institution in terms of
three interlocking variables. Polygynous practices, including large harems
kept by the wealthy, resulted in a scarcity of marriageable women among the
Azande. This led to delayed marriage for less wealthy young men until their
mid-twenties to thirties. And
because girls were engaged (in a legal sense married) very young, often
at birth, the only way youths could obtain satisfaction from a woman
was in adultery. But that was a very dangerous solution to a young
man’s problem, for the fine his father would have to pay was heavy….
[I]t sometimes happened that the husband was so enraged that he
refused compensation and chose instead to mutilate the offender,
cutting off his ears, upper lip, genitals, and hands. So, the risk being too
great, it was the custom for cautious bachelors in the military
companies who were living at court, if they were not content to
masturbate—a practice to which no shame is attached, though a young
man would not do it in public—to marry boys and satisfy their sexual
needs with them.81
The cultural solution was boy-marriage, which followed the pattern of
heterosexual marriage. The boys were regarded as “women”: “Ade nga ami”
they would say, “we are women.” A boy was addressed by his lover as diare,
“my wife,” and the boy addressed him as kumbami, “my husband.” Kinship
rules and terminology were followed for these marriages. While the boy might
perform many tasks usually associated with a woman’s roles as a wife, he did
not perform every activity. Apparently there was not complete overlap between
boy-wives and women-wives, although Evans-Pritchard is sketchy on this,
noting for example that they did not cook porridge for their husbands and
that they carried their husbands’ shields on journeys (presumably women
wives did not).
With regard to the sexual side, at night the boy slept with his lover, who
had intercourse with him between his thighs (Azande expressed disgust
at the suggestion of anal penetration). The boys got what pleasure they
could by friction of their organs on the husband’s belly or groin.
However, even though there was this side to the relationship, it was
clear from Zande accounts that there was also the comfort of a nightly
sharing of the bed with a companion.82
After reaching adulthood, the boy-wives would become warriors and take
their own boy-wives, while their former husbands went on to marry women.
A reinterpretation suggests that it is the young boys’ position as wives to
bachelor warriors that may be central to the status rather than the homosexual
relations per se. A postmodern and constructionist lens begs for comparison

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with the forms of woman marriage previously described. As a temporary

status, was the boy-wife a transformed gender or an alternative gender? How
might this complex be differentiated from ritualized Sambian homosexuality
as described by Herdt?83 How did it fit into the gender system? Clearly
reanalysis of the ethnographic record offers a wealth of material for expanding
our understanding of gender and institutionalized forms of gender variant
marriage patterns.

5 Cross-gender Rituals
To attempt to surround cross-gender rituals definitionally is a difficult one
since rituals are generally embedded with symbols of gender and gender
opposition. However, for purposes of this discussion, the focus will be on
rituals and gender crossing in which one gender adopts temporarily the role
concomitants of the other gender (where there are two.) I shall make no
attempt to survey this vast literature but rather focus on cross-gendered rituals
in terms of Victor Turner’s construct of liminality.
Perhaps one of the best known and earliest modern investigations by an
anthropologist of cross-gendered rituals was Bateson’s analysis of the sex
ethos of the Iatmul. It is now a classic study of institutionalized cross-dressing
(transvestism) during ceremonial occasions.84 Bateson’s hypothesis is that when
a person of one gender finds her- or himself in a unique circumstance that
demands behaviors of the other gender, s/he will adopt through dress “bits”
of the other gender’s culture.85 He describes the transvestite riding habit of
women as an example and then relates it to the Naven ceremonials in which
both women and men cross-gender ritually. However, when women cross
gender boundaries, they dress and act as proud warriors, while men embody
old “hags” and generally present themselves as decrepit women in a parody.86
Bateson’s analysis ties these expressions to dichotomies in the sex ethos of
each gender. New Guinea societies are characterized by inequality in the system
of gender relations and it is this inequality that is symbolically expressed in
the transvestite components of rituals.
Bateson’s analysis dovetails with Victor Turner’s analysis of ritual behavior
as it relates to “liminality” and “communitas.” Turner has described liminal
phases of rituals in which an individual occupies a symbolic space “betwixt
and between” the structures of society.87 For Turner, the reversal of the ordinary
and the culturally expected temporarily transforms the structures of society
into antistructure.88 In cross-gendered rituals, the profane elements of gender
would be elevated to the sacred, allowing for the articulation of schisms and
conflicts embedded in gender dichotomies and hierarchies to be manifested
in communitas.89 Rituals of the type Bateson described relate to communitas
in that an event may allow participants to equalize and deconstruct gender
relationships momentarily. Shared aspects of identity among the genders (that
is to say, our common humanity), that are culturally denied by gender role

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expectation and hierarchy, may be conveyed in communitas through cross-

gendered rituals. The Iatmul rituals transcended mundane gender divisions.
As Young has noted, such rituals of reversal may “have served as an ideological
resource” by presenting “a more egalitarian model of relations between the
sexes [genders].”90
Liminal positions are symbolically dangerous as it is possible that
transformation may be an outcome of experiencing antistructure. Perhaps
the evolving non-surgical options and new gender hybridization in the
transgendered community may be interpreted in this light. In this regard,
Turner states:
The liminal areas of time and space…are open to the play of thought,
feeling, and will; in them are generated new models, often fantastic,
some of which may have sufficient power and plausibility to replace
eventually the force-backed political and jural models that control the
centers of a society’s ongoing life.
The antistructural liminality provided in the cores of ritual and
aesthetic forms represents the reflexivity of the social process wherein
society becomes at once subject and direct object; it represents also its
subjunctive mood, where supposition, desires, hypotheses, possibilities,
and so forth, all become legitimate.91
In conclusion, ritualized cross-gendered behavior is fertile ground for analysis.
Definitions and identifications of types of cross-gendered behaviors in rituals
are necessary preliminary prerequisites. It seems that this field is ready for
comparative studies, including controlled comparisons and cross-cultural
correlational studies of the HRAF variety. As one possible model, Zelman’s
study92 of ritual and power is instructive. Zelman reported a correlation
between female pollution-avoidance rituals, male rituals associated with the
female reproductive cycle (the couvade), and gender equality and inequality.
While the literature in which rituals are analyzed in terms of gender is vast,
the theoretical development of cross-gendered ritual behavior as a form of
gender variance remains to be developed, particularly in relationship to the
other forms. Where are the consistencies and where are the cleavages among
these pure forms?

THE WESTERN GENDER PARADIGM:

IMPLICATIONS AND INFILTRATIONS
Gender variance has interested anthropologists from the early days of the
discipline. Research on the subject was published as early as 1906 in the
ethnological work of Edward Westermarck.93 Scholars of anthropology have
described and theorized these five forms of gender variance in diverse ways
as discussed. Two-spirit and manly-heart (North Piegan) types of traditions
have been investigated in terms of culturally instituted identities/statuses and

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roles.94 Cross-cultural cases of hermaphroditism as socially recognized

alternative categories of gender have been framed in terms of essentialism
and cultural constructionism.95 African woman-marriage has been discussed
in relation to kinship96 and debated as to the issue of lesbian activity.97 Cross-
gendered rituals have been investigated by two of anthropology’s most notable
theorists: Gregory Bateson98 and Victor Turner99 among others.100
The cross-cultural data on gender variance offer field cases in which gender
identity as a social construction and representation is problematic. In addition,
two-spirit careers offer evidence that gender identities may be acquired and
shed, while the hermaphrodite data presently indicate that identities are not
clearly or directly tied to a detectable biological baseline/ hormonal
environment but are interpreted through the cultural lens. Such evidence
intimates that further studies of this kind of phenomena are in order in the
analytic genre that includes liminal positions as well—those that are not only
at the bottom or outside but between the gender order as well.101
The phenomenon of gender variance has cross-culturally challenged
scholars and scientists to reexamine our own scientific understandings that
span the spectrum from the essentialistic to the constructionist. It includes
the appropriation of behavior from a biocentric perspective as in some of the
sociobiologically oriented work that assigns chromosomes, endocrinological
functioning, and reproductive strategies as antecedents of gender dimorphic
behavior and even cultural practices.102
The constructionist position in the study of gender has conflated sex and
gender, while scholars of gender variance have segregated sex and gender,
thereby challenging Euro-American heterosexism. Some researchers have re-
entangled sex and gender but in complex synthetic paradigms that are
historically and culturally contextualized. The studies of the mahu, xanith,
and hijra include homosexual components but are social identities that are
not derivative of sexual orientation/practice. The ethnographic record has
indeed revealed a fluidity and flexibility in sexual behaviors and choice of
sexual partners.
Modern Western genetic and endocrinological testing methods to identify
an individual’s sex are irrelevant for the emic or indigenous construction of
gender variance. Paradoxically, the more scientific the methods to assess the
biological sex of an individual, the less clear and the more cloudy the
assessment actually becomes, as witnessed by the Olympic games discourses
on evaluating the “true” sex of an athlete.103 Nonetheless, Western gender
variation is framed within a syndrome model that argues for a “basic biological
mandate” for the expression of gender oppositions and has been extended to
imply universals in gender “anomalies.”104
The contemporary Euro-American folk gender paradigm, essentially a
nature theory of gender, is reproduced in the scientific literature. Thus, not
only is gender identity regarded as unfolding according to a biological map
but variation in obviously cultural behaviors such as dress casts aspersions

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upon the “nature” of the individual’s identity. Gender identity is regarded as

something that comes to fruition, given a biological time clock, by
approximately five years old and once acquired is not changed unless there
has been a major biological input error. It is not regarded as a temporary way
of expressing a gendered personhood as in the case of the Omani xanith. In
short, gender is an ascribed, not an achieved characteristic in the Western
gender schema.105
A deconstruction of the Western gender paradigm reveals that “…gender
is a social construct that mediates another social construct of biology.”106 In
fact, “… gender can become a metaphor for biology, just as biology can
become a metaphor for gender.”107 Girl/woman and boy/man as genders are
attributed on the basis of role presentations and read as femininity/ masculinity
in daily encounters, and then retroactively reduced to a metatext of sex and
genitalia. The metatext is the dominant and prevalent Western gender schema
which takes as its “incorrigible propositions” the centrality of sex and biology
as natural determinants of masculinity and femininity.108 Masculinity and
femininity are the embodiments of biological differences.109
From the meanings we assign to insignias that cover everything from
adornments to muscles are transcribed gender and de facto sex. That capitalism
and patriarchy narrowly circumscribe these into a gender schema is true. It is
just as true that broad changes in the social, the economic, and the political
have been textualized on the male and female body to create pluralism in the
expressions of masculinity and femininity. These meanings, in turn, influence
perceptions of gender, gender variance, and ideologies reactively, proactively,
and recursively. Gender begins with the visible inspection of the genitalia
when an assignment is made, unless there is an anomaly present such as
hermaphroditism. The genitals, and in adulthood, other secondary
characteristics are the icons of gender revealing the rules by which gender is
culturally produced. These premises underlay the North American gender
paradigm and are regarded by society as natural: that there are only two
sexes, that these are inviolable and are determined by genitalia.110
Western society spawns its own forms of gender variance. Western
transsexualism, for example, both reproduces and rebels against gender
dualism and biocentrism. As a social identity, transsexualism posits the analytic
independence of four gender markers that are embedded in the Western gender
schema as “incorrigible propositions.”111 These are presented in a number of
scientific discourses as well as among the public as “naturally” linked: sex,
gender identity, gender role, or social identity (including behaviors and
appearance), and, in some cases, sexual orientation. Herdt has referred to
this as the “principle of dimorphism”…“an invention of modernism.”112
A deconstruction of the transsexual social identity suggests that these
primary categories of classification revolve around a binary and oppositional
gender paradigm that is regarded as immutable. These oppositions reverberate
with an ideological underpinning of patriarchal heterosexism.113

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The power of a natural system and the meaning that it has for
individuals as actors must be explored as a symbolic layer in the
scientific paradigm for gender variation. How do actors construct their
own variance vis-á-vis a powerful biological gender theory when their
own experience, such as in the case of the male-to-female transsexual,
may reproduce yet refute it? It is undeniable that transsexual surgery
supports the essential genital-gender paradigm on one hand, yet contests
its basis in terms of evolutionary reproduction (à la Darwin) and
heterosexism.114
People who identify themselves as preoperative, post-operative, and
nonsurgical male-to-female transsexuals as well as male cross-dressers
collectively form a transgender community which is in the process of creating
not just a third gender, but the possibility of numerous genders and multiple
social identities. As such they impugn the dominant American gender paradigm
with its emphasis on reproduction and the biological sexual body as the raison
d’être of gender identity and role. Without a naturist system that regards
biology generally and genitals specifically as the sine qua non of gender, it
may be questioned whether the phenomenon we label transsexualism would
exist at all.

TRANSGENDERED COMMUNITY115
Elsewhere, I have described the emergence of the transgendered community.116
It is argued here that the theoretical development of cultural constructionist
approaches to the study of gender variance cross-culturally has been (along
with other factors) one impetus for the transgendered community to
encompass diversity. Before proceeding, a caution issued by anthropologist
Jason Cromwell is in order:
Unlike many male transgendered people (male transvestites or cross
dressers and male-to-female transsexuals), very few female-to-male
transsexuals identify with the concept of Native American berdache
[two-spirits]. Nor do they identify with its linguistic cousins: female
berdache [two-spirit], amazons, cross-gender females, manlike women,
female “man-woman,” or dykes…. Furthermore…such terminology is
inappropriate and, as such berdache [two-spirits] does not have any
symbolic meaning or significant relevance for contemporary US female
gender variant individuals.117
Transgendered and non-surgical options for social identities were not available
sixteen years ago when I first studied North American male-to-female
transsexualism in the Berdache Society.118 At that time, among the population
I worked with, there were only two social identities options available:
surgically oriented male-to-female transsexuals and male transvestites who
were not self-identified as gay.119

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Male-to-female transsexuals defined themselves by a bottom-line

criterion of desire for hormonal reassignment and surgery…. If one
was not absolutely committed to having the surgery, then one was de
facto a transvestite. Transvestites were delineated as heterosexual
men (men attracted to women) who had the urge to cross-dress but
were not “really” women. If these individuals had a feminine identity,
the reasoning went, they would be pursuing surgery—with no
apologies.120
In 1992, I initiated a study of social identity with transgendered individuals
and found that the polarization of male-to-female transsexuals and male
transvestites had been challenged from within and replaced by a concept of
continuity and multiplicity of social identities.121
Through recent research, it has become apparent that there has been a
movement in which people of various gender-transposed identities have
come to organize themselves as part of a greater community, a larger
in-group, facing similar concerns of stigmatization, acceptance,
treatment and so on. This recognition of similarity fostered by growing
political awareness of gender organizations has facilitated the
burgeoning of new gender options, such as the “transgenderist.”
Transgenderist is a community term denoting kinship among those with
gender-variant identities. It supplants the dichotomy of transsexual and
transvestite with a concept of continuity… This sense of collective
interests is important for understanding cultural-historical change in
gender identities and in clarifying the relationship of individual
experience to the social construction of gender variance.122
Holly Boswell, in an article (“The Transgender Alternative”) that is rapidly
becoming a political classic in the transgendered community, defines
transgenderism as a “middle ground,” “a viable option between cross-dresser
and transsexual person, which also happens to have a firm foundation in
the ancient tradition of androgyny.” 123 According to Dallas Denny,
transgenderists may be:
described as persons who change gender roles, but do not plan to have
reassignment surgery. They have alternatively been defined as persons
who steer a middle course, living with the physical traits of both genders.
Transgenderists may alter their anatomy with hormones or surgery, but
they may purposefully retain many of the characteristics of the gender
to which they were originally assigned. Many lead part-time lives in
both genders; most cultivate an androgynous appearance.124
and Denny continues elsewhere:
Even many of those who have chosen to alter their bodies with hormones
and surgery, like myself, maintain a proud transgender identity rather

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than attempting to assimilate into the mainstream culture. In fact, we

have a term for those who do so—“wood-workers.”125
While there are other sociocultural influences giving impetus to the cultivation
of transgenderism, the grass-roots organizational adoption of a political
agenda is an important one.126
The dominant Euro-American gender system of biological reductionism
does much to shape the construction of social and hence personal
identities. Consequently, in my early research gender identities across a
broad spectrum were shuffled into two categories: male-to-female
transsexual and male transvestite. A cultural awakening to gender
pluralism among transgendered people has challenged the dominant
paradigm that a social woman is a genital one. This pantheon of personal
identities was the raw material for the infusion of a political agenda for
gender diversity and cross-cultural studies provided the fuel. For the
purposes of this analysis, the issue of whether the examples of gender
variant traditions can be framed in Western terms such as homosexuality
or transsexualism (which I doubt) is not relevant. What is important is the
use made of this knowledge by the diverse constituencies in the
transgender community.127
Although I am not arguing that schism and divisions do not persist, the
national organizations have made significant progress in creating unity
within diversity. In this regard, one post-operative male-to-female
transsexual reports:
I think that over the past few years one of the biggest changes I have
seen in the transgender community is you no longer have to fit in a box.
You do not have to be TS or TV. It is ok to be transgendered. You can
now lie anywhere on the spectrum from non-gendered to full transsexual.
You do not have to have SRS [sex reassignment surgery] just because
you are transgendered.
The organizational gatekeepers of the gender community, which include at
least five very prominent national organizations with large memberships
along with other smaller national, local and regional groups, have
embraced the ethnographic record, anthropology’s relativism and
theoretical cultural constructionism.128 This is evidenced in a number of
ways as reference to the “berdache” and two-spirited persons is
incorporated into the transgendered self-discourse. In a recent letter to the
editor of SOLGAN (The Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists
Newsletter), Dallas Denny, Executive Director of the American
Educational Gender Information Service, Inc., states:
Being transgendered myself, I was especially pleased to learn that
the AAA [American Anthropological Association] Commission on
Lesbian and Gay Issues in Anthropology has included language

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about transgendered anthropologists in its mission statement.

Contrary to stereotypes perpetuated by the media…, many
transgendered persons indeed identify as “two spirited” and rebel
against binary gender roles.129
At regional and national gender community conferences I have attended over
the years, symposia including historical and cross-cultural aspects of cross-
dressing are a mainstay. Anthropologists are invited experts to address the
subject, although community members themselves are well read on the
anthropological literature and some are speakers and writers of the subject
themselves. Over the past three years I have presented papers annually on
cross-cultural gender variance at one of the national conferences. On a personal
note, my sense of the audience is that I feel as if I were interacting with
anthropologists who were specialists on gender variance. The transgendered
audience is familiar with the writings of Nanda, Roscoe, Herdt, Cromwell,
Williams, and others.
Two themes related to ethnography and gender dominate the concerns of
the audience and program planners: societies in which two-spirit/
hermaphrodite and gender role variance are positively regarded; and the topic
of the cultural explanations of third and/or alternative genders. These themes
are an important discourse to the transgender community, as is demonstrated
among the publications and educational/community support documents
available through organizations. Several examples from my research at the
annual meetings are illustrative.
Holly Boswell has written an article entitled “Reviving the Tradition of
Alternative Genders” in which she states:
While contemporary societies still seem determined to polarize gender
along strictly anatomical lines, the vast majority of cultures throughout
history and around the globe understood that anatomical sex does not
dictate gender identification any more than it does sexual orientation
…Ancient Goddess religions and other natural spiritual world views
respected men and women as equals, regarded Nature as divine, [and]
revered diversity…
Since the replacement of Mother Nature with God the Father (about
5,000 years ago), the constructs of gender have been defined more
narrowly and rigidly to suit the purposes of those in control of each
particular society….130
Another document, entitled “Historical Facts of Interest to the Gender
Community,” written by Wendy Parker,131 contains two full pages of citations
representing:
1 Societies, events and individuals where crossdressing was accepted and
tolerated, for example:
30,000 BC—Siberian tribes cross over ice “link” to N. America bringing

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 CULTURAL CONTEXT AND GENDER PRACTICES

third gender “berdache” traditions from Asia. Existence of berdaches

has been documented in at least one hundred and thirty North American
tribes. 1702—Royal Governor of Colonial New York, the Viscount,
lives openly as a woman conducting much government business
crossdressed…
2 Events and explanations of why crossdressing was discriminated against.
1200’s—The beginning of church/state campaign against gender and
sexual variations begin during Medieval period of Crusades. Brought
in from Persia, sexual relations with young feminized boys was
considered an accepted Islamic practice and therefore considered
“heresy” as it was a “pagan” ritual.
3 Information concerning important transgendered figures in the history
of crossdressing, including the “invention” of various clinical
terminologies. 1930—Very first experimental “sex change” surgery in
Germany. First known post op TS Hans Eighner becomes “Lillie Elbe.”
1960’s Harry Benjamin…first popularizes the term “transsexual.”…
4 And important events in the organization of crossdressing. 1960—
First issue of Transvestia published by Virginia Prince. 1975—Ariadne
Kane founds the Outreach Institute and begins the first Fantasia Fair.
This major crossdressers’ convention has been given yearly uninterrupted
to today.
The historical and anthropological record is integrated into a developing
gender system by the transgendered community. Anthropological studies of
gender variance are valued by the transgendered community as a vehicle for
identity enhancement and destigmatization for individuals and the community
at large. As a consequence of identifying culture as an important component
in the construction of gender ideologies, identities and status, the common
enemy of transgenderism has emerged as society and its institutions.
Demonstrating time and spatial dimensions allows individuals, regardless of
their self-identity, to employ this information as…a “neutralization technique”
or disclaimer. Because relativism is a “…reflection on the process of
interpretation itself,”132 it becomes for transgendered people an avenue for
recreating and reinventing themselves.133 The common adversary of societal
oppression has fostered a recognition of unity and community within diversity
as a form of cultural creativity.
The transgendered identity is not a docile one in Foucauldian terms.134
Non-surgical solutions, gender mixing, and hybridization, client desires for
hormones without surgery and the like, challenge medical orthodoxy and
treatment agendas prescribed for transsexuals and transvestites. The new
transgendered option creates rebellious bodies—hybrid and hermaphroditic
ones that create disarray and threaten to overthrow the “biopower” of the
medical profession who have the capability of “controlling the very sex of
the human body.”135 It can be argued that the “knowledge” of cross-cultural

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 ANNE BOLIN

gender variance is constitutive of the empowerment of an evolving

transgenderism and the birth of new identities.
There is a serendipity between the transgendered community and the
gay community in relationship to two-spirit traditions. According to
Midnight Sun “cross-cultural material is often used to support claims about
contemporary western homosexuality.”136 In Living the Spirit: A Gay
American Indian Anthology,137 gay Native Americans claim their antecedents
in two-spirit traditions of transgendered people. By being “other” and
seeking roots with “otherness,” transgendered people and gay men and
women can transform their status collectively. Evidence of variant traditions
cross-culturally is a vehicle through which the transgender community and
the lesbian and gay community(ies) have become active participants in
reshaping their identities.138 This may result in inter-community solidarity
among transgendered, gay and lesbian peoples; or conversely knowledge of
alternative genders may also lead to the birth of new gender forms and the
consolidation and revision of existing social identities crossing both groups.
For example, transgendered empowerment has followed from the active
process of self-definition and in locating their own history and traditions.
In this light, Denny writes:
The current interest in alternate genders and alternate sexes is
encouraging, but I would caution gay and lesbian anthropologists to be
careful not to appropriate transgender history…. There is an
unfortunate tendency for transgender lives to be rewritten as gay and
lesbian lives, when it is convenient to do so. Transgendered persons are
not a subset of the gay community, although the obverse may be true:
gay men and lesbians, after all, transgress gender roles by their
selection of same sex partners.139
As anthropology turns to issues of multiculturalism both globally and in
North America, new understandings of “ethnic diversity as a source of
strength and resilience, rather than as a maladaptive process…” are being
addressed.140 This is a complex process of revision, or to use Roscoe’s
concept “cultur-ing.”141 The transgender community is crafting new forms
of identities and seeing new relationships in social forms as identities. As
one transgendered consultant explained to me, “We have pride in ourselves
and in our own history. We are the first generation who can assimilate or
choose not to.”

CONCLUSION
Although the “male-to-female transsexual identity” as a socially recognized
phenomenon is recent, a trend toward blurring of the extant variant gender
identities for genital males such as transsexual, non-surgical transsexual,
transvestite, and cross-dressers has gained momentum over the last decade.

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The components of the Western gender schema including biological attributes,

gender identity, role concomitants, and gender of erotic interest are rearranged
and recombined in new ways by those in the gender divergent community.
This reshuffling both reflects and infiltrates the Western gender paradigm as
gender change is felt in wider society and experienced personally and through
cultural symbols.

NOTES
1 Sue-Ellen Jacobs, “Native American Two-Spirits,” in Anthropology Newsletter,
vol. 35, No. 8 (November, 1994), p. 7.
2 Sue-Ellen Jacobs states in “Native American Two-Spirits:”

The term “berdache” [sic] as used by anthropologists is outdated, anachronistic

and does not reflect contemporary Native American conversations about gender
diversity and sexualities. To use this term is to participate in and perpetuate colonial
discourse, labeling Native American people by a term that has its origins in Western
thought and languages.
The preferred term of Native Americans who are involved in refining
understanding about gender diversity and sexualities among Native American
peoples is “two spirit”…or terms specific to tribes.

I have adopted this usage where it seems appropriate to refer to gender transformed/
alternative genders throughout the nonwestern ethnographic record.
3 Mildred Dickemann, “Wilson’s Panchreston: The Inclusive Fitness Hypothesis of
Sociobiology Re-Examined,” in Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 28, No. 2 (1995),
pp. 147–83.
4 Gilbert Herdt, “Cross-Cultural Forms of Homosexuality and the Concept Gay,”
in Psychiatric Annals, vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 37–9.
5 Herdt, “Cross-Cultural,” pp. 37–9.
6 This research will bring in evidence of gender variance that includes a wider
scope than that generally undertaken in studies in efforts to move beyond the
limits set by our own Western constructs, and to challenge scholars to reassess
the applicability of the concepts “status” and “role” cross-culturally.
7 Anthropology’s new reflexive mood includes a view that regards people among
whom we research as collaborators, rather than informants or subjects. Some
samples of this approach can be found in the following examples: George E.
Marcus and Michael M.J.Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986; Anne Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering: Male-to-Female
Transsexuals, Dichotomy and Diversity,” in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third
Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, New York: Zone
Books, 1994, pp. 447–85, 589–96.
8 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” pp. 447–8, 589–96.
9 Nancy Bonvillain, Women and Men: Cultural Constructs of Gender, Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1995; Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender, New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994; Sherry B.Ortner and Harriet Whitehead
(eds), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
10 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo, London: Routledge, 1966, p. 100; Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes

43
 ANNE BOLIN

on the Management of a Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-

Hall, 1963; Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual, Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1967.
11 See Gilbert Herdt, ‘The Sambia Turnim-Man:’ Sociocultural and Clinical Aspects
of Gender Formation in Male Psuedohermaphrodites and 5-Alpha-Reductase
Deficiency in Papua, New Guinea,” in Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 17,
No. 1 (February, 1988), pp. 37–9; cf. R.W.Connell, “The Big Picture:
Masculinities in Recent World History,” in Theory and Society, vol. 22, No. 5
(October, 1993), p. 602.
12 E.g. Suzanne J.Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological
Approach, New York: John Wiley, 1978; Holly Devor, Gender Blending:
Confronting the Limits of Duality, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
13 My research has been limited to self-identified male-to-female transsexual, cross-
dressing/transvestite and transgendered people. People who were assigned as
females and girls at birth but who identify as “f-to-m” (argot) or transgendered
are also part of the newly emergent transgendered community. There is very little
research with this population with the exception of anthropologist Jason Crom-
well’s ethnographic work. Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough, in Cross Dressing, Sex
and Gender, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 94–112,
argue that cross-dressing among women has great historical significance while
cross-dressing among men is a recent phenomenon. Although I refer to collectivities
of such groups as male-to-female transsexuals, male transvestites, and
transgenderists as a literary convenience, I am by no means suggesting scientific
representativeness. My findings were based on a limited population using a
convenience sampling technique and ethnographic methods.
14 Eugene N.Cohen and Edwin Eames, Cultural Anthropology, Boston,
Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 1982, pp. 418–9.
15 Robert J.Stoller, Presentations of Gender, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1985, p. 6. See also, Kessler and McKenna, Gender, p. 7.
16 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 77; Harold Garfinkel and Robert J.Stoller, “Passing and
the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person,” Harold
Garfinkel (ed.), Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1967, pp. 116–85; Kessler and McKenna, Gender, 1–20; S.Jacobs
and C.Roberts, “Sex, Sexuality, Gender and Gender Variance”; Sandra Morgan
(ed.), Gender and Anthropology, Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological
Association, 1989, pp. 438–62.
17 Richard A.Shweder, Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 3.
18 J.Money and A.A.Ehrhardt, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: The Differentiation
and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity, Baltimore,
Ohio: The John Hopkins University Press, 1972, p. 284.
19 Cf. M.Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies, Female of the Species, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1975, pp. 84–107.
20 Cf. Anne Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage, South Hadley,
Mass: Bergin and Garvey, 1988; Anne Bolin, “Vandalized Vanity: Feminine
Physiques Betrayed and Portrayed”, in Francis Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe
(eds), Tattoo, Torture, Adornment, and Disfigurement: The Dennaturalization
of the Body in Culture and Text, Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1992, pp. 79–
99; Devor, Gender Blending.
21 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,”

44
 CULTURAL CONTEXT AND GENDER PRACTICES

in Victor Turner (ed.), The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of the Ndembu Ritual,
Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 93–110; Victor Turner,
Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 1974; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An
Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York: Frederick A.Praeger,
1966; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1973; Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese
Cockfight,” Clifford Geertz (ed.), Myth, Symbol, and Culture, New York: Norton,
1971, pp. 1–33; Clifford Geertz, “The Uses of Diversity,” in S.McMurrin (ed.),
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986, pp. 253–75.
22 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800,
New York: Longman, 1981; Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, The
Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century,
Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1987; Janice M.Irvine,
Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology, Philadelphia,
Penn.: Temple University Press, 1990.
23 Susan R.Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist
Appropriation of Foucault,” in Alison M.Jaggar and Susan R.Bordo (eds), Gender/
Body/Knowledge/Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989; Susan R.Bordo, “Reading
the Slender Body,” in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, New
York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 83–112; Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as; Michel
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, New York: Vintage Books, 1985; Michel Foucault,
“Technologies of the Self,” in Luther B.Martin et al. (eds), Technologies of the
Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst, Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988.
24 Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea, New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1987; Herdt, “The Sambia “Turnim-Man”;” Gilbert Herdt
(ed.), Homosexuality and Adolescence, New York: Haworth Press, 1989.
25 Serena Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India, Belmont, California:
Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1990; Serena Nanda, “The Hijras of India: Cultural
and Individual Dimensions of a Institutionalized Third Gender Role,” in Journal
of Homosexuality, vol. 11, No. 3–4(1985).
26 Money and Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, p. 290.
27 Money and Ehrhard, Man and Woman, p. 285.
28 W.W.Hill, “Note on the Pima Berdache,” in American Anthropologist, vol. 40,
No. 2 (April-June, 1938) pp. 338–40.
29 Robert B.Edgerton, “Pokot Intersexuality: An East African Example of the
Resolution of Sexual Incongruity,” in American Anthropologist, vol. 66, No. 6,
Pt. I (December, 1964), pp.1288–99.
30 Edgerton, “Pokot Intersexuality,” p. 1295.
31 Edgerton, “Pokot Intersexuality,” pp. 1288–99; also Kessler and McKenna,
Gender, p. 23; and Martin and Voorhies, Female, p. 89.
32 W.W.Hill, “The Status of the Hermaphrodite and Transvestite in Navajo Culture,”
in American Anthropologist, vol. 37 (April, 1935), pp. 273–9; W.W. Hill, “Note;”
and Martin and Voorhies, Female, pp. 89–93.
33 Martin and Voorhies, Female, p. 92.
34 Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman, pp. 35–55.
35 Nanda, “The Hijras of India,” p. 42.
36 Edward Sagarin, “Sex Rearing and Sexual Orientation: The Reconciliation of
Apparently Contradictory Data,” in Journal of Sex Research, vol. 11, No. 4
(November, 1975), pp. 329, 34.

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 ANNE BOLIN

37 J.Imperato-McGinley, L.Guerrero, T.Gautier, and R.E.Peterson, “Steroid 5a-

Reductase Deficiency in Man: An Inherited Form of Male Hermaphroditism,” in
Science, No. 186 (1974), pp. 1213–15.
38 Sagarin, “Sex Rearing,” p. 331.
39 John Money, “Gender Identity and Hermaphroditism,” in Science, No. 191 (1976),
p. 872; Hein Meyer-Bahlburg, “Hormones and Psychosexual Differentiation:
Implications for the Management of Intersexuality, Homosexuality, and
Transsexuality,” in Clinics in Endocrinology and Metabolism, 11 (1982); and
Gilbert Herdt, “Gay Culture in America: Essays from the Field”, Boston,
Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1992, pp. 433–46, for a thorough review of the
Dominican Republic Syndrome.
40 Gilbert Herdt, “Mistaken Gender: 5-Alpha Reductase Hermaphroditism and
Biological Reductionism in Sexual Identity Reconsidered,” in American
Anthropologist, No. 92 (1990), pp. 433–46.
41 Gilbert Herdt and Julian Davidson, “The Sambia ‘Turnim Man:’ Sociocultural
and Clinical Aspects of Gender Formation in Male Pseudohermaphrodites with
5-Alpha-Reductase Deficiency in Papua, New Guinea,” in Archives of Sexual
Behavior, vol. 17, No. 1 (February, 1988), pp. 33–56.
42 Imperato-McGinley, “Steroid 5a-Reductase;” J.Imperato-McGinley, L. Guerrero;
T.Gautier, and R.E.Peterson, “Androgens and the Evolution of Male-Gender
Identity Among Male Pseudohermaphrodites with 5 Alpha-Reductase Deficiency,”
in New England Journal of Medicine, 300 (1979), pp. 1233–7; J. Imperato-
McGinley, R.E.Peterson, M.Leshin, J.E.Griffin, G.Looper, S.Draghi, M.Berenyi,
and J.E.Wilson, “Steroid 5 Alpha-reductase Deficiency in a 65-Year-Old Male
Pseudohermaphrodite: The Natural History Ultrastructure of the Tests and
Evidence for Inherited Enzyme Heterogeneity,” in Journal of Clinical
Endocrinology Metabolism, vol. 54 (1980), pp. 15–22; J.Imperato-McGinley, R.
E.Peterson, T.Gautier, G.Looper, R.Danner, A.Arthur, P.L.Morris, W.J. Sweeney,
and C.Shackleton, “Hormonal Evaluation of a Large Kindred with Complete
Androgen Insensitivity: Evidence for Secondary 5 Alpha-Reductase Deficiency,”
in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology Metabolism, vol. 54 (1982) pp. 931–41.
43 Herdt and Davidson, “The Sambia ‘Turnim Man:’ Sociocultural,” p. 41.
44 Money and Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, pp. 150–62.
45 Imperato-McGinley, “Steroid 5a-Reductase;” Imperato-McGinley, “Androgens
and the Evolution;” Imperato-McGinley, “Steroid 5 Alpha-reductase Deficiency;”
Imperato-McGinley, “Hormonal Evaluation.”
46 Evelyn Blackwood, “Lesbian Behavior in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” M.S. Thesis,
San Francisco State University, 1984; and Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and
Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,”
in Signs, vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 27–42.
47 Evelyn Blackwood, “Breaking the Mirror: The Construction of Lesbianism and
the Anthropological Discourse on Homosexuality,” in Journal of Homosexuality,
vol. 11, Nos. 3–4 (1985), p. 6.
For reports of the female two-spirit tradition see Blackwood’s “Sexuality and
Gender;” Blackwood’s “Lesbian Behavior;” and Walter L.Williams’s The Spirit
and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, Boston, Massachusetts:
Beacon Press, 1986, pp. 233–51. My discussion is limited to male two-spirit
traditions for several reasons: space considerations, my background is in the area
of male traditions, and the literature is dominated by reports of male forms. In
addition, it is questionable whether female two-spirit traditions are the mirror
image of the male (see Blackwood, “Breaking the Mirror”). I have included
examples on women’s gender variation under the other forms.

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Another example, Omer Stewart recorded its occurrence for Alfred L.Kroeber’s
Cultural Element Distributions, University of California: Anthropological Records,
1937–1943, vol. 1–81. G.Devereaux cited in “Institutionalized Homosexuality
of the Mohave Indians,” in Human Biology, vol. 9, No. 4 (1937), pp. 498, 527,
reported the case of the alyha among the Mohave Indians as a Berdache (two-
spirit) role. E.Adamson Hoebel also noted in his work, Man in the Primitive
World, New York: McGraw Hill, 1949, pp. 458, 45–9, that two-spirit institutions
were present among Plains Indians groups, as did Robert Harry Lowie in The
Crow Indians, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935, p. 48. E.E.Evans-Pritchard
observed gender variance among the Azande in “Sexual Inversion Among the
Azande,” in American Anthropologist, vol. 72, No. 6 (December, 1970), pp.
1428, 34; Hill among the Navajo in “The Status,” pp. 273, 279, and Pima in
“Note on the,” pp. 338, 340). W.Bogoras described the “softman” of the Chukchee
in The Chuckchee Religion, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History,
Leiden: E.S.Brill, 1907, pp. 11,449. See also Anne Bolin, “Transsexualism and
the Limits of Traditional Gender Analysis,” in American Behavioral Scientist,
vol. 31, No. 1 (September-October, 1987), pp. 41–45; Will Roscoe, “Bibliography
of Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles Among North American Indians,” in
Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 14, Nos. 3–4 (1987); Will Roscoe, The Zuni
Man-Woman, Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1991,
among others.
48 Sue-Ellen Jacobs and Jason Cromwell, “Visions and Revisions of Reality:
Reflections on Sex, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Variance,” in Journal of
Homosexuality, vol. 23, No. 4 (1992), pp. 43–69; Charles Callender and Lee
Kochems, “The North American Berdache,” in Current Anthropology, vol. 24
(August/October, 1983), p. 53; Harriet Whitehead, “The Bow and the Burden
Strap: A New Look at Institutionalized Homosexuality in Native North America,”
in S.B.Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural
Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981, pp. 80–115.
49 Williams’ The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 273–4; Wainwrig Churchill, Homosexual
Behavior Among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation,
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971, p. 81; R.D’Andrade, “Sex
References in Cultural Institutions,” in L.Hudson (ed.), The Ecology of Human
Intelligence, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 34; Clellan Stearns Ford and
Frank A.Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior, New York: Harper and Row, 1951,
p. 130; Herdt, “The Sambia ‘Turnim-Man,’” p. 38.
50 Martin and Voorhies, Female, p. 96.
51 Kessler and McKenna, Gender, p. 29.
52 Whitehead, “The Bow and the Burden Strap,” p. 93.
53 Edwin N.Ferdon, Early Tahiti: As the Explorers Saw It 1767–1797, Tucson, Arizona:
University of Arizona, 1981; Niko Besnier, “Polynesian Gender Liminality through
Time and Space,” in Herdt (ed.), Third Sex Third Gender, [note 7], p. 300.
54 Robert Levy, “The Community Function of Tahitian Male Transvestism: A
Hypothesis,” in Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 44, (1975), pp. 12–21; Robert
Levy, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, Chicago, Illinois:
University of Chicago Press, 1973.
55 Levy, “The Community Function.”
56 Besnier, “Polynesian Gender,” p. 286.
57 Levy, “The Community Function;” and Levy, Tahitians.
58 Callender and Kochems, North American; Charles Callender and Lee M. Kochems,
“Men and Not-Men: Male Gender-Mixing Statuses and Homosexuality,” Journal
of Homosexuality, vol. 11, Nos. 3/4 (1985).

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59 Levy, Tahitians, p. 34.

60 John Kirkpatrick, The Marquesan Notion of the Person, Ann Arbor, Michigan:
UMI—University of Michigan Research Press, 1983.
61 For discussion of the mahu, see Kirkpatrick’s The Marquesan; Levy, “The
Community Function;” Levy, Tahitians; Douglas L.Oliver, Ancient Tahitian
Society, Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1974; and Anne Bolin,
“The Polynesian Islands: French Polynesia,” in Robert T.Francoeur (ed.), The
International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, New York: Continuum Press, 1995;
Besnier, “Polynesian Gender.”
62 S.Chanteau, et al., “A Serological Survey of AIDS in a High Risk Population in
French Polynesia,” The Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 145, No. 2 (1986),
and A.Spiegel et al., “HTLV-I in French Polynesia: A Serological Survey in Sexually
Exposed Groups,” in The Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 155, No. 11 (1991).
63 Unni Wikan, “Man Becomes Woman: Transsexualism in Oman as a Key to Gender
Roles,” in Man, new series, vol. 12, No. 2 (August, 1977), pp. 304–19.
64 See also Judith Shapiro, “Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Sexual Differentiation,”
in Herant Katchadourian (ed.), Human Sexuality: A Comparative and
Developmental Perspective, Berkeley, California: University of California Press,
1979, p. 274 for discussion.
65 Oscar Lewis, “Manly-Hearted Women Among the North Piegan,” in American
Anthropologist, new series, vol. 43, No. 2, Pt. I (April–June, 1941), p. 176; Martin
and Voorhies, Female, p. 101.
66 Martin and Voorhies, Female, p. 102.
67 Martin and Voorhies, Female, p. 102.
68 Kirkpatrick, The Marquesan Notion of the Person.
69 See Kath Weston, “Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology,” in Annual
Reviews of Anthropology, vol. 22 (1993), pp. 339–67.
70 Sabine Lang, Männer als Frauen-Frauen als Männer: Geschlechstrollen-wechsel
be den Indianer Nordamerikas, Hamburg, Germany: Wayasbah-Verlag, 1990.
71 Blackwood, Lesbian Behavior.
72 Denise O’Brien, “Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies,” in Alice Schlegal
(ed.), Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural View, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1977, pp. 109–26; Salvatore Cucchiari as quoted in Evelyn Blackwood,
“Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Lesbian Relations,” p. 1984.
73 Edward E.Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1951.
74 Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage.
75 Oboler as quoted in Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender,” p. 57.
76 Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender,” pp. 59–60.
77 Regina Smith Oboler, “Is the Female Husband a Man? Woman/Woman Marriage
Among the Nandi of Kenya,” Ethnology, vol. 19, No. 1 (January, 1980), pp. 69–88.
78 Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender,” p. 60.
79 Evans-Pritchard, “Sexual Inversion,” pp. 1428–34.
80 Evans-Pritchard, “Sexual Inversion,” p. 1429.
81 Evans-Pritchard, “Sexual Inversion,” p. 1429.
82 Evans-Pritchard, “Sexual Inversion,” p. 1430
83 Gilbert Herdt, Guardians of the Flute: Idioms of Masculinity, New York: McGraw
Hill, 1981; and Herdt, “The Sambia Turnim-Man.’”
84 Gregory Bateson, Naven: The Culture of the Iatmul People of New Guinea as
Revealed Through a Study of the“Naven” Ceremonial, Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 1958, pp. 198–203.
85 Bateson, Naven, pp. 198–203.
86 Ibid., pp. 198–217.

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87 Victor W.Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,”
in Turner, The Forest of Symbols, pp. 93–111.
88 Turner, “Betwixt and Between;” Victor W.Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure
and Anti-Structure, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977; Turner, Dramas,
Fields.
89 Turner, “Betwixt and Between.”
90 William Young, “The Kába, Gender, and the Rites of Pilgrimage,” in International
Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1993) p. 296.
91 Turner, The Ritual, p. vii.
92 Elizabeth Crouch Zelman, “Reproduction, Ritual, and Power,” in American
Ethnologist, vol. 4, No. 4 (November, 1977) pp. 714–33.
93 E.Westermarck, “Homosexual Love,” in Homosexuality: A Cross-Cultural
Approach, New York: Julian Press, 1956, pp. 101–38.
94 See Hill, “Note on the;” Devereaux, “Institutionalized Homosexuality”; Lewis,
“Manly-Hearted Women;” Williams, The Spirit; Will Roscoe, The Zuni; James
Steel Thayer, “The Berdache of the Northern Plains: A Socioreligious
Perspective,” in Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall 1980),
pp. 287–93; Martin and Voorhies, Female; Kessler and McKenna, Gender; Levy,
Tahitians; Jacobs, “Native American;” and Jacobs, “The Berdache.”
95 Imperato-McGinley, “Steroid 5a-Reductase;” Gilbert Herdt, “Cross-cultural
Forms;” Herdt, “The Sambia Turnim-Man’;” Sagarin, “Sex Rearing;” Morris
Oboler, “The Hijar (Hermaphrodites) of India and Indian Nation Character: A
Rejoinder,” in American Anthropologist, vol. 62 (1960), pp. 505–11; and Nanda,
Neither Man nor Woman.
96 Evans-Pritchard, Kinship.
97 Blackwood, “Lesbian Behavior.”
98 Gregory Bateson, Naven.
99 Turner, The Ritual.
100 See Note 47.
101 Besnier, “Polynesian Gender.”
102 Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979; Robin Fox, “In the Beginning: Aspects of Hominid Behavioral
Evolution,” in Man, vol. 2, No. 2 (June, 1967), pp. 415–33; Lionel Tiger, Men
in Groups, New York: Vintage Press, 1970; Edward O.Wilson, On Human
Nature, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978; Edward O. Wilson,
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1975.
For an excellent critique of sociobiological applications to homosexuality
and the conceptual muddles embedded in Western scientific categorization of
gender variant identities see Dickemann, “Wilson’s Panchreston.”
103 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” pp. 447–85, 589–96.
104 Weeks, Sex, Politics, p. 3.
105 After Linton, see Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1974.
106 Bryan S.Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, Oxford,
England: Basil Blackwell, 1984, p. 28.
107 Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” in Signs,
vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), p. 637; Anne Bolin, “Women Bodybuilders:
Relation, Reflection, and Reform.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of
the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, November 6–9,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1991, p. 6.
108 Kessler and McKenna, Gender, p. 4.
109 For a discussion of how the Euro-American dual gender paradigm evolved in

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the Western scientific imagination see Gilbert Herdt, “Representations of

Homosexuality: An Essay on Cultural Ontology and Historical Comparison,
Part I,” in Journal of History of Sexuality, vol. 1, No. 3 (January, 1991), pp.
481–504.
110 Kessler and McKenna, Gender, p. 4.
111 Ibid.
112 Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender, pp. 25–6.
113 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” pp. 452–60.
114 See also Bolin, “Vandalized Vanity,” pp. 79–82, and Bolin, “Transcending and
Transgendering,” pp. 482–5.
115 See Herdt, “Introduction: Third Sexes and Third Genders,” in Third Sex Third
Gender, pp. 46–57, for an excellent review of the evolution of scientific discourses
on gender variance.
116 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” pp. 452–60.
117 Cromwell, “Not Female Berdache.”
118 Bolin, In Search of Eve.
119 This section includes some research initially reported in Bolin, “Transcending
and Transgendering,” pp. 475–7.
120 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” pp. 451–2.
121 Cross-dresser is the preferred designation, although at the time of this research
transvestite was also used informally by community members. Cross-dresser is
considered less stigmatizing than male transvestite. It denotes the medical
terminology which equates transvestism with “sexual disorder.” The latter is
regarded as too restrictive and unrepresentative of the actual diversity within
this population. It has been suggested by Denny, Director of AEGIS [American
Educational Gender Information Service], in the journal Chrysalis Quarterly
that transsexuals be referred to as transsexual people and persons with
transsexualism for the same reasons in Dallas Denny, “Dealing with Your
Feelings,” AEGIS Transition Series (Decater, Georgia: AEGIS, 1991), p. 3. This
terminology provides a deliberate effort on the part of an organization, AEGIS,
to engage in social identity management by deflecting the “otherness” associated
with the terms transvestite and transsexual. I felt that it was already cumbersome
to use the designation male-to-female transsexual in efforts not to contribute to
female-to-male transsexual invisibility. To add the term “people” to that
designation would have been too cumbersome.
122 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” pp. 461–2.
123 Holly Boswell, “The Transgender Alternative,” in Chrysalis Quarterly, vol. 1,
No. 22 (1991), pp. 29–31.
124 Dallas Denny, “Deciding What to Do About Your Gender Dysphoria,” AEGIS
Transition Booklet Series, Decatur, Georgia: AEGIS, 1990), p. 6.
125 Dallas Denny, “Letter to the Editor,” in Society of Lesbian and Gay
Anthropologists Newsletter, vol. 17, No. 1 (1995), p. 1.
126 For review of research methods, see Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,”
pp. 448–9 and Bolin, In Search of Eve, pp. 32–9.
127 For commentary on other sociocultural influences, see Bolin, “Transcending
and Transgendering,” pp. 462–85.
While gay cross-dressers or female impersonators are not usually included as
transgenderists, this is not universal. In addition, since sexual eroticism varies
among those identified as transgenderists, discussion of sexual orientation
illustrates the limits of a Western biologically based discourses on sexuality. For
example, how would one define the sexual orientation of a non-surgical male-
to-female transsexual who is married to a physiological female and continues to
engage in sexual intercourse?

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128 “Historic First: Five National Transgender Organizations to Sponsor Educational

Booth at NASW (National Association of Social Workers) Conference,” in
AEGIS News Quarterly, September 2 (1994), p. 1.
129 Denny, “Letter.”
130 Boswell, Reviving the Tradition of Alternative Gender, Decatur, Georgia: AEGIS,
n.d., pp. 1–2.
131 Parker, “Historical Facts of Interest to the Gender Community.”
132 Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural, p. 32.
133 Bolin, “Transcending and Transgendering,” p. 477.
134 Michel Foucault, Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a
Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall, New
York: Pantheon, 1980.
135 Fausto-Sterling 1993, p. 24; Foucault, Barbin.
136 Midnight Sun, “Sex Gender Systems in Native North America,” in Will Roscoe
(ed.), Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1988, p. 33.
137 Roscoe, Living the Spirit.
138 Roscoe, The Zuni, p. 3.
139 Denny, “Letter,” p. 2.
140 Susan Skomal, “Multiculturism in the Quincentennial Year: Highlights of the
Ninety-First Annual Meeting,” in Anthropology Newsletter, vol. 33, No. 8
(November, 1992), p. 1.
141 Roscoe, The Zuni, p. 1.

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 3

SUMER
Gender, gender roles,
gender role reversals
Judith Ochshorn

What role reversals signify is contingent on the meaning attached by cultures

to gender roles themselves and the latter, though ubiquitous, have obviously
varied over time and across and within cultures. Gender role reversals then,
like gender roles, both illuminate and are shaped by the fundamental beliefs
and practices of the societies that give rise to them.
If we reach back to the literature of ancient Sumer, from that part of
the world usually regarded as the cradle of Western religions, if not
civilization, there are some tantalizing references to gender reversals among
devotees of the fertility goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia. For example,
accounts of one cultic celebration of the great Sumerian goddess Inanna
refer to what might have been cross-dressing by her worshippers.1 The
Kurgarûs, originally guards of Inanna but later assigned to various roles
in her cultic service, are said to have been changed by that goddess from
males to females, sometimes carrying spindles or symbols of femininity,
and typically engaging in bloody war games.2
Given the apparently widespread conviction in the ancient Near East that
the divine intervened constantly in everyday life, and that some individuals
in the human community could mediate between it and the sacred, the likely
meaning of these gender role reversals to their own cultures may be inferred
from Sumerian conceptions of goddesses and gods, the nature of their cultic
worship, and how gender figured in both. However, attempts to reconstruct
Sumerian culture and its attitudes toward gender elicit the kinds of concerns
present in all reconstructions of the past as well as those specific to Sumer.
How do we move beyond accounts in the written records left to us, perhaps
selected to be left, by a literate minority of mostly men whose viewpoints,
consciously or not, most frequently coincided with those of the “winners” in
history? How might we reconstruct the roles and life experiences of the
excluded, of ordinary and lower-class people, of women, of slaves, for all of
whom cultural values probably resonated deeply? All of them “made” history,3
most of them filled prescribed gender roles, some resisted them. But we may
infer their experiences and contributions to their cultures only from those
written records which, incidentally, are used to corroborate the meanings of

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allegedly unbiased physical artifacts.4 And all of these become more of a

concern the further back in time we look.
There are other difficulties in reconstructing the meaning of gender role
reversals in ancient Sumer. The Sumerian language and literature, indeed its
very civilization, were lost to us for more than 2,000 years. Though they
provided part of the ambience of biblical monotheism and its views on gender
roles, we were ignorant of Sumerian views until cuneiform tablets began to
be deciphered in the nineteenth century. Sumer was decisively defeated by its
enemies and, except for a brief renaissance, ceased to exist as a political
entity around the end of the third millennium BCE.
Nevertheless, its cultural influence was enormous. Sumerian continued to
be used as the language of the literary and religious texts of its Semitic
conquerors; Sumerian divinities were incorporated into the Babylonian
pantheon; the Sumerian language and literature were used by schools that
trained scribes, and they continued to be studied in the intellectual and spiritual
centers of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, Hurrians, Hittites, Canaanites,
and Eblaites. Despite all this, and the existence by now of a body of hymns,
myths, accounts of rituals, and epics, much Sumerian literature is undoubtedly
lost to us forever due to the ravages of time, political conquests, and cultural
and linguistic shifts in antiquity.5
Finally, when we examine data about gender roles from the past through
the lenses of the present—as indeed we must and should6—how can we be
sure that we are doing more than imposing our own familiar assumptions
and stereotypes about gender on other times and places? For instance, one
contemporary scholar finds the character of the fertility goddess Inanna
perplexing, anomalous, even inexplicable since she is, simultaneously, the
goddess of love and war, fertility and violence, young bride and raging
destroyer.7 Another portrays the fertility goddess Ishtar, the Semitic counter-
part of Inanna, as “the female with the fundamental attributes of manhood”
in describing “her being and her cult (where she changes men into women
and women into men).” Characterizing fertility goddesses as “manly” because,
for instance, Inanna wanders about freely “unlike a proper married woman,”
and because, even more than men, both Inanna and Ishtar love warfare and
seek lovers, this view argues that these goddesses were dangerous because
they were not permanently domiciled within the house of a god. Indeed, they
were divine prototypes of “the sexually available woman undiverted by
domestic preoccupations and unencumbered by children.”8
The fusion of ferocity and fertility might only seem to be an illogical union
of opposites, of masculine and feminine traits, if assessed according to the
gender stereotypes of our own time. In the ancient Near East, the prosperity,
even survival, of human communities from year to year was precarious. They
depended on producing enough food in the face of capricious weather,
maintaining a sufficient population in the face of little-understood illnesses,
and defeating their enemies in a time of frequent warfare. Under such

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conditions, it may have seemed perfectly logical for these communities to try
to assure their survival into the next year and meet their most basic needs—
for fertility and victory over their enemies—by reliance for both on the
intervention of the same powerful goddess. Certainly the chief god of the
pantheon, Enlil, was not noticeably well-disposed toward humans and was
often portrayed as violent or capricious. And it is simply not the case that
every culture shared or shares our own views of sexuality, family life and
domestic bliss.
Beyond that, central to Sumerian conceptions of divine gender roles was
the sharing of equivalent, sometimes identical, powers by goddesses and gods.
Like Inanna and Ishtar, both the god Enlil and his son Ninurta were portrayed
as deities of vegetation and destruction, or as fertility gods, as was the god
Ningirsu, son of Enlil (or An), who was the deity of war and annual spring
rains and riverfloods.9 Thus, apart from the arguable issue of whether there
was such a close fit between real women and goddesses, there is the question
of whether what is being described by modern scholars conveys Sumerian
attitudes toward gender or our own.
I shall argue here that, in fact, ancient Near Eastern ideologies of gender
were not based on masculine-feminine polarities, or the location of norms of
appropriate female and male behavior, in either the divine or secular spheres,
at opposite ends of the spectrum of human behavior. It is not that there were
no distinctions made on the basis of sex or that hierarchies were unknown or
unimportant. Rather, from the third to the first millennium BCE, conspicuously
absent from Sumerian and later Babylonian religious beliefs and practices
was the assignment of importance to gender and gender differences in those
activities then understood as meeting the most basic community and, later,
individual needs.10 Gender was not conceived of as the locus of morality,
honor, courage, sin, indeed power itself. Thus, ancient Near Eastern
polytheistic attitudes were radically different from those that emerged
subsequently in the West, perhaps most notably, but by no means exclusively,
in the literature and traditions of biblical monotheism that radically elevated
the importance of gender and gender differences.11
Even when goddesses and gods did not share identical powers, over say
fertility and war, they often shared equivalent ones. For example, the
establishment and proper functioning of temples were considered essential to
community survival. Among the oldest Sumerian literary works recovered is
an early third-millennium “Hymn to Kesh” or temple hymn. The chief deity
of this temple was the birth goddess Nintur or Ninhursaga, initially one of
the ruling cosmic triad along with the gods An and Enlil. She performs the
divination ritual necessary before the construction of a temple to ensure
favorable conditions for it. Also described in the hymn are the presence and
role of the goddess Nidaba in the establishment of this edifice. Variously
referred to as a goddess of vegetation, writing and literature including
astronomical texts, the deity of “the house of understanding” (most likely

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intelligence), and as she who “knows the (inmost) secrets of numbers,” Nidaba
records Enlil’s words of praise in establishing the temple, thus providing the
“standard version” of events as they truly happened. In a later myth, Nidaba
records or preserves the exploits and triumphs of the fertility god Ninurta
over the barrenness of the land.12
The god Enlil’s words of praise (or decrees) were required for the
establishment of the local temple or vehicle for cosmic intervention on behalf
of the community. The god Ninurta guaranteed an adequate food supply to
the community by overcoming the barrenness of the earth. Both became part
of the indispensable cultural legacy articulated and preserved by the goddess
Nidaba who, by her intelligence, enabled the survival and prosperity of Sumer.
Later, the Sumerian god of wisdom Enki and his Akkadian counter-part Ea
were to assume (some say usurp) many of Nidaba’s roles.
However, in a myth transcribed as early as 2000 BCE but believed to have
been current centuries earlier, “Inanna and Enki: The Transfer of the Me
from Eridu to Erech,” the god Enki, to whose safekeeping as the god of
wisdom the me or arts of civilization were entrusted by the god Enlil right
after creation, in effect permits the goddess Inanna to move them from his
cultic center, Eridu, to Erech, her own.13 Obviously, the significance of this
transfer hinges on the meaning of the me.
By the time of the second half of the third millennium BCE, Sumerian
theologians believed that, at the time of the creation of the universe, Enlil
composed the me, all of the essential plans, laws, and norms that governed
its successful, harmonious functioning, and that provided what was needed
for civilized life. In intricate if as-yet-not-fully-understood detail, the me
consisted of:
a comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards,
rules and regulations, rights, powers, and insignia relating to the cosmic
realms; to countries, cities, and temples; to the acts of gods and men;
and to virtually every aspect of civilized life.14
Samuel Noah Kramer characterizes the me described in Sumerian literary
documents as:
“good,” “pure,” “holy,” “great,” “noble,” “precise,” “innumerable,”
“eternal,” “awesome,” “intricate,” “untouchable,” they could be
“presented,” “given,” “taken,” “held,” “lifted,” “gathered,” “worn”
(like a garment), “fastened at the side,” “directed,” “perfected”; deities
could sit upon them, put their feet upon them, ride upon them; they
could even be loaded on a boat and carried off from one city to another.15
It is precisely the last that Inanna accomplishes, and whatever the full meaning
of these complex me, it is clear that they were viewed as encompassing, among
other things, divine plans and provisions for the most fundamental aspects
and laws of civilized life as well as an explanation of divine-human

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relationships. Hence, the goddess Inanna is the equal of the god Enki in wisdom
and power, by virtue of her possession of the all-important me, and nowhere
in the myth are distinctions made about the fitness to possess them on the
basis of the sex of the divine.16
At times, divinities of the same sex share identical or equivalent powers.
The god Ninurta decides “the country’s lawsuits,” representing the claims of
the just to his father Enlil. Like the latter, Ninurta decrees the fates of deities
and humans. Like the god Utu, Ninurta dispenses social justice. At times,
divinities of both sexes share equal or equivalent powers. Like Ninurta and
Utu, the goddesses Inanna and Nanshe dispense justice; like Enlil, they make
far-reaching decisions;17 and, like Enlil, Inanna in her violence terrifies humans
and divinities.18
It would seem that at least until the first half of the second millennium
BCE, poets and theologians considered the gender of the divine almost
irrelevant to the pursuit of what they saw as the most important concerns
of their societies, namely divine preservation of their legacies from the past
and divine assurances that their communities would continue into the future.
Both goddesses and gods were seen as running the universe, and the range
and content of their powers did not derive from their sex. Indeed, at times
they were imaged as bisexual, or their sex changed as their worship spread
to new locales.19
In contrast to the later tracing of descent through males, powerful Sumerian
divinities were sometimes identified as the offspring of both their parents; for
example, the hero Utu is called the child of Ningal and the child of Enlil.20
Ninshubur was the name of a god and a goddess. When s/he is Inanna’s
handmaiden or page she is female.21 Likewise, both women and men were
seen as appropriate and efficacious servants of and intercessors with divinities
for the human community.22 In “The Nanshe Hymn,” the fertility goddess
Nanshe installs a female majordomo to run her “house” or temple and
eliminate cheating. A majordomo might have been a male or female who
headed a household, business, or city.23 Therefore, with the apparent lack of
importance ascribed to gender identity in the accomplishment of social goals,
gender role reversals in ancient Sumer and Babylon might have signified
something quite different from what they were to mean later and elsewhere.
While there is no way to measure the presence or depth of individuals’
religious faith, Sumerian goddesses and gods were routinely invoked for a
variety of purposes in both official and popular religion—to assure compliance
with laws and diplomatic treaties;24 to ward off divine punishments for
communal transgressions;25 to assist in the exorcism of sickness and other
calamities, both personal and social;26 and to solicit their intervention in one’s
personal affairs. 27 Religious beliefs provided not only a fundamental
explanatory model for the people of these ancient cultures but were also
based on trust in the efficacy of rituals to solicit divine influence or mourn
divine intervention in daily life.

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 SUMER

One type of religious literature, the balag-lamentations, were recited by

gala-priests from the third through the first millennium BCE. Though most
of the lamentations derive from the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000–1600
BCE), it is believed that many were preserved from an earlier period, and
they continued to be inscribed and translated in the neo-Assyrian period or
middle of the first millennium.28 The importance of these lamentations is that
for a few thousand years they expressed enduring human fears and concerns,
and solicited divine assistance to ward off adversity and keep chaos at bay
for the following year.
Lamentations were recited for specific purposes: to deal with bereavement
at funerals; to keep evil demons away at times of change, when a building
was to be dedicated or a journey undertaken; and to placate the anger of
divinities when their dilapidated temples and shrines or sacred objects were
to be dismantled and renovated. Specific recitations by the gala-priests were
performed as part of a fixed liturgy on certain days each month to prevent
the anger of one deity or another over the involuntary transgressions of the
community or king. Since the balag-lamentations represented efforts to ritually
express and deal with uncertainties, anxieties, and tragedies afflicting everyone,
from personal bereavement to social disasters,29 they probably reflected
prevailing attitudes about gender and gender differences, and therefore yield
information about the probable meaning of gender role reversals.
It is important to note that Sumerian lacks a specific symbol that
differentiates between male and female deities. Therefore, by the middle of
the first millennium, neo-Assyrian scribes differentiated those lamentations
directed to male deities from those directed to female deities by listing, in the
former, events or works attributed to Enlil, the chief god of the pantheon;
and in the latter, those attributed to Inanna, the chief goddess.30 And despite
the continuing and general decline in status of both women and goddesses in
the increasingly masculinized culture of the Near East by the neo-Assyrian
period, “God in Sumer never became all male… Inanna played a greater role
in myth, epic, and hymn than any other deity, male or female.”31 That religious
conceptions of gender and gender roles in the divine and earthly realms
remained surprisingly fluid would not be inconsistent with the frequent
disjunctions in time between religious norms and social realities.
At first glance, some of the divine roles in the balag-lamentations might
appear to have had some basis in notions of gender, for example, the
characteristic and raging destructiveness of the god Enlil, virtually a primal
force in nature, and the characteristic desolation suffered by goddesses and
women who most frequently lament it or plead for relief on behalf of the
community or themselves. But even in the midst of Enlil’s destruction,
goddesses sometimes proudly identify themselves individually and, in the first
person, assert their greatness.32
In one lamentation, a goddess does not so much mourn her losses as
directly accuse Enlil of wasting “my” city. In another, Inanna is the only

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deity of either sex who apparently dares to approach Enlil to pacify him,
and confront him with a “how long?” In yet another, Inanna, identifying
herself as “the hierodule [or Queen] of heaven” and “the destroyer of the
mountain…she who causes the heavens to shake,” describes the cultural
brilliance of the cities where she was worshiped, mourns their destruction,
and accuses the powerful gods An and Enlil of destroying them. In effect,
she sets her many and awesome attributes as countervailing powers
against those of the greatest gods.33 Moreover, in this literature and
elsewhere, the goddess Inanna is also described as a raging destroyer
feared by deities and humans alike.34
Poets recorded that when goddesses and gods abandoned their cities and
temples, the inhabitants often experienced it as a terrible storm or military
defeat that ravaged their communities. On a deeper level, this abandonment
signaled the disruption of right relationships and the natural order of things.
In the latter, individuals viewed themselves as part of a social group that, in
turn, resided in nature, in which divinities were immanent and to be
propitiated. The well-being of the community and individual were seen as
resting on the well-being of nature.
The slight degree to which divine gender figured in the satisfaction of
communal needs or the expiation of communal guilt is found in much of the
literature. “The Lament for Ur” recounts the abandonment of that city by
the goddess Ningil and her consort, the god Nanna. Ningil laments the ensuing
desolation for her ravaged city, Nanna laments it for his ravaged city, and
then both are entreated to return to Ur.35 Likewise, the destruction of cities is
reported to both Enlil and his divine consort Ninlil.36 The “Hymn to Enlil”
praises that god as the source and administrator of all life on earth, preeminent
vegetation deity, originator of all moral authority, and benefactor of humanity
by his words and decrees. It concludes in praise of the goddess Ninlil who,
along with her husband, issues decrees and makes decisions for the world.
When Enlil is exalted, Ninlil too is exalted.37 Even scholars who define ancient
Near Eastern polytheism as dimorphic, in which divine roles are grounded in
the essential femaleness and maleness of goddesses and gods, describe the
rather incidental role of gender in the public functions of Sumerian deities:
“In some cases, the sex of a god [sic.] makes no real difference to its function.
In their control of cities, goddesses and gods play equivalent roles. The god
[sic.] of the city could be either male or female.”38
Frequently, both female and male divinities are invoked in attempts to
put an end to the rampaging fury of the divine. Both goddesses and gods
are begged to persuade Enlil not to abandon his city Nippur by
abandoning his shrine there; both attempt to be protective to their cities;
both pray to Enlil to “calm his heart,” and both bless offerings to pacify
him.39 Divinities of both sexes were seen as so closely involved in human
affairs that, in laying the foundations of a temple, the gala-priest would set
up offering-tables for its general deities and, in addition, tables for the

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god, goddess and genie of the temple. In one lamentation, the life of the
nation is described as placed in the “house” or temple of the god Enlil and
his wife, the goddess Ningal.40
The very language used in appeals to divinities is marked by ambiguity in
terms of their sex. In a lamentation to the god Nergal, he is referred to as cow
and bull just as the goddess Inanna describes herself as cow and bison. Divine
retribution is experienced by divinities of both sexes. When Enlil turns away
from his shrine and city Nippur, the god Enki “goes in tears” as does his son,
his daughter-in-law and his mother. In a late third-millennium temple hymn,
Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, claims the goddess Ninsuna as his divine mother
but refers to her as his mother and father, both implanting “the germ” of him
in his mother’s womb and giving birth to him “from out the vulva.”41
Similar fluidity in divine gender roles is evident in some of the creation
stories. Goddesses and gods, tired of caring for themselves, create human
beings for the specific purpose of ritually feeding them. On the divine
plane, goddesses are shown as ritually feeding gods. But in “The Cylinders
of Gudea,” a hymn to a temple, god Ningirsu serves food to his father
(and it is unclear here whether he is An or Enlil), an honor usually bestowed
on the eldest son.42
Just as prayers for relief from affliction were directed to both goddesses
and gods who, in turn, were portrayed as engaged as supplicants to other
divinities on behalf of the community or as victims of divine wrath, so when
it was feared that a god or goddess had abandoned a city or shrine, explaining
or foretelling communal disasters, women and men alike were portrayed as
suffering the consequences. When Enlil curses the city’s lord he causes the
lady’s sickness. Both its lord and lady are no longer present in the devastated
city, and both depart for the Nether World, or the realm of the dead. When
the word (or decree) of the destroyer Enlil is encountered by a man or woman,
both moan, both are afflicted “with woe,” both sob in their misery.43 Though
repetition marks the form of the lamentations, what is striking is the sexual
parallelism, specifically naming men and women as members of co-suffering
humanity. Calming the fears of communities and individuals and meeting
their needs clearly took precedence over the sex of the divine or the human
intermediaries between them and their worshippers.
During the second half of the third millennium BCE, from which some of
the balag-lamentations are thought to date, there is evidence that at least
upper-class Sumerian women occupied positions of public power and
influence. That apparently was also true during the first half of the second
millennium, or during the Old Babylonian period, in the kingdom of Mari
and Sippar, and this public prominence of women as well as men encompassed
their many cultic roles as temples reached their long arms out into the economic
and political life of surrounding communities.44
This apparent comfort with female prominence is reflected in the literature
describing one of the oldest and most widespread cults in ancient Mesopotamia

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that celebrated the Sacred Marriage of the young shepherd god Dumuzi with
the nubile goddess Inanna, and lamented his early and seasonal death. While
one of its aspects marked the turn of the seasons and its effects on nature and
the food supply, another suggests the possible existence at some point, perhaps
by then only a memory, of a matrilineal or relatively egalitarian social structure.
Inanna’s brother Utu prepares her for marriage; when Dumuzi is pursued by
the emissaries of the Nether World who want to drag him to his death, he
appeals for help to his brother-in-law Utu and his sister Geshtinanna; and
though his death is lamented by women—his wife, mother and sister—Dumuzi
asks his mother, not his wife, to mourn him. Informing all of these texts are
the contributions of male and female divinities to the ongoing processes of
nature. Significantly, Inanna is informed by her mother, the goddess Ningal,
that after her marriage she will move into and belong to the household of her
husband and his family.45 If these texts indicate the gradual social transition
from matrilyny to patrilyny with obvious implications for attitudes toward
gender roles—and that can only be conjectured at this point—it would help
to explain the relatively high status and public presence of at least upper-
class women in third-millennium Sumer.
When Inanna establishes her main temple, Eanna, in Uruk, she also sets
up the giparu temple, the traditional residence of an en priest or priestess.46 A
recent study corroborates the cultic presence and importance of one class of
women and their several public roles in community life. Challenging the
traditional view that the Akkadian quadis?tu, “she who is set apart,” was a
prostitute, sacred or otherwise (because they were unattached to individual
men?), apparently from the Old Babylonian period on, those women instead
were cultic functionaries. They participated in temple rituals in the cult of
the god Adad and his consort Shala and also acted as midwives, wetnurses
and sorcerers.47
This was by no means extraordinary. We know from the correspondence
of mostly royal women in the second-millennium kingdom of Mari that both
women and men served in the priesthood, offered prayers and sacrifices on
behalf of the king, interceded with the divine, and interpreted dreams. Both
women and men were oracles, diviners, and prophets, significant at a time
when major personal, community and military decisions rode on the results
of oracles and prophecies.48 In short, females and males in both the divine
and earthly realms were viewed as active agents sharing many of the same
attributes, causing and experiencing the same desolation, and few distinctions
were made on the basis of gender alone.
Gender role reversals in the worship of Inanna and Ishtar might best be
understood, then, in the context of Sumerian conceptions of the divine.
Conceived of as plural, no one divinity of either sex was considered
omnipotent, possessed of total power over life and death. Rather, each
possessed a cluster of non-exclusive attributes that might change over time to
accommodate changing human needs, values, and historical circumstances.

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The relationships, interrelationships, actions, and interactions of the most

powerful goddesses and gods—their alliances, conflicts, triumphs, and
defeats—were understood to determine not only the changing face of nature
but also the contours of social life, and none of these fell strictly along gender
lines. For example, Enki, god of wisdom, might have usurped the functions
of Nidaba, goddess of writing and literature, but the struggle for kingship of
the gods, in which younger male divinities usurped the roles of older ones,
also runs like a leitmotif through ancient Near Eastern religious texts.
Goddesses and gods were conceived of anthropomorphically, as both
immanent and transcendent, but they were never only just like humans in
their behavior, and such comparisons are unwarranted. Poets tell us that
their sexual and familial behavior were most often far different from that
sanctioned in the human community. For the most part, divinities were non-
monogamous. The consequences of divine sexuality, particularly divine female
sexuality, were seen as beneficial to human society and its representative, the
king. Two thousand years of Sumerian poetry commemorate the Sacred
Marriage Rite that, on the sexual initiative of the goddesses Inanna and Ishtar
guaranteed (instead of divine offspring) the fitness of the king to rule, his
victory in battle over enemies, and the fertility of the land. Divine illegitimacy
and incest were alien concepts. There was no mind/spirit-body split or double
standard among deities. And goddesses were not more limited in their powers
by their reproductive roles than were gods.49 What is attested in the literature
about Inanna and Ishtar, as well as other of the greatest gods preeminent in
divine pantheons of hundreds, is that their powers were overwhelming to
both divinities and humans who feared their judgment and punishment.
Against this backdrop, we have the following kinds of allusions to role reversals
in the worship of those goddesses.
One hymn to Inanna50 opens with a description of her powers as equivalent
to those of An, Enlil, and Enki, calling forth the homage of the Anunnaki, the
great deities of Sumer. It then describes a monthly ritual engaged in by Inanna’s
cult personnel and many others from the community who parade before her
to honor her prowess as warrior and goddess of war. Part of the parade
consisted of a corps of “eminent ladies” armed for battle whose “right arms
are clothed with cloth in male fashion,”51 and this scene (with all the
ambiguities of the Sumerian language) is sometimes rendered as “The people
of Sumer parade before you. The women adorn their right side with men’s
clothing…the men adorn their left side with women’s clothing.”52
Another explicit reference is in the balag-lamentation, “That City Which
Has Been Pillaged.”53 Inanna, lamenting the wreckage of the city, catalogues
her vast powers, in the midst of which she proclaims:

I go at the front. I am lofty.

I proceed in the rear. I am wise.
I make right into left.

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I make left into right.

I turn a man into a woman.
I turn a woman into a man.
I am the one who causes the man to adorn himself as a
woman.
I am the one who causes the woman to adorn herself as
a man.
I cause the weak to enter the house.
I expel the mighty from the house.
…
I am the stairs to the high roof.
I am … the low parapets.
I turn white into black.
I turn black into white.54
These allusions to gender role reversals by Inanna, as part of a series of other
reversals, may reflect the Sumerian view of her enormous power to reverse
and effect virtually everything in the universe. For what we have in the remains
of the sacred texts of ancient Sumer, regardless of the relative insignificance
of gender to the exercise of divine authority, are narratives ascribing a level
and scope of power to the activities of goddesses rarely seen in the West
before or since.
For example, in one of the earliest extant Akkadian hymns dating from
the end of the third millennium BCE, “The Exaltation of Inanna,” the poet-
high-priestess-princess Enheduanna celebrates that goddess’ power over all
of heaven and earth in its account of the transfer of the me, in this case
from the powerful moon-god Nanna to Inanna.55 The latter, autonomous
initiator of the Sacred Marriage, is shown here in another guise as goddess
of war, the terror of deities and people alike, the terrible judge of humanity
who exacts retribution by devastating the land when she is paid insufficient
homage. In the widely-proliferated Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar
threatens to raise the dead so they will outnumber the living if her father
An, the God of heaven, refuses to unleash the Bull of Heaven against
Gilgamesh to punish that hero for daring to reject her advances. 56
Similarly, Ereshkigal, goddess of the Netherworld, threatens to release the
dead in numbers that would overwhelm the living if her lover, the god
Nergal, is not returned to her by the chief gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea.57 And it
is Ishtar who forbids the chief god Enlil to partake of the sacrifices offered
to gods and goddesses by the survivors of a terrible flood unleashed by
Enlil because she holds him responsible for the destruction of “her”
people.58 In all these instances, the dominant gods bow to the power of the
dominant goddesses and agree to their demands.
The meaning of gender and the significance attached to gender differences
have always been fundamental to how cultures understand and organize
themselves. Thus, gender role reversals, or causing men to dress like women

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 SUMER

and women to dress like men, could have been merely another demonstration
of Sumerian conceptions of the all-encompassing power of the Goddesses
Inanna and Ishtar over heaven and earth, love and war, life and death, and,
what is basic to all human cultures, gender and gender roles.

NOTES
1 Mark E.Cohen, The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia, 2 vols,
Potomac, Md.: Capital Decisions Ltd., 1988, II, pp. 587–603.
2 Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once… Sumerian Poetry in Translation,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 286, n.75 and 76.
3 Cf. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
4 Cf. Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1982; “Early Christian Women and Their Cultural Context: Issues of Method
in Historical Reconstruction,” in Adela Yarbro Collins (ed.), Feminist Perspectives
on Biblical Scholarship, Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985, pp. 65–91.
5 Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary
Achievement in the Third Millennium BC, rev. edn., Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1972, pp. 28–9; Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I, pp. 11–12.
6 Cf. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Remembering the Past in Creating the Future,”
in Collins, Feminist Perspectives, pp. 43–63.
7 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 17, n.2, 19, n.1.
8 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the
Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth, New York and Toronto: The Free Press
and Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1992, pp. 28–9, 66–9, 80.
9 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 235–72; Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I, pp. 136–43.
10 Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian
Religion, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
11 Judith Ochshorn, The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
12 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 251–2, 271–2 n.81, 86, 377–80, n.11, 382, 394, n.28, 409,
n.77, 412.
13 Kramer, Sumerian Mythology, pp. 64–8.
14 Samuel Noah Kramer, From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification,
Adoration, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979,
p. 45.
15 Ibid., pp. 45–6. Here Kramer cites the work of Gertrud Farber-Flügge, Der Mythos
Inanna und Enki Unter Besonderer Berucksichtigung der Liste der Me, Rome:
Biblical Institute Press, 1973.
16 Ochshorn, Female Experience, pp. 62–4.
17 Cf. Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 141–2,237–8, 327.
18 Enheduanna, The Exaltation of Inanna, trans. William W.Hallo and J.J.A.Van
Dijk, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
19 Ochshorn, Female Experience, pp. 31–3; “Ishtar and Her Cult,” in Carl Olson
(ed.), The Book of the Goddess Past and Present, New York: Crossroad Publishing
Co., 1983, p. 16.
20 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I, p. 217.
21 Jacobsen, Harps, p. 207, n.3.
22 Ochshorn, Female Experience, pp. 110–26.
23 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 126–42, esp. p. 130, n.17.
24 James B.Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old

63
 JUDITH OCHSHORN

Testament, 3rd edn with supplement, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969,
pp. 159–206.
25 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I and II.
26 Julian Morgenstern, “The Doctrine of Sin in the Babylonian Religion,” in
Mitteilungen der Voerderasiatischen Gesellschaft, Berlin: Wolf Peiser Verlag, 1905,
pp. 3–5; Campbell R.Thompson, The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, Being
Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires,
Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits Which Attack Mankind, trans.
from the original cuneiform texts, Luzac’s Semitic Text and Translation Series,
vols XIV and XV, London: Luzac & Co., 1903.
27 Jacobsen, Treasures.
28 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I and II.
29 Ibid., I, pp. 13–14.
30 Ibid., pp. 18–19, n.33.
31 Kramer, Poetry of Sumer, p. 81.
32 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, II, pp. 436, 521, 534, 594–8, 662–6.
33 Ibid., I, pp. 198–9,261–2; II, pp. 648–9, 718–25.
34 Cf. Enheduanna, Exaltation.
35 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 448–74.
36 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I, p. 331.
37 Ibid., p. 341; Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 101–11.
38 Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake, p. 12.
39 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I, pp. 108, 141–2, 293–7; II, pp 626–7, 477–8,
497–8.
40 Ibid., I, pp. 26, 397.
41 Ibid., I, p. 109; II, pp. 512, 648, 664; Jacobsen, Harps, p. 391.
42 Jacobsen, Harps, p. 400, esp. n.48.
43 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, I, pp. 112, 137, 139–40, 381, 383–4.
44 Samuel Noah Kramer, “Poets and Psalmists: Goddesses and Theologians; Literary,
Religious and Anthropological Aspects of the Legacy of Sumer,” in Denise
Schmandt-Besserat (ed.), The Legacy of Sumer, Bibliotheca Mesopotamica:
“Primary sources and interpretive analyses for the study of Mesopotamian
civilization and its influences from late prehistory to the end of the cuneiform
tradition,” Giorgio Buccellati (ed.), vol. IV, Malibu: Undena Publications, 1976,
pp. 12–16; Georges Dossin and Andre Finet, Archives Royales de Mari:
Correspondence Feminine, Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1978;
Rivkah Harris, Ancient Sippar: A Demographic Study of an Old Babylonian City
1894–1595 BC, Belgium: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut Te
Istanbul, 1975.
45 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 3–84.
46 Ibid., p. 281 n.8.
47 Mayer I.Gruber, The Motherhood of God and Other Studies, USF Studies in the
History of Judaism, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992, pp. 17–47.
48 Dossin and Finet, Archives Royales, pp. 79–139.
49 Ochshorn, Female Experience, ch. 2–4.
50 Jacobsen, Harps, pp. 112–24.
51 Ibid., p. 116.
52 Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth,
New York: Harper & Row, 1983, p. 99.
53 Cohen, Canonical Lamentations, II, pp. 587–603.
54 Ibid., p. 596.

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 SUMER

55 Enheduanna, Exaltation, p. 15.

56 The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N.K.Sandars, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books
Ltd., 1960, pp. 107–9.
57 A.K.Grayson, “Akkadian Myths and Epics,” in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern
Texts, pp. 507–12.
58 Gilgamesh, p. 85.

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 4

CROSS-DRESSING AND
CROSS-PURPOSES
Gender possibilities in the Acts of Thecla
J.L.Welch
In the late fourth or early fifth century the Christian pilgrim Egeria visited
the “very beautiful” shrine of the protomartyr Thecla in Seleucia, a town on
the coast of what is now southeastern Turkey. There she found “countless
monastic cells for men and women” and a “holy church,” where she prayed
and listened to a reading of “the complete Acts of Saint Thecla.”1
What Egeria heard was the tale of a beautiful young virgin, engaged to be
married, who takes to heart a sermon preached by the Apostle Paul and
resolves to remain celibate. After many ordeals, she triumphs over her
persecutors and goes off, dressed as a man, to preach the word of God.
Thecla’s story, which does not seem to be based on that of any historical
figure, appears in a text called the Acts of Thecla, one segment in the longer
Acts of Paul, a narrative (of which we have only fragments) which begins
with Paul’s activities in Damascus and Jerusalem and ends with his martyrdom
in Rome. The text is dated to the middle or late second century, but
incorporates older oral traditions. Like most of the other Apocryphal Acts of
Apostles, the Acts of Paul and Thecla probably originated among ascetic
Christian congregations in Asia Minor.2
The Acts of Thecla circulated widely apart from the Acts of Paul. At the
end of the second century, the North African writer Tertullian testified,
disapprovingly, to Thecla’s popularity.3 Methodius, Ambrose, Gregory of
Nyssa, and Jerome are among the Church fathers who praised Thecla in
the following centuries.4 By the time Egeria visited her shrine in Seleucia,
Thecla’s cult was well established. She continued to be a popular figure
well into the Middle Ages.
Because she is a strong female character who takes on male dress and
roles, some modern readers have looked to Thecla for evidence concerning
women’s experience and access to authority in the early Church, even
concluding that the Acts of Thecla may be the work of a female author or
authors.5 But it is obvious that the story of the heroic transvestite also
appealed strongly to men. At the heart of Thecla’s story is a symbolic
alteration in gender; but the notion of simple gender-switching—female
into male—does not begin to exhaust its possible meanings. In what

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 GENDER POSSIBILITIES IN THE ACTS OF THECLA

follows, I will examine the way the complex gendered imagery of the Acts
of Thecla lends itself to multiple, even conflicting, interpretations, and
thus to the agenda of diverse audiences, depending on whether the
transformation of a virgin female into a male-garbed apostle is understood
as acquiring the attributes of maleness, as attaining a state of androgyny,
or as annihilating the feminine.

THE STORY
Thecla is a young virgin of Iconium, already betrothed in marriage, who
listens from her window to a sermon preached by the Apostle Paul in the
house of a neighbor, Onesiphorus. The sermon proclaims “continence and
the resurrection.”6 To the great consternation of her mother, Theocleia, and
Thamyris, her betrothed, Thecla becomes “dominated by a new desire and a
fearful passion” to follow the Apostle and his ideal of chastity.7 After an
angry mob led by Thamyris has Paul thrown into jail for “corrupting our
wives,” Thecla uses her jewelry and her silver mirror as bribes to escape her
home and enter his prison cell.
Thecla, too, is brought before the governor who asks why she
refuses to marry Thamyris. When she remains silent, “looking steadily
at Paul,” her mother cries out, “Burn the lawless one! Burn her that is
no bride in the midst of the theatre, that all the women who have been
taught by this man may be afraid!”8 After Paul is flogged and driven
out of the city, the “young men and maidens” bring fuel to burn Thecla
in the arena. The governor weeps at the sight of her naked body,
amazed at “the power in her.” Looking into the crowd, Thecla sees
“the Lord sitting in the form of Paul.”9 Miraculously, the fire blazes
around the steadfast virgin without burning her. A tremendous rain and
hail storm quenches the flames, destroying many in the crowd and
allowing Thecla to escape.
Thecla flees Iconium and finds Paul fasting and praying for her outside the
city. She proposes to cut her hair short and follow him, but he replies, “The
season is unfavourable and thou art comely. May no other temptation come
upon thee, worse than the first, and thou endure not and play the coward!”
Thecla then asks to be baptized: “Only give me the seal in Christ, and
temptation shall not touch me.” Paul responds, “Have patience, Thecla, and
thou shalt receive the water.”10
Paul and Thecla proceed to the city of Antioch where Alexander, “one
of the first of the Antiochenes,” sees Thecla and conceives an immediate
passion for her. He tries to buy her from Paul, who replies: “I do not
know the woman of whom thou dost speak, nor is she mine.”11 Alexander
then attempts to “embrace” Thecla on the street, but she resists him,
ripping his cloak and hurling the wreath he wears as a sign of rank to the
ground. For this impertinence Thecla finds herself once again before a

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governor, this time condemned to be devoured by beasts in a gladiatorial

show Alexander is sponsoring. Women in the audience protest the “godless
judgment.” The governor grants Thecla’s request to “remain pure” until
her ordeal, allowing her to become the ward of a rich widow, Tryphaena,
whose natural daughter has died.
The next day Thecla, stripped and girdled like a gladiator, is thrown
into the arena while the crowd roars, some for and some against her. The
beasts are set loose and a fierce lioness defends Thecla, killing off a bear
and then a lion, against which the lioness dies fighting. Thecla’s female
partisans bewail the lioness’ death. More beasts are sent in and Thecla,
expecting to breathe her last, baptizes herself as she jumps into a pool of
water in which ravenous seals wait to devour her. Lightning strikes the
animals dead while a cloud of fire clothes Thecla’s nakedness. Finally,
Alexander has the naked Thecla tied by the feet to his two “fearsome
bulls” which are then goaded to a frenzy by flames applied to their
genitals. Instead of being ripped in half, however, Thecla escapes once
again as, in the nick of time, the fire burns her ropes.
At this point Tryphaena faints and the populace, believing her dead, rises
up in alarm because she is related to Caesar, whose retribution against the
city they fear. At Alexander’s request the governor frees Thecla, who gives a
short speech about the saving powers of her God. Taking the garments the
governor has commanded be brought to her, she says, “He who clothed me
when I was naked among the beasts shall clothe me with salvation in the day
of judgment.” The city resounds with the voices of women who cry out,
“One is God who has delivered Thecla!”12
Tryphaena becomes a Christian along with “the majority of her maid-
servants.” She makes over her fortune to Thecla for distribution to the poor.
After instructing Tryphaena’s household for eight days, Thecla girds herself
and sews her mantle into a cloak “after the fashion of men.”13 Accompanied
by a crowd of young men and maidens, she goes to find Paul in the city of
Myra. Paul “was astonished when he saw her and the crowd that was with
her, pondering whether another temptation was not upon her.” She reassures
him by telling him of her baptism: “for he who worked with thee for the
Gospel has also worked with me for my baptism.”14 Many convert after
hearing Thecla’s story. When Thecla declares her intention of returning to
Iconium, Paul replies, “Go and teach the word of God!”
In Iconium Thecla returns to the house of Onesiphorus, where Paul had
preached, and offers a prayer of thanks to God for delivering her from prison,
fire, and beasts. Thamyris is dead but Theocleia still lives. Thecla encourages
her mother to believe in the God who has manifestly saved her daughter and
who will provide (through Tryphaena’s donation) for her daily needs.
Theocleia’s response is not recorded. Thecla’s story simply concludes, “And
when she had borne this witness she went away to Seleucia; and after
enlightening many with the word of God she slept with a noble sleep.”15

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ACQUIRING MALENESS
If one approaches the Acts of Thecla, as many readers and listeners of late
antiquity surely did, with the assumption that weakness is an inherently female
trait while strength is an attribute of men, then Thecla herself stands out as a
splendid exception to nature’s rule. Inspired by the word of God, represented
in the Acts of Thecla by the sermons of Paul, and thus invested with divine
power, she suddenly gains the moral and physical strength to resist her intended
husband, escape from her family home, beat up a male attacker, and endure
a variety of public tortures. She exhibits, in other words, the courage and
fortitude “of a man.” So thoroughly is she transformed that even her outward
appearance comes to match her new “male” identity.
Thecla’s acquisition of this desirable quality, masculinity, is open to several
interpretations. First of all, it can be seen as an example of the “reversal”
motif well known in early Christian, especially Pauline, literature: the last
becomes the first, the victim becomes the victor. The ultimate archetype is
Christ’s “victory” on the cross.
Martyrdom accounts vividly dramatize the theme. Displaying the
exceptional fortitude that comes only from God, the martyr turns the moral
tables on his or her adversaries and “wins the crown” of everlasting life.
Female heroines, martyrs, and others offer particularly dramatic illustrations
of the Christian God’s ability to empower even the weakest and most
humble.16 The female martyr’s unusual strength is often expressed in
masculine metaphors.
So, for example, in what is taken to be a relatively historical second-century
martyrdom account, the slave woman Blandina endures frightful tortures
before winning the martyr’s crown. Her approving chronicler writes that
“tiny, weak, and insignificant as she was she would give inspiration to her
brothers, for she had put on Christ, that mighty and invincible athlete.”17
When the Carthaginian martyr Perpetua dreams of her coming ordeal she
sees herself preparing to wrestle a ferocious Egyptian. “I became a man,” she
wrote, and proceeded to defeat him.18
Thecla becomes a “man” after she succeeds in tests of her courage, faith,
and fortitude. In her case reversal of status—from innate weakness to
strength, from a mortal condition to salvation—manifests itself as a complete
reversal of gender. Masculinity is her crown, an emblem of her divinely
invulnerable state.
But Thecla acquires more than male appearance, she takes on male roles:
she baptizes herself and, with Paul’s blessing, preaches and converts many. In
the Acts of Thecla, as in the real world, maleness confers not only strength
but also authority. The “egalitarian” reading of the Acts of Thecla sees it as
sanctioning the right of women to occupy positions of authority in the Church,
even to exercise authority equal to that of men. Thecla claims the rights and
privileges of a male apostle, based on the same access to power. As she explains

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to Paul, “…he who worked with thee for the Gospel has also worked with
me for my baptism.”19
That some of Thecla’s partisans did interpret her story this way is evident
from Tertullian’s efforts to rebut them. He warns:
If those who read the writings that falsely bear the name of Paul adduce
the example of Thecla to maintain the right of women to teach and to
baptize, let them know that the presbyter in Asia [Minor] who produced
this document, as if he could of himself add anything to the prestige of
Paul, was removed from his office after he had been convicted and had
confessed that he did it out of love for Paul.20
Tertullian’s “presbyter of Asia” was certainly not alone in promoting the
authority of women. A number of Christian circles, especially in the East,
tolerated or encouraged women in leadership positions. The Montanist and
Quintillian movements stood out in this respect.21
One scholar, Dennis MacDonald, argues that the Acts of Paul and Thecla
and the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), which come from close
to the same date and locale, represent variant, conflicting strains of Pauline
Christianity.22 The Acts of Thecla offers an egalitarian interpretation of
Paul of Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek…slave nor free…
male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Pastoral Epistles,
MacDonald suggests, were written specifically to refute this and other
positions taken in the Acts of Paul. They exclude women from positions of
authority and advise them to be submissive, wear modest and “seemly”
apparel, and seek salvation through marriage and childbearing.23 While
there were (and are) pockets of resistance, over time the conservative point
of view prevailed.
A more radical view of Thecla’s transformation focuses on the issue of
female autonomy. Traveling as a woman, Thecla is attacked by a lustful
stranger. Clothed as a man, she roams freely, in safety. Maleness is seen to
confer more than physical and moral strength or ecclesiastical authority. In
“becoming male,” Thecla escapes not only the risks, but also the obligations
of traditional womanhood: marriage and childbirth. In doing so, she achieves
freedom from domination by men.24
Thecla’s autonomy comes as the result of her rejection of sexual
intercourse. Celibacy offered those women who could afford it, or who
were “widows” supported by the community, the opportunity to control
their own bodies and thus their own place in the world, a fact remarked
on by ancient writers as well as modern.25 By dressing as a man, Thecla
publicly declares her freedom from sex and all the social and political
consequences it had for women.
In the Antioch episode at least, Thecla saves her chastity by defeating a
host of specifically male, overtly or implicitly sexual, aggressors, human and
animal. We have no way of knowing if women in late antiquity found, or

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possibly expressed, in Thecla’s story the deep hostility toward men or resistance
to patriarchal society that some modern readers see there. Friction between
celibate females and male Church authorities did exist, both at the time that
the Acts were written and in following centuries.26 Whatever their attitude
toward men, there is no reason to doubt that in the numerous households
and communities of “widows” that had begun to proliferate by the end of
the second century, Thecla, the woman who rejected traditional female
sexuality and seized the rights and privileges of manhood, served as an
important model and inspiration.

BECOMING ANDROGYNOUS
“…[T]he unification of opposites, and especially the opposite sexes,” writes
Wayne Meeks, “served in early Christianity as a prime symbol of salvation.”27
Unification language was prominent in the ritual of baptism. When the Apostle
Paul declares: “There is neither Jew nor Greek … slave nor free … male nor
female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he is quoting from a pre-Pauline
baptismal formula.28 Baptism conferred on the new Christian a state of ritual
androgyny.
Within the context of baptism, androgyny is subject to various
interpretations. It speaks perhaps of a return to the “primal, undifferentiated”
reality of humankind’s original state;29 of the union of all Christians in the
mystical body of Christ;30 or of a restoration of the divine image the original
Adam possessed.31
The dramatic structure of the Acts of Thecla mirrors the steps of the
Christian ritual of baptism. Thecla undergoes an initiation, gives up her
worldly identity, takes part in a public spectacle involving nakedness,
immersion in water, and reclothing/rebirth, and emerges with a new identity
in Christ. For the new Thecla “there is no male and female.”
When the first century Christian, Hermas, encountered a personification
of the virtue Continence (Enkrateia) in one of his famous visions, she appeared
to him girded, looking like a man.32 In ascetic Christian circles the figure of
the androgynous female transvestite was an image of sexual chastity. In this
context, androgyny implies the absolute negation, the canceling out of
sexuality. Male and female are no longer separate poles; the “treacherous
spark” of desire cannot jump between them.33
In the so-called “Encratite” churches, it appears that baptism entailed a
life of sexual continence.34 (Although not necessarily virginity. The Apocryphal
Acts offer a number of examples of couples who adopt continent marriages.)
This expectation is behind Thecla’s request of Paul: “Only give me the seal in
Christ, and temptation shall not touch me.”
Thecla’s story can be read as an allegory illustrating the defeat of sexual
desire. Chastity’s enemies are gendered male in keeping with the view
traditional in the ancient world that the man is the active partner in sexual

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intercourse. In a variation on the reversal theme, the “victim,” the human

being prey to the onslaughts of lust (and thus passive/female) overcomes
her attackers. So, from the allegorical point of view, can the mortal man or
woman, with Christ, resist the demons of sexual desire and achieve
androgyny/asexuality.
Why is sexual continence the means and mark of salvation? The answer
has to do with the Encratite apocalyptic vision. In the ascetic Christian
communities of the East, sexual intercourse and childbearing, traditionally
cherished as the frail mortal’s best hope of “immortality,” came to be seen as
the very means by which the demonic rulers of this age maintained their fatal
grip on a doomed humanity. The defeat of death and the advent of the New
Jerusalem presupposed a halting of the juggernaut of human history. What
was required was a “boycott of the womb,” a radical rejection of the
institutions of marriage and family, the foundations of social and political
life in the ancient world.35 Continence was the key to ending the old age and
bringing on the new.
Paul’s message to Thecla is clear: he preaches “continence and the resur-
rection.” His accusers claim “he deprives young men of wives and maidens
of husbands, saying: ‘Otherwise there is no resurrection for you, except
ye remain chaste and do not defile the flesh…’” 36 When Thecla,
accordingly, rejects her intended husband, her persecution begins. The
status quo has its defenders.
More than a few Christians did take the apocalyptic message to heart.
Much criticism of them, by Christians and pagans alike, had to do with their
rejection of social and familial obligations and their implied contempt for
city and state. Many, like Thecla, adopted a family “in Christ” to the exclusion
of their biological kin. Some became propertyless itinerants as well.37
Seen as androgyny, Thecla’s triumphal state undermines “a potent
symbol for the stability of the world order,” the “differentiation and
ranking of women and men.”38 In its broadest sense it stands for the
collapse of temporal society.

ANNIHILATING THE FEMALE

There were other views in the ancient world about the problem of sexual
desire and its solution. “When men thought about it,” writes Peter Brown,
“they tended to see it in terms of the peril presented to them by the perpetual
seductiveness of women.”39
Beautiful women have the power to infatuate men—as Thecla does
Alexander—and fill them with uncontrollable sexual passion. Female beauty
is the cause of temptation and beautiful women thus incarnate it. Young
virgins are the most tempting of all. As the Christian John Chrysostom wrote
in the fourth century, “For even if a man accepts a widow as his wife, it is not
as if he had taken her as a virgin, for his amorous desires are more violent

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and frenzied with the virgin than with the widow—a point, I suppose, that is
obvious to everybody.”40
Possessing this power of attraction constitutes a major portion of a woman’s
“frailty” and elsewhere in the Apocryphal Acts of Apostles it is a reason for
punishment and a source of shame and contrition. The Acts of Peter (which
may have been a source for the Acts of Paul41) presents the story of Peter’s
virgin daughter. At the age of ten the girl is “a great harm to men” because of
her beauty. When she is paralyzed Peter gives thanks to the Lord. To
demonstrate God’s miraculous powers, Peter heals her momentarily but then
returns her to her invalid state. Another story concerns a virgin Peter
reluctantly raises from the dead. When she is “seduced” by a passing stranger,
the lesson drawn is that she was better off dead.42
In the Acts of John one finds the remarkable story of Drusiana who, having
achieved a continent marriage with her husband after much travail, excites
the passions of another man. Feeling herself “partly to blame for wounding
an ignorant soul,” she prays for and receives death. Alas, her dead body
continues to arouse her suitor who attempts to desecrate it. In the nick of
time a huge snake appears and kills him. When the Apostle and bereaved
husband return to Drusiana’s tomb they raise up and interrogate the lecher
to determine whether he succeeded in his foul plan. Only when they know
Drusiana is still pure do they bring her back to life.43
In exploiting images of sexual attraction and sexual violence, the
Apocryphal Acts—including the Acts of Thecla—succeed in representing sex
at the same time that they reject it. Writing about antique Jewish, Christian,
and pagan popular literature in general, one author points out, “In folklore
and fairy tale there is often a frank acceptance of sexual and aggressive feelings.
Bourgeois popular literature accepts such material with certain premises,
adequately summed up in the thesis ‘Crime does not pay.’ One can depict
nearly any amount of sex and violence as long as transgressors reap their due
reward. In cultures where sex is suspect, torture and rape become acceptable
outlets, for they reinforce the notion that sex is bad.”44
That the rejection of sex should entail the torture and rape of women seems
as self-evident to the author quoted above as it did to men writing in antiquity.
In the Acts of John a young man driven to murder because of the lust he feels
for a certain woman castrates himself. He is rebuked by the Apostle, who says
“it is not those organs which are harmful to man, but the unseen springs
through which every shameful emotion is stirred up and comes to light.”45
It is the female body as symbol of both sin and purity that is the appropriate
object for demonstrating the defeat of one by the other. While martyrdom
accounts typically focus on the body of the martyr, it is rarely in stories about
men that sexual torture and the shame and humiliation of nakedness play an
important part.46 When the second-century bishop Polycarp strips off his
clothes in preparation for being burned in the arena, the author concentrates
on the detail of the old man stooping to remove his own sandals “although

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he had never had to do this before: for all the Christians were always eager to
be the first to touch his flesh.”47 Here the author uses a synecdoche to represent
nakedness, which is not in any case understood to be shameful.
In contrast, when the martyr Potamiaena, a virgin like Thecla, came before
her judge we are told that he “subjected her entire body to cruel torments
and then threatened to hand her over to his gladiators to assault her
physically.” She dies by having boiling pitch slowly dropped all over her
body.48 The virgin martyr Irene is sentenced to be placed naked in a public
brothel before being burned on a pyre.49 When Perpetua and Felicitas are
brought into the arena in Carthage, “the crowd was horrified when they saw
that one was a delicate young girl and the other was a woman fresh from
childbirth with the milk still dripping from her breasts.”50 The text’s concern
with the modesty of the two women merely confirms the fascinating quality
of female pain and humiliation.
In none of these accounts is sexual continence a major issue. When the
drama turns around the defense of chastity—that is to say, when it concerns
sex per se—the female martyr’s ordeal often consists of explicitly sexual
mutilation.51
From a few centuries after the Acts of Thecla comes the vivid example of
the Syrian martyr, Febronia. Raised in a convent where she has never set eyes
upon a man, Febronia is nevertheless required to do extra penance because
of her extraordinary beauty. When a persecution of Christians takes place,
only Febronia and two old sisters remain at the convent. Expecting to be
arrested by soldiers, the older women are distraught thinking that Febronia
will yield to their “seducement.” They exhort her to remember the prize of
virginity. When Febronia is taken prisoner by a pagan nobleman seeking to
convert and marry her, her convent sisters greatly fear she will be unable to
resist. Febronia’s torture focuses on her sexual identity. Her face is disfigured,
her teeth knocked out, her buttocks and thighs beaten mercilessly with rods.
One at a time, her breasts are cut off and each time she is forced to parade
around the city holding the severed organ in her hand. As she suffers this
disfigurement and loss of female body parts her strength and her sisters’
confidence increase. When Febronia is no longer recognizable as a woman
her success as a saint is complete. An interesting feature of the story is that it
invokes the name of Thecla and recalls her vision in the arena of “Christ in
the form of Paul.”52
The case for misogyny in the Acts of Thecla relies on some of the same
evidence used to illustrate its “hostility toward men.” There is first the curious
behavior of the Apostle Paul: he vanishes from the scene whenever Thecla is
in trouble, rejects her request for baptism, and, on more than one occasion,
expresses fear that she will give in to “temptation.” This may be, as some
suggest, a deliberately negative portrayal of a male character or it may
represent another concern—that a “comely” woman poses risks and, until
she proves herself a Christian hero, is not to be trusted.

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Thecla’s Antioch ordeal, by which she proves her trustworthiness, is

explicitly sexual in nature. Her travails begin with Alexander’s attempt to
rape her. Or rather, with her successful resistance to his sexual overture. In
the arena she is stripped of her clothing, a condition acknowledged to be
shameful by the detail that a cloud of fire hides this nakedness as Thecla
baptizes herself in the pool of water. The beasts who threaten her are
specifically male and implicitly sexual. The last torture visited upon her is a
graphic attempt at sexual mutilation: Alexander’s two “fearsome bulls,” driven
wild by their sizzled genitals, nearly rip the naked virgin apart by the legs.
Thecla survives to live into old age. But not as a woman. Before taking up a
career as an itinerant preacher, she “sews her mantle into a cloak” and takes
on the soothing aspect of a man.
Citing the enormously popular story of Pelagia the Harlot who, after her
conversion, dresses in a monk’s robe and takes up a life of such extreme
isolation and asceticism that she is assumed to be male, Sebastian Brock and
Susan Harvey describe the theme of female transvestism as an “annihilation”
of femaleness.53
The salient point of Thecla’s story is that she triumphs by surviving all the
threats posed against her. She trounces her attacker. She is invulnerable. But
perhaps the author is uncomfortable with the “perpetual seductiveness” of
even a consecrated virgin, as long as she remains a woman. Thecla receives
Paul’s blessing only after a series of tests, after the explosive hazard of her
beauty is defused by the male identity she takes on following her baptism and
her experience of symbolic rape. It is possible to interpret Thecla’s
transformation as the female equivalent of castration. Achieving “continence
and the resurrection,” following the misogynist logic, requires annihilating
the feminine.
As with celibate women and the feminist interpretation, there is no way
to know to what extent Christian men (or women) read the Acts of Thecla
this way. The abundant examples of misogyny in similar and related works
suggest that even holy women were the objects of deep ambivalence on the
part of men.

CONCLUSION
In the diverse Christian communities of late antiquity, some men and women
made Thecla’s choice, linking themselves to a spiritual family and a heavenly
spouse. There were certainly communities of celibate women. The typical
continent woman resembled Tryphaena, however, not Thecla. She was a
widowed head of a household with property and influence in her
community.54 In the eastern Empire and elsewhere there also lived men and
women joined in continent marriages, the objects of respect from many and
of occasional condemnation by skeptics.55 And there were, of course, those
heirs to the male Apostles, the “church fathers,” as well as an ever-expanding

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contingent of celibate men. Far outnumbering any of these were men and
women of lesser vocation, sexual beings who paid their repects to others’
heroic feats of chastity.
There was certainly no single audience for the Acts of Thecla and no single
meaning assigned to Thecla’s act of putting on male dress. It comes as no
surprise that male and female readers or listeners might have had (or continue
to have) different interpretations of Thecla’s transformation. The question
arises, how different? Or, for that matter, how much the same? Looking beyond
the simple dichotomy of male/female, one perceives that how an audience
was likely to understand Thecla’s gender depended, at least in part, on its
attitude toward sex, that is, toward sexual desire and the means and
consequences of defeating it.

NOTES
1 Egeria, Diary of a Pilgrimage, Ancient Christian Writers, New York: Newman
Press, 1970, vol. 38, ch. 23, p.87.
2 Wilhelm Schneemelcher, “Introduction to the Acts of Paul,”, in Edgar Hennecke,
New Testament Apocrypha, vol. II (NTA II), ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher,
Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965, p. 351.
3 De baptismo 17, quoted in NTA II, p. 323.
Methodius, Symposium; Ambrose, De virginibus; Jerome, De viris illustribus;
Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina.
See Virginia Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy, Lewiston, NY: E.Mellen Press, 1987;
Stevan Davies, The Revolt of the Widows, Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1980; Dennis R.MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle,
Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983.
6 Acts of Paul and Thecla, in Hennecke, Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha,
vol. II, ch. 5, p. 354.
7 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 9, p. 355.
8 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 20, p. 358.
9 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 21, p. 358.
10 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 25, p. 359–60.
11 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 26, p. 360.
12 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 38, p. 363.
13 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 40, p. 364.
14 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 40, p. 364.
15 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 43, p. 364.
16 Davies quotes an excellent example from the Acts of Xanthippe in which a
disgruntled demon exclaims, “From this destroyer [Christ] even women have
received the power to strike us.” Widows, 68.
17 Martyrs of Lyons, in Herbert Musurillo (trans.), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 75.
18 Martyrdom of Perpetua, Musurillo, Christian Martyrs, p. 118.
19 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 40, p. 364.
20 De baptismo 17, in NTA II, p. 323.
21 MacDonald, Legend, pp. 37–9.
22 MacDonald, Legend, in particular, ch. 4.
23 1 Timothy 2:9–15, 5:11–14; Titus 2:3–5.

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24 In addition to Burrus, Davies, and MacDonald (fn. 5), see also Jo Ann McNamara,
“Sexual Equality and the Cult of Virginity in Early Christian Thought,” in Feminist
Studies 3:3/4 (Spring/Summer 1976), pp. 145–58; Rosemary Radford Ruether,
“Mothers of the Church,” in R.Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, (eds), Women
of Spirit, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979, and “Misogynism and Virginal
Feminism,” in R.Ruether (ed.) Religion and Sexism, New York: Simon & Schuster,
1974.
25 MacDonald quoting Pseudo-Chrysostom on the hard injunctions of Genesis: “…
the text that reads ‘your turning shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over
you’ is powerless with respect to those not lorded over by husbands. The passage
‘she shall bear children in sorrows’ does not apply to those who live as virgins,
for she who does not bear children is outside the sentence of terrible labor pains.”
Legend, p. 53.
26 1 Timothy 5:3–16. The Council of Gangra, CE 346, forbade celibate women to
dress as men. See Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, New York: Harper &
Row, 1986, p. 372.
27 Wayne Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne,” in History of Religions, vol. 13,
No. 3 (February 1974), pp. 165–6.
28 Dennis R.MacDonald, There is No Male and Female Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1987. pp. 5–14; Meeks, “Image,” pp. 180–1.
29 Peter R.L.Brown, The Body and Society, New York: Columbia University Press,
1988. pp. 49–50.
30 MacDonald, Male and Female, p. 128.
31 Colossians 3:9–10 uses the saying in reference to the divine image, but omits the
pair male/female. See also Meeks, “Image,” pp. 189–95 on diverse Gnostic sources.
32 Meeks, “Image,” p.196, fn. 137.
33 Brown, Body and Society, p. 100; McNamara, “Sexual Equality,” p. 154.
34 Brown, Body and Society, pp. 92–3, 96.
35 Brown, Body and Society, p. 99.
36 Acts of Paul and Thecla, ch. 12, p. 356.
37 MacDonald, Legend, pp. 46–9.
38 Meeks, “Image,” p. 180.
39 Brown, Body and Society, p. 85.
40 John Chrysostom, “On Not Marrying Again,” in Elizabeth Clark (ed.), Women
in the Early Church, Wilmington: M.Glazier, 1983, p. 155.
41 Schneemelcher, NTA II, p. 345.
42 Acts of Peter, NTA II, pp. 276–7; p. 279.
43 Acts of John, NTA II, pp. 247–51.
44 Richard I.Pervo, Profit With Delight, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987, p. 49.
45 Acts of John, NTA II, p. 241. Evidently the practice continued. The Council of
Nicaea (CE 325) banned self-castrated men from the priesthood. Lane Fox, Pagans
and Christians, p. 355.
46 See Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 57.
47 Martyrdom of Polycarp, in Musurillo, Christian Martyrs, p. 13.
48 Martyrdom of Potamiaena and Basilides, Christian Martyrs, p. 133.
49 Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, Chione, Christian Martyrs, p. 291.
50 Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, Christian Martyrs, p. 129.
51 In her study of religious representations of female nakedness, Margaret Miles
notes that, “more than a millenium after Christian martyrdom virtually ceased in
the West, texts like Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend and myriad visual
images supplied the popular interest in women’s body parts. Devotional texts
like the Golden Legend graphically describe women martyrs, and such texts are
often accompanied by pictures of their torture, dismemberment, and executions…

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pornography did not become secular until well into the modern period”. Carnal
Knowing, p. 156.
52 Sebastian P.Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 152–76. See also the very
similar martyrdom accounts of Anahid (Holy Women, pp. 92–6) and Candida
(Brock, “A Martyr at the Sassanid Court under Vahran II: Candida,” in Syriac
Perspectives on Late Antiquity, London: Variorum Reprints, 1984). Of the Syrian
martyrs, Brock and Harvey write, “The specifically sexual character of some of
the tortures imposed on women martyrs reflects on the fact that men were the
torturers. But the gratuitously detailed manner in which these incidents are
described (in fictional accounts as well as historically accurate ones) reminds us
further that men are also doing the writing.” Holy Women, p. 25.
53 Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, p. 25.
54 Brown, Body and Society, p. 150.
55 Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1957, p. 49 re: respect; for skepticism, see for example the second Pseudo-
Clementine epistle, “On Virginity.”

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 5

MARTYRS, ASCETICS, AND

GNOSTICS
Gender-crossing in early Christianity
Karen Jo Torjesen
Gender crossing within early Christianity was determined by the patterns of
gender relations and gendered expectations of Roman and Greek societies
from the first through the fifth centuries. Both societies took as their prototype
for maleness the aristocrat in his role as warrior or statesman-citizen and in
either arena, whether war of politics, the quest for honor was integral to
masculinity. In the public places where men gathered—athletic fields, the
assembly, the courts, and the agora (town square) as well as on the battlefield—
claims to male honor could be staked out or contested and either won or lost.
The quest for honor was agonistic. Every social interaction between equals
witnessed by a “public” could be viewed as a contest for honor—a dinner
invitation, a gift, an arranged marriage. The arbitrator of honor was public
opinion. Like the Greek chorus, the “public” was the anonymous audience
for acts of honor; it deliberated and weighed claims to honor and gave its
collective judgment. Ritualized recognition of honor could be secured through
military duties, public trials, participating in debates, benefactions, holding
public office and participating in assemblies.1
Honor was both public and masculine. The aggressive quest for honor, the
willingness to compete for it and the determination to avenge dishonor defined
the masculine character.2 Because notions of masculinity evolved first in the
context of warfare, the military virtues of courage and loyalty and the quest
for glory became the hallmarks of masculinity.3 The aggressiveness of the
masculine personality and the willingness to avenge a loss of honor were
correlates of the fact that the “instant willingness to engage in personal combat
required a high level of personal aggression.”4 Not surprisingly, those traits
which defined a masculine personality—aggressiveness, dominance, a desire
for precedence, and a willingness to defend one’s reputation—were the traits
essential for success in the competition for honor.
The rules which governed the quest for honor in public life were codified
into a set of virtues which guided public men in the performance of their civic
duties. For the Greeks, these were courage, justice, and self-control; the
Romans added a fourth, prudence, to head the list.5 Although ancient writers
treated these virtues as a universal code of virtue, they were gendered masculine

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because their practice was located in the masculine sphere of public life. The
Roman discourse of moral excellence was masculine, the virtues for which a
magistrate, a benefactor, a patron, were praised were the civic virtues that
defined male achievement. Since there was no language for female
achievement, when influential Greek and Roman matrons exercised political
authority they were praised for the “manly” virtues of courage and self-
control or for having a masculine mind.

FEMININITY AND SHAME

The social construction of femaleness did not preoccupy Greek and Roman
intellectuals, but to the extent that it was articulated, the feminine was an
antipode to the masculine. The counterpart of the public man was the
domestic woman whose activities and domain were classified as private to
set them apart from the public spaces and political activities dominated by
men. The triad of female virtues, chastity, silence, and obedience were the
counterpoint to the masculine virtues of courage, justice, and self-control.6
Since women were defined by their sexual roles as wives and mothers, the
principal virtue of womanhood was chastity; it alone constituted the
foundation for a woman’s honor.
Although a woman’s honor was her reputation for chastity, it was not
an honor that could be enhanced or advanced. It was a passive form of
honor that must be defended. A woman was constantly at risk for losing
her reputation for chastity; so her quest for honor focused on the
preservation of sexual reputation. Since a woman’s sexual fidelity was
difficult to judge (affairs could be kept secret) there were socially
prescribed ways that a woman could publicly signal her privately observed
chastity, through her simple dress, modest grooming, no makeup and
reticence to be seen in public. Girls were socialized to acquire a “feminine”
personality, to be discreet, shy, restrained, and timid, qualities that would
safeguard female chastity and womanly honor.7
A woman with a sense of shame possessed the female version of honor.
A shameless woman had no concern for her reputation and therefore had
lost her honor. The cultural foundation for a woman’s sense of shame was
her suppressed sexuality and her knowledge of her inferiority, the basis of
her subordination to her husband. Although the virtue of courage is
commended to both men and women, men are to show it by commanding
and women by obeying.8 The virtuous woman earned a reputation for her
deference to her husband and her intent to please him. The virtue of
silence was also a measure of women’s subordination to their husbands,
but more importantly it was a social value by which women could be
discouraged from participation in the political sphere where speech was
the primary instrument of power, the vehicle of authority, and means of
domination. The defining qualities of womanhood, chastity, passivity, and

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subordination, could be sustained only as long as women were

circumscribed within the world of the household.

FEMALE MARTYRDOM AND GENDER-CROSSING

The passive female virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience were incompatible
with the heroic ideal of the aggressive quest for honor. The dilemma for
Roman authors and for their Christian counterparts was how to praise women
for heroic achievements. The only form in which women’s stories have been
preserved is in the lives of martyrs and ascetics, written to honor them and to
praise the ideals of suffering for the faith and renouncing the world.
The martyrdom of saints Perpetua and her slave Felicity (Felicitas) is a
rare piece because it was written by a woman.9 Vibia Perpetua, a young
woman of noble birth, kept a journal of her trial and days in prison and an
eyewitness added an account of her death. For those who copied her
journal, its religious value lay in her visions, windows on the world to
come which the martyrs themselves were about to enter. Shortly before her
scheduled execution Perpetua received a vision interpreting her anticipated
death in the amphitheater where she would be thrown to wild animals for
the entertainment of the crowd. In her vision, as the contest begins, her
clothes were stripped off, her body became male and her assistants rubbed
her down with olive oil: she had become a gladiator. Her opponent, “an
Egyptian of vicious appearance,” came out to fight her and the two fought
fiercely hand to hand. She pummeled his face until he weakened, then she
put him in a head lock. When finally he fell, she placed her foot on his
head and the crowd roared. She had won. The trainer awarded her the
green branch of victory and “she walked in triumph toward the gate of
life.” So much for Perpetua’s vision.
The eyewitness report tells a different story. Because Perpetua and Felicity
refused to wear the robes of priestesses, they were stripped naked, entangled
in a net and left in the arena to be mauled by two wild heifers (a perverse
pairing off of the gender of the victims and the gender of the beasts). Because
the naked female body was such a potent symbol of weakness and
vulnerability, even the blood-thirsty crowd was “horrified when they saw
that one was a delicate young girl.” The two women were then clad in tunics.
Although wounded from being thrown and trampled, Perpetua was still alive,
and the crowd’s lust had been satiated. Perpetua was conducted from the
arena to the executioner’s sword and died there for her faith.
The significance of Perpetua’s gender crossing lies in the way her vision of
herself as a gladiator in the arena reverses the meanings of her being thrown
to the beasts. Although both events were staged as a spectacle for the crowd,
the gendering of Perpetua’s body as either male or female shapes the meaning
of the event quite differently. In the actual arena Perpetua and Felicity were
indeed helpless, tied up in the net and victims of the animals. But Perpetua

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the gladiator was a fighter, an athlete taking a challenge, engaged in a contest

and competing for victory. She faced an opponent with whom she was evenly
matched and she could by courage, strength, and skill overcome him. A naked
female body in the arena could only suggest a passive victim, not an active,
powerful protagonist, but the naked male body of the gladiator of Perpetua’s
vision was a cultural symbol of courage, power, and strength.
Inscribed on the female body itself were the cultural values of female
shame, women’s inferiority made visible. In contrast the male body was
an icon of honor and dignity, the visual representation of maleness. The
dishonor of the female body was heightened when Perpetua was thrown
by the wild heifer. She landed on her back, the tunic she was now wearing
was torn and her hair was in a wild disarray. These two, the disheveling
of the hair and the exposure of the body, were powerful symbols of shame
for the female body whose honor could be preserved only by keeping it
hidden and ordered. Here Perpetua is shamed, but Perpetua the gladiator
wins honor through her victory, which is affirmed in the cheers of the
crowd. In her male body she is awarded the victory branch and led
through the gate of life. In her female body after being thrown to the
animals she is led to the executioner’s sword and dies as a spectacle.10
By seeing herself as male gladiator, athlete and contestant—an identity
only possible in a male body—Perpetua takes the measure of the physical
courage and strength she will need for the very physical spectacle that will
play out in the arena. It is the very physicality of the experience of the martyrs,
the brutal forms of torture during interrogation and the physical suffering of
their slow deaths that call forth such masculine imagery.11
The naked female body itself is a spectacle signifying weakness and
shame, the sexualized object of the male gaze. Perpetua in the arena in her
female body is twice a spectacle, first of the dishonored female body, then
of the humiliated prisoner first tortured by the beasts and then executed by
a soldier. The gender-crossing of her vision makes possible a reversal of the
meaning of her execution. She is a combatant not a victim; she is honored,
not shamed; she is victorious rather than executed. To inscribe these
meanings onto her experience as a martyr she needs a male body.12 Women
martyrs often reinterpret the meaning of their nakedness, they refuse the
shame society attempts to inscribe on their bodies and they use the body
itself as a visible symbol of their spiritual power.13 This is equally true of
the women ascetics.

THE GENDER-CROSSING OF THE FEMALE ASCETICS

Up until the conversion of the emperor Constantine (CE 313), the heroism of
the martyrs eclipsed that of the ascetics. But after the trauma of persecution
was over Christians celebrated the heroic virtues of courage, justice and self-
control in the lives of ascetics who renounced property, household

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responsibilities, and family to seek Christian perfection in withdrawal from

the world. The disciplines they undertook, the practice of fasting, vigils of
prayer, sexual abstinence and the suppression of desire, were heralded by
their biographers as heroic feats. Because the inferiority of women and their
subordination to men was directly linked to their reproductive sexuality, by
renouncing the body and sexuality and following the ascetic life, women
seemed to transcend their femaleness.14 Since the heroic ideals of mastery of
the body and the passions had long been enshrined in the figure of the warrior,
women who could sustain the physical rigors of fasting, the sleeplessness of
the vigil, and the deprivation of poverty were praised for demonstrating
masculine virility.
Male hagiographers used the figure of Thecla as a bridge between the
woman martyr and the woman ascetic, for in Thecla’s story the heroism of
the martyr was endured on behalf of asceticism.15 In this way the masculine
heroism of martyrdom could be used to frame female asceticism. The story
of Thecla was already recounted in the preceding chapter. But some points
bear reiteration and development. 16 Of especial interest is Thecla’s
condemnation to death at Alexander’s tribunal—a condemnation which led
directly to her being thrown naked into the arena where, it was expected, she
would be devoured by wild animals. Instead, Thecla was defended by a fierce
lioness, who fought and killed the other beasts. Saved, thus, in an ostensibly
miraculous fashion, Thecla was freed and thereupon, set out once more as a
traveling teacher, now in a man’s cloak and accompanied by a retinue of
young men and women. When she finds (St) Paul, he confirms her in her
vocation to teach and baptise by saying, “Go and teach the word of God.”
Neither Thecla’s cutting of her hair in the style of a man nor her dressing
in a man’s cloak receives any narrative development, but each stands at the
conclusion of a longer process of a change in identity. Although the process
begins with Thecla’s rejection of a social identity as wife, as she breaks off
her engagement with Thamyris, it reaches its critical point when she refuses
also the role of loyal daughter, rebelling thus against the authority of her
mother even when it is backed by the state. This resolute act of self-assertion
is at the same time a repudiation of the female virtues of obedience and
submission. Her rejection of her familial social identity is the most radical
stage of her gender crossing, for in this one moment she changes from rich to
poor, from heiress to disinherited, without family, home or even city.
What is her new social identity? That of a traveling philosopher or teacher.
The story develops this new identity with significant narrative detail. Her
passion for the new teaching is underscored in the picture of her sitting
transfixed at her window for three days without moving or eating, captivated
by “ the discourse of virginity.” She has “fallen in love” with the teachings on
chastity in the words of the story. Her devotion to Paul as her teacher is
highlighted by her clandestine visit to him, purchased at the price of her
feminine adornments which she sheds as she casts off her old identity. In

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prison she sits at Paul’s feet in the position of a disciple receiving instruction.
Finally she becomes his companion and accompanies him on his tour of
preaching and teaching. Having refused to model her life on that of her mother,
she has chosen to model it on that of Paul, the apostle, evangelist and teacher.
In the framework of the narrative this change of identity is so radical that
Paul himself is not yet prepared to acknowledge it and refuses to baptize her.
The rich detail in the story of the martyrdom, emphasizing the brutality,
shame and suffering of death in the arena, highlight her strength, courage
and fearlessness. These “manly” virtues prove the completeness of her identity
change; she is no longer frail, weak and passive female. Not only was courage
gendered male, but the freedom to choose was as well. Her defiance of family
is, in fact, a masculine act of self-determination. She rejected the identity set
by sociobiological necessity—that of wife and mother—and entered into her
new identity by an act of willfulness.17 The element of the miraculous in her
martyrdom attests to divine approval of her new identity and, of course,
saves her for the next episode.
When Thecla enters Antioch as a traveling companion and disciple of
Paul, she has already assumed her new identity. However her identity as a
traveling teacher is immediately contested by Alexander who sees in her not
a traveling teacher of chastity, but a kept woman. At this point she is in
danger of being reduced to her sexuality, her gendered identity at its most
elemental. In this episode she must literally fight for her new identity in what
is almost hand to hand combat with Alexander. She defends her chastity and
her female honor by dishonoring him. The chastity she defends is
quintessentially female, but her mode of defending it is aggressively masculine.
She asserts her new identity as bearer of the message of Christian chastity
before the governor and he becomes the first to publicly acknowledge it by
releasing her into the custody of queen Tryphaena instead of sending her to
prison. Once again her martyrdom reveals her (masculine) courage, strength
and honor and seals this new identity in Antioch as the first one had in Iconium.
When she sets out from Antioch she is no longer a disciple of Paul, but a
teacher in her own right, accompanied by young men and women, presumably
those she had converted to Christian chastity. By the end of the story she has
also become an apostle, evangelist and teacher. Her donning of the male
cloak signals that this transformation is complete.18
Women like Thecla had appeared earlier in the Greek philosophical schools.
Diogenes Laertius describes the gender crossing of Hipparchia (300 BCE)
who chose to become a philosopher. Her story has similarities with that of
Thecla, Laertius reports, “She fell in love with the discourses and the life of
Crates and did not pay attention to any of her suitors.” When her parents
failed to dissuade her from this new passion, they appealed to the philosopher
Crates for help. He is reputed to have stood in front of her naked with his
philosopher’s cloak lying beside him and to have declared, “This would be
your bridegroom and these would be your possessions.” To choose for

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philosophy meant to choose against property, wealth, and comfort, all that a
young woman stood to gain by accepting the right suitor. In Laertius’ story,
as in Thecla’s, to choose the vocation of philosophy meant assuming a male
identity. Thecla put on a cloak and traveled in public, male space. Laertius’
story of Hipparchia follows a similar plot, “So the girl chose and adopting
the same dress went about with her husband and lived with him in public.”19
Nor did the gender-crossing of this female philosopher go unchallenged.
Hipparchia, as a practising philosopher, took part in symposiums, all-male
collegial affairs held in a private home with food and much wine in which the
only women who were normally present were slaves and courtesans.20 When
she bested a colleague in an argument he attempted to recover his honor by
reducing her to her femaleness, by ripping off her cloak. Hipparchia, although
a woman, had by now transcended femaleness, and thus Laertius reports
approvingly, “But Hipparchia showed no sign of alarm or of the perturbation
natural in a woman.” She could not be shamed by having her body exposed
like the bodies of the courtesans and slaves who were there for sexual service.
She had achieved a “manly” mastery over the emotions, and her body could
not be sexualized by the male gaze.
Again her opponent tried to silence her argument by invoking her
femaleness, “Is this she who quit woof and warp and comb and loom?” A
woman was destined for the social identity of household manager and the
domestic woman was always portrayed at her loom. Hipparchia responded
by appealing to a premise of the Platonic school that both men and women
could be seekers of wisdom, “Shouldn’t I instead of wasting further time on
the loom spend it in education?” Because the work of women in the domestic
sphere was valued less than the activities of men in the public sphere,
Hipparchia’s opponent could have only answered her question with a “yes.”
The women philosophers crossed the boundaries of their gender by donning
the philosopher’s cloak, abandoning women’s domestic work, taking up the
masculine activities of study and by demonstrating a masculine mastery over
the emotions. In crossing gender boundaries ascetic women exchanged their
female socio-sexual identities as fiancé, wife, mother, courtesan, or prostitute
for male social identities as teacher, philosopher, pilgrim, hermit.
The donning of a male cloak and tunic was often literally a flight from
female sexual identity. The Christian ascetic Matruna escaped her retinue
by disguising herself as a man in order to become a hermit and evade the
authority of her family over her person.21 Pelagia fled her life as a wealthy
courtesan by expropriating the cloak and tunic of the bishop who
converted her while he slept.22 Apollinaria, a daughter of the emperor, also
fled her retinue and her worldly life in the cloak of a man.23 A female
ascetic who took on the male identity and joined a male monastic
community could represent herself as a eunuch, who for either religious or
social reasons is castrated. Nonetheless even a eunuch has a masculine
identity. Anastasia became Anastasius, Eugenia, Eugenius, Euphrosune,

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Esmeraldus. These were not gender-crossings in name only, the female

ascetic also demonstrated a masculine character. “You are rightly called
Eugenius,” says a bishop who has discerned that the monk before him is
female, “for you act in a manly (courageous) way.”24
The female body suffered in the hands of male hagiographers for whom
the effacing of female sexuality also represented the transition from sin to
holiness. In converting to asceticism these women made a life commitment to
chastity. To signal this transformation they cut off their hair and donned
male clothes. For their biographers it was equally important that the beauty
of the female body (or the femaleness of the body) was also effaced through
the ascetic disciplines. Fasting disfigured the beauty of the wealthy courtesan
Pelagia so that she was not even recognizable as a woman.25 The fountain of
tears associated with women’s ascetic piety washed away Demetria’s beauty,
and the natural appeal of the female sexual body was obscured by Syncletica’s
refusal to bathe.26 Fasting and exposure to the elements had made the naked
body of Mary of Egypt unrecognizable to the holy monk Zosimus.27 For
their male hagiographers the effect of the ascetic disciplines in rendering the
sexual body of the female asexual was more significant than their heroic
renunciations.
The male admirers of ascetic women who praised their “manly” courage
and boldness possessed only a masculine terminology for excellence, but for
ascetic women gender-crossing meant more than becoming male, it meant in
some way transcending gender altogether. This female perspective on gender-
crossing is captured in a speech for Eugenia:
I shall make known the truth, not in the pride of human rhetoric but
for the glory of Christ. So great is the power of his name that women
who stand in fear of it achieve the dignity of men. Nor can either sex
claim the superiority in faith, the instructor of all Christians says that
in the Lord there exists no distinction between male and female for we
are all one in Christ. His rule I have wholeheartedly embraced, and out
of the faith I have in Christ, not wishing to be a woman, but preserve
an immaculate virginity I have steadfastly acted as man. For I have not
simply put on a meaningless appearance of honor such that while
seeming a man I might play the part of a woman, but rather, although
a woman, I have acted the part of a man by behaving with manliness,
by boldly embracing the chastity which is alone in Christ.28
Christian ascetic identity which raised a woman to the dignity of a man,
erased the natural shame and inferiority of woman. However, this movement
to masculine dignity and social worth was based on the idea that Christian
identity transcends gender, that “in Christ there is neither male nor female.”29
The superiority of male over female was abolished. Eugenia did not aspire to
womanhood when she embraced the traditionally female virtue of virginity,
nor did she aspire to the honor accorded to maleness. Her claim to male

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dignity is not to an empty masculine honor, she is not a woman who appears
to be a man, but a woman who acts like a man boldly embracing virginity. It
is a masculine dignity, because it liberates her from feminine shame and
inferiority, but she retains her female identity, which now freed from female
shame is enacted in her bold and courageous embrace of virginity.

GNOSTICS
In the use of gendered imagery to express notions of sin and salvation in
early Christian writing, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of
Philip, we find what we might call cosmic gender crossing. In some of the
earliest versions of Christianity, salvation was expressed as the overcoming
of sexual difference. When Peter challenges Mary Magdalene’s right to be
counted among the apostles, saying: “Let Mary leave us because women are
not worthy of the life.” Jesus responds: “Behold, I myself will lead her so as
to make her male that she may become a living spirit like you males, for
every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”30
Peter was asserting the social hierarchy of men over women. Since women
were social inferiors, intellectually and morally deficient, they would not be
appropriate candidates for the spiritual teachings which Jesus will disclose.
But the reply of Jesus at one and the same time acknowledges, contests, and
reframes this notion of gender. Jesus’ rejoinder is that woman, qua woman, is
indeed worthy of “the life,” because her social identity as woman is not a
hindrance to a spiritual identity. Social femaleness is radically different from
cosmic femaleness. In fact, both men and women are symbolically female
until they have entered a state of salvation.
Femaleness here signifies a spiritual state in which difference has not yet
been overcome, a state of multiplicity.31 Here unity symbolizes perfection,
while multiplicity and difference is understood as an inferior or deficient
mode of being. Becoming male signifies attaining a spiritual state in which
difference is overcome and unity is restored: “When you make the two into
one, when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner…
and when you make the male and the female into a single one so that the
male will not be male and the female will not be female, then you will enter
the kingdom.”32
Another text, the Gospel of Philip, uses androgyny rather than “becoming
male” as a metaphor for overcoming sexual difference. Here androgyny does
not mean transcending masculine and feminine characteristics, but a
restoration of the primal unity through union with the missing and separated
part of the primal self. “When Eve was still in Adam, death did not exist.
When she was separated from him, death came into being. If he again becomes
complete and attains his former self, death will be no more.”33 Both Adam
and Eve, both male and female, must be reunited with their alter ego, their
lost companion, in order to be restored to their original nature.

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Christians following the Thomas tradition celebrated an individual’s entry

into this state of primal perfection through a ritual of the bridal chamber.34 In
this gendered imagery the bridal chamber symbolizes the union attained in
the final state of perfection, the restoration of that original unity that preceded
the fall into gender difference. “Christ came to repair the separation which
was from the beginning and again unite the two and to give life to those who
died as a result of the separation and unite them. Indeed those who have been
united in the bridal chamber will no longer be separated.”35 In the Acts of
Thomas a couple, newly converted to asceticism and abandoning sexual
relations, is promised “an incorruptible and true marriage” in which each
will be united to a heavenly mate and will thereby be restored to his or her
original androgynous nature.36 Death itself is the consequence of the alienation
of the self, symbolized in the original differentiation of the two genders.
Gnostic Christians used gendered imagery in their myths to challenge the
conventional social meanings of masculinity and femininity and to push their
boundaries to suggest a different and radical understanding of maleness and
femaleness. The Gospel of Philip attempts to explain it like this:
Whereas in this world, the union is one of husband with wife—a case
of strength complemented by weakness. In the aeon the form of the
union is different, although we refer to them by the same names. There
are other names, however, they are superior to every name that is named
and are stronger than the strong. These are not separate things, but
both of them are this one single thing.37
In this world the union of husband and wife is not understood to be a union
of equals. Masculinity was characterized by strength and femininity by
weakness. It was precisely the hierarchical ordering of male and female that
made the gendered imagery ultimately inadequate in its conventional form.
This other way of naming masculinity and femininity was superior to the
way they are named “in this world.” Once masculinity and femininity have
been understood in this superior sense, it is possible to grasp the nature of the
primal self that “both of them are this one single thing.” Notwithstanding,
even gnostic writers continued to speak of the “perfect man” as the metaphor
for the final state, just as the Gospel of Thomas speaks of “becoming male.”
The assumption here is that male is generic on the cosmic level and that
socially gendered men and women can become cosmic males. The fact that it
is male, rather than female, which symbolizes generic humanity, reflects of
course the cultural assumption of the natural superiority of males. Although
the social construction of gender roles is challenged and done away with, the
same gendered meanings are reinscribed in the symbolic order.38
As in Greco-Roman society, so also in the ideological world of
Christianity moral excellence was described in masculine terms. In the
social world of aristocratic Roman society moral excellence must be
achieved in the public, political arena. Therefore the cultivation of moral

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excellence was viewed primarily as a male pursuit. In the countercultural

world of early Christianity, however, the quest for moral excellence was
urged on every Christian because the disciplines of fasting and praying, of
scripture reading, and meditation were practiced beyond the boundaries of
the public male domain. Men and women alike committed themselves to
the quest for Christian perfection. Nonetheless the metaphor used to
describe perfected humanity was the perfect man, vir perfectus.39 Clement,
the influential Alexandrian theologian of the second century, urges, “We
should make haste to become like the gnostic, manly and perfect” for “the
Perfect are rendered more masculine by the virginal spirit.”40 Since most
early Christian writers viewed sexual differentiation as part of the fallen
state, to become a perfect man meant to transcend differentiation
altogether. The metaphors of a woman turned into man and the manly
woman do not so much signify gender crossing as the intention to push
beyond the categories of gender themselves. The tragedy is that this
metaphorical discourse remains trapped within the discredited gender
system, because gendered imagery is continually used to praise this
progress toward perfection. So the effect of the gendered imagery on the
symbolic level is to reinforce the social hierarchy of the world order or
male dominance and female subordination. To praise the ascetic Olympias
by saying “What a man!” celebrates her transcendence of gender
distinctions, but at the same time underlines the social fact that female
metaphors cannot be used for excellence or perfection.41
To the extent that generic human being is male, that is rational soul, every
description of the Christian process of salvation is a form of gender crossing
for women. To be saved out of the world of body, flesh, and sexuality to
become an incorporeal, rational soul is to become symbolically male. In the
light of these traditional notions of salvation, the cosmology of a female
founder of a Gnostic school, Phloumene, is quite striking. She posits that in
the original creation souls were already gendered. Since gender distinctions
exist on the cosmic level, the rational soul cannot be gendered masculine in
the symbolic order, as it is in Greek philosophy and early Christian theology.
Since it was masculine and feminine souls that fell into bodies, the process of
salvation will restore men and women to their primal gendered identity. Only
in her system of thought can a woman be saved without undergoing
symbolically some form of gender crossing.42

NOTES
1 David Cohen, Law, Sexuality and Society: the Enforcement of Morals in Classical
Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 70–97
2 For anthropological studies of Mediterranean notions of male honor and female
shame, see David Gilmore (ed.), Honor and Shame and the Unity of the
Mediterranean, Washington, DC: Special Publication of the American
Anthropological Association, No. 221, 1987.

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3 Karen Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early
Church, San Francisco: Harper, 1993, pp. 115–18.
4 John H.Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982, pp. 170–7.
5 See Cicero’s De Officiis for the catalogue of civic virtues.
6 Torjesen, Women Priests, pp. 118–21.
7 Carol Delaney, “Seeds of Honor, Fields of Shame,” in Gilmore (ed.), Honor and
Shame, pp. 35–48.
8 Aristotle, On Politics, 113 and 198.
9 The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, trans. Herbert Musurillo, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972, pp. 108–31.
10 Perpetua interprets her own vision as revealing that the contest on the day of
execution will not ultimately be with the beasts, but with the devil. By remaining
faithful to death she will defeat him.
11 Maureen A.Tilley, “The Ascetic Body and the (Un)Making of the World of the
Martyr,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion vol. 59, No. 3 (Fall 1991),
pp. 467–79.
12 Elizabeth Castelli points out that in Perpetua’s story she progresses through
several stages of divesting herself of her female social identity. She repudiates
her gender identity as daughter when she rejects her father’s desperate order to
renounce her dangerous Christian faith and she surrenders her gendered identity
as mother when her infant son is taken from her and is miraculously and
instantaneously weaned. That her female body has been replaced by male body
is the culmination of this process. “‘I Will Make Mary Male:’ Pietes of the Body
and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity,” in Body
Guards, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), New York and London;
Routledge, 1992, pp. 35–42.
13 Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, pp. 58–62.
14 Kerstin Aspergen, The Male Woman, Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell
International, 1990, pp. 139–43.
15 The ascetic Olympius walked in the footsteps of Thecla, Elizabeth Clarke, Life of
Olympius I, in Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends, p. 127; the ascetic Syncletica
was the true disciple of Thecla. See Elizabeth Castelli, “Life and Activity of
Syncletica,” in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity, ed. Vincent Wimbush,
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990, p. 269.
16 For the Acts of Paul and Thecla see New Testament Apocrypha, ed. E.Hennecke,
vol. 2, ed. W.Schneemelcher, London: Lutterworth press, 1965.
17 Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 55.
18 Both hair and clothing were important signifiers for female identity and more
importantly for female virtue. A woman wore a veil over her hair and a plain
white stolla to signal her chastity. These externals of dress and grooming were the
cultural codes for making status and virtue public and visible. The cutting of the
hair and the wearing of a man’s cloak are critical to the story because they make
visible and publica private conversion. They become the cultural insignia of her
new identity.
19 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers VI. Other women as well were
members of the Platonic schools, e.g. Lastheneia of Mantinea and Axiothea of
Philius. See Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman, Montreal: Eden Press, 1985,
pp. 127–63.
20 The gender segregation in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean required that the
matron and daughters of the home retired to the woman’s quarters during a
banquet. Hipparchia belonged to this social class.
21 Patrologia Orientalis, vol. 3 (Paris, 1900), pp. 289–91.

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22 Joyce Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins, London: Verso, 1991, pp.
99–103.
23 Acta Sanctorum Jan. 1, pp. 257–61.
24 John Ansom, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and
Development of a Motif,” Viator, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 5 (1974),
p. 22.
25 Salisbury, Independent Virgins, pp. 99–103.
26 Karen Jo Torjesen, “In Praise of Noble Women: Gender and Honor in Ascetic
Texts,” Semeia, vol. 57 (1992), pp. 41–64.
27 Salisbury, Independent Virgins, pp. 68–73.
28 Ansom, “Female Transvestite,” p. 23.
29 Galationa 3.28 quoted here is an early baptismal formula that women often appeal
to to argue that they had transcended the shame, inferiority, and subordination
of their female identity by becoming Christians.
30 Gospel of Thomas, Logion 114, in The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James
Robinson, San Francisco: Harper, 1978, p. 130.
31 In the Gospel of the Egyptians femaleness refers to lust, birth, death, and decay.
See Aspegren, The Male Woman, p. 123ff.
32 Gospel of Thomas, 22, in The Nag Hammadi Library, p. 121.
33 Gospel of Philip, II, 3, in The Nag Hammadi Library, p. 141.
34 I am grateful to Donna Wallace for calling attention to a tradition of salvation as
androgyny in the Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Thomas and Acts of Thomas in an
unpublished paper, “From Thomas to Thecla: Androygyn as Salvation in Early
Christianity.”
35 Gospel of Philip, II, 3, in The Nag Hammadi Library, p. 142. See also p. 139.
36 Acts of Thomas, 12–15, in New Testament Apocrypha vol. 2, ed. Wilhelm
Schneemelcher, Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992, pp. 339–441.
37 Gospel of Philip, II, 3 in The Nag Hammadi Library, p. 145.
38 Karen King, “Ridicule and Rape, Rule and Rebellion: Images of Gender in The
Hypostasis of the Archons,” in Gnosticism and The Early Christian World, ed.
James Goehring, Charles Hedrick, Jack Sanders, Hans Dieter Betz, Sonoma:
Polebridge Press, 1990, pp. 3–24.
39 Kari Vogt, “Becoming Male: One Aspect of an Early Christian Anthropology” in
Women Invisible in Theology and Church, ed. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza,
Edinburgh: T.T.Clark, 1985, p. 74–5.
40 Clement, Strommateis, IV. 132, V.6.
41 A male’s movement toward perfection is not described as gender crossing. A
Christian man is described as feminine only when he becomes morally degraded.
Gender crossing for men signified a loss of status in the social order and a loss of
moral virtue in the Christian order.
42 Anne Jensen, Gottes selbstbewusste Toechter: Frauenemanzipation im fruehen
Christentum, Freiburg: Herder, 1992, pp. 365–426.

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 6

CROSS-DRESSING, GENDER
ERRORS, AND SEXUAL
TABOOS IN RENAISSANCE
LITERATURE
Winfried Schleiner

In the Renaissance, cross-dressing appears as festive and ritual practice during

seasons when ordinary rules of behavior are suspended (carnival, the Twelve
Days of Christmas), as a transgressive act whose severity is discussed in legal,
religious, and medical contexts, and—most notably in England—as theatrical
practice, since here (as on the classical Greek stage) women’s roles were played
by male actors. If one asks where the imaginative center of Renaissance
accounts of cross-dressing lies, the writers’ veiled language, their suggesting
while withholding, or their muting of existing sources can point the direction
for an answer, for in the realm of the sexual they are sure indications of
taboos at work: what is not really said or said with seeming resistance or
difficulty is worthy of focal attention. Before considering cross-dressing in
imaginative literature, we may glance at how the topic was treated in some
prose accounts of the period.

CROSS-DRESSING IN GENERAL ACCOUNTS

OF THE PERIOD
As a way into this topic, I will consider a story often cited in the Renaissance
that originated with the second-century writer Hyginus. A young woman of
Athens, in order to circumvent a supposed Athenian law forbidding slaves
and women to exercise the art of surgery, cuts her hair, puts on male clothes,
and enters the service of a physician. Although modern translations are
available, I quote this passage from Thomas Heywood’s compendium on
women, Gynaikeion (1624), starting from the point at which she has learned
the art of medicine from her male mentor:
By her industrie and studie having attained to the deapth of his skill and
the height of her own desires, upon a time hearing where a noble ladie
was in child-birth, in the middest of her painfull throwes, she offered her

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selfe to her helpe, whom the modest Ladie (mistaking her Sex) would by
no persuasion suffer to come neere her, till she was forced to strip her
selfe before the women, and to give evident signes of her woman-hood.
After which she had access to many, prooving so fortunate, that she
grew verie famous. In so much that being envied by the colledge of
Physitians, she was complained on to the Areopagitae, or the nobilitie of
the Senat: such in whose power it was to censure and determine of all
causes and controversies. Agnodice thus convented, they pleaded against
her youth and boldnesse accursing her rather a corrupter of their
chastities, than any way a curer of their infirmities: blaming the matrons,
as counterfeiting weaknesse, onely of purpose to have the companie and
familiaritie of a loose and intemperate yong man. They pressed the
accusations so far, that the Judges were readie to precede to sentence
against her; when she opening her brest before the Senat, gave manifest
testimonie that she was no other than a woman: at this the Physitians
the more incenst made the fact the more heinous, in regard that being a
woman, she durst enter into the search of knowledge, of which their Sex
by the law was not capable. The cause being once more readie to goe
against her, the noble matrons of the cittie asembled before the Senat,
and plainely told them, they were rather enemies than husbands, who
went about to punish her, that of all their Sex had beene most studious
for their generall health and safetie. Their importance so far prevailed,
after the circumstances were truely considered, that the first decree was
quite abrogated, and free libertie granted to women to imploy themselves
in those necessary offices, without the presence of men. So that Athens
was the first cittie of Greece, that freely admitted of Mid-wives by the
meanes of this damosell Agnodice.1
The story would merit analysis on a number of levels: the historical and
mythical were both addressed to some extent by Campbell Bonner, who
claimed that the statement that the ancients had no midwives was absurd
and was convinced that “wise women” treated minor ailments with impunity.
He considers the story therefore a novella of popular origin, sharing, for
instance, with the Christian legend of Saint Eugenia the elements of cross-
dressing and “exposure as apotropaeic gesture.”2 A different level of interest,
and one much closer to my concerns, would be the reception of the Hagnodice
story in the Renaissance. For it seems to have been quite well known and
taken for fact, as appears from Girolamo Bardi’s (1600–67) inclusion of
Hagnodice among famous female physicians.3 Heywood emphasizes the envy
and even malice of her male colleagues and renders with apparent satisfaction
the successful class or sisterhood action of the Athenian women. It is doubtful
that Bonner would have arrived at his ideas of the apotropaeic and
aischrological core of the story on the basis of the English version, for
Heywood does not have Hagnodice lift her tunic twice, but has her

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demonstrate her sex considerably more modestly.4 Be that as it may, there is

no doubt that Heywood’s muting of sexual detail as well as the core of the
story for him (the Athenian lady’s “modesty” and the nature of the envious
physicians’ original allegations) are based, in our terms, heterosexually.
Perhaps there is also a touch of something else when, as Heywood puts it, the
physicians, after realizing that a woman has been treating women, “make
the fact the more heinous,” but since at best (or worst) this seems to him a
pretext and thus an inauthentic reaction, I will not press the point. With
reference to our range of topics, this “something else,” that is, a different
kind of phobia, is not hard to find.
When Jacques Duval, a professor of medicine, writes his book Des
hermaphrodites (Rouen, 1612), which contains an account of how the
physician rescued Marie le Marcis from prison and ignominious death by
persuading the court that the accused was really Marin, a male, Duval early
in his account comments that he is not writing on the subject of hermaphrodites
“for any lascivious emotion [of his] whatsoever.” 5 This rejection of
questionable motive not sufficing, he adds that he has led a long and happy
married life. His addition clarifies what kind of critique an author in the
period, particularly one writing in the vernacular—since Duval was writing
his work in French, partly addressed to ohstetrices et matrones—had to
anticipate when taking up a certain range of problems, namely
hermaphroditism, crossdressing, gender errors, and gender change. In Latin,
the physicians of the period express themselves more freely on such subjects
because their addressees are the learned (and would necessarily have excluded
most women).6 The physician Rodrigo a Castro, for whose style Robert Burton
expressed his admiration in his longish disquisition in Latin on “unnatural
acts,” annotates in his famous work on women’s diseases the word
masturbatores in a learned “scholion” defining four kinds of masturbation,
but then adds: “This I would like to have written only for the learned, and it
is certainly to be omitted if someone should translate this book of [medical]
praxis into the vernacular…”7 It would seem that all these topics are dangerous
because they variously stand in some relation to the subject most tabooed of
all, that of same-sex sexuality.
It is hardly surprising that the topic of cross-dressing, in the period
conceived as the proper use or the “abuse” of clothing, is located in the same
tension field. In Philipp Camerarius’ book Operae horarum subcisivarum,
sive meditationes historicae, first published in Latin, then translated into
vernacular languages and reaching its most expanded form in the French
edition of 1610, there are several sections on clothing including one entitled
“Sçavoir si l’habillement d’homme est sans distinction defendu au sexe
feminin, ou non?” This is a rather roughly “historicized” account of the
subject that cites the famous passage from Deuteronomy 22:5 (“The woman
shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on
a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy

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God”), council decrees threatening specifically cross-dressing women with

excommunication, and the Thalmudists’ praise of conservative Jewish dress.
Change of clothes, like all change (notably in speech and in forms of
government) is conceived of as dangerous and potentially fraudulent.
Interestingly, however, the second half of the chapter proposes a non-literal
understanding of the interdiction in Deuteronomy, for here the author
summarizes a couple of dozen “judicial” cases or instances of justified cross-
dressing, divided into ancient and “modern.” The most detailed case of the
latter is that of a Christian taken prisoner by the Turks in 1595, who after
being recognized to be female, under interrogation boldly revealed that she
had all along fought the Turks in the Emperor’s army; another case is that of
Joan of Arc. Following the exposition of Nicholas of Lyra, Camerarius
explains the Biblical interdiction as growing out of Jewish opposition to
pagan practices: in sacrifices to Mars, Pagan women were armed as men, and
in sacrifices to Venus, men cross-dressed as women. (Modern scholars have
pointed to similar practices during Dionysian festivities.)8 On the basis of the
famous exegist, Camerarius’ conclusion seems simple: the biblical text is
about “ordinary” use of clothes, l’usage confus, and abuse, for it gives rise to
vice. “For dressed as a man, a woman could with greater freedom abandon
herself to men: as also a man in women’s clothes would have freer access to
the quarters and rooms of women” (pp. 324–5).
Answering a query about cross-dressing by Ben Jonson (whose specific
question does not seem to have been preserved), the distinguished Hebraist
John Selden, in a letter to the poet of 28 February 1615, takes the reading
of the passage from Deuteronomy to a considerably higher level, namely to
the level of a historical critique of mythology. He begins by retranslating it,
as he puts it, “word for word:” “‘man’s armour shall not be upon a
woman, and a man shall not put on a woman’s garment.’ In Deut xxii.5 so
it is and not as the vulgar hath it, that a woman shall not wear a man’s
garment, nor a woman’s.”9 He omits to say that the King James version
(which I inserted above, somewhat anachronistically, into my translation
of Camerarius) is quite close to the “vulgar” or Vulgate. With the help of
Maimonides and others, Selden’s point is historical: that the focus of the
interdiction is not prevention of some indecency, but “avoiding of a
superstitious rite used to Mars and Venus, which was, that men did honour
and invoke Venus in Woman’s attire, and women the like to Mars in man’s
armour” (col. 1692). This practice, to which, as we saw, Camerarius had
alluded in passing, is then elucidated with a wealth of detail about the
mythological ancestry particularly of Venus (whose origins, according to
Selden, were worshipped in the Palestine deities Dagon or Astarot and who
is ultimately identical with “the Mater Deum in mythology”). Baal,
Dagon, Moloch, Atargatis, powerful names in the mythology of the
Middle East, “were expressly noted by both sexes, and according to that
mystery of community of sexes, were worshipped” (col. 1696). His

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concern is neither the “trifles” of grammatical genders (an interest with

which he reproaches the great contemporary classicist Isaac Casaubon),
nor any moral evaluation, but the “mystery of their theology concluding
upon the masculine-feminine power.” Unlike most Renaissance writers
using the passage from Deuteronomy, including Camerarius, Selden seems
to dismiss moral speculations deriving from it as equally trivial: “With
what ancient fathers, as Cyprian and Tertullian specially have of this text
or others dealing on it, as it tends to morality, I abstain to meddle.”
This letter, by one of the most learned scholars of the period to a poet
priding himself on his learning, puts into perspective Camerarius’ topic of
the freedom, and sometimes license, that male dress gives to women when
they approach or seek out men and reveals the topic to be considerably more
standard or even “commonplace”—in fact the genre of his work can be
identified, in a descriptive and non-evaluative way, as a commonplace book.
But we may probe a little deeper by focusing on what is not said in this
section. First, in view of the many reported justified cases of women dressing
as males, it is striking that Camerarius in this chapter does not here give a
single “judicial” case of a man disguised as a woman. It is true that the title
of the chapter narrows the focus to only half of the question regarding gender
disguise, but he is quite aware that Deuteronomy forbids both male and
female cross-dressing. In fact the negative example of the reign of “the young
Andronicus” and his debauched court at Constantinople seems to suggest, if
not identify, both kinds (p. 321).
That Camerarius has no example of justified cross-dressing of a man as
woman unquestionably has to do with the Renaissance gender hierarchies
that have been pointed out with respect to “hermaphroditism” and sex
change: according to most (but not all) physicians of the period, the “one-
sex model,” as Thomas Laqueur has called it (that the female genitalia
were the inversion of the male sex organs), seemed to exclude the
possibility that a man could turn into a woman, but it was thinkable,
possible, and documented in the medical literature of the period that
occasionally a female changed to the “higher” gender and became male.10
It would seem, first, that for Camerarius the question of whether a male is
ever allowed to wear women’s clothes need not even be asked—the
possibility is unthinkable or at least unmentionable. (If he had lived in
England, where boys regularly played women’s roles on the stage, he
might have sided with those radical Protestant attackers of the theater
who found this practice abominable.)11 Second, it is clear that something
unmentionable lurks generally behind the passages most insistently
presenting the dangers of cross-dressing: “If there is so much danger and
bad portent in the change of clothes from one area to another, how much
more frightful (redoutable) is the change from men’s clothes to women’s
and from women’s to men’s? For apart from the lightness which is found
there, followed by change in custom, honesty and shamefulness are lost,

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and there is danger of horrible confusion… For if one sex could not be
distinguished from the other, such an abominable mix would open the
door to all dishonest and shameful acts” (321–2). It would seem that
behind such a phrase as “horrible confusion” lurks the fear of same-sex
sexual acts.

MEN DRESSED AS WOMEN IN

IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE
Renaissance romances contain quite a few episodes in which a male
protagonist for reasons of intrigue, love stratagem, or escape from danger,
puts on female clothes and baffles the bystanders by his beauty, a situation
quite in contrast to the male macho prototype of the hero typically presented
in modern romance, whether from the screen or the newsstand.12
In The Honour of Chivalrie, a romance Elizabethans could have read in
translation from Italian, Don Belianis puts on a female disguise to facilitate escape,
wherewith he became so fair that the damsels not a little wondered to
see him so beautiful, that Persiana cryed out. Is it possible oh gods;
such beautie should be on earth, you have been better served to glorifie
your imperial thrones, unlesse heere you will inhabit to manifest your
great powers among us.
And truely (Sir knight) such beauty was never scene but in the
Princesse Florisabella our Lady Mistresse: And well it is for all knights,
you are not of our sexe, else so many would by you perish, as by the
Princess our Mistresse, whose onely sight killeth (though not outright,
yet with living death) like the murthering eyes of a slaying baselike.13
Similarly, when in the sequel to the “French” Amadis de Gaule, a work of
paradigmatic importance for the entire Renaissance romance tradition, Amadis
de Grèce changes clothes and becomes the slave girl Nereide, the narrator
exclaims that anyone who then had seen Amadis in that Turkish taffeta
interwoven with gold would have been as elated as was Aeneas by the
appearance of Venus.14
Before we decide that such scenes might describe a fictional world entirely
divorced from our own, we need to be reminded—as, for instance, Emmanuel
Forde’s romance Ornatus and Artesia (written c. 1598) makes clear—that
the male heroes in such romances are conceived of as very young. Ornatus
“attired himself like a virgin of a strange country (which he might well be
esteemed to be, by his youth).”15 There are at least two ways in which we
may historicize this conception of beauty: it can be seen as the ultimate
consequence of the “one-sex model” said to dominate Renaissance sexology;
and it may relate, in some cases, if not in all, to the Renaissance notion that
love makes a man (in a particular Renaissance sense) “effeminate” or, to use
Sir Philip Sidney’s term, applied to his cross-dressed hero Pyrocles in Arcadia,

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“womanish.” (In fact, Pyrocles donning Amazon attire has been read as the
visual or iconic expression of this Renaissance commonplace.)16
Cross-dressed often in order to prove themselves male (that is, to gain
access to their beloved), these young romance heroes, after adopting
female “bashfulness” and female discourse, appear to think of themselves
as phallic “women,” as is noticeable in a curious permutation of intrigue
to which the cross-dressing often leads: another male in some way
“tricked” by the cross-dressing will make overtures to the disguised male.
This happens to Pyrocles, who is wooed by King Basilius; to Ornatus who,
disguised as Sylvia, is wooed by the tyrant Floretus; and, perhaps most
strikingly, in the sequels to the Amadis. I quote one of several passages
describing how Amadis de Grèce (disguised as Nereide) is assaulted
sexually by an aging Sultan:
But inasmuch as impotent age had taken from him the strength of
arm, it had left him even less of the force of excess. Since he knew
this, Nereide was biting his tongue to the blood to keep himself from
laughing… In any case, the [Sultan’s] knife, unbridled and out of the
stable, falters constantly, since it was so weakened through years
past, that the more he stirs the bridle or works it the less he finds it
responsive, without even pretending to bounce or to kick, always
keeping its head lowered: for a weak body does not respond to such
desire at all.17
“Nereide’s” laughter is à la dérobée and voyeuristic. At the same time, his
reaction is eminently male: the smirk of the powerful and potent at the
havenot and would-be. The passage depicting the attempted assault is one of
the most sexually outspoken in this literary genre. The directness of sexual
reference (only slightly veiled by the extended rider-horse metaphors) is not
an accident but intimately connected with the topic we are considering. The
occasion of cross-dressing allowed the narrator to write about sex while
hiding behind a distancing as it were or ut ita dicam. His language was
proper since he was speaking improperly. He created for himself an area of
Maskenfreiheit, for he could pretend (and even say against better
knowledge) that he was not really writing about sex at all, since at least one
character and the reader knew that it was all a mistake. While on the one
hand a passage such as this therefore approaches satire, its homosexual
implications cannot be entirely denied. In fact, if we switch perspective from
the cross-dresser to the assailing Sultan, would we not have to ask how it
was possible that he was so deluded? (Renaissance accounts of “unnatural
acts” ascribe same-sex love to the religious and cultural other, the Turk.)18
Could it be that in a literary genre that could represent subtleties of male
friendship and even what we may call unconsummated homoeroticism, this
manner, à la dérobée and indirect, was the only one in which a version of
homosexuality could be presented?19

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WOMEN DRESSED AS MEN

Scenes of Renaissance fiction describing gender disguise constitute moments
of high gender consciousness, and so it is with episodes of women cross-
dressing. The purported motives for such disguise range from practical (to
enter a castle or jail [à la Fidelio]) to what may loosely be called feminist (to
explore a world of power, usually military—or at least to escape weakness).20
In different parts of the episodic continuations of the Amadis, two women
in male clothes, Oronce and La Belle Sauvage, do stunning deeds of valor,
sometimes by physical force, sometimes by intelligence. With all the carnage
of battle and their superior strength in any duel, the author is careful to insist
on their beauty and delicacy, and they are thus further examples of a
Renaissance idea and ideal of beauty in which the erotic charge does not
derive, as it were, from the genders being apart or diametrically opposed, but
from their similarity: this similarity becomes the source of erotic titillation.21
In their disguise as males, Oronce and La Belle Sauvage are so good-looking
that all women, including duchesses, princesses and queens, marvel at their
beauty and may even fall in love with them. When a duchess, for whose
cause Oronce has valiantly borne arms, sees her taking off her armor, the
duchess is both surprised and excited by the warrior’s face, since she still
thinks Oronce is male. She had expected someone “robust and strong, because
of the high degree of valor; when she saw such a delicate, rosy, and beautiful
face, she was overcome not only by much wonder but also by a wonderful
pleasure: and as she felt the pleasure, she fell in love as if she had never seen
or hoped to see such a handsome and graceful knight.”22 Thus Oronce’s
delicacy and beauty, those traits that the reader, aware of her cross-dressing,
knows to be feminine, are the prime stimuli of the duchess’s sudden infatuation.
A little later, the Infanta Licinie, who until then has been absorbed by her
attempts to free her imprisoned brother, experiences a similar emotion. Licinie,
who until that hour had not felt how powerful love is, felt her heart so
much burn with the beauty of the person she thought a knight that
leaving any concern for her brother, the prince, it seemed to her that
she wanted to lose her eyesight looking at Oronce and to see the image
of herself in her beauty.23

Like Oronce, who travels in the company of a lady (and therefore acquires
the surname “Chevalier de la Damoiselle”), La Belle Sauvage has sought out
a young lady called Lucence (thus being named “Chevalier de Lucence”),
and naturally Lucence falls deeply in love with her “chevalier.” In fact, for La
Belle Sauvage, we have the narrator’s statement that she possesses a certain
grace that will attract males and females to her, not at the same time, but
according to the gender that she professes by her clothes.
When a queen, smitten with the handsome Chevalier de la Damoiselle
(Oronce) “si jeune et sans poil de barbe” finds out to her distress that the
beloved is a woman, her friend the duchess (who has gone through the same
experience before) tries to console her: “O how well have we done not to

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reveal our love! Else it would be all over with us.”24 The fear of making a
mistake (a fear I will provisionally and tentatively call homophobic, that is, a
fear of the homosexual) is shown even to traumatize a character. Thus the
princess Licinie, who, as we saw, was so infatuated with Oronce, is emotionally
traumatized upon learning of her error and paralyzed by the suspicion of
further possible gender ambiguity after Oronce’s female identity has been
revealed. She is most reluctant to enter an emotional relationship with a
young man with whose good looks she is impressed, for she is afraid that he
will turn out to be a cross-dresser, too!
Rather than pursuing in more prose romances the subject of Licinie’s
shudder at the possibility of a same-sex act (for closer analysis, see my essay
referred to in fn. 18), I would like to end with a glance at a brief segment of
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that some interpreters and editors, possibly
unaware of the tradition I have been describing, have found enigmatic.
Viola (in Shakespeare’s time of course played by a boy), after shipwrecking
has entered, in men’s clothing, the services of Duke Orsino, who has sent her
as his messenger to plead his case with the seemingly hard-hearted Lady
Olivia. Unlike other messengers before her, Viola as Cesario has succeeded in
delivering a message to the lady, and Olivia, fooled by the cross-dresser, has
taken a strong liking to the unusual servant. As Viola is on her way to return
to Duke Orsino, she is pursued by Lady Olivia’s servant Malvolio, at her
behest “returning” a ring to the messenger.
Mal. She returns this ring to you, sir. You might have sav’d me my
pains, to have taken it away yourself. She adds moreover, that
you should put your lord into a desperate assurance she will none
of him. And one thing more, that you be never so hardy to come
again in his affairs, unless it be to report your lord’s taking of
this. Receive it so.
Vio. She took the ring of me, I’ll none of it.
Mal. Come, sir, you peevishly threw it to her; and her will is it should
be so return’d. If it be worth stooping for, there it lies, in your
eye; if not, be it his that finds it.
Exit.
Vio. I left no ring with her. What means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
She made good view of me; indeed so much
That methought her eyes had lost her tongue,
For she did speak in starts distractedly.
She loves me sure, the cunning of her passion
Invites me in this churlish messenger.
None of my lord’s ring? Why, he sent her none….
Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
(II.ii.5–28, Riverside edn)

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The seeming contradiction between Viola’s affirmation to Malvolio that Olivia

took the ring from her (“She took the ring of me, I’ll none of it”) and her
subsequent denial (“I left no ring with her”) at the beginning of the soliloquy
has stimulated much discussion among interpreters, one of whom even suggests
that the former line ought to read “She took NO ring of me!” Another one
chronicled in the New Variorum Edition did not want to change the words,
but thought that “a note of admiration after ‘me’ best expressed the author’s
intention, which was no doubt to make Viola utter an exclamation of surprise,
equivalent to saying, is it possible any one can say she took the ring of me?”25
But according to yet another view recorded there, “this passage always
appeared to us one of the finest touches of the play,” primarily because Viola
is immediately seen to grasp “that the message [from Olivia] contained a
secret of some kind which had not been confided to the messenger.”
Licinie’s traumatic experience (in the Amadis) of falling in love with
someone who turns out to be a woman, Licinie’s “homophobic shudder,” as
I may provisionally, although debatably, call it, can serve as the context for
Viola’s immediate reflex to shield and protect Lady Olivia through her lie
(“She took the ring from me”) from the prying and possibly malevolent
servant. Potential same-sex love is the secret only Viola is able to grasp at this
point.26 When she is alone and full realization of what is happening sets in,
she is presented as shocked, a state in which Shakespeare has her tap into the
kind of harsh and ideologically loaded “discourse” which was common in
his time on the subject of cross-dressing and with which we are familiar from
Camerarius’s commonplace book: “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness/
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.”

EPILOGUE
About a century after the period of my primary interest, the notorious printer
Edmund Curll published an anonymous work (now attributed at least in part
to Giles Jacob, 1686–1744) entitled Tractatus de Hermaphroditis.27 That the
title is in Latin in this case only serves as spice, because the work is in English
and belongs to the genre soon to be called “curious.” Its center section is
called “Intrigues of Hermaphrodites and Masculine Females, and of the
outward Marks to distinguish them” and contains stories, ostensibly set in
Italy, depicting from a decidedly male-prurient perspective the most
outspokenly “lesbian” behavior presented in English and in print until then.
One of them is about two young women who after losing their male lovers
are described as taking up a practice of satisfying one another with artificial
penises and instruments spraying moisture to simulate ejaculation. A young
man falls in love with one of the women and in order to gain access to his
beloved has not only to cross-dress but to simulate same-gender preference:
he puts on women’s clothes and makeup and carries a dildo in his hand. At
one point he walks away from the ladies and, “pulling up his petticoats,”

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pretends attaching “the instrument in a furbelow of his gown” (p. 44). He is

said to deceive his beloved successfully “’till the moment of Ejaculation, which
was not usual with the same Instrument in her Embraces with Amaryllis,”
the lady’s female lover. “Prodigiously surpris’d,” the young woman,
“experiencing a material Difference between Art and Nature” (p. 45), then
abandons her lesbian ways and rewards the ingenious gallant for his stratagem
by marriage.
In some ways this episode of cross-dressing is the natural extension of the
ones from the Renaissance we have considered. But some differences are
obvious and bring into focus the specifics of the Renaissance versions. These
two lesbian women most decidedly are not of the kind that figure in
Renaissance books on “hermaphrodites,” women (often called tribades) with
a clitoris so large that it resembles a penis and makes them close to incapable
of heterosexual intercourse. What remains unmentionable in Renaissance
romances is named in these early eighteenth-century narratives. Whereas the
character Licinie was emotionally paralyzed—traumatized—by the thought
of the unmentionable, these women are described as acting out the previously
unsayable, and this, in turn, is the result of a trauma received in their
heterosexual life. Therefore the male cross-dresser can appear as the healer
returning the women through his male pharmakon to comforting
heterosexuality. The topic of cross-dressing may be said to have sunk to the
level of pornography; the unmentionable has been tamed, domesticized, and
even erased.

NOTES
1 Thomas Heywood, Gynaikeion: Or Nine Bookes of Various History, Concerning
Women, London, 1624, p. 204.
2 Campbell Bonner, “The Trial of Saint Eugenia,” in American Journal of Philology,
vol. 41, (1920), No. 3, p. 260. Margaret Alic assumes the story to be historical—
I do not know on what authority; see Hypathia’s Heritage: A History of Women
from Antiquity to the Late Nineteenth Century, London: Women’s Press, 1986,
pp. 28–30.
3 Girolamo Bardi, Medicus politico Catholicus, Genoa, 1644, p. 278.
4 For the Latin version, see Hyginus, Fabularum liber, Basel, 1535, where the story,
no. 274, is on p. 63. For a modern translation, see The Myths of Hyginus, trans.
& ed. Mary Grant, Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1960, pp.
175–6.
5 Sig. A7: “pour aucune affection lascive qui soit en moy…” Stephen Jay Greenblatt
has called attention to Duval in Shakespearean Negotiations—The Circulation of
Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1988, ch. 3, “Fiction and Friction.”
6 See, e.g. Caspar Bauhin, De hermaphroditorum natura, Frankfurt, 1614; Amatus
Lusitanus, Curationum medicinalium centuriae, Burdigulae, 1620, particularly
centuria secunda, curatio 39; Estavão Rodrigues de Castro, Tratatus de natura
muliebri, Frankfurt, 1668, particularly p. 55; Johann Georg Schenck, Historia
monstrosa, Frankfurt, 1609; Isaac Cardoso, Philosophia libera, Venice, 1673,
particularly lib. 6, quaestio 14, “De sexus mutatione.”

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7 Castro, De universa mulierum medicina, Hamburg, 1603, pars 2, lib. 1, c.

15, p. 69.
8 See Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy: Sex-Roles and the Madness of Dionysos,
New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988.
9 John Selden, “To my honoured and truly worthy Friend, Mr. Ben Jonson,” in
John Selden, Opera omnia, ed. David Wilkins, London, 1726, II, cols. 1691–6. I
am grateful to Jason Rosenblatt for pointing me to this letter.
10 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 65 (on the one-sex model);
p. 141 quoting Zacchia as saying that nature is turning “to the more perfect.”
However, Isaac Cardoso is one of a small group of physicians thinking that sex
change in either direction is possible (Philosophia libera, p. 462). In a very detailed
account of the most famous Renaissance case of sex change, Patricia Parker has
presented a differentiated account of medical and popular ideas on the subject;
see “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germin,” in Critical
Inquiry, vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter 1993), pp. 337–64.
11 On the anxiety in England about the consequences of cross-dressing young boys,
see Vern L.Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 76–7.
12 I have treated these matters at greater length in my essay “Male Cross-Dressing
and Transvestism in Renaissance Romances,” in Sixteenth Century Journal, vol.
19, No. 4 (Winter 1988), pp. 605–9.
13 The Honour of Chivalrie Set Downe in the Historie of Don Bellianis, London,
1598, p. 132.
14 Le huitiesme livre d’Amadis de Gaule, Lyon, 1575, p. 526.
15 Emanuel Forde, Ornatus and Artesia, in Shorter Novels: Seventeenth Century,
ed. Philip Henderson, London: Dent, 1930, p. 21.
16 See Mark Rose, “Sidney’s Womanish Man,” in Renaissance Essays and Studies,
n.s. 15 (1964), pp. 353–63.
17 Le huitiesme livre, p. 541, my translation.
18 See my essay “Burton’s Use of praeteritio in Discussing Same-Sex Relationships,”
in Claude J.Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), Renaissance Discourses of
Desire Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993, pp. 159–78.
19 This is raised here as a question of literary decorum. The most important works
in this general field are Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London:
Gay Men’s Press, 1982 and Bruce R.Smith, Homosexuality in Shakespeare’s
England: A Cultural Poetics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1991. See also my essay “‘That Matter Which Ought Not To Be Heard of:’
Homophobic Slurs in Renaissance Cultural Politics,” in Journal of Homosexuality,
vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter 1994), pp. 41–75.
20 The literature on this subject in different cultures is immense. I have chronicled
some of it in f n. 3 of my essay “Le feu caché: Homosocial Bonds Between Women
in a Renaissance Romance,” in Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer
1992), pp. 293–311.
21 Marianne Novy has observed something similar in Shakespeare’s plays: “Among
the young lovers in the romances, as in the comedies, the genders are not polarized
in their activities,” Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare, Chapel
Hill and London: North Carolina Press, 1984, p. 189. Stephen Orgel instructively
compares the urgency of Elizabethan warnings of the dangers of being enthralled
to women with warnings against “sodomy.” See his “Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why
Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol.
88, No. 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 7–27.
22 Le vingtiesme livre, fol. 192V, my translation.

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23 Ibid., fol. 211v (misnumbered 122v).

24 Le vingtiesme livre, fol. 78v.
25 The New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. H.H.Furness, vol. xiii: Twelfth
Night, or, What You Will, Philadelphia and London: Lippincott, 1901, p. 101.
26 See also Valeric Traub, “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern
England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1994, p. 62–83; particularly p. 70: “…Viola’s
articulation of anxiety…is more appropriately viewed as the expression of the
dominant discourse on trihadism and sodomy.”
27 (London, 1718). The Folger copy is bound with Johann Heinrich Meibom, A
Treatise of the Use of Flogging and has the no. 184284. For the attribution, see
Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll, London: Chapman & Hall, 1927, p. 253.
I have written about the latter work in Medical Ethics in the Renaissance,
Washington, DC: Georgetown University, in press.

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 7

ELENA ALIAS ELENO

Genders, sexualities, and “race”
in the mirror of natural history in
sixteenth-century Spain
Israel Burshatin

For three weeks in the summer of 1587, the women’s quarters of the municipal
prison of Ocaña housed two prisoners who were husband and wife. They
were Eleno de Céspedes, a surgeon by trade, and María del Caño, his spouse.
No, prison officials did not flout the rules separating male and female prisoners
for the sake of bringing husband and wife together. On the contrary, this
uncommon arrangement was emphatically orthodox in its intended aim of
putting Eleno in the place where the governor and chief magistrate of Ocaña
ruled that he—or, rather, she—belonged:
In the town of Ocaña, 7 June 1587, the licentiate Felipe de Miranda,
chief magistrate of this province, ordered that said Elena de Céspedes
be removed from the room where she is now, for men frequent it, and
that she be taken to one of the rooms in the same jail, which are at the
stairway in the first patio, to the left of the hearing room, and that it be
locked and the key handed to said chief magistrate. And that her wife,
María del Caño, be put in another room in the women’s section, distinct
and apart from where said Elena de Céspedes might be, and likewise be
locked so that no one may speak with her. (And this was thus instructed,
commanded, and signed [etc.]
[Signed:] Licentiate Felipe de Miranda.)
En la villa de Ocaña, en veynte e siete días del mes de junyo de myll e
quinientos y ochenta e siete años, el licenciado Felipe de Miranda, alcalde
mayor desta probyncia, mandó que la dicha Elena de Céspedes se quite
e saque del aposento donde está, por ser frequentado de onbres, y se
ponga(n) en uno de los aposentos que están en la dicha cárcel, en una
escalera que está en el primero patio della, a mano izquierda de adonde
se hace audiencia, y se cierre con llabe y se le entregue al dicho alcalde
mayor. Y la dicha María del Caño, su muger, se ponga en otro aposento
en el quarto de las mugeres, distyncto y apartado de donde estubiere la

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dicha Eleno de Céspedes, y ansy mysmo se cierre con llabe de manera

que nynguna persona la hable. Y ansy lo probeyó e mandó e firmó [etc.]
[Signed:] El licenciado Phelippe de Myranda.)1
The prisoners relocation captures the vehemence—as well as the futility—of
official attempts to peg Eleno’s protean genders according to the ruling model
of dimorphic sex and gender. Having heard from the physicians and midwives
who examined Eleno’s genitalia, the Ocaña tribunal orders Eleno’s move
from one side of the jail to the other. The accused is now legally—and
grammatically—a female subject. But still impinging on this court-ordered
gender reclassification is Eleno’s rather smart male attire, a vivid reminder of
more than twenty years of successful cross-dressing. Eleno’s relocation to the
female prisoners’ quarters is also meant as a prophylactic of sorts, for men
“frequent” her room. This easy association with men smacks of immodesty,
at the very least. But after being pronounced female, Eleno’s alleged feminine
chastity also needs to be safeguarded. According to the report filed by the
midwives who examined Eleno’s genitalia, her vulva is so tight and resistant
to the candle and fingers utilized to explore its constitution, that the midwives
conclude that Eleno’s virginity is intact:
She stuck the candle up her female sex, and it entered a bit, with difficulty,
and this witness was suspicious, so she also introduced her finger, and it
entered with difficulty, and the witness, therefore, does not think that a
man has ever been with her.

La qual le metió por su natura de muger la dicha bela, la qual entró

premyosa e poco, y esta testigo no se confió y tanbién le metió el dedo
[…], y entró premyoso, y con esto esta testigo no entiende que aya
llegado barón a ella.
The midwives conclude that she is not only female, but a virgin as well.
Reclassified and relocated, Eleno would be among her kind.2 But what kind
is that? The regime of bipolar gender and compulsory heterosexuality shows
its limits as it produces a classic moment straight out of a “women-behind-
bars” B-movie. Having received the midwives’ reports that Eleno is a woman
who has never been penetrated by a male and that her wife María “is corrupted
and wide and roomy” (“La qual está corronpida e ancha y anplia”), Eleno’s
sexuality acquires mythical proportions. The chief magistrate takes precautions
and isolates Eleno from both male and female contact; yet he brings Eleno
nearer to his beloved María, who is also under arrest in the same women’s
quarters.
By reclassifying Eleno as Elena and situating her among the women, the
authorities produce a dissident female subject vulnerable to prosecution for
offenses “against nature.” With medical proof of what they suspected all
along, Eleno is to be tried for her unruliness as a female.3 The record of her
first hearing in Ocaña (18 June 1587) shows the extent of official displeasure

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over the name Eleno. Rather than furnishing a masculine veil, the altered
name seems to proclaim a defiant gender reversal, a deliberate statement of
transitivity that challenges the rigid limits of the bifurcated world of masculine
versus feminine:
She was asked if they named her “Eleno” at her baptism, and how was
it possible to give her that name and call her thus, since the name “Eleno”
is neither customary nor is it used, while “Elena” is a well-known
woman’s name and is not used by men, nor is it so considered.4
Preg[unta]do si le pusieron este nonbre Eleno en el bautismo, y cómo es
posible selo pusiesen y llamasen ansí, pues este nonbre de Eleno no es
acostumbrado ni se usa y el de Elena es nonbre conoçido de muger y no
de onbre usado y guardado por tal.
The physical examination enables the court to (re)feminize Eleno as Elena
and restore her name’s grammatical gender according to its putative feminine
source. The prisoner enters the women’s side of the prison and is led to the
rooms located to the left side of the courtroom—the side, which, coincidentally,
is also the body’s feminine side, according to Renaissance medical discourse.
The Ocaña authorities thus produce the conditions for lesbian desire. Penal
sexual etiquette confines Eleno among the women, and soon thereafter (4
July 1587) she is formally indicted for committing sodomy with the aid of a
dildo: “with a stiff and smooth instrument she committed the unspeakable
crime of sodomy” “con un instrumento tieso y liso con el qual cometió el
delito enefando de sodomya.” The proscribed sexuality is a figure of deception.
It is an artifice, an impersonation of male-female relations; the alleged dildo
fetishizes the phallic order of things that Eleno is accused of transgressing.
Eleno must be kept among women, but she may not consort with them.
Indeed, the precautions taken by the chief magistrate to sequester Eleno
bespeak official discomfort with Eleno—that his transgendered persona
displaces “true” masculinity and serves as a magnet for lesbian desire.5 Female
Elena will be held in solitary confinement in the women’s quarters. And no
one but the chief magistrate himself will hold the key to the female surgeon’s
cell. A woman with medical knowledge, who also happens to be married to
another woman, contradicts the ruling ideology of the household, and it is
therefore not surprising that this brown-skinned surgeon—her mother was
an African slave—is also under suspicion of having made pacts with the devil,
as some have alleged. Her wife, María, is under strict orders to be kept “distinct
and apart” from this seductive and capable surgeon.
In addition to the midwives’ report, chief magistrate don Felipe de Miranda
also receives learned confirmation of Eleno’s female genitalia from three
physicians (doctors Alonso Gutiérrez, Villalta de Carbajal and Vázquez) who
concur that Eleno is a woman and that her body shows no signs of
hermaphroditism. Their working medico-legal definition of sex is mainly
genital. But, unlike the midwives’ physical sketch, the physicians’ portrait of

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Eleno slips into the more ambiguous areas of cultural style and performance.
They first list genital conformation, the primary measure of Eleno’s correct
location in the hierarchy of gender. But most interesting from the point of
view of the history of sexualities is that two out of the three physicians include
along with the expected physical characteristics (“vagina” and “breast”/
“vasso” and “pecho”), language and other unspecified cultural markers
(“speech and all the rest”/“habla y de todo lo demás”), and that most
polyvalent and malleable of all visible corporeal signifiers, “face” (“rrostro”):
They found that, in reality, she is not nor has she ever been a man, but
a woman, which they saw and found in her natural vagina, similar to
and properly that of a woman, and all the signs of woman, like breast,
face, speech, and all the rest, from which it is inferred that she is female
[Dr. Villalta’s testimony].
Having looked at and examined him [sic], there was not nor does she
have any sign of being a man, but only the female sex, and in the
composure of body, face, and speech she has the appearance of a woman,
as she is, and not a man [Dr. Vásquez’s testimony].
Hallaron que realmente no es ni a sido honbre, sino muger, lo qual
vieron y constó de su vasso natural, semejante e proprio de muger, e
todas las señales de muger, como son pecho y rrostro y habla y de todo
lo demás, de que se ynfiere ser muger [Dr. Villalta’s testimony].
A el qual aviendo vido e miradole no tenía ny tiene ni a tenido señal
nynguna de hombre, sino solamente sexo de muger y en conpastura
[sic] de cuerpo, de pecho, y rrostro, e fabla pareçe ser tal muger como
lo es e no hombre [Dr. Vázquez’s testimony].
As these physicians would have it, Eleno’s feminine conpostura (“composure”)
belies her attempts at masking her true gender.
In a medico-legal setting, the concept of conpostura renders the code of gender
and sexuality as an unproblematic system of correspondences: body, speech,
body-language, humoral complexion, voice, and the site within which all of
these corporeal and cultural signs of gender are articulated are taken
unambiguously as statements of the feminine. The experts conclude that Eleno
is, after all, just Elena. The Book of Nature is transparent when it comes to
gender. It is, as Pliny would have it, a world in which bodies, even in death,
continue to articulate the division of cultural roles that makes patriarchy possible:

Males are heavier than females […] The dead bodies of men float upon
the back, those of women with the face downwards, as if, even after
death, nature were desirous of sparing their modesty.
Virorum cadavera supina fluitare, feminarum prona, velut pudori
defunctarum parcente natura.6
(Book VIII, Ch. 18; vol. 2, pp. 158–59)

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The male body and ethos represent a completed process of development,

“weightier” in every respect. Drier and hotter in complexion, male
composure orients the body upwards, superior and supine, facing the sun.
The female body, on the other hand, its complexion cold and wet,
communicates modesty and shamefulness by its prone position, looking
down toward the depths of the watery medium that informs its personal
constitution and temperament.
What was Eleno’s true conpostura? In view of Eleno’s astounding
record of twenty years of successful “passing” as a man, we may properly
question the uninflected femininity that physicians and midwives read into
Eleno’s conpostura. They would picture Eleno floating in a prone position.
But the story of her/his life, which reads like a picaresque narrative of
fluctuating “fortunes and adversities” (“fortunas y adversidades”), would
trace a free-floating body mirroring the ebb and flow of willed and
imposed gender inflections, as well as the multiplicity of readings
generated by those constructions.7 Contrary to the Ocaña decision, a year
and a half earlier the Madrid court of the archbishop of Toledo had ruled
that Eleno was a man and not a hermaphrodite, thus clearing the way for
Eleno and María’s union. But before arriving at a singular, masculine
identity for Eleno, his/her rather more complex intergendered conpostura
left its mark in the legal record. In December of 1584 the vicar of Madrid,
Juan Baptista Neroni, was struck by the ambiguity of Eleno’s beardless
face: “The vicar, seeing her without a beard or facial hair, asked her
whether she was a capon, and she replied, no” (“Y el vicario biendo a ésta
sin barba y lampiña la dixo que si hera capón, y ésta respondió que no”).
A capon is a castrated male, a eunuch. Eleno has no facial hair, but her
skin is not smooth. Eleno’s face bears the brand of slavery, which was
burned into both cheeks when she was a little girl and a slave.
Born into slavery, Eleno’s manumission occurred, at age twelve, following
the death of her mistress, the “original” Elena de Céspedes, in whose
memory the freed slave was (re)named. Is there a truly personal history to
Eleno beyond the laconic record of the transfer of human chattel she presents
to the court? The bits and pieces scattered throughout the court documents
give no account of a name prior to the one bestowed at age twelve “in
contemplation” of the deceased owner. As far as the legal system of
slaveholders is concerned, the name Elena—an archetype of femininity if
there is one—locates the prisoner’s gender antecedents in servitude, which is
itself a paradox, for the intensely phallocratic regime of slavery calls into
question gender as a naturalized category. The whip and the branding iron
ungender the slave’s body and transform it into a living and breathing ledger-
book entry.8 Is it really possible to examine Eleno’s face and not interpret the
slave brand? Or, rather, do the physicians construe the mark of ungendering
as a sign of feminization when they include “rrostro” (“face”) in their list of
feminine markers of Eleno’s conpostura?

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Confronted with Eleno’s history of gender ambiguity, the ability to translate

the mark of slavery as a sign of feminine gender furnishes a convenient
advantage for a tribunal seeking to feminize and punish “her” for gender
dissidence and sexual irregularity. The name Elena becomes synonymous
with the slave brand on the subject’s face, which remains intelligible according
to the ruling code of Castilian hegemony nearly thirty years after manumission.
The standard autobiographical testimony portion of trials of the Inquisition,
“Discourse of her/his life” (“Discurso de su vida”), is for Eleno a narrative
that subjugates by its sequential and linear disposition. And, thus, in the act
of narrating her slave origins Eleno rearticulates a slave positionality in a
society obsessed with documenting honorable and “untainted” origins and
the so-called “purity of blood” (“limpieza de sangre”). At the time of Eleno’s
birth c. 1545, Habsburg Spain was turning increasingly ruthless in its
extirpation of the multicultural elements of medieval Spain, whose porous
frontiers prior to 1492 and the conquest of Granada offered fertile ground
for extraordinary cultural and human achievements amidst its three
constitutive religious cultures of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Eleno’s birth
in Alhama de Granada placed her at one of the principal sites of an Islamic
culture increasingly proscribed and in swift decline, but vibrant, still, in its
resistance to Christian and Castilian hegemony.9
To what extent do culture and “race” figure in the calculus of gender, sex,
personal constitution, and complexion that comprise Eleno’s compostura?
Eleno’s history is an important document in this regard since hermaphrodite
emerges not just as a designation for disruptive sexuality and unusual corporeal
morphology, but as “nation” or “race.” Eleno’s chief defense to the triple
charge of sodomy, contempt for the sacrament of marriage, and demonic
affiliation is that he is a hermaphrodite, even though at the time of her trials,
first in Ocaña and then, after 14 July 1587, in the court of the Inquisition at
Toledo, her body bears no actual “facts” of hermaphroditism. Although
physically a female, her subjectivity remains that of the hermaphrodite he
claims to have been from the age of sixteen until just twelve days prior to his
imprisonment in Ocaña. He describes how his full set of male genitals withered
from a cancer that developed following a traumatic riding accident. From
Eleno’s own perspective—that of a licensed and literate medical practitioner—
his or her hybrid compostura is assimilated to the male subjectivity that he
overestimates, even after losing the male member that he and others testify
was present at the time of his physical exams prior to his marriage to María.
As a mode of filiation with history, hermaphroditism stands as a metaphor
for race that displaces slavery/femininity. In claiming the status of
hermaphrodite, Eleno transforms the meaning of her brown skin. Facing the
Inquisitors, Eleno’s only felicitous point of origin is the transformation to
hermaphrodite that he describes.
Although some medical theories lent weight to the notion of female to male
transformations, Eleno would find little support for her assertion that her

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body was more than the bearer of slave “stygmata.”10 But there is something
numinous about her body’s transformation in the course of giving birth to her
first and only child, the event that led to her subsequent adoption of masculine
dress, her passage from typically female to male professions (weaver,
hosemaker, shepherd, tailor, soldier, surgeon) and to her becoming a husband,
the ultimate “confirmation” of superseded femaleness. Her description of the
effects of childbirth transforms the body of a former slave into the mirror of
the other, as in an Ovidian tale translated into a “Christian” language11:
When she gave birth, as she has said, with the force that she applied in
labor she broke the skin over the urinary canal, and a head came out
[the length] of about half a big thumb, and she indicated it so; in its
shape it resembled the head of a male member, which when she felt
desire and natural excitement it would come out as she has said, and
when she wasn’t excited it contracted and receded into the place where
the skin had broken.

Quando ésta parió, como tiene dicho, con la fuerça que puso en el
parto se le rompió un pellejo que benía sobre el caño de la orina y le
salió una cabeza como medio dedo pulgar, que ansí lo señaló, que parecía
en su hechura cabeça de miembro de hombre, el qual quando ésta tenía
deseo y alteración natural, le salía como dicho tiene, y quando no estava
con alteraçión se enmusteçía y recogía a la parte y seno donde estava
antes que se le rompiese el dicho pellejo.
She had married about a year earlier, at age sixteen (c. 1561), and had lived
with her husband, a stonemason from Jaén, for a scant three months, until he
left her. She never saw him again, but soon thereafter she received news of his
death. Their son, who was named Christóval after his father, was thought to
be living in Seville, where she had left him as a little boy in the care of a
foreigner who operated a bread oven in the city, and she apparently had no
further contact with her son. Eleno thus gave birth to a son and to a penis.
But the newly acquired male genitalia were imperfectly formed, in that the
sexual arousal (“alteration”) Eleno felt in the company of women was impeded
by the skin covering his penis, which prevented him from having a full erection.
Within a year after his metamorphosis, while living in Sanlúcar de Barrameda,
Eleno underwent a surgical procedure to remove the impediment. The
operation was performed by a certain licenciate Tapia. Eleno credits this
surgeon with the first medical diagnosis of his condition—that Eleno was a
hermaphrodite. The operation left Eleno with a fully working member: “and
she was left with the aptitude to have relations with women” (“y esta quedó
con abtitud de poder tener quenta con muger”). His female to male
transformation finally complete, Eleno, who was working as a hose maker at
the time, was properly endowed to carry on a love affair with his employer’s
wife for the next four or five months.

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In his own defense and in answer to charges of sodomy and the sin against
nature, he submits to the Toledo tribunal of the Inquisition a learned letter
contextualizing his body’s metamorphosis in the discourses of medicine and
natural history.12 He pleads innocent to all the charges. Nothing he ever did—
dressing as a man, being aroused by and having sexual relations with women,
marriage to María, and medical practice as a male surgeon—was contrary to
nature, since nature itself produced his altered form. He reasons that his
physical transformation, though unusual, parallels the metamorphoses and
unusual births recorded in natural history by such eminent authorities as
Cicero, Saint Augustine, and Pliny:
But neither with tacit nor explicit pact with the devil did I ever pretend
to be a man in order to marry a woman, as has been alleged. And what
happens is that since in this world many times people have been seen
who are androgynous, who, in other words, are called hermaphrodites,
who have both sexes, I too have been one of these, and when I intended
to marry I prevailed more in the masculine sex and was naturally a man
and had all that was necessary for a man to be able to marry. (And I
informed them about it and gave visual proof to the physicians and
surgeons expert in the art, who saw and touched me and testified under
oath that I was a man and could marry a woman, and with such judicial
proof I married as a man […]
As for the other [charge], regarding the testimony by women questioned
in this case, with whom I have had carnal coupling, they have given
evidence that I was a man and had the effect of such at the time that
such coupling occurred, and I was considered a man, and that is what
the first of the four witnesses says, whose testimony was given to me.
And this is not denied by saying that I had no effusion of seed, since this
did not occur due to my not being a man, but for some of the same
reasons that other men fail to do so […]
As for the other [charge], I am not hindered by the testimony of three of
the four witnesses who declare in the declaration given to me, that I
naturally could not have been a man, but that if I have given the
impression of one, it has been due to devilish illusion or artifice, as these
said witnesses have claimed, and they speak thus of appearances and
vain beliefs, and they do not harm me in particular because I have quite
naturally been a man and a woman, and even though this may seem like
a prodigious and rare thing that is seldom seen, hermaphrodites, as I
have been one myself, are not against nature [emphasis added].
Por que yo con pacto expresso nj tácito del demonio nunca me fingj
honbre para casarme con muger como se me pretende imputar. E lo que
pasa es que como en este mundo muchas veçes se an vjsto personas que
son andróginos, que por otro nonbre se llaman hermafroditos, que tienen
entramos sexos, yo tanbién e sido uno de estos. Y al tienpo que me

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pretendí casar incalecía e prevalescía más en el sexo masculino e natural

mente era honbre e tenja todo lo necessario de honbre para poderme
casar, y de que lo era hiçe información e probanza ocular de médicos e
zirujanos peritos en el arte, los quales me vjeron e tentaron e testificaron
con juramento que era tal honbre y me podía casar con muger y con la
dicha probanza hecha judiçial mente me casé por honbre […]
Lo otro por que por dichos de mugeres que están en esta causa
examjnados con quien yo e tenjdo ayuntamjento carnal constara yo
ser honbre y tener efectos de tal al tiempo que tenja el djcho
ayuntamjento, y tenerme por tal honbre. Y ansí lo dize el primero
testigo de los quatro que se me dieron en publicación. Y no obsta el
deçir que no tuve effusión semynys, por que aquello no fue por falta
de ser honbre, sino por alguna de las causas por las quales otros
honbres caen en esta falta […]
Lo otro por que no obsta lo que diçen los tres testigos de los quatro que
se me dieron en esta ultima publicación, que natural mente yo no e
podido ser honbre, sino que si lo e parecido a sido por illusión del
demonio o arte suya, por que estos dichos testigos vjenen a conclujr
que esto les paresçe, y así hablan de parezer y vanas creençias, y en
espeçial no me dañan por que yo natural mente e sido honbre y muger,
y aunque esto sea cosa prodigiosa y rrara que pocas veces se ve, pero no
son contra naturaleza los hermafroditos como yo lo e sido.

On the margins of the passage quoted Eleno cites his classical sources: Cicero,
De Divinatione, Augustine, Civitatem Dei, and Pliny, Naturalis Historia.13
Among these, his citation of Book VII of Pliny’s Natural History is an especially
pertinent reference, and one that would have an uncanny relevance to Eleno’s
place in historiography.
Organized acording to Pliny’s customary principle of “chaotic
enumeration,”14 Book VII ranges across “Man, his birth, his organization,
and the invention of the Arts.” Echoing Eleno’s own concerns we find the
following chapter headings: The wonderful forms of different nations (Ch.
2); Marvellous births (Ch. 3); Some remarkable properties of the body
(Ch. 18, which contains the excerpt quoted above regarding the “physics”
of gender in the bodies of the supine male and the prone female); and
Slaves for which a high price has been given (Ch. 40). In citing Pliny, Eleno
casts himself as one more instance in a long chain of nature’s marvels:
“Individuals are occasionally born, who belong to both sexes; such
persons we call by the name of hermaphrodites; they were formerly called
Androgyni and were looked upon as monsters, but at the present day they
are employed for sensual purposes” (Book VII, Ch. 3, 2:136). In some, the
transformation occurs after birth, as implausible as it may seem: “The
change of females into males is undoubtedly no fable” (Book VII, Ch. 3,
2:138). Even in the locus classicus cited by Eleno in order to naturalize her

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sexual variance, two questions immediately arise regarding the

preternatural, which will also haunt Eleno: what are marvelous “facts”
and what sort of agency produces them?
In her searching study of the epistemology of miracles and marvels in
early modern thought, Lorraine Daston outlines the operative “distinctions
between marvels and miracles, and the related distinctions between natural,
preternatural, and supernatural causation.” Daston contrasts Augustine’s
“profusion of marvels, ordinary and extraordinary” with Aquinas’s
Aristotelian framework, within which “nature [is] considerably more orderly
and autonomous […].” For Aquinas, the supernatural consists in “God’s
unmediated actions”; the natural is “what happens always or most of the
time”; and the preternatural is “what happens rarely, but nonetheless by the
agency of created beings […] Marvels belong, properly speaking, to the realm
of the preternatural.” Preternatural effects can therefore be produced by
“unaided nature,” as well as by spirits, angels, and demons. In the sixteenth
century “the preternatural came to be ever more closely associated with the
dubious and possibly demonic activities of magic and divination.”15 While
the Spanish Inquisition was remarkably rationalistic in its rejection of demonic
agency, the charge alone of having made pacts with the devil could have
devastating consequences for the accused, and it was often used to quell
dissident women, Moriscos, conversos and other marginal groups.16 Viewed
in this wider context, Eleno’s citation of Pliny is a well considered move,
since she insists that nature, and not sorcery, is the agent of her metamorphosis.
“Hermaphrodites like myself are not contrary to nature, even though this is
a prodigious and rare thing, seldom seen.” Her body belongs to the temporal
and logical sequence of the preternatural. Pliny’s text furnishes the record of
these unique deviations. In the words of Gian Biagio Conte, while the order
of nature is indisputable, it also “abandon[s] itself to play […] experimenting
with multi-form productivity.” The supreme agent of artifice is nature itself,
natura artifex.17
Pliny’s hermaphrodites inhabit a peripheral geographic region on the edges
of the empire, which is also home to people of darker colored skin. Eleno’s
own genealogy—furnished to the Inquisitors as a requisite portion of the
“Discurso de su vida”—links Eleno to these other “gentiles.”

In response to the question, he said that he thinks both parents are Old
Christians, although his mother was a slave who was black and she
must have been of the caste of Gentiles. And that neither she nor her
parents have ever been penanced by the Holy Office.

Preguntada, dixo que éste y sus padres cree son christianos viejos,
aunque su madre era esclava que era negra, y devía de ser de casta de
entiles, y que ésta ni sus padres no an sido presos ni penitençiados por
el sancto officio.

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Despite an Old Christian and Castilian father—a shadowy and ultimately

absent figure in Eleno’s upbringing and legal status—it is through her black
African mother that Eleno taps into the discourse of “race” and Europe’s
others. Natural history designates Aethiopia and India, regions of extreme
heat, as the breeding ground of monsters and wonders. If heat is the superior
form-inducing agent of the masculine-feminine polarity of humoral physiology,
in a geographic and imperial context it produces races to be wondered at as
their bodies instantiate disseminated forms and exceptions to nature’s
predictable order:
It is not at all surprising that towards the extremity of this region the
men and animals assume a monstrous form, when we consider the
changeableness and volubility of fire, the heat of which is the great
agent in imparting various forms and shapes to bodies. Indeed, it is
reported that in the interior, on the eastern side, there is a people that
have no noses, the whole face presenting a plane surface; that others
again are destitute of the upper lip, and others are without tongues […]
(Pliny, Book VI, Ch. 35, 2:101)
The Androgyni are amongst these creatures of torrid volubility:
Above the Nasamones and the Machlyae, who border upon them, are
found, as we learn from Calliphanes, the nation of Androgyni, a people
who unite the two sexes in the same individual, and alternately perform
the functions of each. Aristotle also states, that their right breast is that
of the male, the left that of a female.
(Pliny, Book VII, Ch. 2, 2:126)
One of the most influential works in the wonder literature of sixteenth-century
Spain is Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas (1570), which is
written in the form of a philosophical dialogue. In the section on
hermaphrodites, Luis, one of the interlocutors, refers to the case of a
hermaphrodite in Burgos who was burned at the stake because of her
bisexuality—she first “chose” to use her female nature, but it was later
discovered that she was also secretly availing herself of her male genitalia.
After adducing another example of a hermaphrodite burned to death, this
time in Seville, Antonio introduces the concept of a nation of hermaphrodites
whose geographic location might some day be charted. Thus, even what is
unnatural sexuality at home, may have a proper place abroad. The notion of
“strategic location,” which is crucial to the imperial gaze on subordinated
cultures, also comes into play in imagining sexual dissidence.18 The connection
between sexuality and “race” is a powerful and effective one—as it is in
Eleno’s own defense against the charge of sodomy. Citing Pliny, Antonio
relativizes the figure of the hermaphrodite by linking it to the notion of
sympathy—the connection between peoples, places, climate, personal
constitution, and humoral complexion. There is a place in which the

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phenomenon is not scandalous, as “we” think of it here, “as it is in these

lands” (that is, Spain; “en estas tierras”). Although the details derived from
Pliny are garbled, Antonio further historicizes the Roman writer’s imperial
musings on an exotic homeland for androgyny and sexual variance, which is
situated at the edge of the known world:
In these lands it would be considered a great marvel for men to have a
female sex, or women that of men; but look at Pliny, attributing to the
philosopher Calliphanes, who accompanied Alexander the Great at the
conquest of India, who says that in the far reaches of the Nasamones
there is the province of a people called the androgyni, who are all
hermaphrodites and have no respect for any sort of order or concert in
coitus; rather, they use [their pudenda] willy-nilly with same and other.
En estas tierras por muy gran maravilla se ha de tener que los hombres
tengan natura de mujeres, o las mujeres de hombres; pero ved a Plinio
alegando al filósofo Callifanes, que se halló en la conquista de la India
con el grande Alejandro: el cual dice que en los confines de los
Nasamones hay una provincia de gentes, llamadas andróginas, que todos
ellos son hermafroditas, sin guardar orden ni concierto alguno en el
coito, sino que los unos y los otros usan de ello igualmente.19
A third interlocutor, Bernardo, is astonished by all this talk of hermaphrodites
and, presumably, their ability to “choose” sexual partners of either sex. The
hermaphrodite is the erotic other—witness the peculiar social standing of
hermaphrodites as sexual workers in Pliny: “at the present day they are
employed for sensual purposes” (Book VII, Ch. 3, 2:136). Bernardo puts
aside his doubts about these sexual marvels because they are “authorized by
such grave authors” (“la autoridad de autores tan graves que la afirman por
verdadera,” Torquemada 117).
But it is the fact of empire, in the end, that furnishes the proper
epistemological framework within which sexual and racial variance find their
“true” place. Bernardo is confident that these reports must be accurate, for
our time and place (“in these lands”) daily receives news of wondrous places
and peoples. The far-flung Portuguese and Spanish empires provide new
insights into natural history. In an expansive age the wonderment induced by
marvels will be a spur to epic conquest and adventure. Bernardo’s comments
show precisely the complementarity of both imperial expansion and archival
accumulation and revision. His dialogue with his fellow amateurs of nature
and science occurs in the privileged space of the metropolis, which commissions
adventures to distant lands and receives not only material evidence and news
of such exploits, but slaves by the thousands, imported from those lands and
employed in domestic labor. That is the political framework for the
accumulation of goods, wealth, peoples, facts, and other material to be
marketed, displayed in rarified cabinets of curiosities, enumerated and
contextualized in encyclopedic works like Jardín de flores curiosas, “captured”

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in the archives of the Inquisition, and then turned into spectacles of cruelty
and scorn in an auto da fé. Bernardo’s openness to difference is the liberality
of the conqueror, enabled by the politics of imperial expansion and its necessary
revision of the concept of natural agency. Adventure and archive operate in
Torquemada’s dialogues not as alternatives, as Conte suggests is the case in
Pliny, but as secret sharers of natural history. Although a nation of androgyni
strains all belief, Bernardo is confident, nevertheless, that it does exist in
India: “The way things are today, I still consider it possible” (“según las
cosas que hay en el mundo, no dejo de tener ésa por posible,” 117). In the
metropolis, hermaphrodites have no proper place and are burned for their
transgressions. But, in theory, at least, regardless of how unusual the products
of natura artifex in the colonies and periphery of known civilization may
seem, they can systematically be given a proper place in harmony with their
land of origin or the political needs of the metropolis.
When such cases appear in Europe, however, the notion of natural
“sympathy” produces a rational and beneficent nature. Bernardo is intrigued
by a report by the physician Andria Matiolo Senés (Epístolas medidnales),
that he saw in the kingdom of Bohemia three he-goats with teats like a female,
and that he found their milk an effective remedy in treating certain diseases.
This bit of fantastic stuff is just too much to accept, but Bernardo observes
that underneath apparent transgressions of the natural order may lie
unsuspected reasons: “There must not have been a lack of cause for nature to
depart from its order in a thing like this” (“No debió faltar causa para que
naturaleza saliese de su orden en una cosa como ésta […],” Torquemada
115). The hermaphrodite nation lies very, very far away (much farther than
Bohemia!); indeed, its remoteness accentuates an unsuspected “sympathy”
of land and people that would account for their frenetic and orgiastic sexuality.
In those other lands there is a hidden harmony that would account for their
frantic—and titillating—sexual acrobatics: they “have no respect for any sort
of order or concert in coitus; rather, they use [their pudenda] willy-nilly with
same and other (“sin guardar orden ni concierto alguno en el coito, sino que
los unos y los otros usan de ello igualmente,” Torquemada 117). Pliny’s
hermaphrodite nation will surely come under Spanish imperial sway, which
confidently retraces the glories of Alexander the Great and shall, no doubt,
pinpoint the geographic location of the Androgyni; their land may yet be
“discovered,” as other regions of India are at this very moment charted and
explored: “even though this province must be remote from those which are
now again being discovered in India” (“aunque esta provincia debe estar
bien apartada de las que ahora en la India de nuevo están descubiertas,”
Torquemada 117).
While Eleno served the empire most loyally as a soldier in the War of the
Alpujarras (1568–70), the Toledo tribunal of the Inquisition does not accord
her any special treatment on that account. Neither is it moved by Eleno’s
belonging to the “caste of Gentiles” to accept her narrative of transmutation.

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Indeed, all the medical experts who examine Eleno at Toledo agree with the
findings in Ocaña that Elena is, and always has been, female. The tribunal’s
final sentence insists on that point and condemns her for the crime of bigamy-
by passing a direct ruling on some of the other, legally messy accusations
leveled against her by the tribunal’s prosecuting attorney.20 Elena’s bigamy
consists in her failure to obtain proper documentation of the death of her
husband prior to her marriage to María. As a bigamist, Elena receives the
standard punishment of two hundred lashes and ten years of confinement.
But her case is given a higher profile by the Inquisitors themselves, when they
also make her appear in an auto da fé, held in Toledo on Sunday, 18 December
1588, in which she publicly abjures her crimes de levi (reconciliation for
minor crimes) and is forced to parade around the central square wearing the
requisite mitre and robes (sambenito), with insignias “appropriate” to her
crime of bigamy. But the text of the sentence issued by the Inquisitors to
accompany her public lashing goes beyond the narrow legal principles applied
in her conviction and encompasses the closeted charges of sodomy.21 True to
their misogyny, the Inquisitors vent their contempt for and anxiety over the
sexuality of a woman-identified woman. With the physical punishment
occurring on the streets of the two principal sites of her transgressions—
Toledo, where the trial was held, and Ciempozuelos, where the “same-sex”
betrothal occurred—Eleno’s notoriety as a “woman who fooled other women”
(and not a few men as well) grows stupendously. The last document in her
dossier in the archives of the Inquisition shows precisely the almost mythical
proportions that her powers acquire in the popular imagination. Elena, now,
presumably, in female attire, serves out her sentence in the Hospital del Rey
(King’s Hospital) at Toledo, where she heals the indigent sick. Her sentence
is, in effect, ten years of “community service.” But on 23 February 1589, the
hospital administrator files a petition with the Inquisition of Toledo for Elena’s
transfer to another, more remote facility, on account of the disruption that
attends to Eleno’s medical practice:

The presence of Elena de Céspedes has caused great annoyance and

embarrassment from the beginning, since many people come to see and
be healed by her.

Que es grande el estorbo y enbaraço que a causado la entrada de la

dicha Elena de Céspedes por la mucha gente que acude a verla y a
curarse con ella.
A reputed hermaphrodite, a woman who has lived, loved and married as a
man, has become a surgeon, and has even been suspected of possessing magical
healing powers, this mulata is now a local cause célèbre. Of Eleno’s many
bodies, none is as powerful as this latest incarnation. Thanks to the formidable
Toledo Inquisitors, Elena alias Eleno is a pilgrimage site. Her transfer to the
hospital at Puente del Arzopbispo, however, does not extinguish interest in

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Eleno’s numinous persona, even when that interest aims to discredit Eleno’s
claims to the preternatural.
In 1599, ten years after Eleno’s ouster from Toledo, the physician and lay
agent (“familiar”) of the Inquisition, Jerónimo de Huerta, publishes his
annotated translation of Pliny, Natural History. Eleno has cited Book VII in
his own behalf, but it now becomes the place of her insertion into the annals
of natural history. If nature is the supreme artificer (natura artifex), then
woman is the wiliest counterfeiter—and none more so than a female slave.
This baroque Pliny shifts attention from the hermaphrodite to the slave, from
nature’s wonders to the counter-natural deceptions that the servile castes are
capable of.22 In the table of contents Elena is the unproblematic she who
deceives: “Deceit by a female slave who pretended to be a man” (“Engaño de
una esclava que se hazia hombre” folio 5v). Eleno’s account is fraudulent, a
desperate lie told by a slave. If Pliny narrates the preternatural, Eleno
instantiates lesbian sexuality as duplicity and as history:

[…] invention and deceit, as the one that occurred in Castile, with that
Andalusian slave, named Elena de Céspedes, who having abandoned
female dress, for many years pretended to be a man [and] gave
indications of being one, though badly sculpted, and without a beard
and with some deceitful artifice; and it was so natural in style that after
being examined by several surgeons and declared a man, she was married
in Cien Poçuelos.23
[…] inuencion y engaño, como fue el que sucedio en Castilla, con aquella
esclaua Andaluça, llamada Elena de Céspedes, la qual dexado el habito
de muger, fingio muchos años ser hombre, mostraua serlo aunque mal
tallado, y sin barba con cierto artificio engañoso, y era tan al natural
que despues de auerle mirado algunos cirujanos, y declarado ser hombre,
se caso en Cien Poçuelos[…]

Along with his fellow Inquisitors, Huertas reads Eleno’s femaleness as slavery
in the mirror of natural history. To peg Eleno as “an Andalusian woman
slave” is to produce an overdetermined subordinate subject, whose
“sympathy” with the land bespeaks cheap labor and “sensual purposes,” but
not wonder.

NOTES
1 This and all subsequent citations from the trial summaries of Elena de Céspedes
are from my transcription and translation of the dossier at the Archive Histórico
Nacional, Madrid (Sección Inquisición: Legajo 234, Expediente 24). The
documents are written in various sixteenth-century hands. I give no page numbers,
since the originals lack consistent page or folio numbers. My transcriptions show
some slight modifications to facilitate reading. I resolve all abbreviations (e.g.
dho=dicho, Ma=María), furnish accent marks and punctuation, and regularize

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the use of u and v. Recent studies of Eleno can be found in Marie-Catherine

Barbazza, “Un caso de subversión social: el proceso de Elena de Céspedes (1587–
89),” in Criticón, vol. 26 (1984), pp. 17–40; Michèlle Escamilla, “A propos d’un
dossier inquisitorial des environs de 1590: les étranges amours d’un
hermaphrodite,” in Amours légitimes, amours illégitimes en Espagne (XVIe-XVIIe
Siècles), Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985, pp. 167–82; Guillermo Folch
Jou and María del Sagrario Muñoz, “Un pretendido caso de hermafroditismo en
el siglo XVI,” in Boletín de la sociedad española de historia de la, farmacia, vol.
93 (1973), pp. 20–33. See also, Vern L.Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross
Dressing, Sex, and Gender, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993,
pp. 94–6, who cite, apparently, from an unpublished paper by Richard A.Kagan,
which I have not seen.
2 On the role of physicians in establishing the legal status of hermaphrodites in
sixteenth-century France, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,
“Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France,” in Critical Matrix: Princeton Working
Papers in Women’s Studies, vol. 1 No. 5 (1985), pp. 1–19.
3 On women and the law, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early
Modern Seville, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
4 The Spanish indirect object pronoun, le, (“to him” or “to her”) is not gender
specific, but the authorities already believe Elena to be female—hence my
translation, “her.”
5 Daston and Park, p. 7, emphasize the homophobic reaction to hermaphrodites in
sixteenth-century France. Among many recent studies on the history and meaning
of the hermaphrodite, see, e.g., Emma Donoghue “Imagined More than Women:
Lesbians as Hermaphrodites, 1671–1766,” in Women’s History Review, vol. 2
(1993), No. 2, pp. 199–216; Julia Epstein, “Either/Or—Neither/Both: Sexual
Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender,’ in Genders, No. 7 (March 1990), pp.
99–142; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender:
Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Julia Epstein and
Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity,
New York-London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 80–111; Georgia Nugent, “This Sex
Which is Not One: Deconstructing Ovid’s Hermaphrodite,” in Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 160–85;
Lauren Silberman, “Mythographic Transformations of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite,’
in Sixteenth-Century Journal, vol. 19, No. 4 (Winter 1988), pp. 643–52.
6 This and all subsequent English citations from the Natural History are from Pliny,
The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 2, London: Henry G.Bohn, 1855; the Latin
text is from C.Plini Secundi, Naturalis Historiae (Libri VII–XV), Leipzig: B.G.
Teubner, 1909. I cite in the text the book and chapter number, along with the
volume and page number from the Bostock and Riley translation.
7 I refer to the rogue protagonist of the sixteenth-century picaresque novel, Lazarillo
de Tormes, ed. Francisco Rico, Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1988.
8 The cultural meanings that attach to the whipping and dismemberment of female
African slaves in the Americas is the subject of Hortense J.Spillers, “Mama’s
Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Diacritics, vol. 17, No.2
(Summer 1987), pp. 65–81. On slavery in Spain, see Jose Luis Cortés López, La
esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, Salamanca: Ediciones
Universidad de Salamanca, 1989; Alfonso Franco Silva, Los esclavos de Sevilla,
Sevilla: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1980; Alfonso Franco Silva, “La mujer
esclava en la sociedad andaluza de fines del medioevo,” in Angela Muñoz
Fernández and Cristina Segura Graiño (eds), El trabajo de las mujeres en la Edad
Media Hispana (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1988) pp. 287–301.

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 SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

9 On Moriscos, see Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de

los moriscos: vida y tragedia de una minoría, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1978.
10 Daston and Park observe the shift away from the “Aristotelian complexion view
of sexuality…to a Hippocratic-Galenic view based upon the proportions of male
and female seed present at conception,” p. 4. See also Danielle Jacquart and
Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Adamson,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion
of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in
European Intellectual Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Thomas
Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990; Katharine Park and Robert A.Nye,
“Destiny is Anatomy; Review of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks
to Freud, by Thomas Laqueur,” in The New Republic (18 February 1991), pp.
53–7; Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine,
Science, and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Gilbert Herdt
(ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and Society,
New York: Zone Books, 1994.
11 On the numinous aura of the Ovidian tale, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made
Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism, New Haven-London: Yale
University Press, 1986.
12 Unlike Aragon, the Inquisition in Castile did not have jurisdiction over sodomy
cases. While Eleno was also charged with sodomy, her principal offense was
“mockery of the sacrament of marriage,” which was a matter for the Inquisition.
On the prosecution of sodomy, see Bartolomé Benassar, “El modelo sexual: la
Inquisición de Aragón y la represión de los pecados ‘abominables,’” Inquisición
española: poder político y control social, ed. Benassar, Barcelona: Editorial
Crítica, 1981; Rafael Carrasco, Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia.
Historia de los sodomitas (1565–1785), Barcelona: Laertes, 1985; Mary
Elizabeth Perry, “The ‘Nefarious Sin’ in Early Modern Seville,” in Kent Gerard
and Gert Hekma (eds), The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in
Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, New York-London: Harrington Park
Press, 1989, pp. 67–89; Francisco Tomás y Valiente, “El crimen y
pecado contra natura,” in Sexo barroco y otras t r a n s g r e s i o n e s
premodernas, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990, pp. 33–55; William Monter,
Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to
Sicily, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 276–99.
13 Left margin: “A.Cicero lib..1. de diuy natu. Diuus Agustinus Lib. 16. de civitate
dei.c.8. Pli[n]j lib. 7. natur. histor.” Eleno possessed a library, numbering twenty-
seven volumes, which was inventoried by the Inquisition. The contents of the
catalogue—books on medicine, surgery, rhetoric, and natural philosophy in
Spanish, Latin, and Italian—and her testimony indicate that she purchased it in
its entirety from a medical humanist.
14 Gian Biagio Conte, “The Inventory of the World: Form of Nature and Encyclopedic
Project in the Work of Pliny the Elder,” in Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love
Elegy, Pliny’s Encyclopedia, trans. Glenn W.Most, Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 67–104, quotation at p. 72.
15 Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern
Europe,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, No. 1 (Autumn 1991): 93–124, quotations at
pp. 96–8.
16 See, e.g., Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Thousand Cases of
the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank,” in
Gustav Henningsen, John Tedeschi, and Charles Amiel (eds), The Inquisition in

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Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, Dekalb, Ill.: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1986, pp. 100–29; Monter, Frontiers pp. 255–75; Mary
Elizabeth Perry and Anne J.Cruz (eds), Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the
Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991.
17 Conte, pp. 84 and 86; see, also, Paula Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of
Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” in
Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 292–331.
18 I borrow the notion of “strategic location” from Edward W.Said, Orientalism,
New York: Vintage, 1979, pp. 20–1.
19 Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín deflores cunosas, ed. Giovanni Allegra, Madrid:
Castalia, 1982, pp. 116–17. Subsequent citations of this work will appear in the
text, with page numbers in parentheses. All English translations from this and
other Spanish works cited above are mine.
20 Bigamy was a major concern for the Inquisition after the Council of Trent, see
Enrique Gacto, “El delito de bigamia y la Inquisición española,” in Sexo barroco,
pp. 127–52.
21 Reading the sentence in an auto da fé “was an instrument of propaganda and
popular education consciously used by inquisitors to mold opinion. As such, it is
interesting for the purpose of recovering the image that the tribunal wished to
give of itself and of the beliefs it attacked,” Jean Pierre Dedieu, “The Archives of
the Holy Office of Toledo as a Source for Historical Anthropology,” trans. E.W.
Monter, in Hennigsen et al. (eds), The Inquisition, p. 180.
22 By the term “baroque” I refer to the “cult of (and anxiety about) the artificial”
that obtained in post-tridentine Spain, John R.Beverley, “On the Concept of the
Spanish Literary Baroque,” in Anne J.Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (eds), Culture
and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, Hispanic Issues, vol. 7, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992, pp. 216–30, quotation at p. 223.
23 Gerónimo de Huerta, Tradvcion de los libros de Caio Plinio Segvndo, de la historia
natvral de los animales. Hecha por el licenciado Geronimo de Huerta, medico, y
filosofo. Y anotada por el mesmo con anotaciones curiosas, Alcalá: Justo Sánchez
Crespo, 1602, folio 20v, my emphasis.

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 8

BECOMING MALE
Salvation through gender modification
in Hinduism and Buddhism
Cynthia Ann Humes

Numerous world literatures share the motif of humans experiencing a change

of sex. In some cases, a gender reversal may be desirable for personal reasons.
In some religious circles, on the other hand, changing one’s sex—particularly
if born female—is considered essential for salvation. Some Hindu and Buddhist
soteriological texts, for instance, argue the necessity of females to adopt male
bodies before complete emancipation can be reached. Further, even when
actual physical transformation of sex is deemed unnecessary, in both Hindu
and Buddhist scriptural traditions, key spiritual concepts of transcendence
are linked with symbology that has been likened “male” or “masculine,”
such that women are specifically admonished to purge themselves of
“women’s” characteristics and “become male” in gender orientation to
become enlightened.
I am interested here in offering a broadly drawn picture of why this
religious gender transformation, whether in body or in mind, is or was
thought to be necessary, and how such concepts have influenced both men’s
and women’s experience. In doing so, I also seek to demonstrate certain
Hindu and Buddhist theories of embodiment in general, and gendered
embodiment in particular. Throughout, I will discuss a number of pertinent
themes interwoven in both traditions. These include perceived dichotomies
of gender, matter and spirit, ascetic/philosophical and devotional approaches
to salvation, and immediate or distant salvation. In the first section I explain
Hindu religious theories. In the second, in addition to describing Buddhist
theories, I draw conclusions comparing and contrasting Buddhist and Hindu
concepts of gender and salvation.

GENDER AND SALVATION IN HINDUISM

Belief in the superiority of male birth undergirds most Hindu salvation
schemes. Hindu literature even up to today accepts that a change from woman
to man is virtually always desirable, while the reverse is undesirable:
paradoxical exceptions merely tend to prove this rule.1

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“Hinduism” is a widely accepted heuristic term which encompasses within

it a variety of South Asian-based traditions, but virtually all of them claim as
their common heritage four sets of Sanskrit literature they view to be sacred:
.
the Sam hita-s (c. 1400–1000 BCE), Bra-hmanas (c. 1000–700 BCE), -ranyakas
(c. 800–600 BCE), and Upanis.ads (c. 800–500 BCE). Those people of north
India who composed the earliest set of scriptures agreed today to be Hindu
actually called themselves -rya[n]s, followers of the “superior” path. Aryan
religion is also known as Vedic, so named after its literature, collectively
referred to as the Veda[s], repository[ies] of “knowledge.”
I must introduce at this point an immediate caveat. Although they are
now perceived as significant contributors to concepts of gender and salvation
for all Hindus, these sets of scriptures were in fact popularized only in the
modern era by non-Indian Orientalists and Indian Nationalists, who used
them as resources to facilitate their own group’s divergent agendas. Further,
the texts reflect a minority view from their very creation. Their authors
omitted discussion of the religious experience of those that did not fall
within their self-conceived elite groups, and, even today, most of their
passages hold little import for the vast majority of those people who have
come to be called “Hindu.” Since, however, the texts have assumed such
vast importance in the construction of a Hindu identity since the nineteenth
century, examining them for their views on gender change remains a
significant task in its own right.2 Thus, while they give insight to a dominant
view, this view derives from what was originally a minority, nevertheless,
and its value is still contested.
The Aryans did promote patriarchal traditions (for example, elevation of
males, patrilineality, and patrilocality), but women could themselves attain
salvation. As wives and mothers, women were important to men’s religious
.
goals as well. Their first set of texts are the collections of hymns or Sam hita-s (c.
. -
1400–1000 BCE). The Sam hitas suggest an appreciation of both femininity
and the complementarity between husband and wife.3 Both domestic and public
rituals, for instance, depended on the copresence of husband and wife, and
pairing of them was believed to be divinely ordered. No Hindu scripture
henceforth offered an alternative view of sexuality and gender construction other
than natural heterosexuality.4 The maintenance of harmony between husband
and wife was a primary concern of Vedic verses, one which perdures into the
present as a major feature of later stri- dharma, or women’s religious duty.
Human women appeared often in didactic scriptures as good wives who
contributed importantly to the trivarga, or three modes of worldly life which
together constituted a mode of salvation. Through their ideal behavior, women
supported dharma, the divine order of the family, society, and the cosmos. In
producing sons, they contributed to artha, material wealth. Through their
aesthetics, they symbolized the well-being of the family as a whole, and inspired
the third aim of worldly life, ka-ma or desire and pleasure. Such affirmative
evaluations of women’s contributions continued into later ages. At least within

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.
the Sam hita-s, salvation was conceived as a joint venture of husband and
wife. A woman’s gender, while it defined her contributions, did not render
her incapable of salvation per se.
This positive evaluation of women shifts somewhat in the more
hierarchical religious concepts recorded in the second set of Hindu texts, the
Bra-hman.as (c. 1000–700 BCE). The Bra-hman.as posited greater disparities
between birth-groups (ja-ti-s) and the increasing importance of a son as the
deliverer of his father to heaven. Later Bra-hman.as proposed that one must
be “born again” through initiation into Vedic ritual to be saved. Initiation
was reserved for members of the top three classes or varn.as. (literally
“color”), thus excluding from heaven the fourth varn.a—the Sudras, or
members of the servant class. Further, one had to undergo rigorous training
at the home of a teacher after initiation to gain the expertise necessary to
perform rituals and hymns properly. Although domestic and public rituals
continued to be performed for various goals, including the acquisition of
wealth, progeny, and health, domestic rituals were increasingly seen as
inferior to the more elaborate rituals directed towards the maintenance of
the universe which required professional overseers to complete properly.
Greater stress came to be placed on the need for elaborate ritual intervention
to attain life after death in heaven, which was coupled with the emphasis
that males perform such sacrifices, sponsored by and presided over by
legitimate sons with the aid of priests. This led to a considerable widening of
the gulf between men’s and women’s educational levels. For instance, while
boys of the highest (Bra- hmin) class were enjoined to study and
accommodated, girls were educated only optionally.
Given the new prerequisite for legitimate sons in the quest for heaven,
greater emphasis was also laid on controlling women’s sexuality. Eventually,
women’s chastity was equated with “purity,” which came to be viewed as a
proper substitute for female education. A man’s status became closely related
to his wife’s purity/chastity, increasing further need for greater control of
women’s sexuality. These developments contributed to the increasingly more
common view that women were ignorant and incapable—even if chaste and
honored—by their very nature. By the late Bra-hman.a era (c. 800–700 BCE),
women came to be viewed as a source of pollution through menstruation and
childbirth; hence, their dangerous nature was both physical and
temperamental.
The third and fourth sets of Hindu texts, the -raTyakas (c. 800–600 BCE)
and UpaniUads (c. 800–500 BCE), introduced new religious goals and
philosophical concepts of the material and spiritual which had great
repercussions on salvation theories for women. Most of these promoted a
new vision of human destiny: all persons are subject to continual rebirth, and
.
hence are trapped in sam sa-ra (the perpetual, cyclical rounds of phenomenal,
worldly existence). Concomitantly, the religious goal shifted. The trivarga
was expanded to include a fourth dimension: mokUa, or release from rebirth.

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In some cases, mokUa was escape to a heaven with a/the god(s), not all that
unlike visions found in earlier Hindu scripture, but more commonly, mokUa
meant escaping the cycle of rebirth entirely.
The many UpaniUads accepted as authoritative expound various views;
some are deeply theological, others speculative and monistic. Most UpaniUads
incorporated early S&mkhya dualism (variously dated, but the seeds of which
devalued prakr. ti, which came to be viewed as an aspect of the puruUa. The
date c. 500 BCE) which posited two eternal principles: matter or prakr. ti,
which was feminine and the material cause of the universe, and spirit or
puruUa (literally, “man”) which was the masculine consciousness. These
UpaniUads puruUa was identified with the a-tman or individual soul, which
was ultimately identical with the immaterial, spiritual essence of the universe,
Brahman. Brahman was an all-pervasive, eternal, and fully real principle;
the world was material, temporary, and therefore, to a degree, a lower level
of reality which should be transcended in mokUa. Female fertility came to be
equated with sexuality, which itself was deemed the delusory force or power
of prakr. ti. If left uncontrolled, sexuality/prakr. ti would obstruct the path to
enlightenment.
In the highly regarded and influential Advaita [non-dual] philosophy, which
is rooted in the more monistic UpaniUads, prakr. ti and puruUa are not
distinguished from the highest point of realization, and gender, too, is
ultimately irrelevant. Gendered constructions are ephemeral, or in
philosophical or ascetic approaches, serve as tools or ideological hooks meant
to assist one to eventually transcend distinctions.5 Yet this ideal realization is
known by the tradition to be a rare insight, and Advaita philosophical
discourses still employ gendered terminologies and values. Thus, philosophical
treatises admonish followers to destroy attachment to the “female” material
element and hold fast to, and become, fully spirit or puruUa—literally, “male.”
Thus, while the word brahman is a neuter noun, the epitome of human
behavior or the spirit, in addition to underlying the dominant modes of action
for its realization, is directly modeled on the masculine and male experience.
Classical Hinduism attempted to synthesize all four sets of texts even as it
added new elements. It affirmed the necessity of traditional Vedic study, but
its purpose was to prepare the student for greater tasks in the enlightenment
quest, such as philosophical rumination, asceticism, and meditation, which
together lead to enlightenment. Realization succeeds in attaining the ultimate
goal: freeing the individual soul from a cycle of rebirth in material worlds
(including rebirth in heaven). Classical Hinduism thus deemphasizes family
and early Vedic ritual performance conducted in pursuit of worldly aims and
a life in heaven with the gods.
Women’s participation in Classical Hinduism gradually grew increasingly
restricted. During the early UpaniUadic age, upper class women could be
initiated into Vedic learning and devote themselves to study. By the time of
the dharma texts (c. 400–100 BCE), women were classified into two categories:

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brahmava-dini-s and sadyodvadha-s or sadyodva-ha-s. Brahmava-dini-s were

those women who remained lifelong students, becoming “knowledgeable in
Brahman” Ordinary renunciation involved wandering celibate alone, and by
definition, an unprotected woman was unchaste. Thus, Brahmava-dini-s
underwent initiation, and conducted their study, fire rituals, and begging,
but within the confines of the parental home, leaving later interpreters to
debate as to whether they had actually attained complete enlightenment.
The sadyodvadh*s also underwent initiation, but their study lasted only
eight or nine years until their marriage. By c. 300–200 BCE, the initiation
ritual for women came to be only a formality, and girls were immediately
married. For instance, Manu, the prominent codifier of law whose work
has held an enviable position of enormous authority in Hinduism,
recommended that no Vedic mantras be recited on the occasion of girls’
initiations.6 Initiation without Vedic mantras being recited therein or
taught after the ritual was a contradiction in terms, of course, and so more
straightforward authors of dharma texts such as Y&jñavalkya began to
simply prohibit the ceremony altogether for girls. By the first century BCE,
marriage was interpreted to be the equivalent of initiation for women,
serving her husband came to be equated with residing with a teacher, and
household duties were substituted for the service of the sacrificial fire.
Women’s proper religious behavior (stri- dharma) was patiyoga. Patiyoga is
union with, or discipline under, one’s husband or pati, literally “ruler” or
“lord.” It combined sacrifice, asceticism (yoga), and devotion (bhakti), all
under the auspices of stri- dharma, that is, directing all one’s religious actions
to the worship of the husband.
Once women’s marriage became equated with initiation, a widespread
belief developed by the first century BCE that women who were
unlearned, unable to recite so much as the hymns of daily .
prayer—even if
of Bra-hmin birth and marriage—were not unlike Sudras, who were
automatically excluded from Vedic sacrifice. This association may have
been facilitated in part by the rise .of inter-caste marriages between twice-
born (hence “Aryan”) males and Sudra females; once these men married
them, tensions with Bra-hmin priests arose as to whether the non-twice-
born women could cosponsor Vedic sacrifices. Perhaps in part to by-pass
the potential problem of distinguishing between “Aryan” and “non-
Aryan” women, c. 200 BCE the dharma scholar Atiœ &yana declared that
all women were ineligible to participate so that none would be offended.7
His view eventually came to be the dominant one.
However, this negative view of women in Vedic ritual and initiation into
study and renunciation was tempered by the continued appreciation of woman
as wife and mother, and the positive evaluation of female chastity and purity.
Marriage came to be seen as a far more transformative event for women
than men. When women marry, their lineage and bodies are believed literally
to change; they become members of their husband’s lineages.8 While for men

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marriage is important to sire a legitimate son to repay the debt he owes his
ancestors (putradharma, or the dharma of [siring] a son) and to light his own
cremation pyre to save him from hells reserved for the issueless, marriage
does not effect essential changes of his nature.9
The inescapable link of women to marriage and consequently, patiyoga,
led to dramatic consequences regarding Hindu concepts of gender and
soteriology. Women’s lives were henceforth divided into three phases:
maidenhood, marriage, and—should the husband die first—either self-
immolation on the husband’s funeral pyre (becoming a sati-, a “truthful/
virtuous woman”), or widowhood.10 In contrast, the ideal life-cycle of upper-
caste Hindu males had four stages or a-œ ramas: studentship, householdership,
forest dwelling, and renunciation. The only time period when males and
females shared a complementarity was householdership, although women
were to share vicariously the benefits of a husband’s asceticism during the
latter two stages, and more rarely, if allowed by her husband, by ascetic
practice conducted alongside him. Women were taught to prolong and value
householding, whereas men were taught to escape and devalue it. Indeed, a
man’s depreciation of the world was in many ways symbolized by woman:
she embodied sexuality, reproduction, and family, in essence, embodiment
itself, the major obstacle to liberation. Yet even though male celibacy is a
major religious virtue, to become an ascetic without first having experienced
marriage and parenthood is to act contrary to the even more stringent social
and religious norms of putradharma. Thus, men were caught between two
opposing values: marriage was obligatory, but renunciation was a higher
calling.
Almost all Hindu philosophical systems which stressed asceticism and
wisdom viewed women as either ineligible by nature, or incompetent, for the
higher stages of discipline necessary for complete release. Thus, women’s
best option became either heaven, understood at this point as a temporary
reward for good behavior, or a higher rebirth, that is, accompanying her
husband in later births and eventually becoming male herself in a distant
future life when she would finally be capable of pursuing final liberation.
Bhakti, or devotional worship, soon eclipsed Classical Hinduism’s fusion
of Vedic sacrifice, learning, and UpaniUadic renunciation. Bhakti for women
stressed devotion not only to one’s husband, but also to a benevolent, all-
powerful deity. In contrast to the postponed freedom necessitated by a
woman’s gender in Classical Hinduism, bhakti admitted the possibility of
immediate, ultimate deliverance. And unlike the temporary heavens stylized
for good wives in the UpaniUads, the deity’s heaven was not merely a
temporary reward for good conduct, but salvation itself. The prerequisites
necessary for pursuing release in the UpaniUads (lengthy education, male
gender, and twice-born status) were unnecessary in bhakti. In addition, unlike
Vedic sacrifice, women and low-caste persons could offer food, songs, and
prayer in private worship services. Indeed, the most famous female bhaktas

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or exemplary devotees were those who refused to marry, and thus could
focus on their chosen deity without the distraction of husband-worship still
deemed incumbent on the good wife.
Bhakti and patiyoga do not necessarily conflict, however, and they continue
to coexist as the dominant forms of women’s religious experience in Hinduism.
They effectively by-pass exclusivist, male-dominated forms of asceticism even
as they integrate self-abnegation, which is a form of renunciation. Thus, while
women have been devalued and excluded by their nature from certain paths,
alternate, gender-geared forms of Hindu soteriology allow for their release
as women. Further, the majority of people who fall in “lower-caste” group
categories now called Hindu were relatively unaffected by what the scriptures
had to say in the first place. They practiced their own unique forms of religion,
with often widely varying experiences for both genders, many of which held
far less oppressive views of women.
Descriptions of gender reversal in Classical Hinduism almost always depict
change as a progression from inferior female to superior male in later lifetimes
as a reward or outcome of good behavior, or a regression from superior male
to inferior female in later lifetimes as a punishment or result of bad behavior.
In bhakti, gender reversals may actually occur where male devotees adopt
feminine modes of being to become closer to the divine. This type of gender
reversal is predicated on the common belief in Hindu culture that women are
more emotional, and therefore capable of deeper love for the deity. Males
within the Vallabha sect in southern India, for instance, impersonate women
to win the attention of the god Krishna, recalling tales of his affairs with the
milkmaids, and imagining physical union with Krishna in an erotic
symbolization of the union of the soul with its lord.11 Thus, whereas women’s
temperament is a detriment for ascetic paths, it can be an advantage in
devotional ones, so that a female mind is deliberately inculcated—restricted,
of course, to relating with the divine.
In worship of female deities, males may adopt feminine dress and
mannerisms, either in imitation, or in some cases, because of possession by
the goddess. Legend has it that when the famous nineteenth-century Bengali
saint Ramakrishna became a woman in his blissful devotion to the goddess,
he began to menstruate, but such bodily transformation is clearly an exception.
Gender reversals described in bhakti are not in physical or bodily form,
but in the sense of play-acting: men really are not expected to become women.
This type of salvific cross-dressing is in keeping with Hindu notions of li-la¯,
or “divine play.” The term li-la- connotes both amusing diversion or sport,
and drama or game playing. Li-la- refers both to the divine imitating human
form or taking on manifestations unlike their true nature, and humans
imitating divine form. The universe itself is often considered to be divine li-la-
, or the sport of gods and goddesses, simultaneously being and not being
“divine.” Likewise, in their own li-la-s, human actors might imitate the divine,
and by so doing, actually “become” them, even without any specific physical

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transformation. This transformation is regarded as “true” enough such that,

in certain contexts, other devotees worship these players as divine
embodiments. Formal li-la- performances intended for public viewing may
stipulate that only males may act out the parts of the gods and goddesses.
Since there are both male and female deities in India, male human actors
imitating the divine may adopt either gender. However, I have not found
many instances of women becoming male in imitation of male deities; rather,
because of the elevation of women as the more emotional of the two genders,
female bhaktas focus on male divinities through various modes of intense
male-female interaction, whether acting as the mother, lover, servant, and so
on, of the male deity. In the case of goddess worship, women may respond to
her as their mother, or less commonly, act as her vehicle for possession,
becoming themselves “mothers.”12
Hindu Tantric philosophy (originating CE c. fifth century), posits that one
need not escape from the world to be enlightened, nor undergo asceticism
which denies sexuality. Indeed, the very aspects of the phenomenal world
held by mainstream Hindus to be polluting or liminal are valorized as essential
means to attaining enlightenment. Thus, its religious practice utilizes wine,
meat, fish, symbolic hand gestures and figures, and sexual intercourse.13 In
this system, since women’s bodies are not obstacles to enlightenment, changing
sex is not a prominent theme. Hindu Tantra underscores the fact that
perceptions of the world, sexuality, and women’s bodies are consistently linked
in Hindu religious thought.

GENDER AND SALVATION IN BUDDHISM

-
Buddhism originated within the same general cultural milieu as the AraTyakas
(c. 800–600 BCE) and UpaniUads (c. 800–500 BCE), the third and fourth sets
of scriptures which introduced new religious goals and philosophical concepts
in Hindu salvation schemes.
The Buddha (c. ?563–483 BCE) formulated Four Noble Truths which even
today remain the core Buddhist teaching. The first explains that “everything
is dukkha, unsatisfactory or suffering.” Dukkha is the first of three
characterizations of the world, and connotes the misery of human existence:
unfulfilled desire, anxiety, pain, disease, old age, and death. The world and
humans are also transitory; they have no abiding permanence. All things in
the world are composed of a mixture of five components, the combination of
which shift and change from one moment to the next. One’s whole being is
in a state of constant flux, hence there can be no permanent, abiding,
unchanging soul. No permanent entity transmigrates from body to body.
Rather, the Law of Karma (literally, “action”) teaches that each act of thought,
word, or deed causes an accumulation of volitions to further action. These
volitions to further action result in future thoughts, words, and deeds. The
nature of each individual is thus the result of past action by the karmic impulses

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carried by that individual, and what one will become is conditioned by action
undertaken in the present. Rebirth is merely the result of karmic impulses,
not the transmigration of an essential self, as it is perceived in Hinduism. The
second truth explains that the reason why people are unsatisfied with existence
is because they desire a multitude of things, continued life, and a permanent
essence that might remain after death. The third truth affirms that where
there is no desire, there is no suffering. This absence of suffering is nirva-Ta,
the “extinction” of desire. The fourth truth explains the eightfold path to
achieving nirva-Ta which causes the cessation of dukkha.
In Hinduism, the world and material themselves, and attachment to them,
are often symbolized by the feminine and by women; so it is in Buddhism.
Buddhist texts use women as a metaphor for the karmic energy that maintains
suffering in the world because they embody birth, thus representing suffering,
death, and rebirth. Further, women are believed to be more grossly implicated
in the ensnarements of the world than men, and are thus reasoned to have a
more difficult time untangling themselves from it.14
Buddhism is usually split into two major divisions: Theravada (Way of the
Elders) and the later Mahayana (Great Vehicle). Within the Mahayana, a
third branch developed called Vajrayana, a form of Buddhist Tantra
(originating CE c. fifth-sixth century). Like Hindu Tantra, it also posits that
one need not escape from the world to be enlightened nor undergo celibate
asceticism, and its religious practice thus also utilizes wine, meat, fish, symbolic
gestures and figures, and sexual intercourse. Again, as with Hindu Tantra,
since women’s bodies are not obstacles to enlightenment in Buddhist Tantra,
changing sex is not a prominent theme.15 Mahayana adds many other works
to the Theravadin scriptural corpus and departs from earlier doctrine in ways
that have important implications for our topic. I will briefly sketch some
outlines of both divisions here, particularly as facets may pertain to gender.
The Theravada Cnllavagga portrays the Buddha to have reluctantly
established a female monastic community only after being approached several
times by disciples and his widowed aunt. He predicted that as a result of its
creation, the dharma (here understood as Buddhist teachings) would last only
five hundred instead of one thousand years. He also specified that nuns would
be required to observe eight special rules mandating their subordination to
all monks as a precondition for admittance. Thus, while the Buddha’s initiation
of a nuns’ order confirms that women are capable of gaining the insights
required for liberation, he also implicitly expressed or at least recognized
endemic cultural prejudices concerning women’s “materiality,” inferior
spiritual capacities, and their purported negative influence on men in the
spiritual quest.
These views are confirmed in the ancient conviction that women were by
their gender incapable of the full range of enlightenment experiences possible.
There are five states of existence in the world for which a female’s body
renders her unqualified: she is barred from becoming a Buddha, a universal

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monarch (a person ready either to attain supreme temporal authority or

Buddhahood), a Œakra-god (Indra, king of gods), Brahm&-god (creator and
lord of the Brahm& worlds), or a Ma-ra (lord of love and death, who tempts
and destroys).16 Both a Buddha and the universal monarch conform to the
Great Man (Maha-purus.a) physique, among whose thirty-two characteristic
marks is possession of a sheath-covered penis.17
Buddhist soteriological texts thus share certain similarities with Hindu
works on gender. They also presume sex changes across multiple lifetimes,
and male births are generally regarded as superior to female. Further, female
imitation of “male” behavior is in a broad sense presumed to be necessary
for success along the spiritual path, and, like Hinduism, Buddhist female
renunciants are subject to different, stricter rules than males.
The Therigatha, “Songs of the Women Elders,” includes numerous
biographies and poems detailing nuns’ efforts and expressions of attaining
enlightenment. However, only several centuries after Buddha’s death the
.
monastic sangha or community became increasingly less open to both the
laity and female renunciants. The Buddhist conviction that women could not
gain enlightenment grew popular in India at the very time period as similar
beliefs came to be accepted in Classical Hinduism. Though the nuns’ order
was transmitted to many places in South and Southeast Asia, for a variety of
reasons, an order of fully ordained nuns did not survive in the Theravada
countries. Gendered rules of initiation preclude women from being initiated
by monks. Since Theravadins generally believe full monasticism to be necessary
to gain the insight necessary for nirv&Ta, women cannot attain enlightenment
in Theravada traditions while still embodied as women.18
Contemporaneous with and parallel to the rise of bhakti within Classical
Hinduism, a new development emerged within Buddhism that like bhakti
was less hierarchical and more universal in scope than the dominant tradition.
.
Mahayana Buddhism deliberately emphasized the larger sangha, that is, the
community composed of lay people of both sexes in addition to monks and
nuns.
At the time of their split, there were many in both Theravada and Mahayana
Buddhist camps who expressed negative attitudes towards women. However,
“no one who strongly advocated women’s positive qualities seems to have
been in the camp of the more conservative, older forms of Buddhism.”19
In Mahayana, “salvation” was possible even while living within the confines
of ordinary society. The Theravada goal of personal enlightenment (arhat-
ship) required complete renunciation of the world and entrance into the
.
monastic san gha. Mahayana texts substituted the goal of bodhisattva hood
for arhat-ship. A bodhisattva develops both the proper insight into the true
nature of things, as well as a correlative compassion for those still benighted.
Having realized the interconnectedness of all things—and in later Mahayana,
the ultimate emptiness of all phenomena—the bodhisattva thus vows to
continue returning to states of embodiment to facilitate the enlightenment of

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all. Mahayanists thus assert a profoundly positive world view, even while
maintaining its ultimate emptiness. Their claims about the value of the world
are dramatically illustrated in allegorical texts which portray enlightened
females and laypersons teaching hopelessly dull Theravada monks.
Mahayana thus both inherited and amended Theravada teachings on
gender. Popular Buddhism in both divisions, like the popular Hinduisms of
early Vedic ritual and later Bhakti, realizes that because of the difficulty of
attaining enlightenment, most people will remain within the realm of sam sa-ra.
.

It thus incorporates rituals designed to ease and prolong life in the world,
and a model of gradual spiritual progress which restructures bad karma to
.
good, as it were, called the way of merit (punya). References to the misfortunes
of female rebirth abound.20 Since female birth is more painful and less
meritorious than male birth, many rituals are designed to insure that future
births be male, even though Mahayana affirms the possibility of women
attaining enlightenment.
Likewise, in the Pure Land Mahayana tradition’s Land of Bliss
Scripture (Sukha-vati-vyu-ha Su-tra), the problem of female rebirth is solved
by the great Buddha Amitabha by eliminating it entirely. With his great
powers, he established a place for his followers to work on their salvation
called the Western Paradise. This paradise is easily reached through
devotion to him, and since the circumstances of unfortunate births are too
difficult to overcome for most people, Amitabha ensured that his is a land
where no unfortunate births of any kind will occur, including female
births; not even the name of “woman” will be heard there. Pure Land’s
popularity led to the common practice in Japan of giving women
practitioners male names during funeral ceremonies on the assumption
that since there are no females in the next life in the Pure Land, at death
they become male.21 In the less well-known Eastern Paradise of the
Buddha AkUobhya, women are wonderfully beautiful, freed from the curse
of menstruation, and—being a place devoid of sexual desire or jealousy—
become pregnant without sexual intercourse. Thus, the problem of female
rebirth can either be avoided in its entirety, or by removing its biological
or physical constraints and incumbent sexual desires.22
Pure Land Buddhism thus depreciates the female human body to such
an extent that rebirth as a man is expressly promised, or womanhood is
shorn of supposedly negative female traits which cause suffering. Recall
that the Buddha is believed to have predicted that the dharma would
decline after a certain period. Pure Land Buddhism posits that the world
itself is now in that predicted state of decline. All embodied creatures
suffer under this entropy, and women more than men. In this theory of
embodiment, the dharma cannot be fulfilled by people of unfortunate
birth. Thus, the promise of a male-only or male-like paradise appealed to
those who believed that embodiment in this world at this time in the
female gender were three strikes that by definition meant losing one’s

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place at bat. By escape to a pure world, in the future, in a fortunate birth,

salvation could be assured.
The proscriptions of females from the five births whose characteristic marks
included male physiology are continued in some Mahayana texts. While there
are exceptions, most maintain that bodhisattvas in the final rebirths are always
male, for instance, and those Mahayana s*tras or sacred scriptures which do
not hold emptiness as a major teaching, such as the The Lotus of the True
Law Scripture (Saddharmapundari-ka S*tra), do seem to suggest that change
of sex is necessary if a woman is to take the final step to Buddhahood.
Other texts rejected this view of gender and enlightenment. For those
pursuing the way of perfected understanding (prajña-), gender is irrelevant,
because from the point of view of ultimate truth, gender is like all such
distinctions: an empty construct.23 The only position consistent with today’s
standard Mahayana doctrine of the emptiness of all phenomena is that only
the ignorant make distinctions between the religious aspirations and
intellectual and spiritual capacities of men and women.24
In Mahayana texts positing fundamental emptiness, a striking
illustration of this point is the magical and instantaneous “physical” sex
change. These changes almost always involve females becoming males.
Their transformations do not prove that women cannot attain
enlightenment, however, or that bodhisattvas or buddhas cannot be
female; rather, magical sex changes underscore the already realized state of
the woman who changes herself which proves the irrelevance and falsity of
gender distinctions. Females change their bodies only in response to
challenges to their understanding, and transformations are only possible
on the women first reaching the insight that no dharmas (constituents of
reality) whatever are born, that none therefore has a fixed reality or
anything to define, and that since dharmas are as fluid or as deceptive as
illusion (ma-ya-), they are fundamentally impossible to apprehend as
distinct entities. 25 Thus, the women who adopt male bodies are
demonstrably capable of enlightenment while embodied as women, as the
very change is contingent on realization.
Changing the female body is a Buddhist narrative device which directly
confronts earlier views of women’s spiritual limitations. It challenges the
notion that women’s bodies are visible evidence that they have not reached
a high level of spiritual maturity and cannot therefore be candidates for
Buddhahood.
But in a sense, maleness is not merely physical in philosophical Mahayana
Buddhism. Diana Paul has suggested that in many such works, it is not only
one’s female physique that must change, but also one’s “woman’s thoughts,”
that is, her woman’s nature and mental attitude. A “male attitude” means
being unattached to sexuality and responsible for one’s actions, whereas being
a female did not entail such detachment and responsibility.26 In some Indian
Buddhist texts, it is stated that female physiology and its concomitant sexual

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“power” result in a physiological weakness of will, such that to advance on

the spiritual path one must not only seek rebirth in a male body, but a woman
must also renounce and eradicate her sexual power, which ties her to sexual
desire and therefore is seen as inferior and an obstacle. Once this power is
removed, a male rebirth is possible, during which male sexual power can be
destroyed and Buddhahood obtained. In Buddhahood, the male form is
retained: the male body represents perfection of the mind. Transformation of
sex thus represents a transition from the imperfection, impurity, and
immorality of human beings, represented by the female body, to the mental
perfection of bodhisattvas and buddhas, represented by the male body.27 To a
degree, the male is not truly embodied or even gendered; he is unmarked,
beyond gender.
Thus, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, women and femininity symbolize
the world or worldliness, and men and masculinity symbolize the “unmarked”
or transcendence. Further, when one speaks of gender in both traditions, one
must pay attention to more than just physical manifestation, since ways of
thinking, action, and modes of perception have been understood in terms of
gendered categories. Even in Buddhist texts stressing the emptiness of all
things, or Hindu scriptures espousing the illusion or falsity of distinctions,
the mode of ultimate being is still predicated on what the tradition has
identified and valorized as the masculine.
On the whole, when phenomenal reality or the world is devalued, so is
female embodiment. When phenomenal reality is valued or perceived as
useful to religious quest, female embodiment is not an impediment to
salvation. A key determinant in the perception of women’s nature in the
religious quest for both Hindu and Buddhist traditions is thus their
understanding of the phenomenal world. A brief review of some of the
traditions noted here illustrates this point. Popular Hindu devotional
approaches which affirm the ability to be saved by deities during one’s
lifetime on earth have not only denied that being female is an obstacle, but
some assert it may even be an advantage. Bhakti demands attachment and
affection, both of which are identified as feminine—they are “women’s
thoughts,” predispositions, or feelings. Similarly, those Mahayana
philosophies which fused the realms of transmigration and enlightenment,
and which also saw liberation within and through the world despite its
ultimate unreality, deemed that being a woman was not necessarily an
obstacle to enlightenment, and their magical sex changes demonstrate this
insight. In contrast, in popular Buddhist devotional forms such as the Pure
Land, in which detachment is seen as impossible for all while living in the
current world, an alternate, gendered view emerges. Instead, one must
pray to transcendental figures capable of assisting those living in the age of
the decay of the dharma for rebirth in a pure place. In the two Pure Lands,
one offers a direct gender change for females to male bodies, and the other
allows for the transmutation of a woman’s earthly, biological, and

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temperamental constraints due to her gender. Both claim to be better

worlds; the first is an ideal single sex culture of males, and the other boasts
a pseudo-androgyny where women become as men, that is, beautiful, non-
menstruous, non-sexual, and able to create by their own power.
Depending on their point of view of dichotomies, and, in particular, the
phenomenal world, Hindu and Buddhist soteriological stances may allow
for women to gain salvation as women, or they may assert the necessity of
a female becoming male to experience the pinnacle of human destiny.

NOTES
1 W.Norman Brown, “Change of Sex as a Hindu Story Motif,” in Journal of the
American Oriental Society, vol. 47 (1927), p. 6.
2 For a careful study of the negotiated construction of a textualized view of women
based on these ratified scriptures by Orientalists and Nationalists in the nineteenth
century, see Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?
Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past,” in Kumkum Sangari and
Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 27–87. In the same vein,
Sumanta Banerjee traces nineteenth century Bengali urban elites of both genders
whose actions stigmatized and suppressed popular women’s traditions newly
stylized as “lower class.” Their elite artistic productions deliberately adopted
Sanskritized views of women and culture. “Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth
Century Bengal,” in Recasting Women, pp. 127–79.
3 Most of these trends have been well documented. I have drawn particularly on
Katherine K.Young’s “Hinduism”, in Arvind Sharma (ed.), Women in World
Religions, Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, pp. 59–103, and A.S.Altekar’s succinct if
not entirely correct review, The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization: From
Prehistoric Times to the Present Day, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2nd edn, 1959,
pp. 336–61. For ease of reading, I do not use diacritics or underline names of
formal religious movements.
4 Robert P.Goldman, “Foreword,” in Padmanabh S.Jaini, Gender and Salvation,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. xviii.
5 For instance, neophyte male ascetics should avoid contact with women because
they would excite sexual desire and inhibit practice. Upon enlightenment, a male
ascetic would not be affected improperly by women, hence he can interact with
women once again without threat. Making discriminations between sexes is thus
initially heuristic in thought and practice, but if kept, it would become an
impediment to understanding the fundamental identity of all things.
6 Altekar, Position, p. 203.
7 Altekar, Position, pp. 345–6.
8 William Harman, The Sacred Marriage of a Hindu Goddess, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989, p. 122.
9 Harman, Sacred Marriage, p. 127.
10 In recent years several excellent books have been published which explore the
development of the sati- tradition in India. See John S.Hawley (ed.), Sati: The
Blessing and the Curse, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Sakuntala
Narasimhan, Sati: A Study of Widow Burning in India, Delhi: Viking, 1990; and
Arvind Sharma, et al., Sati: Historical and Phenomenological Essays, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1988. See especially the revisionist essays by Lata Mani, for example,

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“Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Sangari and

Vaid (eds), Recasting Women, pp. 88–126.
11 Brown, “Change of Sex,” p. 23.
12 See Kathleen Erndl, for example, Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of
Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993, pp. 114–34. A notable exception to women not adopting male deity’s
dress is some female devotees’ impersonation of Krishna. This is perhaps done
not so much in imitation of Krishna, however, as in imitation of the cowherd
deity’s preeminent bhakta: his lover, Radha. In myth and art, Radha is portrayed
as having exchanged her clothing with Krishna, and “played” with gendered
conventions of dominance and submission in their relationship.
13 A caveat might be introduced here. These five (called the pañcamaka¯ras or “five
m’s” because each word begins with the consonant m) are replaced later by many
adherents with symbolic substitutes, revealing the power of taboo and societal
prohibition. Also, the gendered experience of Hindu Tantric women adherents in
real-life situations may be little different than that experienced by women in other
forms of Hinduism.
14 Lorna Rhodes AmaraSingham, “The Misery of the Embodied: Representations
of Women in Sinhalese Myth,” in Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring (eds),
Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles, New York: Plenum Press, 1978, p. 104.
15 This does not fully acquit Tantra (both Hindu and Buddhist) from the evils of
sexism. I recommend to all those interested in Tantra in general and Vajrayana in
particular Miranda Shaw’s Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric
Buddhism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Rita M.Gross’s study,
Buddhism After Patriarchy, Albany: SUNY Press, 1993 has interesting theological
insights on how Vajrayana practice might be redeemed so that it lives up to its
egalitarian philosophy.
16 Nancy Schuster, “Changing the Female Body: Wise Women and the Bodhisattva
Career in Some Mah&ratnak*tas*tras,” in Journal of the International Association
of Buddhist Studies, vol. 4 (1981), No. 1, p. 27.
17 Schuster, “Changing”, p. 27.
18 Today, some Buddhist women in Asia advocate a revival of the nuns’ sangha in
places no longer retaining a lineage, but this is a controversial and disputed
proposition. See Karma Lekshe Tsomo (ed.), Sakyadhi-ta-: Daughters of the Buddha,
Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publ., 1988, or Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, “The Future of
the Bhikkun( Samgha in Thailand,” in Diana L.Eck and Devaki Jain (eds), Speaking
of Faith: Global Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change, Philadelphia:
New Society Publishers, 1987, pp. 148–58.
19 Gross, After Patriarchy, p. 57.
20 Schuster, “Changing”, p. 44.
21 Gross, After Patriarchy, pp. 65–6.
22 Gross, After Patriarchy, pp. 63–5.
23 Schuster, “Changing”, p. 28.
24 Schuster, “Changing”, p. 25. This more egalitarian position is very prevalent in
Ch’an or Zen works, although in practice, Ch’an/Zen Buddhist nuns were often
still discriminated against. See Kumiko Uchino, “The Status Elevation Process of
Soto Sect Nuns in Modern Japan,” in Eck and Jain (eds), Speaking of Faith, pp.
159–73.
25 Schuster, “Changing,” pp. 50–1.
26 Diana Paul, Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition,
Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979, pp. 186–7.
27 Paul, Women in Buddhism, pp. 171–5.

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 9

GENDER, POWER AND

SPECTACLE IN LATE-
IMPERIAL CHINESE
THEATER
Sophie Volpp

In Chapter 36 of the late sixteenth-century novel The Plum in the Golden

Vase (Jin Ping Mei) the wealthy merchant Ximen Qing hires an acting troupe
to entertain a new first laureate of the civil service examinations.1 Ximen
Qing’s personal servant in the study, Shutong, dresses as a woman and joins
the actors of the troupe. The first laureate, mistaking Shutong for one of the
actors, is much taken with him. He asks for a song from the play The Jade
Bracelet (Yu huan ji).2 Shutong sings the part of the chaste bride.
Shutong poured the wine, and clapping his hands, sang:
From the time I was young to the time that I was ready to marry,
The grace of my mother and father was as profound and vast as
the sky.
I am ashamed that there is nothing that I can do to repay them,
This is something that tugs at my heart,
my husband and I have deeply absorbed by parent’s favor,
And I hope that my husband will be honored and distinguished.
An, the first laureate, was originally from Hangzhou, and his preference
leaned towards the “Southern Mode.”3 When he saw that Shutong sang
well, he took his hand, and the two of them drank one after the other in
turn…. Shutong was wearing a jade-colored jacket over a red skirt, and
a gold band round his waist. Holding the jade cup high, he lifted his
wine and sang again.4
When the chaste bride’s words issue from Shutong’s lips, the incongruities
between Shutong’s assumption of the feminine voice and his male body and
between Shutong’s promiscuity and the bride’s chastity enhance Shutong’s
erotic allure. The lyric aids him in his self-dramatization as erotic spectacle, a
spectacle for which the first laureate is the primary audience. In this
performance, the boundaries between world and stage dissolve as the spectator
becomes implicated in the spectacle.

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That Shutong’s self-dramatization as erotic spectacle has been successful

becomes clear in the words of Ximen Qing’s friend Ying Bojue, who exclaims,
“The sound that issues from his throat is that of a flute. Why talk of those
women of the bawdy houses…we’ve heard all their songs. How could theirs
be as luscious as his!”5 Ying Bojue refers not merely to Shutong’s lusciousness
on-stage, but to his lusciousness off-stage, to his performance not just at the
banquet, but in the bedroom, to the fact that he has a “flute” which plays
different “songs” from those of a woman.6 In Ying Bojue’s words, we hear
an implied competition between the courtesans of the bawdy houses and
male actors, who, like courtesans, were considered sexually available.
One of the primary themes in late-imperial Chinese representations of the
actor is the rivalry between actor and courtesan for the ground of femininity.
Actors as a group were symbolically coded feminine; that feminization was a
part of their professional identity in their off-stage interactions with patrons.
We find anecdotes about male actors named “Elder Aunt” and “Sixth Sister,”
“Small Tenderness,” and “Peach Blossom Rain,” anecdotes about male actors
who were acclaimed at public events as the “wives” of their literati lovers.
The feminization of actors was an artifact not only of cross-dressing in
performance, but of the sexual availability of actors to elite men.
As the appropriation of feminine names, feminine kinship terms, and
allusions commonly used to describe courtesans implies, the discourse on
male actors in late-imperial China is largely shaped by cultural icons of the
feminine, and, in particular, the representation of courtesans. Yet
representations of the male actor also resist the similarities implied by this
appropriation, insisting instead upon the superiority of the male actor.
Consider the following poem written in praise of three actors named Qinxiao,
Yangzhi and Ziyun, who were owned by the literary luminary Mao Xiang
(1611–93).
Qinxiao sings and Yangzhi dances,
Among them, Ziyun is particularly enticing.
There are too many Little Hongs and Little Xues to count,
And Peach Leaf and Peach Root are like muck and excrement.7
Little Hong and Little Xue are common appellations for prostitutes; Peach
Leaf and Peach Root may have been prostitutes of Nanjing, where there was
a Peach Leaf ford, or simply domestic servants. As we can see from this
aggressive differentiation, it is partially the uniqueness of the male actor that
makes him so enticing; the women are common in both senses of the term.
The most extended and complex seventeenth-century argument for the
superior femininity of the cross-dressed actor is to be found in a drama entitled
The Male Queen (Nan wanghou). The Male Queen offers a unique
opportunity to examine how the theater interprets such conventions of
performance as the cross-dressing of male actors, for it is the only premodern
play that takes a male who cross-dresses as a woman as its theme. The only

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surviving northern drama (zaju) written by the theorist of the theater Wang
Jide (d. 1623),8 The Male Queen tells the story of a young boy named Chen
Zigao who seduces the King of Linchuan—the first Emperor of the Chen
dynasty—with his feminine charms. The King, noting that Zigao is more
seductive than any of the women in his harem, has the boy dress as a woman
and crowns him Queen.
The boy’s successful impersonation of a woman gives rise to an unusual
comedy of errors. Soon not only the King, but the King’s sister is after Zigao.
Not knowing that Zigao is a boy, the sister, the Princess Yuhua, declares that
this new Queen “has a seductiveness like nothing I have ever seen. Even I
can’t compare to her. Forget about my brother, a man, falling in love with
her. I am a girl, and I wouldn’t mind swallowing her down like a drink of
cold water.”9 Her maid offers to find her a man, but the princess insists that
no man could compare to Zigao. At this point, the princess’s maid reveals to
her that the object of her affections is, in fact, a boy. Armed with this
knowledge, the princess forces Zigao to marry her secretly. But her maid,
who herself has an interest in Zigao, reveals the marriage to the King. The
King initially decides to behead both Zigao and the princess, but hesitates,
unwilling to sacrifice his unique partner. Finally, he reasons that if he lets the
couple formalize their marriage, both he and his sister can share the boy.10
Not only the plot, but the stage directions inscribe a series of gender
crossings. Either a male or female actor trained to play the female lead could
have acted the part of Chen Zigao in The Male Queen. For an actor to play
the opposite sex in performance was quite ordinary. Most troupes were single-
sex, and performers were trained from an early age to play a certain role
type. Such role types included clowns, gentlemen, and leading ladies. Each
role-type had a certain style of movement, vocal production, makeup and
costume. What is extraordinary in this play is that Wang Jide’s stage directions
request that the actor who is trained to play the principal female role, the
dan, play the role of a male character, Chen Zigao. This creates a nested set
of gender crossings that would immediately force an audience—or reader—
to view the gender of the actor’s body in a different light. If a male actor
played the role of the female lead, the audience would witness a male actor
dressed as the female lead playing the part of a young boy who cross-dresses
as a woman. If we were to imagine a set of Russian dolls, the Queen would
be the outermost doll, the boy the next. Inside the boy we would find the
female lead, and inside the female lead, the male actor. These nested gender
crossings ensure that both genders are immanent in the body of the actor.
These layers of gender crossing create a parallel between the male actor,
who cross-dresses as female lead, and the young boy, who cross-dresses to
become queen. The play exploits this parallel between the cross-dressed actor
and the cross-dressed character in that the erotic relationship between boy
and king becomes a suggestive metaphor for the erotic relations between
actor and patron.11 The play also exploits the confusion between actor and

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character and, masculine and feminine that these layers of gender crossing
create.12
The play opens with the boy’s self-introduction, a playful poem in praise
of himself. The poem becomes an advertisement of the actor’s skill in
approximating the feminine.
Iridescent clouds of hair, black sleeves so graceful that I myself am
surprised,
I fear that you will not be able to tell when you cast your eyes.13
The actor’s opening lines tease the spectator: can the spectator distinguish
life from art? It is only if the spectator cannot that he will find pleasure in the
spectacle. The spectator’s pleasure lies in his being mastered, not in mastering.
The advertisement of the actor’s mastery here is not just an advertisement
of his ability to create the successful illusion of femininity, but of the actor’s
erotic charms. Zigao’s self-introduction continues,
Even though my body is that of a man, my features are like those of a
woman…. If I were a woman, I would certainly make a match with a
king…. I could be such a fox, I could bedazzle my man. Even if he were
a man of iron, I could make half his body go so soft it couldn’t move.
It’s a pity I was made a boy by mistake.14
Even as this speech introduces us to the conceit of the play, the erotic
relationship between the boy and the King, it invites the audience to consider
the actor as an erotic spectacle. Zigao’s fantasy paradoxically suggests that
the arousal of the spectator will paralyze him. Oddly enough, arousal leads
to the spectator’s feminization. To respond to the actor’s eroticism is to become
emasculated, paralyzed, and disempowered.
The boy Zigao is captured by soldiers, who take him to their king. The
King asks, “What kind of abilities have you?” Zigao’s reply advertises his
flexibility, the range of positions he can assume.
My charming figure is used to straddling a horse.
My soft waist knows how to pull a bow of the most flexible wood.
I can with great care hold your precious sword….
When you are bored,
I’ll be the puppet you play with in your spare time.

My King, I don’t dare tell you that I will make you die of pleasure
with this little treasure.15
As Zigao entices the King with this list of erotic positions, the actor advertises
his own body before the audience, putting the audience in the position of the
King. Zigao speaks of himself as a puppet, as an empty shell devoid of agency.
The speech lures the King—and the audience—into believing in the fiction of
the empowerment of the voyeur. And yet this puppet has the capacity to

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make the King die of pleasure. The empowerment of the voyeur is a

pleasurable, but deadly, fiction.
Zigao adopts feminine speech both in response to the King’s interest, and
in an attempt to intensify that interest. But his feminine speech is exaggerated,
theatrical, almost parodic. When the King asks him how old he is, Zigao
rephrases the question using honorifics: “You ask how many fragrant years
has this Blue Jade?”16 This odd violation of usage underscores the transgression
of gender boundaries, but it also reinforces the theatrical quality of the boy’s
positioning of himself as a woman.
Impressed with Zigao’s quick wit, the King asks Zigao to enter his harem,
saying that there are many women in his harem, but none with the charms of
Zigao’s figure. The King then orders the women of the palace to help Zigao
dress as a woman. As the palace women dress him, at first he literally repeats
their words. He mimics their speech and actions. But as his transformation
proceeds, he declares himself independent of the “real women” on stage (who
would likely have been played by men), independent of their tutelage and
even of the rouge and powders which they have applied to his face. He
explains, “You women just streak on a load of rouge in imitation of crabapples/
If you don’t make yourselves up, you’re merely ordinary.”17 Zigao answers
the implicit accusation that he is dressed in imitation of women by claiming
that women are dependent on artifice. Not only are they dependent on artifice,
but their femininity is itself imitative. Thus, he accuses the female sex of the
very weakness that he is liable to.
Once Zigao has become symbolically identified as a woman, he begins
to play games with that identification. He compares himself to such
feminine icons of the cultural past as the archetypal femme fatale, the
Tang consort Yang Guifei. If we are to believe the account of the poet Bai
Juyi, the consort Yang became so powerful that families began to wish for
girls instead of boys in hopes of duplicating her success.18 In Bai Juyi’s
words, daughters became “the lintel of a family’s gate,” creating an
inversion of the normal valuation of the sexes. Zigao promises to position
a male body in Yang Guifei’s place: “Who says that daughters are the
lintel of a family’s gate? I tell you, boys will ride the chariots of the inner
palace!”19 Now that a male body has taken the consort’s position in the
inner palace, families will wish for boys again. Zigao imagines himself to
be, like the consort Yang Guifei, one whose rise to power creates a model
of imitation, and a model of inversion. Oddly enough, according to his
model, the boys of the future will become more valued than girls, but only
because they occupy women’s positions, riding the chariots of the inner
palace. Zigao offers a model of inversion which supplants that of the
consort Yang. He corrects the old model of inversion by adding a second
layer of inversion. In doing so, he claims that it is better for boys to
occupy the feminine position than for the female sex to do so, a variation
on the claim that feminine charms are more charming in a male body.

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Zigao gives another reason as to why a boy actor makes a better consort.
He can fall back on masculinity.
Think of those ladies who trail silk in the pepper
chambers
Stripped of their hairpins, having lost the King’s favor.
They still keep painting themselves like gourds.
But if I were to change my clothes, and switch my tune,
I would be a sturdy warrior in a helmet.20
The palace women paint themselves like gourds when they fall out of favor.
All they can do is intensify their femininity in a vain attempt to attract the
King. Zigao, by contrast, can employ gender strategically, choosing when to
act a woman, and when to act a man. This strategic employment of gender is
phrased in terms of changing clothes and switching tunes, drawing attention
to the parallels between the character and the boy actor. Like the character,
the boy actor can play masculine or feminine roles on-stage and off. It is
through his self-mastery that he masters the king, and the spectator.

Once Zigao’s ambitions to be crowned Queen have been realized, he changes

his tune. “You have taken Song Yu, whom women peeped at over his eastern
wall/ And guessed wrongly that I am the divine woman of Gaotang.”21 The
goddess of Gaotang (the goddess of Chu) is a standard in the inventory of
allusions typically used to describe courtesans and other women defined by
their eroticism. Here Zigao resists an assimilation to that category, claiming
that he is not the goddess, but the author who created the goddess. He is Song
Yu, the author of the “Rhymeprose on Gaotang” and the “Rhymeprose on the
Divine Woman,” texts that launched the goddess in the literary tradition. Zigao
accuses the king of mistaking the creator for his creation. He is not the deity,
but rather the man who enabled others to visualize her. The audience has fallen
for an illusion. Zigao divests the audience of the power to engender him with
their eyes by making it clear that their desire has led them to be mistaken about
his gender. Zigao exposes the rules of the game. Femininity has been created in
order to be dismissed. The femininity of the female sex was always a foil for a
more pressing concern, the femininity of the male actor.
Not only is Zigao not the goddess, he is the Song Yu whom “women peeped
at over his eastern wall.” In Song Yu’s “Rhymeprose on Licentious Master
Deng,” the poet defends himself from the accusation that given his astounding
good looks and persuasive wit, he cannot be trusted around the royal harem.22
He argues that despite the fact that a comely neighbor has often peeped at him
over the eastern wall of his garden, he has remained faithful to his ugly wife.
In other words, Zigao argues that although he is an object of female desire as
well as male desire, he can be trusted around the King’s harem.
Ironically, it is at this point that Zigao succumbs to the desire of the princess,
who robs Zigao of his power of self-improvisation and forces him to accept

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her redefinition of his gender. Zigao defined his gender in large part through
the invocation of models from the cultural past. The princess also uses allusive
reference to the models of the past to question the gender of the cross-dresser
and press for redefinition.
The princess’s desire for the new queen further complicates the question
of the gender and sex of the cross-dresser. Unlike her brother, she falls in love
with Zigao believing he is female. When her maid offers to find her “a husband
like that,” she replies scornfully, “Silly wench, she is a woman! How can a
man compare to her? … She is a goddess with pendants chiming in the
mountains of Chu.”23 Zigao chastised the King for mistaking him for the
goddess of Chu. Now the princess repeats the same mistake. Waking from
her delusion, the spectator rebels, moving to take control of the play of gender
and the play itself.
Unlike the King, once the princess realizes her mistake, she assumes
the right of authorship of Zigao’s gender. Once her maid tells her that
Zigao is a boy, she immediately works to redefine him with an onslaught
of literary allusion.

You are not the female ghost of the Cui family, who gave a golden bowl,
You are not Zheng Yingtao, the demon clothed in red robes.24
You are not Zhu Yingtai, disguising her glamour,25
You shouldn’t copy the man of Lu,26 who locked his vermilion doors.27

The princess shuts down the polymorphous play of crossed genders in which
Zigao had engaged. Becasue she uses a process of negative definition, she
does not define the gender of the cross-dresser concretely. The cross-dressed
boy has been the object of the homoerotic desire of the King, and of the
homoerotic and heteroerotic desire of the princess. Ultimately the intersection
of these different types of desires leaves the gender of the boy indeterminate,
unstable, and mutable, just as the gender of the actor is indeterminate, unstable,
and mutable.
The gender of the actor’s body is created by visual illusion and by speech
acts. As such, it is not a stable entity, but constantly mutates as the actor
works visually and vocally to establish symbolic identification as a woman,
or a man, or as a feminine boy superior to a woman. But the gender of the
actor is created not only by performance, but by the desiring eye of the
spectator. The actor’s gender is thus the result of a process of flirtation and
negotiation between actor and audience.
The Male Queen shows us how the actor deflects the desiring eye of the
spectator, frustrating the spectator’s ability to feel confidence in what he
sees. The actor observes the spectator falling for the illusion and taunts him
about it. The site of the spectator’s misrecognition is the gender of the body
of the actor. It is in these senses that the gender of the actor’s body is a
theatrical construct. The gender of the actor’s body is the product of the

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actor’s performance and the spectator’s reception of it, but it is also a product
of the actor’s recognition and manipulation of the spectator. The actor’s
insistence on the spectator’s misrecognition is one enactment of this resistance
to the identification of male actor with courtesan.
In the closing lyrics of the play, it becomes clear that the character Zigao
views himself as an author as well as character, as the creator of the cultural
icons of the future.
Our karmic affinity should be recorded on red paper by the historian’s
brush.
A new variation will pop out of the history books.
A thousand years from now people will tell this amusing story as they
trim their silver lamps.
Who ever saw the exalted face of the Dowager Empress Bo on the misty
terrace?
Even though one ought to write literature in a spirit of jest,
How could we merely have said whatever came to mind?28
One day Zigao himself will be the stuff of historical allusion, a new variation
in the history books. But Zigao does not merely claim that he will be the
mirror in which later ages will view themselves. He also challenges the
verifiability of the historical models against which he himself will be measured.
“Who ever saw the face of the Dowager Empress Bo?” If no one saw the face
of the Dowager Empress Bo, how do we know that her existence was more
real than that of this character in a play? Zigao moves to supplant the Dowager
Empress by saying, “I’m as real as she was.” These lines contextualize the
present as represented on stage, making it the cultural past. Inside the world
of the play, the cultural icons of the past were surpassed by Zigao, a fictional
character of the present. Outside the world of the play, Zigao will become
the cultural icon of the future.
The basic paradigm in the cross-dressed boy’s relation to the female sex
is an inversion of the normal relation between original and copy. The
simulacrum becomes more highly valued than the original—in fact it
becomes an original. In the closing lyrics of the play, we see the same
paradigm taking shape in the boy’s relation to history. Zigao asks how we
know that the historical Empress Bo actually existed, and whether he, as a
literary character, is not more real than she.

The closing lyrics of The Male Queen feature the actors as authors of their
own literary destinies. We should not forget, however, that the figure of the
male actor—and the femininity of the male actor—are projections of the
fantasies of literati authors. The authors of such texts were themselves
connoisseurs of male actors. The very rivalry that we have noted between
male and female characters for the ground of femininity, then, is a
construction of these authors. The author enables the actor to make a claim

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to a superior femininity by scripting the very words that the actor would
recite as he made that claim. In this sense, a drama such as The Male Queen
is not just a comment upon, but an aid to, the male actor’s self-fashioning
as an icon of femininity.

NOTES
1 The novel is considered one of the “Four Great Masterworks” of the Chinese
narrative tradition. Both the authorship and dating of The Golden Lotus are
unclear, but the research of Patrick Hanan and Wu Han suggests that the novel
was completed sometime between 1582 and 1596.
2 Katherine Carlitz discusses the play’s didacticism in The Rhetoric of Chin P’ing
Mei, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 115–16.
3 “The Southern Mode” (nan feng) refers to homoerotic desire and activity. The
term probably arises from a pun on the two words “Southern” and “male,” both
pronounced nan.
4 Jin Ping Mei cihua, ed. by Dai Hongsheng, Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Col,
1986, p. 454.
5 Jin Ping Mei Cihua, ed. Dai, p. 440.
6 Qu Youzhong, as quoted in A Brief History of Yunlang (Yunlang xiaoshi), ed.
Mao Guangsheng and collected in Historical Materials on the Pear Gardens of
the Capital During the Qing Dynasty (Qingdai yandu liyuan shiliao), ed. Zhang
Zixi (reprint, Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chuban she, 1988), p. 962.
7 Wang Jide is remembered primarily as the author of the foundational treatise in
dramatic scholarship, The Rules of Drama Gulu. (Preface by the author dated
1610, first published after 1623.)
8 Although we do not have a date for the composition of The Male Queen, it was
likely written during the last decade of the sixteenth century or the first decade of
the seventeenth. The play was anthologized in Zaju Drama of the High Ming
(Sheng Ming Zaju), an anthology whose preface dates to 1629, six years after
Wang’s death. There is no record of any other edition. See Shen Tai, ed., Sheng
Ming Zaju, vol. 1, juan 27 (two volumes). The only surviving edition is the
illustrated edition by the Song Fen studio.
Volume one was printed in 1918, volume two in 1925. Reprinted in a facsimile
edition by Zhongguo xiju chuban she, 1958.
9 There are two narrative sources for The Male Queen. The first is a biography of
a historical figure, the Chen dynasty general Han Zigao, which appears both in
the History of the Chen (Chen Shu) and in the History of the Southern Dynasties
(Nan Shi). See Yao Silian, Chen Shu, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1972, 20.269–
275 and Li Yanshuo, Nan Shi, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1972. 68.1664.
10 Wang Jide, Nan Wanghou, 15a.
11 Even if an actor were to play the part of the young boy who cross-dresses, the
interpretation of the play would still need to take this parallel into account.
12 No scholar has found mention of a performance of The Male Queen. We should
keep in mind, however, that the late Ming conceptions of performance, audience
and text were quite different from their modern Western counterparts. The text
was not a “play” in the modern sense of the word in that it would have been
more common for actors to sing excerpted lyrics than to have performed the play
in its entirety. If the play were performed in this manner, the excerpted lyrics
would be nearly indistinguishable formally from individual songs.

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13 Wang, la.
14 Wang, 1b-2a.
15 Wang, 7a.
16 Wang, 15a. The phrase “Blue Jade” refers to a young virgin.
17 Wang, 9a.
18 Bai Zhuyi ji jian jiao, ed. Zhu Jincheng, 6 vols, Shanghai: Guji chuban she, 1988,
2:656–659.
19 Wang, 7a.
20 Wang, 12b.
21 Wang, 11a.
22 Song Yu, “Rhymeprose on Licentious Master Deng,” in Xiao Tong, compiler,
Wen Xuan 19.892–895.
23 Wang, 16a.
24 Zheng Yingtao was the male lover of the Jin dynasty general Shi Jilong, also
known as Shi Hu, who murdered both his wives in succession at Zheng’s bidding.
The History of the Jin (Jin Shu) vol. 168:2761–2778.
25 According to popular legend, Zhu Yingtai was a girl who cross-dressed in order
to pursue an education and fell in love with her schoolmate, Liang Shanbo. For
more information on the permutations of this legend in poetry and drama, see
Tseng Yung-yi, On Popular Literature (Shuo su wenxu), Taipei: Lianjing chuban
she, 1973, pp. 121–29.
26 The man of Lu refers to an anecdote about a man so concerned with propriety
that he refused to allow a female neighbor to take shelter in his home when her
home was destroyed.
27 Wang, 19b.
28 Wang, 29a.

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 10

EROTICISM, SEXUALITY,
AND GENDER REVERSAL
IN HUNGARIAN CULTURE
László Kürti

Traditional East European societies have been described in scholarly literature

as patriarchal, homophobic, and male-biased. Often we have been imagining
men and women of former times as helpless, passive victims of patriarchal
institutions. In this chapter, I want to argue that however patriarchal East
European societies have been, men and women created special occasions to
undermine implicit assumptions about gender systems and to contest the roles
and rules assigned to them by the state, the Church, and masculinized
institutions. I am specifically interested in how these practices—although few
and far between—allow individuals to release pent-up frustrations by enabling
them to act out their desires, or misgivings, in a socially sanctioned arena.
While I am aware that the values and actions described here may be considered
by some to be “idiosyncratic” peasant customs relegated only to annals of
folklore collections, I maintain that these unconventional practices have played
important roles concerning the negotiation of gender identities as well as
codified sexual relations.
In village communities throughout Eastern Europe, traditional roles
assigned to men and women were based on patriarchal rule and legitimized
by Church and upper-class ideology.1 Throughout the second serfdom
(between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries), extraordinary measures were
taken to curtail human rights, sexual practices, and family life. The general
subordination of women (and those classed as “others”) to men was
concomitant with the solidification of a masculine gender model. Michel
Foucault’s observation that the modern state attempts to regulate a specific
sexual discourse is applicable to rural producers and their masculine-centered
manorial and Church-supported states before the twentieth century as well,
where constraints were placed on fecundity and reproductive behavior.2 The
conservative religious practices and behavior within the family and marriage
identified by Jack Goody in Eurasia I see as true also for Hungarian rural
societies which rely on patronyms, patrilineal descent, and patrilocal residence
(to which among others the equally powerful prefix “patri” may be attached).3
Such a patriarchal value system has determined sexuality and eroticism strictly

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from the heterosexual male perspective.4 A well-documented seventeenth-

century source proves this point; Miklós Zrinyi (1620–1664), Hungary’s
warring count, while constantly engaging in military missions against the
Turks, offered a strictly male perspective on gender roles in his work Török
Áfium (Turkish Medicine):

The last thing we have to consider is what type of youth should we

recruit into our military and whom should we reject. Fishermen, fowlers,
bakers and weavers, and those engaged in feminine occupations, should
be, in my mind, kept out of the military. On the contrary, blacksmiths,
wheelwrights, butchers, deer and boarhunters should all be drafted.5

The majority of women, on the contrary, were confined to roles in the

household, child rearing, gardening, and, in the case of the well-to-do,
the arts.6
As these historical examples suggest, military and politics have always
been legitimated as traditionally male domains (though not without the
presence of women); yet this dominant mode of rationalization afforded men
super-ordinate status in general.7 Since Hungarian society was militarized
from at least the fourteenth century well into the eighteenth, it is no coincidence
that such (biased) perspectives determined gender relations. Passed from
generation to generation, patriarchal ideology afforded men a superior status
to be fighters, providers (kenyérkeresók) and “born” leaders. At the same
time, women have been viewed largely in terms of their function in
reproduction, as secondary to males, and even as “irrational” in their actions
and thinking.8
Thus, for centuries, peasant communities have functioned by polarizing
male/female and man/woman (férfi/nõ ) into two politicized clearly marked
roles and identities.9 Anything divergent from this classification has been
considered a negative aberration. Even during the period known as “state
socialism” gender identities were strictly divided along male/female lines,
and homosexuals in Hungary and other East European states were forbidden
to openly declare their orientations.10 Homosexual behavior, for instance,
has been shunned and practised outside the legitimate public domain for
centuries. Homosexual individuals have been ostracized and ridiculed; terms
assigned for them have been buzi or csira (“seed”), meleg (“warm”), selyemfiú
(“silky-boy”) and homokos (a derivative of “homosexual” but which could
also mean “sandy”). Only after 1990, when Hungary elected a new parliament
and a multiparty state was created out of the ashes of the former communist
machinery, were differences in sexual orientation allowed to surface openly;
for instance, the homosexual newspaper Others is a recent addition to the
media revolution in Hungary since 1990. As will be seen in this study, however,
there were some allowances made for “difference” in folklore, mythology,
and ritualized gender roles.

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GENDER TRANSFORMATIONS
In traditional patriarchy, as it has existed in East-Central Europe, there have
been only a few ways to manage a multiplicity of gender identities. It has
been even more difficult to challenge or renegotiate rules which appropriate
status, power, and symbolic benefits to those monitoring and upholding them.11
However, when role-reversals are taken as a way of breaking societal barriers
and codes concerning gender roles and identities, the past experiences and
folklore practices provide a wide array of examples. Therefore, those occasions
which may enable participants to balance or neutralize such built-in
inequalities, or even to contest and redefine them, are charged with powerful
content and symbolism.
The historian Natalie Zemon Davis, in her influential article, “Women on
Top,” informs us that during carnival time men and women are allowed to
reverse their assigned roles and gender identities.12 As we know from Villon
and Boccaccio, there were plenty of occasions in popular culture where even
the lower classes were given carte blanche to parade in the mantle of their
lords for the time being. Carnivals and popular culture, as the works of Mikhail
Bakhtyn and Peter Burke describe so vividly, are, to be sure, times of rollicking
licentiousness involving unbridled challenges to dominant modes of discourse
and symbols.13 These staged events limited in time and space enabled
participants to relieve some of the frustrations associated with their conditions
of servitude.14 Men dressing as women, women as men, old as young, young
as elderly, humans as animals, poor as rich—all these are traditional elements
of carnivals, just as they represent the negation of social and class roles and
the sanctioning of attitudes and norms otherwise strictly forbidden (the
carnivals of Rio de Janeiro and Venice and the Halloween parade in New
York City are well known for these).15 As anthropologist Abner Cohen has
said, “A cultural movement is ipso facto also a political movement. A carnival
may ostensibly appear to be a pure cultural performance, but it is inevitably
political from the start.”16
In East-Central Europe, folk carnivals (farsang in Hungarian, Fasching
in German, saptamina nebulior among the Romanians of Transylvania)
are equally libertine events—that is, sexually explicit and eroticized
differently from the heterosexual male’s perspective—if only on a smaller
scale. Among Hungarians, Romanians, and German Schwabs, the mundus
inversus may be acted out in the “women’s ball” or “women’s carnival”
(asszonyfarsang). This event is truly fascinating for it is organized by and
for women without the presence of men, a fact which could have
prompted the Church to forbid local communal carnivals of this nature. In
fact, hired Gypsy musicians, all of whom are males, are needed but since
they are considered “outsiders” (not “one of us”) their presence is
tolerated but their eyes may be covered; or, in some instances, they are
asked to wear their hats pulled down over their faces. The reason for this

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gender-exclusivity is that on this occasion women dance with each other,

sing bawdy songs, and drink heavily; they may dress as males, perform
male dances, and parody manly sexual prowess. It is even noted by
researchers that if males (some of whom are always said to be “spying” on
their wives or loved ones) are caught, they instantly become the laughing
stock of the gathering: for example, their pants are pulled down, they may
be spanked, and sexually explicit verses may be yelled at them.17
Thus, the “women’s ball”, while allowing the participants to reverse
temporarily patriarchal gender roles, is viewed by men as a small and relatively
minor affair when compared to their own male-centered, erotic, and often
abusive sexism, rampant in peasant communities.18 Most songs, though not
all, reflect a young man’s (or woman’s) preoccupation with obtaining a lover
of the opposite sex; aside from the women’s round dance (karikázó), most
dances are strictly couples dances, with the more energetic, fleshy and
impressive styles reserved for young bachelors (in fact some of these are simply
called “bachelor dances” or “barn dances” legényes, csürdöngölõ ); moreover,
ritual and everyday practices are divided according to strict heterosexual
roles, constantly reminding the participants of their assigned and, at times
burdensome, gender identities. Space does not permit me to enter detailed
discussion of these; let me recall only dress codes, folk art, seating arrangements
at home, school, and church, selection of linguistic codes, words and bodily
gestures, and sexually divided labor in the house and on the fields.19
Similarly satirical—again in a light way—are staged plays and masked
processions during carnival time, known all over East-Central Europe (of
which the charivari or palio are well-known French and Italian counterparts
respectively).
In southern Hungary, the sokác people of Mohács (Croats who settled
since the seventeenth century) celebrate their carnival time through the ritual
known as poklada. Cross-dressing is central to this carnival as young men
disguise themselves as women and speak in high-pitched voices so as to imitate
female style speech.20
Among Hungarians in Moha, a village in south-western Hungary, a
similar ritual is the “chicken-kill” (tyúkverõ or tikverõ ).21 Having close
parallels in Slovak and German cultures, the “chicken-kill” features young
males disguised as women who proceed from house to house in search of
food and good times; their clothes are large skirts, blouses, jackets, with
ample ribbons and scarves; even toupées and facial hair, made of corn silk,
horse-hair, and cloth, are utilized. The aim is to disguise oneself as much as
possible so that the members of the household fail to uncover their real
identities. During such visits these masked “women” are allowed a fairly
great degree of debauchery in which male members of the household are
especially targeted; but females are also caught up in the event, and a couple
of dancing “women” and men may be laughed at for their mild implication
of homosexuality.22 Women too were allowed to dress as males at masked

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visitations at traditional pig-kills; the visible signs of their “masculinity”

included a carrot or a cow-horn as an obvious penis-substitute.23 Women
dressed as “men” dance with women in a “heterosexual” context with an
equal dosage of mild homosexual implications. In these rituals, women may
take a humorous retaliation on men, express their pains and hardships and,
in turn, brag about their power and wisdom in outwitting men.
Actually, the insinuation of such homosexual behavior appears only in
rare instances in Hungarian folklore where such allusions are interpreted as
negative and threatening by males. To illustrate I will cite two cases rarely
interpreted by native scholars as possible confrontations with the over-arching
heterosexual male world view. The first concerns homosexual insults that
young males shout at one another during wedding rituals. I observed this
practice in Hungarian communities in the Kalotaszeg region of Romania.
When the groom’s party arrives at the gate of the bride’s family’s house, a
shouting match takes place between the defenders of the bride and the
attackers. At this mock battle, as ritual leaders negotiate the terms of entrance,
the rest of the party engage in verbal (less often mild physical) duels in which
demeaning words are exchanged. The pornographic and sexual overtones
are obvious from one such shout (csujogatás):

Let us come inside

And we’ll take you from behind.
(Eresszenek be bennünket,
Hagy basszuk meg a seggüket.)24

The other instance is more subtle and less available for interpretation. During
the early 1930s, the ethnographer Sándor Gönyey reported an interesting
shepherds’ dance from the Kiskunság region of central Hungary.25 What
distinguishes this particular dance form from other, more “traditional,”
shepherd dances is the close proximity of the dancers to each other, a style
which may be interpreted either as threatening, or, which is the case here, as
“sexual.” Here two men engage in a solo performance facing each other and
advancing and cajoling each other. At one point one man holds the other’s
arm and turns him, a movement quite common in male/female couples dances.
However men touching each other in strictly male dances as such is quite
rare, if not non-existent in Hungarian folk dances. In this version, the turning
of one male dancer by the other reverses not only the standardized heterosexual
dance code of ethic (males dance with females) but challenges taken-for-
granted conceptions about roles taken by men. In couples’ dances the male
takes the lead, and by being the “active” partner, turns the female who, being
the “passive”, follows her partner’s instructions and bodily commands.26
What makes the Kiskunság film rather unique is that here the two men
execute the “active” and “passive” roles; the one who does the lead (the
turner) is active, while his “partner” (the turned) is relegated to a more passive

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role. Traditional folkloric (heterosexual) interpretations concerning this

“aberration” may claim that the men simply imitate the movements common
in male/female couples’ dances with similar music and footwork. Moreover
this theory might suggest that, since the Kiskunság region was the center of
animal husbandry, and because the dancers are herdsmen, the exclusion of
women from the herding community living with the herd at the summer
pasture is quite normal. Such closeness, thus, between two shepherds is not
to be confused with gender reversals, or homosexuality, but is simply an
expression of basic cameraderie.
To these, I might add, however, that the “imitation” of male/female couple
dance theory suffers from an implied classism if not outright ethnocentrism
on the part of native ethnographers. For it claims that the dancing men are
just role-playing in a less serious performance and, moreover, that the dancers
are simplistic in their attitude concerning this “fake” dance. As to the second
part of the argument about the herding community’s exclusion of women,
and the way in which this reinforces a non-sexual, innocent and childish
male bonding, it must be stated that because of the lack of women in the
herding camp—although wives, lovers, and female prostitutes visited them
at regular intervals—and because of the close working relationship between
men of various ages, emotional bonding is even more likely to develop among
them. Let us remember that the youngest herding-boy (known as kisbojtár)
had to perform tasks which were strictly “feminine” (cooking, cleaning, and
upkeep of the huts) to balance the over-masculinized profession of herding.27
I do not mean to suggest that these rare instances imply that there is a
homosexual genre in Hungarian folklore, or that there might be a connection
between latent homosexual desire in these utterances and a technique du
corps of Hungarian males.28 Instead, I will argue that these expressions are
significant, if numerically infrequent, elements for balancing the extremist
heterosexual male point of view. Moreover, in a curious way, such
“femininized” verbal and body discourse may serve to reinforce the extreme
chauvinistic heterosexual code of ethic. That this code exists is itself enough
proof that traditional gender roles and identities are limited, if not overtly
confined, and that in order to reinforce it, some “safety valves” are necessary.
Overt and implied eroticism from the male point of view is present
everywhere: in joking relations, where double play on words occurs; and in
wood carving, embroidery, songs, and dances where sexual symbolism
abounds.29 In places such as Kalotaszeg in Transylvania, even the Hungarian
wedding cake (perec) of the best men is baked as a round cake, symbolic of
the vagina, pierced by the arm of the men who are assigned to carry it.
As we have seen above, wedding calls (csujogatás, rikótozás, hujjintás),
while they may be filled with magical incantations, are notorious mostly
for their explicit pornographic content. This is especially true in the case of
those which are shouted by young males at the bride’s house the night
before the wedding day.

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Women, whether willing or not, are constantly tested as to their faith in

this legitimated system of heterosexuality.30 Even mothers, most of whom
have experienced such ordeals themselves, encourage their daughters to
live up to the expected level of sexual prowess and beauty. Dress codes are
designed to mold young females into objects of heterosexual (male) gaze
and desire. During my recent fieldwork among Hungarians in Kalotaszeg,
Transylvania, one young bride constantly complained to me as well as to
her mother about the wedding dress she had to endure during the day of
her wedding (supposedly the “happiest day of her life”). Expressions such
as “my shoes are too small,” the vest and the waist-band of the petticoat
“are too tight,” the headdress too heavy, the boots are “too small,” are
constant utterances of submission and suffering. Needless to say, after young
women become mothers—changing their attire to more comfortable pieces
of clothes—they in turn purchase similarly uncomfortable clothes for their
daughters. By so doing, they continue the same male-centered ideology of
fashion, modernity, and aesthetics (divatosság).31

RITUALISTIC GENDER REVERSAL

While folklore and peasant customs tell a one-sided story of heterosexual
world view, I maintain that there are enough challenges to allow a more
balanced construction of gender relations and crossings of such
standardized sexual boundaries. As we have witnessed above, dances and
dance calls may, in fact, suggest a mild threat to such confines. However,
the practice of naming, for example, is also imbued with an equal dose of
semiotic double entendre. In Hungary, given names and family names are
strictly separated according to male and female names. In a few instances,
however, there may be an inversion: such as the coupling of “László”
(strictly male first-name) with “Magda” (strictly female first-name) as
“László Magda;” or, similarly, “Mihály Annus.”32 One general theory
holds that forced army service under the Habsburg empire’s strict military
laws, predominant since the end of the seventeenth century, resulted in
Hungarian peasants christening their sons with female names so as to
enable them to avoid the fifteen years or lifelong draft. However, I tend to
be more skeptical about such a utilitarian explanation and would favor a
more inclusive understanding for such folkloric practices. A name with a
dualistic (both male and female) meaning could represent the archaic
practice of naming ritual specialists who are entrusted by the community
with special duties, powers, and roles.
Such individuals with magical powers are: the witch (boszorkány) and the
shaman (táltos). Both of these characters, heroes/heroines of endless legends,
folktales and black magic (babona), are ambiguous as to their gender. The
Ukrainian Baha Yaga, the Bulgarian mora, and the Romanian iele are all
decidedly females.33

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Although in most cases witches are female, represented generally as old

hags, there are plenty of male witches (or warlocks). At least in one instance,
an eighteenth-century trial for witchcraft mentions one female witch who is
accused of being dressed in man’s clothes. The Hungarian shaman (táltos)
may also be good or bad, but mostly they were males, often engaging in
deadly fights with female witches. Interestingly, while in Hungarian folk belief
one could change one’s gender by passing under the rainbow—an equally
impossible act in the eyes of the peasants—and while witches and shamans
are able to change their human form into animal forms, none of these wielders
of magical powers are able to change their gendered boundaries without
great difficulties. Such supernatural specialists, however, as evidenced in witch
trials, are mentioned with ambiguous names. One was Dániel Rózsa: where
the latter part, “Rose,” is reserved strictly for women. Another was titled
Erzsébet Balási, the latter being a man’s name, perhaps suggesting her sacred
and ritual status.34 There are other examples, such as the shepherd János
Virág (“John Flower”), mentioned by the ethnographer László Timaffy, whose
shamanistic personage reveals the combined man/woman social persona.35
The name “Canvas Paul” (Vászon Pál), while it may elicit smiles from
contemporary observers, is also a curious one, for men with “feminine
characteristics,” lack of facial hair, were referred to by this name. An obvious
reversal of the “bearded women” stories—a theme dating back to Pliny the
Elder describing the story of the popular androgynous St. Uncumber who
grew her beard in order to avoid an unwanted marriage foisted upon her by
her family—this institutional characterization afforded such individuals special
status and ritual powers.36 That this may be another reference to Hungarian
shamanism is further supported by the following saying: “He hides himself
as Canvas Paul” (elrejtette magát, mint Vászon Pál). The verb elrejtette refers
literally to “hiding,” which was a term used to describe the sleep-like trance
of Hungarian shamans.
Another shaman, Demeter Farkas (the last name means “wolf”), is
mentioned in the trials at Tiszafüred in 1748, being advised by a seer to dress
in woman’s clothes for thirty-three days, if s/he wanted to be successful in
finding hidden treasures.37 Such a strong perseverance of gendered shamanistic
behavior, however, is not unique to Hungary and, interestingly, the ambiguous
shamanic persona is present elsewhere.
Several researchers have mentioned that shamans are sometimes
recognized because they exhibit “feminine” characteristics (no facial hair,
wear ragged clothes, drink milk, weak physical state, and so on). 38
Moreover, Hungarian shamans do not live in a marital relationship and do
not live according to prescribed heterosexual regulations; they are, thus,
described in the literature as lonesome wanderers or solitary individuals
living on the margins of society. Their seemingly characteristic bodily
weakness, or “sickness” as it is referred to, may, of course, be a part of their
defense mechanism: who could hurt such a weak, fragile creature? However,

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what is extraordinary about these shamans is that despite all these

“feminine” (or let us call them non-traditionally-masculine) characteristics,
they may at will transform themselves into powerful male animals; more
often than not, into stallions, bulls, or wolves. This makes the shaman
superhuman, an individual of neither male, nor female gender who, by
uniting the best characteristics of both in order to create something new,
evolves into something more than either of those single-gendered selves.
Shamans are not alone in their superhuman capabilities, for female
witches as a rule may also transform themselves into animals: into cats,
dogs, frogs, horses, donkeys, and occasionally even roosters (obvious
symbol of masculinity).39 More often than not, their animal forms do not
carry any gender-specific meaning. This way, however, they are able to
step out of their previously defined (human and female) gender roles,
leave behind all of their negative connotations, and become a neutral third,
a ritual being, a non-gendered creature. (In a way, this is what happens in
Greece with elderly women and widows, whose life-long second-class
status is well documented by antropologists of Greece, and whose status
is respect because of their magical qualities and supra-human knowledge
in affairs of the beyond and hereafter.)
That witches and shamans, and other religious specialists and artists, could
cross traditionally dichotomized gender boundaries may be illustrated by the
examples of the North American Indian Zuni berdache, the xanith of Oman,
the mahi of Tahiti, and the man/woman of Hindu mythology known presently
in India as hijra.40 These third-gender, androgynous categories may explain
the existence of such ambiguities and diversity concerning alternative,
transgendered roles, distinct from esither male or female in Eurasian folklore
and mythology as well.41
Not only ritual specialists but heroes of ballads and legends could also be
assigned ambigous gender identities. Such heroes are generally accepted by
the community because of their redeeming characteristics and features eliciting
a positive role-model. However, this may even be the case with regard to
heroes whose negative stereotypes and gender codes are pushing the limits of
traditional roles.
For example, in two Hungarian folk ballads, “Joe the Hunter” (“Jáger
Jóska”) and “The Daughter of Bankó” (“Bankó Lánya”), we may witness
interesting instances for gender inversions. These ballads belong to a larger
category of world-wide ballads known as “changing of genders” (in Hungarian
the nemek cseréje).42 In the first case, the outlaw Joe the Hunter—of which
Slovak and Polish parallels are found in the folk hero Janosik ballad cycle-
surprises his victims dressed in woman’s clothes.43 This ballad, paralleling
many early medieval European transvestite popular stories (often referred to
as “quarrel over trousers,” “the pregnant man,” etc.), is constructed by folk
wisdom so that the popular hero may outsmart the rich; and, in turn, it
allows the poor to laugh and, at the same time, relax their strict codes and

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morals. In the other ballad the daughter takes up the task of defending the
family’s honor in fighting against the intruders. Since there is no male
descendant in the family, the daughter is encouraged to dress up as a warrior
in order to fight against the marauding enemies (Turks in this instance). This
type of ballad, known as the “woman warrior,” with its feudal courtly gesture
and warrior code of ethics, has many more variants in Western as well as
Eastern Europe.44 The similar theme appears in Balkan military history,
especially in Serbian and Croatian folklore, where the heroic sister decides to
enlist into the army to defend the honor of the brother killed by the enemy.
Such courageous, and (un)timely, emancipated “amazon” women are less
common in Hungary and those few (like Ilona Zrinyi or the women of Eger
both fighting against Turkish invaders) are mythologized in nationalist
historiography.
In more contemporary versions, the outlaws Pista Mari (another name
with dual gender!) and Jóska Gesztény both commit their crimes in women’s
clothes. In the case of the former we are only told that the outlaw had a
special dress made of “green silk;” while the latter is dressed in “crinolin,” a
special hoop skirt of the time.45 In another version, the outlaw Jóska Gesztyén,
dressed in female clothing, walks into a store and selects expensive “silk”
material; the ballad ends with the outlaw leaving without paying. In order to
make this a feasible story the singer commented on the beautiful “girl-like
facial feature” of the hero.46
It is worth mentioning that such gender inversions are quite common in
earlier (medieval) folk ballads as well as in the “Arabian Nights,” Balkan
fairy tales and Caucasian heroic legends. 47 Such ballads, despite the
homophobic and heterosexual aversion concerning gender difference, exhibit
the practice of cross-dressing as a positive step for reasons that are obviously
morally justified: in the case of the “primitive rebels” the folk hero fights
against the rich; and in the case of the “male-daughters,” the family’s honor
and status is restored through the sacrifice of the “daughter-as-son.”

CONCLUSION
I claimed in the beginning of this chapter that if we want to understand the
relationship between “sexuality” and “society” we must find those mediating
cultural elements and forms which enforce traditional behaviors by providing
approved channels for temporary deviance from “normal” codes of behavior.
I have, therefore, focused on practices which, however subtle and informalized
they may be, involve actors whose presence and identities must be challenged
and constantly renegotiated in the presence of others. In the heterosexual,
male-dominated society, such as the Hungarian rural community, male and
female, man and woman, masculine and feminine, are selves which are
understood as “constants” and which, from time to time, undergo questioning
and reinterpretations. This may be achieved by specific actions which either

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reinforce or deconstruct taken-for-granted ideas concerning gendered

identities.48
Such transformations and gender reversals were sanctioned both by mores
and by Church ideology, allowing the stage to serve as an open arena of
playful gender inversion to challenge and renegotiate strict gender rules and
roles. However, as Baudrillard argues, such cultural transvestism may be a
product of political transformations as, for example, in Western culture where
“the orgy” period of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when gender roles
were redefined, followed the McCarthy craze of the 1950s.49
What these examples reveal is how gender is constructed differently from
culture to culture and how assumed gender identities may be a problematical
experience for researchers and members of the community studied alike.50
Whether contemporary or historic, urban or rural, the above examples suggest
that one function of these gender plays is to allow the redefinition of gender-
specific borders and actions, to (re)attach multiple meanings to sexual roles,
and then to select and reuse them accordingly. Crossing “traditional” barriers,
then, becomes essential in this process of challenge, for it shows categories to
be limited, rigid, and impossible. Specialists, whether imagined or real, are
asked to serve as mediators (interlocutors) to carry out these tasks and, in
turn, their identities may be redefined as genderless or may be imbued with
distinctive gendered meanings, often referred to as the “third sex.”51
This is one of the fundamental reasons, I believe, why such folklore events
as the “women’s ball,” ballads with cross-dressing theme, folklore genres
with explicit as well as implied non-heterosexual identities, and magical
practitioners who renounce their ascribed gender identities are allowed to
exist, and may be looked upon with a certain trepidation and, therefore,
respect by members of the community. For they reveal the possibility of
diversion from the accepted and the expected by mirroring the limitation of
norms and values based on singularity and dominance. To them, and to those
of the believers—for it must be emphasized that belief in this is a sine qua
non of such gender inversion—transgressing barriers and the all-too-often
replayed scenarios illuminate tendencies in everyday thinking and actions, a
practice necessary to renegotiate identities and boundaries in general. Such
challenges to dominance and control also point to a fundamental flaw in
human thinking and existence: that difference is dangerous, unacceptable
and pernicious to the continuation of society; at the same time, it reassuringly
discovers that such procedure (both transgressing the boundaries and creating
difference) is essential, welcoming, and functional. It is also very human.

NOTES
1 For data on Hungarian women in traditional peasant society see: Judit Morvay,
Asszonyok a nagycsaládban (Women in the Extended Family), Budapest: Szikra,
1956; and Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, Proper Peasants, Chicago: Aldine, 1968.

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Perhaps the best data may be elicited from published women’s autobiographies,
of which a few deserve to be mentioned here: Vankóné Juli Dudás, Falum
Galgamácsa (My Village Galgamácsa), Budapest, 1988; Klára Gyõ ri, Kiszáradt
az én örömem zöld fája (The Tree of my Happiness has Dried Out), Bucharest:
Kriterion, 1975; and Berényi Andrásné, Nagy Rozália a nevem (My Name is
Rozália Nagy), Budapest: Gondolat, 1975.
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, pp.
33–4. The anthropologist Henrietta L.Moore, in her Feminism and Anthropology,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, argues similarly, p. 129.
3 Jack Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage
and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, pp. 465–6.
4 Tibor Szenti, “Genitalitás,” in László Novák (ed.), Hiedelem, Szokások az
Alföldön, Nagykorös: Arany János Muzeum, 1992, pp. 573–92; and “Kurválkodás
a Dél-Alföldön levéltári büntetõ perek alapján, 1723–1843” (“Prostitution on
the Southern Plains in court documents”), in ibid., pp. 247–66.
5 Such a dichotomization of professions into masculine and feminine styles is, of
course, understandable from Zrinyi, a general himself, accupied with setting up a
national army against the marauding Turks; see Miklós Zrinyi, “Török Áfium,”
in Márton Tarnóc (ed.), Magyar Gondolkodók 17. század, Budapest: Szépirodalmi,
n.d., p. 258.
6 See, for example, the testimonies of upper-class women in the collection of life-
histories by Sándor Takáts, Magyar nagyasszonyok (Hungarian Noble Women),
Budapest: Genius, n.d.
7 Male midwifery, contradictory as it may seem at first, was an accepted village
profession. In village communities local “male doctors” performing necessary
tasks on males—mainly connected to genital deformations and venereal diseases—
were referred to as “kanbdba” (literally “male-midwife;” although in Hungarian
kan also refers to male animals). See Sándor Szücs, “Javasok a Nagysárréten,” in
Ethnographia, vol. 52, No. 2 (1941), p. 266.
8 Even a university-educated colleague of mine argued recently that the reason why
so many women drive trams and not buses in Budapest is because they are too
emotional and irrational for bus traffic. For more on gender stereotypes and
imbalances in contemporary Hungarian society, see: Judit H.Sas, Nõ ies nõ k és
férfias férfiak (Feminine women and masculine men), Budapest: Akadémiai Kiado,
1984; and Liviá Mohás, Férfiak mellett magányosan (Lonely with men), Budapest:
Minerva, 1990.
9 For materials from the Balkans see Andrei Simic, “Machismo and
Cryptomatriarchy: Power, Affect and Authority in the Contemporary Yugoslav
Family,” Ethos, vol. 11, Nos. 1–2, Winter (1983): pp. 66–86.
10 For Hungarian state socialist gender relations, see: Eva Huseby-Darvas,
“Introduction,” in East European Quarterly vol. 23, No. 4, Fall, (1990): pp. 385–8;
Susan Gal, “Peasant men can’t get wives: Language change and sex roles in a bilingual
community,” in Language and Society, vol. 7, No. 2, Spring, (1978): pp. 1–16; László
Kürti, “Red Csepel: Working youth in a socialist firm,” in East European Quarterly,
vol. 23, No. 4, Fall (1990): pp. 445–68; and “The wingless Eros of socialism:
Nationalism and sexuality in Hungary,” in H.G.DeSoto and D.G. Anderson (eds),
The Curtain Rises: Rethinking Culture, Ideology, and the State in Eastern Europe,
Atlantic Highlands: The Humanities Press, 1993, pp. 266–88.
11 Most of the Hungarian literature on eroticism and sexuality is from the
heterosexual male perspective; see for example the articles in Mihály Hoppál and
Erika Szepesi (eds), Erosz a folklórban (Eros in Folklore), Budapest: Gondolat,

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1987. Quite different is the study written by Mária Vajda, Hol a világ közepe:
Parasztvallomások a szerelemrõ l (Where is the center of the world; Peasant
testimonies about love) (Kecskemét: Forrás Könyvek, 1988).
12 See Barbara Babcock, A. (ed.), The Reversable World. Symbolic Inversion in Art
and Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
13 For a general view of the carnivalesque milieu in popular culture, see Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Eng. trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1968; and Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London:
Temple Smith, 1979.
14 For Hungarian popular tales describing such activities, see Olga Nagy,
Parasztdekameron, Budapest: Magvetõ , 1977. An early sixteenth-century story,
Calandra, written by Cardinal Bibbiena, depicts the adventures of identical twins,
a boy and a girl, who mock the world in their transsexual frollicking.
15 See, for example, the recent anthropological treatment by Vern L.Bullough and
Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1993; and the descriptions of Hungarian carnivalesqne peasant
traditions with men cross-dressing as women in Endre Makkai and Ödön Nagy
(eds), Adatok téli néphagyományok ismeretéhez (Data to Hungarian winter-
customs), Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Néprajzi Intézete, 1993.
16 Abner Cohen, Masquerade Politics: Explorations in the Structure of Urban
Cultural Movements, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 154.
17 For a description, see Katalin Jávor, “Asszonyfarsang Mátraalmáson” (“Women’s
ball in Mátraalmás”), in Népi Kultura—Népi társadalom (Budapest) II-III: pp.
266–94; László Barabás, “Farsangtemetés a Sóvidéken,” in Kriza János Néprajzi
Társaság Évkönyve 1, Kolozsvár: Kriza János Társaság, 1990, pp. 104–5; and
Zoltán Ujváry, “Asszonyfarsang,” (“Women’s ball”), in Farsangi Népszokások
(Carnival Customs), Debrecen: Alföldi Nyomda, 1991, pp. 227–31.
18 See the testimonies of women despising men for their abusive and careless sexuality
in Vajda, Hol a világ, especially pp. 90–1
19 See, for example, Károly Kós, “Szerelem és halál a Szilágysági népmuveszetben,”
(“Love and death in the folk art of the Szilágyság Region of Transylvania”), in
Népélet és Néphagyomány, Bucharest: Kriterion, pp. 210–25; and László Novák,
“Egy mángorló néprajzi és szemiotikai vizsgálata” (“Semiotic and ethnographic
analysis of an implement,” in Muvészet, vol. 1(1976), pp. 39–42.
20 For a description of this ritual in German, see J.Ernyey, “Buso-Aufzüge und andere
Faschingspiele,” in Anzeiger der Ethnographischen Abteilung des Ungarischen
Nationalmuseums VI (1914), pp. 137–67; and in Hungarian, J.Csalog, Busójárás
(poklada) a mohácsi sokácok tavasz-ünnepe, Pécs: A Dunántúli Tudományos
Intézet Kiadványai, n.d. These elements are also present in carnevalesque events
in Germany, Switzerland and Romania; see, László Földes, “A Néprajzi Múzeum
busómaszkjai,” (“Masks in the Ethnographic Museum of the Sokác People”), in
Néprajzi Értesitõ (Budapest), vol. 60, No.2 (1958), p. 221.
21 László Lukács, “Farsangi alakoskodó népszokások Fejér megyében” (“Masked
customs during carnival in Fejér county”), in László Novák (ed.), Hiedelmek,
Szokások a Nagyalföldön (Nagykörös, 1992), pp. 481–98.
22 Interesting is the fact that squatting women (urination) are a sign of “obvious
feminine” behavior on the part of men; see Lukács, Farsangi, vol. III, p. 60.
23 See Ibolya T.Bereczki, “Disznótori alakoskodás Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok megyében”
(“Masked mummery during pig-kills in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county”), in
L.Novák (ed.), Hiedelmek, Szokások az Alföldön (Nagykörös, 1992), p. 449.

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24 This call is an obvious reference to anal intercourse which was referred to

euphemistically as “törökös élés” (Turkish habit) in Hungary in the eighteenth
century; see Szenti, Kurádlkodás, p. 250.
25 Sándor Gönyey, “Kun táncok” (Dances of the Kun Region), in Ethnographia,
vol. 47, Nos. 1–2(1936), pp. 214–18.
26 On sexual allusion in turning and rotating partners, see B.Bernáth, A szerelem
titkos kertjében, Budapest: Gondolat, 1986, p. 28.
27 My data for Hungarian pastoralism in the Kiskunság region of the Hungarian
Plains are culled from László Czirok Nagy, Pászorélet a Kiskunságon (Herding
life in the Kiskunság Region), Budapest: Gondolat, 1959; and István Tálasi,
Kiskunság, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1977.
28 The classic concept of “les techniques du corps” belongs, of course, to Marcel
Mauss; see his “The techniques of the body,” in Economy and Society, Vol. 2,
No. 1, Spring (1973), pp. 70–88.
29 See, for example, Mihály Hoppál, Tutipán és sziv—Szerelmi jelképek a magyar
népmuvészetben (The Tulip and the Heart—Love Symbols in Hungarian Folk
Art), Debrecen: Csokonai, 1990.
30 There is a specific song style, however, in which young women are allowed to
joke and tease men (legénycsúfolók), a genre having parallels in similar songs of
males; see Zsuzsanna Tátrai, Leányélet (Girls’ Lives), Budapest: Crea-Print, 1994,
pp. 184–93.
31 Other ethnographic accounts for the eccentric way of dressing village maidens in
the Kalotaszeg region of Transylvania also confirm my observations; see J.Faragó,
J.Nagy, and J.Szentimrei, Kalotaszegi népmûvészet (Kalotaszeg Folk Art), Bukarest:
Kriterion, 1978; Samu Vasas, Virágzó Népmûvészet (Blossoming Folk Art),
Bánffyhunyad: Kalotaszeg Kft, 1993, and A Kalotaszegi gyermek (The Child in
Kalotaszeg), Bánffyhunyad: Kráter-Colirom, 1993.
32 While I admit, however, that such names are quite rare in Hungarian culture, I
was surprised to find many such names in the English language. Examples abound
from Tracy, Ellen (Allen), to Chris, and Pat. I find it interesting as well that, while
ancient Greek names are strictly divided accoring to male and female, Greek names
since the Christian period have both male and female versions.
33 For recent analysis of Hungarian and other East European witch and shaman
beliefs, see Gábor Klaniczay, A civilizáció peremén (On the Margins of Civilization),
Budapest:Magvetõ , 1990; and Éva Pócs, Tündérek, démonok, boszorkányok
(Fairies, Demons, Witches), Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1989.
34 See Mihály Hoppál, “Traces of Shamanism in Hungarian Folk Beliefs,” in A.-L.
Siikala and M.Hoppál (eds), Studies on Shamanism, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó,
1992, p. 164.
35 László Timaffy, “A honfoglaló magyarság hitvilágának maradványai a
Kisalföldön” (“Remnants of archaic mythology of the Hungarians from the period
of the Conquest in the region of the Kisalföld”), in Arrabona (Gyõ r), vol. 6 (1974):
pp. 309–32.
36 Bernáth, A szerelem titkos nyelvén, p. 33. That “Canvas Paul” was a historic
figure and not simply a figment of the imagination is proven by Zoltán Trócsányi,
Régi világ, furcsa világ (Old world, Strange world), Budapest: Bibliotheca, 1958,
pp. 448–9.
37 Anikó Füvessy, “Tiszafüred környéki kincskeresõ történetek” (“Treasure finding
stories from Tiszafüred”), in L.Novák (ed.), Hiedelmek, Szokások az Alföldön
(Nagykörös, 1992), p. 310. Finding hidden treasures underground was a special
trade-mark of Hungarian shamans. I have described the nature of shamanism
and the heritage of Hungarian shamanism elsewhere in more detail; see “Language,

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 LÁSZLÓ KÜRTI

Symbol and Dance: An Analysis of Historicity in Movement and Meaning,” in

Shaman: An International Journal of Shamanistic Research, vol. 2, No. 1 (1994):
pp. 3–60.
38 Sverov reports ethnohistorical cases of Koryak, Chukchi and Asiatic Eskimo
transvestism where both men and women cross-dress, changing their hair-style
and manners: “In such cases, men spoke the female dialect and woman the male
dialect… A transformed woman did not participate in male activities, but a ‘soft,’
womanlike man did woman’s work;” See. S. la. Sverov, “Guardians and Spirit-
Masters of Siberia,” in W.W.Fitzhugh and A.Crowell (eds), Crossroads of
Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1988,
p. 249.
39 On Hungarian witches and their craft, see Sándor Solymossy, A “Vasorrú bába”
és mitikus rokonai (The “Iron-nosed” Hag and its Mythical Relatives), Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 1991.
40 See Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman, Albequerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1991; and Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India,
Belmont: Wadsworth, 1990.
41 See Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, “Rethinking Inuit Shamanism through the Concept
of ‘Third Gender’” in M.Hoppál and J.Pentikainen (eds), Northern Religions
and Shamanism, Budapest-Helsinki: Akadémiai Kiadó and Finnish Literature
Society, 1992, pp. 146–50; and R.Grambo, “Unmanliness and seidr: Problems
Concerning the Change of Sex,” in M.Hoppál and O.Sadovszky (eds), Shamanism:
Past and Present, vol. 1, Budapest: Ethnographic Institute, 1989, pp. 103–14.
42`Actually both ballads have heroes/heroines with a play on their names. “Joe the
Hunter” actually takes the names from the German, where Jäger means hunter;
and in the other ballad “Bankó” also means money. This double entendre also
indicates that these ballads have deeper symbolism attached to their characters
than previously were believed by researchers.
43 For a treatment on the historical accuracy of the outlaw Jáger Jóska, see Sándor
Dömötör, “A Jáger Jóska ballada történeti háttere,” (“Historical Background to
the Ballad of Jáger Jóska”), in Ethnographia, vol. 93, No. 4 (1982), pp. 560–9;
and “Kegyetlen Betyárvilág és Jáger Jóska,” in Borsodi Levéltári Évkönyv IV,
1981 (Miskolc), pp. 137–47.
44 Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
45 For both ballads, see Imre Katona (ed.), Szatmári gyû jtés—Gyújtötte Móricz
Zsigmond (The Folklore Collection of Zsigmond Móricz from the Region of
Szatmár), Budapest: Magyar Néprajzi Társaság, 1991, pp. 48, 52.
46 József Molnár, “Adatok a magyar balladák ismeretéhez” (Data Concerning
Hungarian Folk Ballads), in Ethnographia, vol. 53 (1942), p. 52; and Sándor
Dömötör, “Geszten Józsi Borsodban,” in Herman Ottó Múzeum Évkönyve, vol.
XVI (1977), pp. 239–67.
47 See, for example, M.Istvánovits, “Dissemination in the Caucasus of Tales Belonging
to the ‘Change of Sex’-type,” in Acta Ethnographica, vol. 9, Nos. 3–4 (1960), pp.
227–50.
48 That these themes exist outside the folkloric realm of agricultural producers may
be illustrated by numerous historic and contemporary examples from the arts
including the theater stage, from historic “female” ballerinas impersonated by
“male” dancers to cinematic role inversions. In a late 1970s Hungarian film,
“Memories of Herkulesfürdõ ,” a similar gender transformation occurs depicting
the story of a young Jewish hero trying to escape the Nazis by taking up a job as
a nurse in a remote health resort. All is going well until one morning when, after

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a night of escapade with his girlfriend with whom s/he fell in love, he forgets to
shave. Naturally, his bearded face reveals his masculine identity and he is taken
by the authorities. Elevation of similar folkloristic themes may be found in high-
literature as well. In October 1992, the Attila József Theater, a prestigious down-
town company in Budapest, staged a play based on the book of the well-known
cosmopolitan author, Ferenc Molnár, the “Boys from Paul Street” (Pál utcai fiúk).
Written just after the turn of this century, it is a heart-rending story of a group of
boys playing tricks on one another ending in a tragedy of one of the heroes,
Nemecsek. What makes this stage production rather unique is that all the roles–
the “boys”—are played by women.
49 Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena,
London: Verso, 1993.
50 On recent attempts to deal with sexuality and gender in an anthropological fashion,
see Moore, Feminism and Anthropology, Micaela di Leonardo (eds), Gender at
the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991; and Margery
Wolf, A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic
Responsibility, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
51 See the contributions in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond
Sexual Dimorphism, New York: Zone Books, 1994.

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 11

SACRED GENDERS IN
SIBERIA
Shamans, bear festivals,
and androgyny
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

“Spirits when they please, can either sex assume, or both!”

John Milton Paradise Lost (New York: Seabury, 1983)
“…each being contains many forms simultaneously, sometimes
manifesting itself as one, sometimes as another”
Jill Furst and Peter Furst North American Indian Art
(New York: Rizzoli, 1982), p. 141, on Inuit soul beliefs
In the realm of the sacred, as well as in literature, gender distinctions appear
and disappear, and are culturally constructed and deconstructed. Male and
female forces can be used, balanced, adapted, and transformed by those who
are skilled enough to handle their power. Within the cultural traditions of Siberia,
some of the most diverse variations on the theme of gender flexibility are reflected
in beliefs about shamans (spiritual healers), animal spirits, and power through
manipulation of sexual energy. Gender transformations perceived according
to some European standards as deviant become instead sacred.
Shamans, as the Sakha (Yakut) curer Vladimir Kondakov told me in 1992,
should be able to balance and mediate energies within multiple levels of
cosmological worlds.1 To do so requires spiritual transformations into animals
and the harnessing of both male and female sexual potential. For many, this
means having male shamans accept female spirit helpers as guides, and vice
versa, incorporating their power and even their gendered essence in trance
and during séances. It can involve tapping the gendered spiritual force of a
tree, for instance the female birch, to cure a male patient. And in a particularly
dramatic form, the greatest shamans, even if they are males, are able to
themselves give birth to spirit animals.2
The social and symbolically creative environment in which such events
can be heralded is psychologically far from our own. Yet the mastery of a
range of human potential inherent in Siberian shamanism is now being
recognized as a system worth revitalizing in Siberia, and worth examining

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for clues to intertwined mental and physical health. Even before Soviet
repression against shamans as medical charlatans and religious deceivers,
esoteric knowledge of shamanic gender transformation was far from
widely known or understood. It was manifest in different local and even
individual ways, creating a challenge for modern Siberians rethinking their
own traditions.
An historical story still told in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) of Siberia in
1994 illustrates the degree to which thinking about gender is flexible, non-
stereotypical and linked to spirit beliefs. During World War II, in a time of
hardship and starvation, a Sakha man was left with his bawling baby, after
his wife died in childbirth. Far from any human help, he prayed desperately
to the spirits to be given milk in his poor male body. Suddenly, milk appeared
in his breasts and the child was saved. According to several Sakha consultants,
the man, though not a shaman, had tapped into the crucial life-forces of the
opposite sex, as shamans do, using this syncretized, sometimes ambiguous,
sexual power for salvation.3
At times, and in some Siberian cultures, the shamanic use of sexual power
and symbolism meant that male shamans turned themselves into females, for
particular shamanic seances, and, in some cases, more permanently. Among
the Northeastern Chukchi, this transformation occasionally also went the
other way, with female shamans taking on male identities. The turn-of-the-
century Russian exile-ethnographer Waldemar Bogoras thus wrote of certain
particularly revered and feared Chukchi shamans: “A man who has changed
his sex” is termed “soft man,” or “similar to a woman” (ne’uckica), and a
woman in similar condition “similar to a man” (qa’chikicheca)”4 Such
transformations occurred on spirit (ke’let) orders, and were dreaded, at least
at first, by young shamanic apprentices.
To probe the religious meanings and social significance of gender
transformation, it is worth exploring not only the most explicit forms, manifest
within shamanism, but also bawdy ritual transvestism in Siberian festivals
honoring killed bears, and clues to gender identities in other Siberian practices
and symbols. Issues of Soviet and post-Soviet change in Siberian spiritualism
and identities can then be addressed.

SHAMANS IN MANY GUISES

In addition to some Native North American areas, Northeastern Siberia is
the region where practices of transforming shamans are best documented,
among the Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen (Kamchadal), and Siberian Eskimo
(Iupik), plus, less definitively, among the Northeastern Yukagir, and the
Amur Region Nivkh (Gilyak) and Nanai (Gold).5 Norwegian scholar Ronald
Grambo argues that beliefs about the phenomenon are widespread and
archaic, and correlates the Norse seidr and sorcery traditions with Siberian
transformed shamans.6

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 MARJORIE MANDELSTAM BALZER

Bogoras explained various degrees and stages of transformation among

the Chukchi shamans he met, beginning with the male personification of a
woman “only in the manner of braiding and arranging the hair of the head.”7
Occasionally patients, as well as initiates, were asked (by spirits, via shamans)
to do this for a cure. The second stage involved dressing as a woman, without
a complete sex change:
For instance, Kimiqui, who claimed for himself shamanic powers, wore
woman’s clothes, which he assumed in early youth. He was afflicted
with a strange illness, which caused him to sleep in his inner room day
after day, almost without interruption. At length a ke’le appeared to
him in his sleep and ordered him to put on a woman’s dress…
Notwithstanding this, Kimiqui had a wife and four children…[and
cheeks] covered with a stubby black beard, and there could be no
misunderstanding about the sex to which he really belonged.8
Mere clothing change, however, was not considered decisive in conveying
extraordinary powers. For this, an initiate “leaves off all pursuits and manners
of his sex, and takes up those of a woman. He throws away the rifle and the
lance, the lasso of the reindeer herdsman, and the harpoon of the seal-hunter,
and takes to the needle and the skin-scraper.” Spirits assist him in this, even
to the point where his mode of speech changes “from the male to the female,”
and his body alters “in its faculties and forces.” Thus, “he loses masculine
strength, fleetness of foot…endurance in wrestling, and acquires instead the
helplessness of a woman.” He has accompanying psychic changes, as he “loses
his brute courage and fighting spirit, and becomes shy of strangers, even fond
of small-talk and of nursing small children… [Thus] the ‘soft man’ begins to
feel like a woman.”9
A true “soft man” enters into sexual competition with women for young
men, and “succeeds easily with the aid of ‘spirits.’” He chooses a lover and
takes a husband. Bogoras added, “the marriage is performed with the usual
rites, and I must say that it forms a quite solid union, which often lasts till the
death of one of the parties. The couple live in much the same way as do other
people.” His open-mindedness, however, gave out when he explained: “They
cohabit in a perverse way, modo Socratis, in which the transformed wife always
plays the passive role … some “soft men” are said to lose altogether the man’s
desire and in the end to even acquire the organs of a woman; while others are
said to have mistresses of their own in secret and to produce children by them.”10
Bogoras the voyeur (and all anthropologists have some of this in them)
was so curious to “fully inspect” one “remarkable” young shaman named
Tilu’wgi that he offered both the shaman and his/her husband a considerable
bribe, after living with them for two days. Tilu’wgi declined, but the husband
volunteered that, although Tilu’wgi was quite masculine in physique, they
were hoping “he” would eventually “be able to equal the real ‘soft men’ of
old, and to change the organs of his sex altogether.”

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Tilu’wgi’s face, encircled with braids of thick hair arranged after the
manner of Chukchee women, looked very different from masculine faces.
It was something like a female tragic mask fitted to the body of a giantess
of a race different from our own. All the ways of this strange creature
were decidedly feminine. He was so “bashful,” that whenever I asked a
question of somewhat indiscreet character, you could see, under the
layer of its usual dirt, a blush spread over his face, and he would cover
his eyes with his sleeve, like a young beauty of sixteen. I heard him
gossip with the female neighbors in a most feminine way, and even saw
him hug small children with evident envy for the joys of motherhood.11

Gossip behind their backs was one of the aspects of gender transformation
that both male and female shamans lived through. Bogoras only heard of,
but was not able to meet, a woman who had been first called by the spirits
to become a curer in the “usual” way, and then only later been ordered by
them to become a man. She was a middle-aged widow with three children,
and this may help to explain why circumstances as well as spirits could
have led her to become a masculine hunter-shaman. “She cut her hair,
donned the dress of a male, adopted the pronunciation of men, and even
learned in a very short time to handle the spear and to shoot with a rifle.
At last she wanted to marry and easily found a quite young girl who
consented to be her wife.”12 Delicate matters of sex were taken care of by
a “gastrocnemius from the leg of a reindeer, fastened to a broad leather
belt…[used] in the way of masculine private parts.” Child adoption was
also accomplished in this case.13
The flip side of social stigmatization for being unusual was the
extraordinary spirit power that the Chukchi believed accrued to both male
and female transformed shamans. They excelled “in all branches of
shamanism, including the ventriloquistic art.”14 Thus perhaps the widow used
transformation to elevate herself, with the help of her spirits, to a new level
of community respect that could also enhance her chances of survival without
remarriage to an unwanted husband’s brother. In both male and female cases,
the supernatural protector spirits who guided transformations were believed
to be particularly powerful, sometimes marrying their wards in sexual spirit-
human unions that enabled gender identities to be traded. “Soft men,” for
example, were wedded to spirit as well as human males. “Because of their
supernatural protectors…[transformed shamans were] dreaded even by
untransformed shamans, who avoided having any contests with them,
especially with the younger ones.”15 While meek and “bashful” in demeanor,
“soft men” shamans were believed to have spirit protectors who could and
would retaliate for slights. Threat of this both inside and outside of shamanic
households made the shamans themselves doubly influential.
Explanations for gender transformations in shamanism, however, should
not be reduced to quests for locally defined power and wealth. These aspects

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may have accompanied other, deeper issues of involuntary gender identity,

for it is widely acknowledged that shamans underwent transformations,
both into shamans and then (rarely) into an opposite gender, at great personal
sacrifice. Cures of the transformed shamanic initiate included relief from,
and control of, seemingly psychotic episodes, as well as resolution or
balancing of personal gender ambiguity: taking a disadvantage and turning
it into a strength.16
The scholar of Nivkh (Gilyak) shamanism Lev Shternberg was convinced
that one key to the shamanic ability to be intercessors between their people
and the spirits in times of trouble and sickness lay with their sexual relations
with their main helper spirits.17 In other words, he felt that the power of sex,
and sexual transformation, lay at the heart of shamanism. Not surprisingly,
this focus has not been well received by most subsequent researchers, including
other Russian scholars of Amur peoples and the cross-cultural comparativist
Mircea Eliade.18
The theme has been adapted by Canadian anthropologist Bernard Saladin
d’Anglure, writing on gender change and transvestism in Inuit shamanism.
D’Anglure explains that shamans made “use of helping spirits of the opposite
sex,” and also that “these spirits were often at the same time his/her eponyms.”
He elaborates: “an individual who was socialized in such a way as to straddle
the gender boundary ought to be able to span all boundaries.”19 D’Anglure
from this has developed a concept of “third gender” as potent in much archaic
Northern shamanic tradition, and was able to test this theory quite
productively among the Yukagir in the summer of 1993, much to the surprise
of his Yukagir ethnographer host.20
Rather than resolving arguments over the antiquity, significance, or
marginality of gender transformation and sex in shamanism, we can
acknowledge that various degrees and kinds of gender-related symbolism
have played a greater role than earlier thought in Siberian definitions of the
sacred. Gender ambiguity or transformation is not encouraged or even
condoned in every Siberian culture. The very diversity of cases and unevenness
of data on sensitive topics has enabled many arguments to flourish.
Among Amur River peoples, Shternberg found some evidence of spirits
demanding that a shaman change his sex. For example, one Nanai (Gold)
man fell ill with a particularly horrible “shamanic sickness,” during which he
slept for days on end. Finally spirits told him, in his fitful sleeping state, that
he must change his sex, even though he already had a wife and several children.
Only after he became a transformed shaman was he relieved of his suffering.21
Occasionally “ordinary” people, outside the shamanic context, were of
ambiguous or transformed gender among Amur peoples. Shternberg
mentioned two Nivkh (Gilyak) cases, noting, “The attitude…toward
hermaphrodites is quite simple: they evidently view it merely as an anomaly
and nothing to be abhorred at all.” He specified that this was not to be
confused with homosexuality, and described one couple that had been male

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hunting and fishing friends: “One day they went fishing and were forced to
spend the night…the hermaphrodite’s secret was revealed. Thenceforth they
began sleeping together and ended up by getting married—although people
tried hard to talk the young man out of taking this step.”22 Since Shternberg
only encountered this couple while traveling on Sakhalin, and did not know
them well, it may be that he did not learn the full story of the alleged
“hermaphrodite’s” relations with the spirit world. Another reputed well-
adjusted hermaphrodite from the Amur was said to have explained: “I have
two chances, two happinesses.”23
In the Sakha tradition, many shamans combined or balanced male and
female spirit forces without full gender transformation. Those rare male
shamans who were believed to give birth to animal spirits were said to be
compensating for the creativity which human males lack in ordinary life. But
Sakha shamanic practice included reinforcing more conventional sexual
divisions, made clear by a little known “ritual for the enhancement of sexual
power,” reported in the 1920s by the Sakha ethnographer Gavril
Ksenofontov.24 This ritual aphrodisiac was for women, led by a vigorous
male shaman with nine maidens and nine youths assisting him, dancing to
his drumbeat. During the ritual, called “dzhalyn ylyyta,” a small group of
target women were captured by the shaman’s frenzy, dancing with abandon
and neighing like horses “inné-sasakh.” “With their neighs they threw
themselves on the shaman and performed various bodily movements,” pushing
him to the ground until men standing nearby took them off him. “The shaman,
rising, whistled and made a circle with his drumstick. Then the women came
to themselves, calmed down and sat [with blushing faces].” The procedure
was repeated three times, and provoked an observer to remark that “the
most respectable women simply did not come to such a ritual.”25 The roots
of the ritual probably lie in both fertility and culturally defined eroticism.
The messages about gender within various shamanic rituals thus range
from the enforcement of gender difference, to the encouragement of gender
ambiguity, to the acceptance of gender transformation. One complex code
through which some of these varied messages were manifest was transvestism.
Thus, it is not surprising that numerous male shamans, including some Sakha,
many Yukagir and Evenk and some Ob-Ugrians, wore cloaks fashioned in
patterns of women’s dress during their seances, even when they were far
from being “soft men” in everyday life.26

BEAR CEREMONIALISM AND GENDER CODES

An additional realm where questions of gender identity can be explored is
another famed Siberian religious complex, the bear ceremony. Bear
ceremonialism, known throughout Siberia and much of Native North America,
was most elaborately practised among the Ob-Ugrian peoples of West Siberia
and the Amur River groups of the Far East.27 In both regions, the skin and

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head of a ritually killed bear are placed on a sacred bier and fêted for multiple
days, to assuage the potentially angered bear spirit and ensure the reincarnation
of that spirit into another bear. On the Ob River, feasting, dancing, and
partying builds into a climax of sacred epic song singing. Satirical plays are a
main entertainment, both for humans and the bear spirit, during which the
men take the women’s parts in theatrics that sometimes become quite bawdy.
While the roots of the festival may have involved male initiation, other aspects
of its folk theater point to its possible inclusion in the ranks of carnivalesque
“rituals of reversal.”28 Among the symbolic indications of rituals of reversal
are not only male transvestism, but also male hunters saying the opposite of
what they mean on the hunt and uncharacteristic female license.
Several kinds of social tensions are played out in Ob-Ugrian bear ceremony
theater, male-female tensions, exogamous group tensions between two
supralineages (called Mos, or people of the Hare, and For, or people of the
Bear); and inter-ethnic tensions (between Khanty and Mansi, Ugrians and
Samodeic peoples, natives and Russians). Such tensions are not so much
resolved as expressed, and in their expression, analysts can learn much about
Ugrian cultural constructions of gender and change.
One satirical drama indicative of gender and inter-ethnic tensions was
observed by the Russian empire official Nikolai Gondatti and later by Finnish
ethnographer Kustaa Karjalainen.29 In it a “Samoyed” (probably Nenets)
comes as a guest to a married Khanty man who does not understand the
Samoyed’s language, but whose wife knows a little. Misunderstandings
occur. The guest asks for a drink and his host gives him food. The guest
compliments the wife, but her husband thinks he has complimented a
reindeer and offers to sell it. Then the guest tries to convince the wife to run
away with him. He tells her he is rich, will give her metal ornaments and a
whole herd of her own reindeer. At first the wife demurs, but then agrees.
To escape easily, she makes a concoction of brewed vodka and mukhomor
(the hallucinatory mushroom amanita muscaria, which is bright red with
white spots). She and the guest drink only a little, while her husband gets
stone drunk. The guest then sets the wife on his sled and goads his reindeer
to prance away. The Khanty host understands what is happening, but can
do nothing: “his legs refuse to move, tongue to speak, hands to shoot.”30
He falls down in frustration and begins to snore.
This sad, realistic-in-detail tale produced squeals of laughter from Khanty
audiences, perhaps because it is such a model of how not to behave that
nearly everyone could feel secure in his or her own morality. The play sets the
stage for understanding both on- and off-stage festival behavior. According
to the Russian ethnographer Georgi Startsev, who saw festivals on the Vakh
River, women, though barred from theatrical parts, become quite involved,
to the point of behaving with frank masculine brazenness. They dance
energetically and creatively, and are allowed to do things they are usually
afraid to do. They mock their husbands with repartee and “curse, complain,

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race after each other, shout and call each other nicknames.” During the
dancing, “men come into ecstasy to the point where they take off each other’s
clothing and spit on the naked body. The women too are not quiet, but indulge
in baiting the men—cursing, yelling, crawling into the melée.”31
The release that this scene evokes is suggestive of rituals of reversal: rejection
of ordinary life patterns, contorting of the sacred and the profane. Lest it be
viewed as a post-revolutionary drunken degeneration (for Startsev worked
in the 1920s), another play helps us see the link more explicitly between
semi-controlled debauchery and the sacred spirit world. This is one of the
dramas used toward the end of bear ceremonies throughout the nineteenth
century and well into the twentieth. In Karjalainen’s version, a huge masked
forest spirit (menk) arrives from the edge of the village with his wife. They
enter the room where the bear is lying resplendent amidst ribbons, scarves,
coins and other symbolic offerings, and bow to the bear in respect. They then
whistle, dance with scarves, yell, chant, and groan until they become exhausted
and throw themselves on a sleeping pallet.32 Gondatti’s unexpurgated version
of this play continues with the sexual advances of the husband menk to his
wife.33 At first “she” refuses, but then complies. Since menk are Por ancestors,
the suggestion of the sex act is probably related (or once was) to sacred
procreation of Por children. It is at the same time clowning, given that both
actors are male.
Bear ceremony plays criticize the subject of marriage from various angles.
A play seen by Karjalainen made fun of the very serious tradition of women
needing to cover their faces in modesty before strangers and certain male
relatives. In it a man is saved from marrying an ugly girl when Numi-Torum,
the sky god, sends a gust of wind to blow the man’s bride’s scarf away from
her face.34 The tradition of face-covering stemmed from concepts of female
“impurity” which were relinquished only very slowly in the Soviet period.35
Other plays outlasted early Soviet prohibitions on the bear ceremonies. One
involved the indecision of a groom in choosing among three brides. Another,
influenced by Soviet propaganda, portrayed a senile old man trying to buy a
wife, but she marries his son without payment.36
Even this snapshot of Ob-Ugrian bear ceremonialism hints at a dynamic
of culture change that goes beyond maintenance of social and religious status
quo. The dramas survived the intense pressures of Christianization and
Sovietization in part because they were held in secret and were appropriate
to the issues of the day. In the nineteenth century, Russian tax collectors were
mocked. In the twentieth, Soviet brigade leaders took their place.
Gender tensions remained a theme throughout the documented history of
bear festivals, but it may well be that the tensions became greater, and plays
focused more on gender, as Soviet propagandists insisted on changing the
way women worked, presented themselves and thought about themselves.
Laughing over battles of the sexes was certainly an emotional release,
particularly when women’s parts were played by men. But the bear plays

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seem to have done more than provide a functional safety-valve through a

“liminal” (mediating) period of ritual excess, as suggested by several scholars
of rituals of reversal. According to such theories, sex role reversals in ritual
tend to emphasize gender distinctions in parody and thus help to enforce the
social status quo.37 In this view, the pressures of Sovietization which
undermined Siberian female subordination can be seen as an impetus for
sharpening the traditional gender distinctions and roles through masquerade.
This may be one aspect of the bear festival “carnival,” but it puts undue
stress on social equilibrium. Natalie Zemon Davis interprets French carnival
more dynamically: “play with unruly women is partly a chance for temporary
release from the traditional and stable hierarchy; but it is also part of the
conflict over efforts to change the basic distribution of power within society.”38
Thus some aspects of gender reversals create the possibility of enactment of
social change through conflict expression.
When I was in the Khanty region in 1976, people were very secretive
about the continued existence of bear ceremonies, claiming they had been
nearly eliminated or homogenized (made less sexy) by the Soviets. But when
I returned in 1991, I learned of the emergence from underground, and the
resurgence of both the seven-year periodic ceremony and the more impromptu
bear festivals. Some of the more publicized festivals were sponsored by the
newly formed Association for the Salvation of the Ugrian People. Several of
the leaders in the revival movement were women, and several women had
become hunters. But they still were not taking part in the most sacred of the
epic song chants or in the plays, nor did they expect or want to. They regretted
that social group imbalances had made strict observance of lineage marriage
rules impractical, but rejoiced that the essential sacred reverence for the bear
had weathered Soviet repression for most Khanty. In the many hours of
videotaped bear ceremony that I studied, from a festival held in winter 1991
in the sacred Khanty village of Iuilsk, it was clear that both the spirit of
raucous play and pious belief were still wedded in sacred revelry. Men took
women’s parts in a few plays, but the focus for revival, according to Khanty
participants, was on the bear reincarnation itself and on teaching young boys
sacred songs about Khanty ancestors.39
A brief comparative look at the Amur River bear ceremonies also reveals
symbolic messages about gender relations and inter-group tensions, but they
are couched in a different social context and in local understandings about
the relation of humans to bears.40 “Play with the bear” is usually the finale of
memorials for specific dead relatives, in whose honor ceremonies lasting up
to a month or more mark the return to “normal” social life, lifting prohibitions
(including sexual and marital) surrounding death. Dog races, games, and
dancing are more a focus of Amur festivities than satirical plays and temporary
transvestism, although aspects of “carnival” are also present. Other social
purposes of bear festivals include the merging of two lineages (whether
previously enemies or friends), entertaining and solidarity-building among

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affines, adoption of an individual, the honoring of young boys, and the sending
off of young girls in marriage.41 The most striking difference between Ob-
Ugrian and Amur festivals is that for many Amur ceremonies, live bears were
raised, preferably as captured cubs sucking human women’s milk, kept in
cages, and then ritually killed. Raising live bears is prohibitively costly today,
although several Amur River intellectuals have sponsored bear festivals in
their home villages to revive and film the tradition.42
Nivkh ethnographer Chuner Taksami, who has participated in bear festivals
held under Soviet conditions of restraint as well as in festivals revived recently,
stresses the seasonal nature of many bear ceremonies, held mid-winter to
mark the New Year and ensure human and animal prosperity and fertility.
Bears, as “forest people” mediators with spirit masters of the earth, forest,
and sky, are thus sacrificed after three or four years of being fed in a Nivkh
village. Taksami reported a key moment in the festivities, when the bear was
led from house to house for farewells. Skilled young male hunters, hoping to
prove their mettle, acted as brazen “dare-devils:” “dressed in furs worn
backward tied with a seal apron, kosk, [the daring] came up close to him [the
bear], teased him, leapt on him, grabbing him from behind.”43 Some reports
mention attempts to kiss the bear, with those pawed wearing the result as a
badge of honor.44 The paradoxical or reversal symbolism enacted here entails
mixing gender-linked clothing and behavior, wearing seal skin associated with
the water realm, and teasing an honored guest to danger-point. Ultimately, a
key representative of the forest is nearly domesticated, only to be killed and
returned again to the forest.
Gender coding occurs throughout the festival, with meticulous attention
paid to the gender of the killed bear (which dictates the years a bear is raised,
plus the number of times certain rituals are repeated), and to a human division
of labor that partially runs counter to everyday patterns. Elaborately dressed
women bang swinging larch log drums to set the tone for male games, fertility-
associated dog races, and fast circular dances that end when centrifugal force
breaks the line. While women do much of the cooking for enormous numbers
of affinal guests, venerable elder men boil the bear meat, using pure melted
snow water. They also distribute the meat according to social status, with
attention to gender and host lineage prohibitions. Fur from a bear’s genitals
adorns the knife that cuts the bear carcass. Honored elderly women, not
young women, participate in dancing to greet the bear carcass when it comes
inside. Elders ensure that the bear carcass is brought into its host house through
a smoke hole or window, to avoid being tainted by the impurities of
menstruating women who have stepped over the threshold.45 Elders past their
sexual prime become important mediators of gendered and sacred space,
making them analogous to male and female bears, called “[revered] old man”
or “old woman,” mediators of human and spiritual worlds.
On the Amur, shamanic seances are forbidden during the bear festival,
although a shaman may indicate auspicious timing and shamans are involved

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in other rituals to escort dead human souls. Perhaps seances are forbidden
because mediation with the spirit world, and purifications of both humans
and animals, are believed to transpire during the bear festival through
community-wide effort, without the need for special shamanic guidance. The
festival may have earlier been a massive community therapy session, mourned
today by Amur villagers threatened by ecological disasters and outsider
encroachment on all sides.

CONCLUSION: (RE)DEFINING THE SACRED

Folklorists and scholars of religion have long been intrigued by boundary
transcendence as one aspect of definitions of the sacred. The comparativist
Joseph Campbell, analyzing Navaho mythology, explains, for example:
And the brother heroes, though they are spoken of as masculine, are
really both male and female; they are of both the male and female colors
… One thinks of the Chinese Yang and Yin. One thinks of the Hindu
“Lord” and “Shakti.” That final Void – or All – which is beyond all pairs
of opposites cannot be male, cannot be female; is Both and Neither. But
in the realms of manifestation the two are equally present. One may even
conceive of the highest manifestation as androgynous, male-female.46
In Siberian contexts, British social anthropologist Maria Czaplicka came close
to this kind of interpretation by describing shamans as neither males or females,
but rather as belonging to a “third class,” of shamans, who “may be sexless,
or ascetic, or have inclinations of homosexualistic character, but… may also
be quite normal…shamans have special taboos comprising both male and
female characteristics.”47 Given the brief survey of Siberian data here, it is
possible to expand understanding of the power of gender ambiguity and
transference, without loading or prejudging normalcy or deviance, by
encompassing male and female elders grown old and sacred in their
communities, and by including temporary sacralization through transvestism
and name changes in certain rituals.
Although it is important to carefully differentiate various Siberian
traditions, for instance the Ob-Ugrian Khanty from the Amur River Nivkh
and the Northeastern Chukchi from the Turkic Sakha, it is also worthwhile
to make cross-cultural comparisons that can give us insights into theoretical
linkages on such important identity issues as gender. Siberian cases reveal not
only cross-cutting roots typical for peoples in historical contact with each
other, but also cross-cutting experiences caused by Soviet repression and new
chances for rich and varied cultural revival.48
Both bear ceremonies and shamanism have become symbols of cultural
resurgence in many areas of Siberia, but it is misleading to presume the
significance of gender reversals in the process. Instead, we can see varied
gender transformations as one aspect of repeated and ancient attempts to

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harness, define, and redefine the power of sex by explorations of gender

ambiguity and reversal in Siberian concepts of the sacred. Given that gender
identifications are culturally as well as biologically constructed and that each
generation remakes and redefines its own traditions, we should not be surprised
that some cultures that once had “soft men” shamans seem to have lost them.
Certainly none of the researchers who recently have been in the Chukotka,
Kamchatka, or Amur regions have reported the revival of this particular
tradition.49
Under strong Russifying influence, transformed men and women were
doubly reviled in the Soviet period, just as they were doubly powerful before
intense Russian contact. In the 1920s and 1930s, they were persecuted as
both shamans and sexual deviants. Yet the possibility certainly remains for a
reemergence of transformed shamans, given the renewed interest throughout
Siberia in all forms of spiritual healing.
The dual concepts that a shaman can temporarily take on the identity of a
spirit helper of the opposite sex, and that a shaman can have marital relations
with such a spirit helper, are still part of the widespread lore of shamans in
Eastern Siberia. These are intimate, esoteric identity secrets, rarely discussed
with non-initiates, that form the foundation of a shaman’s perceived ability
to cure. One Sakha shaman (oiuun) explained that he uses opposite sex spirit
helpers and that sometimes it is helpful for male shamans to cure female
patients and vice versa. In other interviews with Sakha shamans, I have been
lucky to learn of their animal helper spirits, such as the horse or the raven,
but have never had personal relations with the spirits revealed. One female
shaman (udagan) claims she manifests her powers by becoming a white
stallion. A key to the acceptance of such claims is belief in shamanic ability to
manipulate, bridge, and change cultural boundaries and symbols.
Shamans traditionally could adopt the name of their helper spirits, at least
among the Chukchi, Koryak, and Eskimo, as well as incorporate their essence
if needed during seances. For instance, Bogoras reported that one shaman
was named She Walrus; and another was Scratching Woman, a shaman who
sometimes turned himself into a bear to cure particularly ill patients. Bogoras
also noted that even for ordinary people, “female names are given to men,
and visa versa,” in order to confuse the spirits.50 Some “cover name” practices
continued through the Soviet period throughout much of Siberia.
Spirit name adoptions, “cover names,” and some beliefs about possible
reincarnation into different genders give us clues to the creative and flexible
use of cross-gender referencing in some Siberian cultures. Gender definitions
in terms of balances or tensions between sexual opposites could be mitigated
by wary reverence for people with characteristics of both sexes. More precisely,
those people who were perceived to be able to utilize the energies of both
sexes were often sacralized. In the bear festival, this happened temporarily
when men took women’s parts. The bear festival itself, as a community-wide
spiritual healing, growing, and socializing drama, was an occasion for both

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reinforcement of human-spirit relations and social critique. Usually on a

smaller scale, shamanic seances also enabled adaptations or manipulation of
gendered power relations for intertwined psychological and physiological
cures. Gender transformation of shamans was a matter of degree, ranging
from temporary adoption of hair-style or dress for seances, to the full gender
reversal of male and female shamans.
Gender ambiguity is not the same as full transformation, and neither is
congruent with ritual reversals. Yet I argue that these are related phenomena,
variations on themes that can help us understand more completely the full
range of symbolic, socially constructed meanings for human sexual diversity.
In European fiction and fantasy, reversals have long held fascination. Barbara
Babcock cites the seventeenth-century Jesuit novelist Balthasar Gracian as
saying “The things of this world can be truly perceived only by looking at
them backwards.” 51 The novelist Ursula LeGuin, daughter of two
anthropologists, wrote about a fantasy society where people could change
their gender at will, depending on the social context.52 It is time to better
understand the data already gathered on sexual practices and gender meanings,
and to collect more with open-mindedness. Instead of seeing gender reversals
as deviant, we may see a mirror image: anomaly turned into sacred power.
The study of gender reversals can help us reverse assumptions about the
sacred and the “civilized.”53
Among the postmodern, post-Soviet Sakha, many of the most talented
artists, musicians, poets, and actors are those who are exploring themes of
gender tensions and ambiguity. Some are people who are not afraid to be
slightly effeminate males and masculine females. In 1992, I was given a recently
made drum embellished with old Sakha motifs: a dancing shaman wore female
dress, through which was a clearly drawn penis. In the fin-de-Soviet 1990s,
the Sakha and other Siberians are looking to their spiritual past for their
cultural future.

NOTES
1 I am grateful to Vladimir Kondakov, head of the Association of Folk Medicine,
and widely reputed oiuun (shaman) for conversations in 1991,1992, and 1993.
For a literature review, see Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Shamanism: Soviet Studies
of Traditional Religion in Siberia and Central Asia, Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe,
1990 and Anna-Leena Siikala and Mihály Hoppál, Studies on Shamanism,
Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Helsinki: Finnish Anthropological Society, 1992.
This chapter is based on a literature survey, discussions with colleagues, and
fieldwork in two main areas of Siberia: the Ob-Ugrian region of Western Siberia
(1976,1991) and the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) of Eastern Siberia (1986,
periodically 1991–5). I am grateful for fieldwork and research support from the
International Research and Exchanges Board, the Social Science Research Council,
Harvard’s Russian Research Center, Columbia’s Harriman Institute, and the
Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center. For fieldwork assistance, thanks are due
to the Sakha Republic Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Music and Folklore,

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the Khomus Museum, Yakutsk University, the Institute for the Problems of
Northern Minorities, and the Institute of Languages, Literature and History of
the Academy of Sciences.
2 The part-Sakha ethnographer Alexander A.Popov, “Poluchenie ‘shamanskogo
dara’ u Viliuiskikh Iakutov” Trudy institute Étnografii, vol. 2, 1947, p. 292,
explained that a great shaman’s spiritual initiation, usually around age thirteen,
entailed first giving birth, deep in the forest and alone, to a raven or loon, which
would instantly fly away. In the second year of initiatory pain and trial, the shaman
gave birth to a pike that quickly swam into water. And in the final year, a truly
great shaman could give birth to a bear or wolf. These three events eventually
ensured that the most revered Sakha shamans could mediate three worlds (celestial,
earthly, and underground) and could be reincarnated three times. In other contexts,
fertility and shamanism are not compatible.
3 I am grateful to the historian Egor Spiridonovich Shishigin for this story, considered
plausible by many of my Sakha friends. See also my “Two Urban Shamans:
Unmasking Leadership in Fin-de-Soviet Siberia,” in George Marcus (ed.), Perilous
States: Conversations on Culture, Politics and Nation, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 131–64; and my “Dilemmas of the Spirit: Religion and
Atheism in the Yakut-Sakha Republic,” in Religious Policy in the Soviet Union,
edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993,
pp. 231–51.
4 Waldemar Bogoras, The Chukchee, New York: Memoirs of the American Museum
of Natural History, vol. 11,1909, p. 449. Compare Waldemar [Vladimir I.]
Jochelson, The Koryak, New York: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural
History, vol. 10,1908, p. 53. Both authors were part of the Jesup North Pacific
Expedition.
5 As with the Siberian cases, a very diverse range of gender concepts and practices
exists in North America. The social practice of herdache, as exemplified by the
Plains groups, is the most direct correlate to the Chukchi “soft man,” with
comparable traditions among the Navaho, Hopi and some Algonquin groups.
See Walter L.Williams, The Spirit and The Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American
Indian Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, 2nd edn; Weston La Barre, The
Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, London, New York: Dell, 1972, pp. 138–40,
156–7, 179–81; Alice Beck Kehoe, North American Indians: A Comprehensive
Account, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992, p. 344 figure; and Sabine
Lang’s chapter in this book.
6 Ronald Grambo, “Unmanliness and Seidr: Problems Concerning the Change of
Sex” in Shamanism Past and Present, edited by Mihály Hoppál and Otto von
Sadovszky, Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1989, pp. 103–13. His
argument is mostly convincing, though over-generalized when he states (p. 107–
8) that Yakut “black shamans” “tended to behave like women, since it is from
women shamans that they derive their origin.” See also Vladimir N.Basilov
“Vestiges of Transvestism in Central-Asian Shamanism,” in Shamanism in Siberia,
edited by Vilmos Diószegi and Mihály Hoppál, Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1978,
pp. 281–90; and his Shamanstvo u narodov Srednei Azii i Kazakstana, Moscow:
Nauka, 1992.
7 Bogoras, Chukchee, p. 450–1.
8 Ibid., pp. 450–1. Another degree involves gender transformation only during
seance, especially to personify a main helping spirit. This provides an interesting
parallel with the female shamans of Korea, who “manifest” male authority figures
during curing rituals. See Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Housewives and Other Restless
Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1985, pp. 138–43.

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9 All quotes in this paragraph are from Bogoras, Chukckee, pp. 450–1.
10 Ibid., p. 451.
11 Ibid, pp. 453–4. Writing on “transformed persons” among the Eskimo of Indian
Point, Chukotka, Bogoras also reports Russian empire official and amateur
ethnographer Nikolai Gondatti, “Naselenie Anadyrskogo Okruga,”
ZapiskiPriamurskogo Otdela Imperatorskogo Russkogo Geograficbeskogo
Obshchestva, vol. 2, pt. 1, 1896, as condemning the practice and actively
campaigning for the demise of “soft men.” But the tradition was carried on to a
small degree into the twentieth century, according to Jane Murphy,
“Psychotherapeutic Aspects of Shamanism on St Lawrence Alaska,” in Magic,
Faith and Healing, edited by Ari Kiev, New York: Free Press, 1969, pp. 74–5.
Jane Murphy was told in 1940 that a transformed shaman from Siberia believed
himself to be pregnant, and then tragically ended his life “by having himself
abandoned on another island, and the story goes that the following year the
corpses of an adult and a child were found where he had been left.” Precise
timing is unclear.
12 Bogoras, Chukchee, p. 455.
13 Bogoras, Chukchee, p. 455–6, explains: “After some time the transformed
husband, desiring to have children by her young wife, entered into a bond of
mutual marriage with a young neighbor, and in three years two sons were really
born in her family… They were considered her own lawful children. Thus this
person could have had in her youth children of her own body, and in later life
other children from a wedded wife of hers.”
14 Ibid., p. 453.
15 Ibid., p. 453. On spirit-human unions, compare Leo [Lev], Sternberg [Shternberg],
“Divine Election in Primitive Religion,” in Congrès International des
Americanistes, compte-rendu de la XXIe session Deuxième Partie tenue a Goteborg
en 1924, 1925, Part 2, pp. 472–512.
16 Compare Balzer, Shamanism, p. ix.
17 Leo Sternberg, “Divine Election,” p. 476–80. See also Lev [Leo] Shternberg
[Sternberg], “Gilyaki,” Etnograficbeskoe Obozrenie, No. 2 (March—April 1904),
pp. 19–55; Leo Sternberg, “Die Religion der Giljaken,” Archiv für Religion-
swissenschaft vol. 8,1905, pp. 244–74; and Pervobytnaia religiia v svete etnografiia,
Leningrad: Nauka, 1936. For sensitive treatment of the issue, see Roberte
Hamayon, La chasse a I’ame: Esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme siberien,
Nanterre: Société d’etnologie, 1990, pp. 448–53.
18 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972, p. 73. Compare E.A.Kreinovich “Ocherk
kosmogenicheskikh predstavlenii giliakov,” Etnografiia, vol. 7, No. 1, 1929, pp.
78–102; Kreinovich, “Rozhdenie i smert cheloveka po vozzreniam giliakov,”
Etnografiia, vol. 9, Nos 1–2, 1930, p. 89–113; Anna V.Smoliak “Novye dannye
po animizmu i shamanizmu u nanaitsev”, in Sovetskaia Etnografiia, No. 2 (March-
April 1974), pp. 111–13. Basilov, Sbamanstvo, pp. 126–8 reviews the argument,
which he sees as focused on whether shaman-spirit helper “intimate ties” were
the most prior, archaic form, rather than whether they existed at all. Certainly
Anna Smoliak, Shaman: lichnost, funktsii, mirovozzrenie (narody Nizhnego
Amura), Moscow: Nauka, 1991, p. 227, and many others, give evidence that
some shamans did have marriages with their main spirit helpers. Unresolved is
how crucial these ties were, whether some involved gender transformation, and
how spirit marriages influenced cures.
19 Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, “Shamanism and Transvestism among the Inuit of
Canada,” in Shamanizm kak religiia, edited by Anatoly I.Gogolev, et al., Yakutsk:
Yakutsk University, 1992, p. 18; d’Anglure, “Rethinking Inuit Shamanism through

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the concept of the ‘Third Gender,’” in Northern Religions and Shamanism, edited
by Mihály Hoppál and Juha Pentikainen, Budapest: Akademiai Kiado; Helsinki:
Finnish Literature Society, 1992, p. 147; d’Anglure, “Sila, the Ordering Principle
of the Inuit Cosmology” in Shamans and Cultures, edited by Mihály Hoppál and
Keith Howard, Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1993, pp. 160–8. D’Anglure’s data
are similar to flexible Inuit soul beliefs described by Peter and Jill Furst, North
American Art, p. 173. However, Dutch scholar Jarik Oosten, “Theoretical
Problems in the study of Inuit Shamanism,” in Shamanism Past and Present,
edited by Mihály Hoppál and Otto von Sadovszky, Budapest: Hungarian Academy
of Sciences, 1989, p. 334, does not feel d’Anglure’s “notion of a third sex” is
warranted.
20 I am grateful to Bernard Saladin d’Anglure and to colleagues in the Sakha Republic
for discussion of these issues. The literal term for “soft man” in the tundra dialect
of Yukagir (of the Sakha Republic) would be “pukol’an kejp,” but the Russian
ethnographer Vladimir Jochelson, The Yukagir and the Yukagirized Tungus, New
York: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 12, 1910, p.
112 noted, “I found no indications of such an institution among the Yukagir,
except in the dress of the shamans, which includes articles of female attire.” If we
see the “institution” as a matter of degree, views of Jochelson and d’Anglure can
both be accommodated.
21 Shternberg, “Divine Election,” p. 473–80; Grambo, “Unmanliness,” p. 108.
Compare Leopold von Shrenk [Schrenk], Oh Inorodsakh Amurskogo Krai, St.
Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1903, vol. 3, p. 121–5; and Eveline
Lot-Falk, “Eroticism and Shamanism,” Sexology, vol. 22, No. 1 (January 1956),
pp. 378–83.
22 Chester Chard, “Sternberg’s Materials on the Sexual life of the Gilyak”,
Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, vol. 10, No.1 (1961), pp.21–
2. See original: Shternberg, Lev, “Sotsial’naia Organizatsiia Giliakov,” in Giliaki,
Orochi, Gol’dy, Negidal’tsy, Ainu, Khabarovsk: Dal’giz, 1933, p. 256–7.
23 Chard, “Sternberg’s Materials,” p. 22. Lydia Black, Nivkhi, p. 66, is skeptical of
Shternberg’s “hermaphrodite” designation, considering one case homosexuality
and the other transvestism. Following Shternberg, she discusses these cases under
the category of “sexual perversion.” See also Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg,
“Homosexualität und Transvestition im Schamanismus,” Anthropos, vol. 65, No.
1/2 (1970), pp. 189–228, who discusses a range of shamanic transvestism cases,
only some of which involve homosexuality; and Stepan Krasheninnikov, Opisanie
zemli Kamchatki, St. Petersburg: 1819, vol. 2, p. 158 on the Itelmen (Kamchadal)
“soft men” who were houseworkers called “koiekchuch,” and kept as concubines.
24 Gavril V.Ksenofontov, Shamanizm: izhrannye trudy (puhlikatsii 1928–1929),
Yakutsk: Sever-Iug, 1992, p. 203–5.
25 Ksenofontov, Shamanizm, p. 204. Ksenofontov did not see this ritual, but reported
the observations of Mikhail Govorov, recorded in 1924.
26 British anthropologist Maria Czaplicka contrasted “change of sex” as a
“PaleoAsiatic” institution with the use of “female garments” in shamanic dress,
associating female dress with “Neo-Siberians” (plus the Yukagir), in Aboriginal
Siberia, London: Oxford University Press, 1914, p. 252. She noted (p. 253) that
many “costumes” combine male and female features. Compare Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg,
“Homosexualität und Transvestition,” pp. 190–5, 203; Yekaterina D. Prokof’yeva,
Shamanskie kostiumy narodov Sibiri, Leningrad: Sbornik Muzeiia antropologii i
etnografii, vol. 17, 1971. Valeric Chaussonnet (“Needles and Animals: Women’s
Magic,” in Cross-roads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, Washington,
DC: Smithsonian, 1988, p. 225) reminds us, on the basis of Bogoras’ materials,
that some Chukchi patients wore women’s earrings and boots on order of a shaman
as “a ploy to hide and protect the person from evil spirits.”

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27 A.Irving Hallowell, “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere,” in

American Anthropologist, vol. 28, No. 1 (January-March 1926), pp. 1–175; Boris
Chichlo, “L’Ours Shamane,” Etudes Mongoles, vol. 12, 1981, pp. 35–112; Eva
Schmidt, “Bear Cult and Mythology of the Northern Ob-Ugrians,” in Uralic
Mythology and Folklore, edited by Mihály Hoppál and Juha Pentikainen,
Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society,
1989, pp. 187–232. Eva Schmidt’s work, based on recent and continuing
fieldwork, is especially valuable, and shows the diverse range of concepts about
the bear, even within Ob-Ugrian culture.
28 The male initiation theory is Valerii N.Chernetsov’s (“Fratrial’noe ustroistvo
obugorskogo obshchestva,” Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1939, vyp. 2, pp. 20–41;
“Periodicheskie obriady i tseremonnye u obskikh ugrov sviazannye s medvedem,”
in Congressus secundus internationalis Fenno-Ugristarium, Part II, Acta Etnologica,
Helsinki: Societas Fenno-Ugrica, 1968, pp. 102–11). On rituals of reversal see
Barbara Babcock, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978, pp. 13–36. The theory of “carnival” was
most famously developed in the 1920s by Russian folklorist Mikhail M.Baktin,
e.g. Rabelais and his World, trans. Helen Iswolsky, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965.
See also Olga M.Freidenburg, “Proiskhozhdenie parodii,” in Trudy po znakovym
sistemam, vol. 6, vyp. 308, Tartu: Tartu State University, 1973, pp. 490–512.
29 Nikolai L.Gondatti, “Kul’t medvedia u Zapadnoi-Sibirskoi inorodtsev,” in Trudy
obshchestva estestveni nauk antropologii i etnografii, vol. 8,1887, p. 83; Kustaa
F. Karjalainen, Die Religion der jugra- Vdlker, Porvoo: Finnish Academy of
Sciences, 1927. vol. 3, p. 218.
30 Gondatti Kul’t medvediia, p. 83, with seeming authority(?), explained the effects
of the vodka-mushroom brew: “One does not just get drunk. One loses all sense
of where one is: one walks into a river or lake, throws oneself into a fire, falls out
of trees, and in general does things for which it is necessary to pay later.”
31 Georgi Startsev, Ostiaki: Sotsial’no-Etnograficheskii ocherk, Leningrad: Priboi,
1928. pp. 107–8.
32 Karjalainen, Die Religion, p. 219.
33 Gondatti, Kul’t medvediia, p. 85.
34 Karjalainen, Die Religion, p. 218.
35 For background on beliefs about “female impurity” and the importance of women
“growing old and sacred” among the Khanty after menstruation, see Marjorie
Mandelstam Balzer, “Rituals of Gender Identity: Markers of Siberian Khanty
Ethnicity, Status and Belief,” American Anthropologist, vol. 83,1981, pp. 850–
67. See also Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (eds), Blood Magic: The
Anthropology of Menstruation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
36 Ethnographer Zoia P.Sokolova, Strana Ugrov, Moskva: Msyl, 1976, p. 65, saw
these bear festival plays in the 1960s and 1970s.
37 Edward Norbeck, “The Anthropological Study of Human Play,” Rice University
Studies, vol. 60, No. 3 (Summer 1974), p. 6, for instance, states, “Many of the
institutionalized customs of play, notably including wit and humor and rites of
reversal…may readily be seen to serve in various ways as sanctions for standards
of behavior that apply at other times.” See also Victor Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca: Cornell University, 1977, pp. 183–5.
38 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1975, pp. 130–1; Baktin, Rabelais and His World,
whose work on dialogics and “carnival” is relevant for its combination of status
quo and adaptation-change orientation. See also theorist of sexuality and gender
as expressions of power relations Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité: La
Volonte de Savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

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39 During the festival, reindeer were also sacrificed to the main Kazym Khanty
ancestress. Folklorist of the Eastern Khanty, Olga Balalaeva (personal
communication, April 1994) warns that evidence for male initiatory aspects of
the festival is slim and that Valerii Chernetsov may have been straining for
universals when he stressed male initiation in the bear ceremonials. Olga Balalaeva
has seen recent bear festival plays with males taking women’s parts, and considers
this a temporary “not real” transvestism done primarily for the sake of clowning
and buffoonery. Active participant-ethnographer Eva Schmidt, “Bear cult,” p.
201, 228–9, provides numerous Khanty and Mansi explanations for the origin of
the bear ceremonies, concluding that some symbolize subconscious projections,
especially those regarding the marriage of a human woman with a bear. She too
refutes aspects of Chernetsov’s bear phratry (For) origins theories (p. 203).
40 The bear among the Nivkh (Gilyak) and Olchi, for example, is often seen as a
more direct relative of humans. On bear (“forest people”) ancestry from the union
of a human female with a bear, however, some Ob-Ugrian legends about the
origin of the For people and an Amur River Olchi legend are remarkably similar.
These legends explain the origin of bear ceremonialism through instructions given
by a human female transformed into a bear. But other Ugrian legends take different
form, for example having the original bear be a transformed human boy-hero or
supernatural “son of God.” See Chernetsov, “Periodicheskii obriady,” pp. 102–
11; Schmidt, “Bear Cult,” pp. 187–232; and Alexander M.Zolotarev, “The Bear
Festival of the Olcha,” American Anthropologist vol. 39,1937, pp. 123–4.
41 Chuner Taksami, Nivkhi, Leningrad: Nauka, 1967, pp. 217–22; Osnovnye
problemy etnografii i istorii Nivkhov, Leningrad: Nauka, 1975, pp. 163–73; Lydia
Black, “The Nivkh (Gilyak) of Sakhalin and the Lower Amur,” in Arctic
Anthropology, vol. 10, 1973, No. 1, p. 94; Shternberg, “Gilyaki,” p. 34; and
Shrenk, Ob inorodtsakh Amurskogo Kraia, pp. 64–103. Alaskan Indian potlatch-
like elements were also present. See Zolotarev, “The Bear Festival,” pp.
116,121,129.
42 This includes Evdokiia Gayer, Nanai ethnographer and former parliament deputy,
and Chuner Taksami, head of the Siberian section of the Petersburg Institute of
Ethnography and Anthropology. I am grateful to both for informative discussions.
Evdokiia Gayer, in Fall 1991, explained that she had tried to fund the raising of
a bear cub for several years, but villagers gave up after two and held a festival
prematurely.
43 Taksami Osnovnye problemy, p. 165.
44 Lydia Black comments that the bear’s mark was “sort of a laying on of hands
[paws?] in reverse” in “The Nivkh,” p. 95. See also Shternberg, “Gilyaki,” p. 34.
45 Many of these details are from Taksami, Osnovnye problemy, pp. 163–73; Shrenk,
Ob inorodtsakh Amurskogo Kraia, pp. 64–103; and Black, “The Nivkh,” p. 94–
102. On concepts of female pollution, see Balzer, “Rituals of Gender Identity,”
pp. 850–67.
46 Joseph Campbell, Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial
given by Jeff King, Princeton: Princeton University Press Mythos Series, 1991, p.
78. Campbell, as well as some Jungians and New Age shamanists, is working on a
level of universals that is not attempted here. Some trance journeys of Americans
and Europeans d o, however, appropriate and syncretize very widespread symbols
and concepts. One participant in a trance workshop of Felicitas Goodman recalled:
“The left side of my body was female, the right side male. I became a white female
horse, and I shook off my male side.” See Felicitas Goodman, Where the Spirits
Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 209; Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman: A
Guide to Power and Healing, New York: Bantam, 1982.

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47 Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, p.253. Compare Bernard Saladin d’Anglure,

“Rethinking Inuit Shamanism,” p. 149.
48 Chances for revivals are themselves locally varied, and linked to demographics.
But a spirit of Siberian solidarity was evident on the Lena River during a 1992
conference on shamanism. See Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Shamanism and
the Politics of Culture: An Anthropological View of the 1992 International
Conference on Shamanism, Yakutsk, the Sakha Republic”, Shaman, vol. 1,
No.2,1993, pp. 71–96.
49 Such scholars include Tatiana Bulkakova, Boris Chichlo, Evdokiya Gayer, Bruce
Grant, Mihály Hoppál, Anna Kerttula, David Koester, Igor Krupnik, Juha
Pentikainen, Debra Schindler, and Chuner Taksami.
50 Bogaras, The Chukchee, pp. 467,503. Bogoras mentions, however, that usually
transformed shamans kept their original male names. This reinforces the
androgynous, not fully transformed nature of many “soft men.” In contrast, in
the Inuit tradition, names are not necessarily gendered at all, according to Oosten,
“Theoretical Problems,” p. 334. Very different levels of identity are expressed in
naming related to reincarnation beliefs, versus temporary naming or dressing to
fool spirits.
51 Babcock, The Reversible World, p. 13.
52 Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Ace, 1969. One of the
best lines in the novel is “the king was pregnant.” Note also Lola RomanucciRoss,
“The Impassioned Cognito: Shaman and Anthropologist” in Shamanism Past
and Present, edited by Mihály Hoppál and Otto von Sadovszky, Budapest:
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1989, p. 37, for her comparison of shamans
and anthropologists as mediators, whose “art is to be inside but also outside
everything.”
53 My interpretation can be seen as an adaptation of Margaret Mead’s basic points
in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York: Mentor, 1950,
pp. 215–7, concerning expansion of our understanding of the cultural construction
of gender. But Mead still sees Native American berdache behavior in a context of
biological deviance, whereas I would place it on a continuum of culturally and
psychologically interactive responses to a range of sexuality that some societies
widen and others narrow. See also Micaela de Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the
Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; and Carol MacCormack and
Marilyn Strathern (eds), Nature, Culture and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980.

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 12

THERE IS MORE THAN

JUST WOMEN AND MEN
Gender variance in North American
Indian cultures
Sabine Lang

When the Spanish conquistadores came to Central and South America, they
made acquaintance with a New World in the truest sense of the word. Many
of the religious customs, manners of interpersonal behavior, but also ways of
expressing sexuality that they saw among American Indian cultures seemed
completely alien to the Spaniards’ own perceptions of culture and
“civilization,” and some elements of New World cultures they found positively
shocking. From the early 1500s, for example, Spanish chroniclers frequently
mentioned the custom of males donning women’s clothes, doing women’s
work, and entering sexual relationships with other males.1 Some of these
womanly males even officiated as religious specialists, and all of them
apparently were treated with acceptance, sometimes even with reverence, by
the other members of their communities in Central and South America.2 The
Spaniards, seeing only the sexual component of this institution—which
oftentimes involved the womanly males and their male sexual partners—
equated it with sodomy and prostitution. Sodomy was considered to be a
severe crime in sixteenth-century Spain, ranking third only after heresy and
crimes against the person of the king.3 The Spaniards in the New World
acted accordingly, the most drastic example being Nuñez de Balboa who,
when encountering a number of womanly males at a chief’s court in Panama,
ordered them to be thrown before his dogs, and torn into pieces.4
When Spanish expeditions were sent out from New Spain to explore what
is now the southern part of the US, they found men living like women there,
too, Cabeza de Vaca’s account—based on observations he made in the 1520s
among the Coahuiltecans living in what today are Coahuila, Mexico, and
Texas—being the earliest description:
“I saw a devilry,” he writes, “which is, a man married to another man,
and those are some effeminate and impotent men. They go dressed like
women, and they do women’s work, and they shoot the bow and carry

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heavy loads… And they are larger than other men, and taller: They are
able to carry very heavy burdens.”5
The “effeminate men” (hombres amarionados) described by Cabeza de Vaca
express a trait evidenced in the roles of womanly males in a number of North
American Indian cultures: rather than adopting the culturally defined women’s
role completely, they combine, to varying degrees, elements of both the man’s
and the woman’s roles, and rather than becoming “women” they are seen as
a separate gender, combining masculine and feminine elements. Carrying
burdens in Native American cultures, for example, generally is a component
of the woman’s domain within the division of labor between the sexes, whereas
archery in hunting and in warfare is done by the men, with some exceptions.
Since the publication of the first Spanish accounts, dating from the first
half of the sixteenth century, the custom of males partially or completely
adopting the role of a woman as defined by their respective culture has
been reported from most American Indian cultures, and even though in
many cases it has disappeared temporarily or completely due to the massive
influence of Western culture, it is still alive in a number of Indian
communities on and off the reservations today.6 Compared to the literature
describing and discussing males living like women, sources relating to females
who take up the occupations and ways of men more or less completely are
not nearly as numerous.7
The cultural institution of special roles and gender statuses for males
preferring women’s work and exhibiting non-masculine personality traits, as
well as for females interested in doing men’s work activities, has come to be
referred to as the berdache in anthropology, a term originally deriving from
the Arab bardaj, meaning a male prostitute, or catamite.8 Because of this
original meaning, the term berdache has come to be rejected both by Native
Americans and by an increasing number of anthropologists doing research in
the area of gender variance in American Indian cultures. Apart from being
offensive to womanly males, the term berdache also becomes downright
grotesque when applied to females living in a man’s role. A number of
contemporary Native Americans who self-identify as either gay or lesbian,
or as being of a gender different from both woman and man, have come to
refer to themselves, and to those formerly called “berdaches” in
anthropological literature, as “two-spirit people.”
To avoid any terminology that might prove inappropriate in a historical
context, in the following the descriptive term woman-man will be used to
refer to males who partially or completely adopt the woman’s role as defined
by their respective culture, and who are classified as being of a gender of
their own by their respective culture, and the term man-woman will refer to
females taking up the occupations of men, also being classified as being of a
gender different from both “woman” and “man.”9 These terms also come
closest to the translation of words referring to such individuals in many Native
American languages.

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In anthropological literature the traditions of males living like women and

females living the lives of men in American Indian cultures have, for a long
time, been interpreted as a means by which “homosexual” individuals could
be integrated into those cultures.10 The fact that quite a number of women-
men do enter sexual relationships or even marriages with women—and men-
women, with men—was generally overlooked, as was the possibility that, instead
of just accommodating “deviant” individuals, Native American cultures may
have constructions of gender and sexual behavior that differ from our own.
More recent anthropological research has shown that exactly this is the
case. The earliest sign that a person will turn out to be a woman-man or a
man-woman is not an interest in sexual relationships with members of the
same sex, but a marked interest in work activities belonging to the role of the
“other” sex. This will be noticed by other members of the individual’s
community, and it will result in a reclassification of that individual in terms
of gender; this reclassification, however, is not just a “gender reversal” from
man to woman or vice versa. Instead, a woman-man or a man-woman will
be classified as being of a gender different from both man and woman. In
most North American Indian cultures, there exist not only two genders, woman
and man, but three or four: women, men, men-women and women-men.
This cultural construction of more than just two genders, the “cultural
expressions of multiple genders (that is, more than two) and the opportunity
for individuals to change gender roles and identities over the course of their
lifetimes,”11 is referred to as gender variance. Gender variance is a feature
not only of Indian cultures of the Americas, but can also be found, for example,
in India, Polynesia, Siberia, Africa, and Asia.12 In the following, gender
variance in North American Indian cultures will be discussed within its diverse
cultural contexts and within Native American constructions of gender and
sexual behavior as well as Native American world views.

BINARY VS MULTIPLE: CULTURAL

CONSTRUCTIONS OF SEX AND GENDER
Cultures differ widely in the ways they recognize and value ambiguity in
terms of sex and/or gender as expressed, for example, by intersexed individuals,
some of them being born with both male and female external genitalia, or by
gender blenders who exhibit “a complex mixture of characteristics from each
of the two standard gender roles.”13 Jacobs and Cromwell quote the example
of the East African Pokot where parents are expected to kill intersexed children
immediately; if intersexed children are not killed, they are socialized to fulfill
either a man’s or a woman’s culturally defined roles for their families. Still,
due to their dual sexual nature, they are excluded from certain activities
open to any Pokot individual who is not intersexed.14 Western culture likewise
values the existence of two sexes only, even though – as in Pokot culture – the
existence of another category (or more than just one other category) is

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recognized. In Western culture and in Pokot culture, gender and gender roles
are primarily determined by “the physical characteristics of the external
genitalia”.15 If an intersexed child is born in Western culture, the usual
procedure is to perform surgery in order to remove that child’s sexual
ambivalence, which is considered to be an anomaly rather than part of the
natural order of things. The child will be classified as either a girl or a boy by
his/her parents and by physicians, and be raised to fulfill the gender roles
culturally assigned to his or her surgically created, now unambiguous, sex.
It is within this binary system of sex and gender that transsexual or
transgender16 identities have to be viewed; as was stated by a female-to-male
transsexual interviewed by Kessler and McKenna, “There’re only two
alternatives in society. You’re either a man or a woman. If I don’t feel like a
woman then it’s got to be the other way.”17 There are no culturally defined
gender categories to fit individuals who feel ambivalent in terms of gender
and who basically would feel comfortable blending aspects of the masculine
and the feminine instead of being “a man” or “a woman”, even though this
is exactly what some people do, regardless of the lack of multiple gender
categories in our culture.18 It cannot be overlooked that gender roles in Western
society have become flexible to some degree, making a considerable amount
of variation and experimentation possible for the individual. Yet most people
will feel extremely uncomfortable when confronted with an individual who
is very ambiguous in terms of sex and/or gender, or who even identifies as
belonging to a third sex. Even transgendered individuals who decide not to
have surgery, and who may blend genders comfortably, such as some of the
female-to-males interviewed by Jason Cromwell,19 will usually say that they
are men or women, not something in between, and not something different
from both women and men.
Other cultures hold different views of sex and gender, creating multiple
genders and making gender-mixing statuses available to individuals who do
not behave according to the gender ascribed to them when they were born,
or who are born intersexed.20 There are varying numbers of genders in those
cultures around the world that not only recognize more than two genders,
but also institutionalize gender variance, valuing the fact that nature does
not necessarily lay out things in binary, opposing systems. The Chukchi of
Siberia recognize as many as seven gender categories apart from man and
woman.21 Many if not most North American Indian cultures, as mentioned
above, traditionally recognized, and in some cases still recognize, three or
four genders: woman, man, woman-man, and man-woman.22
Why cultures differ so much in the ways they view ambivalence in terms
of sex and/or gender is a question still waiting for an answer. Part of it,
however, certainly has to do with the religion and world view of a given
culture. In the Judaeo-Christian origin story (Genesis), the world is declared
completed after the seventh day by the Creator, and humans are created man
and woman. In Native American religions, Earth is usually not left in a perfect

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state after the act of creation. Most often, the world remains in a state of
transformation for a long time, the transformations resulting through the
deeds of supernatural beings, such as the so-called trickster or various culture
heroes. Also, everything that exists on Earth does not come in neat,
unambiguous categories. Transformation and what we may perceive of as
ambiguity are recurrent themes in Native American stories. Beings who
resemble humans yet manifest non-human characteristics are transformed
into animals, plants, and natural features. Beings are animals and humans at
the same time and yet none of both. What we may think to be inanimate
objects, such as rocks, are endowed with life, thought, and the ability to act.
Tricksters/culture heroes themselves are masters of transformation and
disguise, the best example being Coyote.
Within world views where things can not be taken at face value, and where
anything within the realms of the worldly and the supernatural may manifest
itself in two or more forms at the same time, the thought of a person combining
the masculine and the feminine becomes just another aspect of a sense of
ambiguity and transformation that is a central part of Native American
religions. Humans who manifest a combination of gender (or sexual)
characteristics will be accepted and not seldom welcomed as individuals who,
in one way or another, have been touched by the supernatural. In some Native
American cultures, there are even supernatural precedents of or role models
for women-men and men-women.23

GENDER VARIANCE IN NORTH AMERICAN

INDIAN CULTURES
When discussing gender variance in North American Indian cultures, it has
to be kept in mind that these cultures are widely diverse, ranging, for example,
from the hunter-gatherers of the Arctic to the sedentary farmers living in the
pueblos of the Southwest, and from the city-states of the Mississipean cultures
of the Southeast to the tiny tribes of California. It seems, however, that one
generalizing statement that can be rightfully made is that most of those widely
different cultures at least traditionally recognized more than two genders,
even though other generalizations pertaining to gender variance can certainly
be made as far as regions or culture areas are concerned where there are
more or less close cultural similarities between neighboring tribes.
Another generalization that can be made is that becoming a woman-man
or a man-woman is not a matter of sexual orientation but of occupational
preferences and personality traits. As has been mentioned above, gender
variance has long been interpreted as institutionalized homosexuality. Native
American informants, however, when asked how they recognize a child that
is not a boy or a girl, but of a different gender, will usually reply that such
children, from an early age, show a marked interest in work activities of the
“other” sex.24 Even though women-men and men-women often, but by no

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means always, eventually enter into sexual relationships with or marriages

to persons of the same physical sex (i.e. persons with the same genitals and
set of chromosomes as the woman-man or the man-woman), there still remains
the question of whether these relationships can be termed “homosexual.”
Within a system of multiple genders, a same-sex relationship is not necessarily,
at the same time, a same-gender relationship.
In defining sexual relationships, Native American cultures emphasize gender
instead of (physical) sex. Thus, in Native American cultures concepts of
homosexuality do exist, but they differ from the Western definition, and, due
to the fact that women-men/men-women and their same-sex partners are of
the same physical sex yet not of the same gender, their relationships do not
fall into Native American categories of homosexuality. A homosexual
relationship, within those categories, would be a relationship between two
women-men or two men-women, or, for example, a relationship between
two men or two women.25 Since anthropologists generally equated gender
variance with homosexuality, little is known about the existence of homosexual
relationships as defined in Western culture—between two individuals of both
the same sex and the same gender, between two women or two men—in
traditional Native American cultures.26

WOMEN-MEN
Expressions of gender variance vary as widely as do the Native American
cultures where they are found. In some cases, a woman-man or man-woman
would take up the gender role culturally assigned to the “other” sex completely,
such as traditionally among the Navajo:
The traditional nádleehé is a person who is the true nádleehé, but I
think only very few exist… A true [male, S.L.] nádleehé or traditional
nádleehé is somebody who is one hundred percent a woman, [who]
was born a man but is a woman in Navajo society—not in their sexual
preferences or sexual persuasion, but as an occupational [preference].27
In other cases, women-men and men-women will combine elements of both
the man’s and the woman’s gender role to varying degrees, as did the
Coahuiltecan women-men described by Cabeza de Vaca. Women-men
sometimes apparently participated in raids, warfare being part of the men’s
domain; this, however, is not contradictory to the women-men’s non-masculine
gender since especially in the Plains women would occasionally accompany
the men on raids, too.28 Some women-men lived kind of “double lives”, such
as an Osage warrior who, due to a vision, started to dress and speak as a
woman in his everyday life, even though he married and had children. Every
once in a while he would still go to war, and he continued to be successful as a
warrior, yet whenever he went on a raid “he discarded his women’s clothing and
dressed himself as a man.”29 Among some tribes of California, women-men

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adopted the culturally defined women’s role yet continued to spend time in
the sweat lodge, which was a place where the men spent their days together
and where women often were permitted only during ceremonies.30 Hidatsa
women-men—called miati—regularly joined the Holy Women Society, a
religious society restricted to women; still, in certain rites where women were
barred from participation, the miati, due to their “mixed” gender status,
acted as representatives of the female members of the Holy Women Society.31
Cross-dressing is frequently mentioned as part of women-men’s expression
of their gender status, even though it is not indispensable, especially in
situations of forced culture change when they may choose to wear men’s
clothes in order to escape the attention of white government agents or
missionaries (and, probably, anthropologists!). In some cases, women-men
also combine masculine and feminine garb.32
Whereas some sources just tersely state that women-men did or do
“women’s work”, others are more specific. In California, women-men joined
the women to collect seeds, and their domestic duties included cooking,
grinding acorns, and weaving baskets; they sewed, carried firewood, and
participated in educating the girls.33 Among the tribes of the Plateau region,
women-men and women collected berries and roots, wove baskets and mats,
and did the cooking.34 In the Northeast, women’s work done by women-
men includes cultivating corn, providing firewood, spinning, and weaving
blankets as well as items for personal adornment using opossum hair and
buffalo wool. They did all kinds of domestic work and raised children within
their extended families.35 Plains women-men likewise did the domestic chores
that were part of the woman’s role; the sources also describe them as
excelling in beadwork and quillwork. They collected wild turnips and wild
potatoes, processed the game brought in by the men, and did the cooking.36
Especially among the Plains tribes, women-men not seldom are said to do
all kinds of women’s work and women’s crafts better than the women
themselves, which is seen as a manifestation of special powers bestowed
upon them by those female supernatural beings who, usually by means of a
vision, cause them to take up the manners and occupations of a gender
separate from man and woman.37
Apart from doing women’s work, women-men in quite a number of tribes
are said to “act like women” or to “behave like members of the opposite
sex,” meaning that they also adopted manners, gestures, and ways of moving
or sitting exhibited by the women of their culture, but not by the men; for
example, they will talk in a voice that is closer to a woman’s than to a man’s.
Where there are specific figures of speech only used by men in a tribe’s language
and others only used by women, women-men will adopt the ways of talking
appropriate for women.38 Where men and women wear different hair-styles,
women-men will wear their hair as do the women. In some tribes where
especially women or girls at least traditionally got tattooed at a certain point
in their lives, women-men apparently got tattooed the same way. And among

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the Mohave of California, alyha (women-men) even imitated menstruation

and pregnancy.39
In a number of tribes, women-men are medicine people of one kind or
another. In some tribes, they will be viewed as being eligible for such a position
because of their special gender status; in others, especially in tribes where it is
predominantly women who are healers or “shamans,” they apparently take
up the role of a medicine person or “shaman” as another element of their
feminine role.40 There are also other areas in which women-men specialize or
where they have special roles. Among some Californian tribes, they had special
functions during funerals. Among some other tribes of California, the
Southeast, and the Plains, women-men accompanied the warriors on raids in
order to take care of the wounded. In several Plains tribes, there were special
tasks for women-men associated with the Sun Dance. Sometimes it was
considered good luck to be given a name by a woman-man. Due to their dual
nature, women-men were also often asked to be go-betweens for lovers or
couples.41
There are various ways for males to take up the gender and role of a
woman-man. In some cases, a family will decide to raise a boy like a girl,
such as among the Aleuts, the Kaniagmiut, the Californian Juaneño and
Luiseño, the Yuma, and in the pueblo of Zuni.42 In other tribes women-men
are said to be usually members of certain families or larger kinship groups.
Especially in the Plains, boys or men enter a gender apart from “man” and
“woman,” and take up feminine dress, manners, and pursuits, because of a
vision which is usually sent by some female supernatural being.43 Among
several tribes of California and Arizona, it is not visions but supernaturally
sent dreams that tell a boy to take up the ways of a woman-man.44 In some
cases there were also special “tests” or rituals a womanly youth had to undergo
in order to establish and legitimize his/her status.45 Oftentimes, taking up the
role and status of a woman-man was also just based on the individual’s own
choice, and he/she would be accepted for who he/she was.
Wherever multiple genders are constructed in Native American cultures,
there are terms referring to men, women, women-men, and men-women.
The terms referring to women-men and men-women usually translate in a
way that points to the combination of masculinity and femininity manifested
by such individuals. Even if a woman-man, for example, takes up the culturally
defined woman’s role more or less completely, he/she does not become a
woman, he/she is classified as a winkte, a lhamana, heemaneh, an elxa, or
whatever his/her tribe’s gender term is for someone who was born male but
chose to live a woman’s life partially or completely.

MEN-WOMEN
There are considerably less sources on men-women than on women-men,
and it is difficult to determine whether males in a woman’s role actually were

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much more common or whether anthropologists and other chroniclers of

North American Indian cultures just have not paid much attention to females
taking up the ways of men. On the other hand, however, there are examples
of women from quite a number of tribes who transcended the boundaries of
the culturally defined women’s role and who combined women’s and men’s
work without being reclassified in terms of gender. Due to the scope of this
contribution, only men-women classified as belonging to a separate gender
category will be discussed below.46
A culturally defined separate gender for females adopting men’s work,
garb, and manners existed—and, in some instances, still exists—in tribes
mostly in the western part of North America, such as California, western
Arizona, the Plateau and Great Basin areas, and the western arctic and
subarctic. Usually such females would be referred to by a term different from
the terms “man,” “woman,” and “woman-man.” The Mohave, for example,
called women-men alyha, men-women were called hwame; among the
Californian Yukli, women-men are referred to as i-wa-musp, “man-woman,”
or iwap-naip, “man-girl,” whereas the word for man-woman is musp-iwap-
naip, “woman man-girl.” Sometimes men-women and women-men would
be referred to by the same term, such as tw!inna ’ek among the Klamath or
tainna wa’ippe among the Shoshone.
Like some women-men, men-women—for example, among the
Atsugewi and Shasta of California—would sometimes not cross-dress,
and combined women’s and men’s work rather than adopt the man’s
role completely.47 In many instances, however, they apparently took up
masculine pursuits more or less completely. Whereas women-men often
not only did women’s work but also exhibited feminine manners of
speech, gestures, and so on, men-women are said to act or behave like
men. Like their male counterparts, they exhibit characteristics of a
special gender while still very young, preferring to play and hunt with
the boys and refusing to learn the work tasks culturally attributed to the
woman’s role. As adults, they would traditionally hunt like the men and,
wherever raiding was practiced, join the men on raids. If there were
different hair-styles worn by women and men in their tribe, men-women
would wear their hair men’s style. Sometimes they would be healers,
mostly in cultures where this profession was chosen by both women and
men, so it is difficult to say whether they became healers or “shamans”
because of their special gender status or because of those vocations’
association with the man’s role.
While women-men, in rare instances, imitated female physiological
functions like menstruation, men-women sometimes would deny those
functions—it was said of some men-women that they never menstruated,
that they had small or nonexistent breasts, or that they were muscular like
men.48 Men-women would usually enter into relationships or marriages with
women. Some of them, however, are said to have remained single (which

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does not mean, of course, that they may not have had lovers of either sex),
and some were married to men.
Among the Ingalik in Alaska, men-women would join the men in the
Kashim or men’s house. Cocopa warrhameh had their septum pierced, as did
boys in puberty, whereas girls got tattoos on their chin. Mohave hwame were
said to be excellent providers, and whenever their wives were menstruating
or pregnant, hwame would follow certain taboos appropriate for the husband
of a menstruating or pregnant wife.49
There are some references to females who were attributed a special status
in tribes that otherwise did not recognize a female gender variance category.
When a Kutenai woman, Ququnak patke, early in the last century returned
to her tribe after having spent a year with a white husband who worked as a
fur trader for the Northwest company, she claimed that she had been
transformed into a man. This was a kind of behavior alien to the Kutenai, at
least as far as females are concerned, and people in Ququnak patke’s
community, rather than accepting her as a man-woman, thought she had lost
her mind. Since she later on led a man’s life successfully, being a warrior, a
courier for white explorers and traders, a shaman, and a prophet, her tribe
finally came to accept her, yet her life story was apparently considered so
unusual that it was passed on for generations.50 The same holds true for
Running Eagle among the Piegan and Woman Chief among the Crow, two
women who were granted status and privileges otherwise reserved to men in
their tribes. In both tribes, as among the Kutenai, there existed genders relating
to women-men, but not to men-women. Both Running Eagle and Woman
Chief were granted special status first of all because they showed extreme
prowess in war. Woman Chiefs war deeds are said to have been so daring
that the men asked her to join them in the council. Running Eagle’s
participation in her first raid was so successful that she was given a man’s
name, being the only female in the history of her tribe who was ever honored
that way. Both these females, like Ququnak patke, are not “men-women”
within institutionalized female gender variance categories, but individuals
unique to their tribes.51
As in the case of women-men, dreams and visions sometimes prompted
and legitimized men-women’s choice to adopt the occupations and manners
of a man. Thus, most men-women took up a masculine role because it was
their own wish to do so or because they were instructed to do so by some
supernatural being. In some tribes, however, parents would sometimes raise
one of their daughters like a boy. This usually happened in regions where
subsistence largely relied on hunting, which is part of the men’s domain within
the sexual/gendered division of labor. If no boys were born into a family, or if
all boys in a family had died, there was a need to socialize a girl to be a
hunter, and to fulfill the role of a boy or man within the family in other
respects, too. Examples of this have been reported from the Canadian Ojibwa,
the Kaska of Alaska, and the Inuit or Eskimo.52

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CONCLUSIONS
Within the majority of North American Indian tribes, there existed—and, in
a number of instances, still exists—a cultural construction of more than just
two genders, allowing individuals to either take up the gender role of the
“other” sex completely, or to mix the culturally defined men’s and women’s
roles to varying degrees. Such individuals are not seen as “men” or “women,”
but as belonging to genders different from both “man” and “woman,”
characterized by a combination of the masculine and the feminine. This
combination can be expressed by an individual who is intersexed, combining
male and female physical characteristics; it can be expressed by an individual
who was born male but who, usually from an early age, adopts the work
activities, manners, speech patterns, and so on, culturally associated with
women and not with men. It can be expressed likewise by a person born
female who takes up the ways and occupations associated with the man’s
role within his/her respective culture. It can also be expressed by someone
who was born either male or female and who combines elements of both the
culturally defined woman’s and man’s roles. Since more than two genders
are culturally recognized and defined, the adoption of manners and work
activities of the other sex can not properly be termed a “gender reversal,”
which implies exchanging one gender for the other within a two-gender system.
Moreover, in many cases individuals grow up as members of a gender that is
neither “man” nor “woman” from a very early age, which means that they
never really “shift” from one gender to another.53 Due to the cultural
construction of more than two genders, Western concepts such as
“transsexual” or “homosexual” can also not be applied to Native American
women-men and men-women: a sexual relationship, for example, between
two individuals of the same sex, yet not of the same gender, is not necessarily
considered homosexual, and within a gender system that provides four or
more genders to accommodate individuals who do not feel comfortable with
the gender and gender role assigned to them by birth, the concept of
transsexualism, which was developed in a culture that only recognizes and
values two genders and two sexes, is not applicable.

NOTES
1 For references see Francisco Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind, London-New
York: Seminar Press, 1971, passim.
2 Ibid., passim.
3 Ibid., p. 221.
4 Theodor De Bry, Collectiones peregrinatorium in Indiam Occidentalem. America,
German edition, Frankfurt a.M.: Bry, 1590–1634, p. XXII.
5 Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, La relation y comentarios del gouernador Aluar
Nuñez Cabeca de vaca, de lo acaescido en las dos jornadas que hizo a las Indias,
Valladolid, 1555, p. 36.
6 Walter L.Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian

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 SABINE LANG

Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, pp. 201 ff; Sabine Lang, “Masculine Women,
Feminine Men: Gender Variance and the Creation of Gay Identities Among
Contemporary North American Indians,” paper presented at the conference “The
‘North American Berdache’ Revisited Empirically and Theoretically,” sponsored
by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Washington, DC,
17 November 1993.
7 Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes:
The Case of Cross-Gender Females,” in Signs, vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn 1984), pp.
1–42; Charles Callender and Lee M.Kochems, “The North American Berdache”,
in Current Anthropology, vol. 24, No. 4 (August-October 1983), pp. 443–70;
Beatrice Medicine, “‘Warrior Women:’ Sex-Role Alternatives for Plains Indian
Women,” in Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine (eds), The Hidden Half: Studies
of Plains Indian Women, Washington: University Press of America, 1983, pp.
267–80; Walter L.Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 233–51; Sabine Lang,
Manner als Frauen—Frauen als Manner: Geschlechtsrollenwechsel bei den
Indianern Nordamerikas, Hamburg: Wayasbah-Verlag, 1990, pp. 310–63; Harriet
Whitehead, “The Bow and the Burden-Strap: A New Look at Institutionalized
Homosexuality in Native America,” in Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead
(eds), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality,
London: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 80–115; Will Roscoe (ed.), Living
The Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988, passim.
8 Henry Angelino and Charles L.Shedd, “A Note on Berdache,” in American
Anthropologist, vol. 57, No. 1, Part I (February 1955), p. 121.
9 Terminology relating to Native American gender variance was one of the issues
discussed at two conferences titled “The ‘North American Berdache’ Revisited
Empirically and Theoretically,” recently sponsored by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research, and organized by Sue-Ellen Jacobs,
Wesley Thomas, and the author. Consensus was reached among the Native and
non-Native participants to replace the term “berdache,” for the time being, with
the term “two-spirit,” defined as “a term in current use by a number of self-
identified alternative sex and gendered Natives as a contested compromise to
move forward the debate in eliminating the culturally inappropriate usage of
‘berdache’ [sic].” The descriptive terms woman-man and man-woman were given
preference in this contribution, however, in order to avoid both the inappropriate
term “berdache” and pitfalls potentially inherent in the term “two-spirit”, which
was coined by urban gay and lesbian Native Americans in the 1980s.
10 For references and discussion see Lang, Manner als Frauen, pp. 31–4 and chapter
3.3, passim; Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 65 ff.
11 Sue-Ellen Jacobs and Jason Cromwell, “Visions and Revisions of Reality:
Reflections on Sex, Sexuality, Gender and Gender Variance”, in Journal of
Homosexuality, vol. 23, No. 4 (Summer 1992), p. 63.
12 Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: Wiley, 1976;
David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago and London,
University of Chicago Press, 1988; Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman:
The Hijras of India, Belmont: Wadsworth, 1990; Williams, The Spirit and the
Flesh, pp. 252–69.
13 Holly Devor, Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality, Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, p. vii.
14 Jacobs and Cromwell, “Visions and Revisions,” p. 49.
15 Ibid., p. 50.
16 Jason Cromwell, “Fearful Others: The Construction of Female Gender Variance,”
unpublished paper, 1992, submitted to Signs.

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17 Suzanne J.Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological

Approach, New York: Wiley, 1977, p. 112.
18 Devor, Gender Blending, is dealing with females who “blend” genders without
questioning their identity as women.
19 Jason Cromwell, “Not Female Berdache, Not Amazons, Not Cross-Gender
Females, Not Manlike Women: Locating Female-to-Male Transgendered People
Within Discourses on the Berdache Tradition,” paper presented at the conference
“The ‘North American Berdache’ Revisited Empirically and Theoretically,”
sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,
Washington, DC, 17 November 1993.
20 For discussion and examples see Jacobs and Cromwell, “Visions and Revisions.”
21 Ibid., p. 50 ff.
22 Callender and Kochems, “The North American Berdache;” Williams, The Spirit
and the Flesh; Lang, Manner als Frauen; Lang, “Masculine Women, Feminine
Men”; Wesley Thomas, “A Traditional Navajo’s Perspective on The Navajo
Cultural Construction of Gender,” paper presented at the conference “The ‘North
American Berdache’ Revisited Empirically and Theoretically”, sponsored by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Washington, DC,
November 17, 1993.
23 Sabine Lang, “Hermaphrodite Twins, Androgynous Gods: Reflections of Gender
Variance in North American Indian Stories,” paper presented at the 93rd annual
convention of the American Anthropological Association, Atlanta, Ga., 30
November-4 December 1994.
24 Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 154 ff. (Data on all aspects of gender variance have
been compiled systematically by the author in her dissertation, Männer als
Frauen—Frauen als Manner; in the following—not in order to strengthen the
author’s ego, but in order to avoid a notes section that is as long as the chapter
itself—rather than listing all the numerous bibliographical references whenever a
certain aspect of gender variance is found in a number of Native American cultures,
reference will be made to the author’s dissertation instead of primary sources
used in that dissertation.)
25 Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 65 ff., pp. 110 ff; Lang, Männer als Frauen,
pp. 241 ff. et passim; Lang, “Masculine Women, Feminine Men,” pp. 4 ff; Wesley
Thomas, “A Traditional Navajo’s Perspectives on the Cultural Construction of
Gender in the Navajo World,” taped lecture, Frankfurt, Germany, September
1993.
26 On lesbians in traditional Native American cultures, see Paula Gunn Allen,
“Lesbians in American Indian Culture,” in Conditions, vol. 7 (1981), pp. 67–87;
for examples of male and female homosexual relationships in the ethnographic
records, see Lang, Manner als Frauen, pp. 375–83.
27 Wesley Thomas, taped conversation with Sabine Lang, 25 April 1992.
28 Medicine, “Warrior Women.”
29 Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, Washington: 27th Annual
Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1911, p. 133.
30 Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 92–5.
31 Alfred Bowers, Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization (Bulletin 194, Bureau
of American Ethnology, 1965), pp. 324, 326, 330.
32 Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 71 ff; Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 123 ff.
33 Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 101–2.
34 Ibid., p. 102.
35 Ibid., pp. 104–7.
36 Ibid., pp. 108 ff.
37 Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 31–42; Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 289–96.

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38 Lang, Manner als Frauen, pp. 146–51.

39 George Devereux, “Homosexuality Among the Mohave Indians,” in Human
Biology, vol. 9 (1937), pp. 498–527.
40 Lang, Manner als Frauen, pp. 173–97.
41 Ibid., pp. 197–217.
42 Ibid., pp. 261–6.
43 Ibid., pp. 266–77; Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, pp. 31–43.
44 Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 276–7.
45 Ibid., pp. 282–7.
46 For females taking up masculine activities without being reclassified as “non-
women,” see, e.g., Medicine, “Warrior Women;” Ruth Landes, “The Ojibwa of
Canada,” in Margaret Mead (ed.), Cooperation and Competition among Primitive
People, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, pp. 87–126; Lang, Manner als Frauen,
pp. 317–22, 331–4; see also Oscar Lewis, “Manly-Hearted Women among the
Northern Piegan,” in American Anthropologist, vol. 43 (1941), pp. 173–87.
47 Lang, Manner als Frauen, p. 315; for females taking up the culturally defined
man’s role more or less completely, see ibid., pp. 322–56.
48 Ibid., pp. 335–6.
49 Devereux, “Homosexuality,” p. 515.
50 Claude E.Schaeffer, “The Kutenai Female Berdache,” in Ethnohistory, vol. 12,
No. 3 (Summer 1965), pp. 193–236.
51 Ibid., pp. 213 f, 227 ff.
52 Lang, Männer als Frauen, pp. 329–35.
53 For a discussion of terminology relating to gender variance see Kath Weston,
“Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology,” in Annual Review of
Anthropology, vol. 22, 1993, pp. 339–67.

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 13

THE PROCREATIVE AND

RITUAL CONSTITUTION OF
FEMALE, MALE, AND
OTHER
Androgynous beings in the cultural
imagination of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of
Papua New Guinea
Fitz john Porter Poole

“I am truly one of ‘Afek’s double-gendered daughters’ (afek’aan

maag’maak migiim mun), …and also walk on the ritual path of the
cassowaries… But the hidden secret of ‘androgyny’ (maag’maak
migiim’aan) is always inside ‘the living center of the life-force’ (mutuuk
kwan kuur finiik) of many things…connected to the ancestral
underworld…”
Gooraniin, paramount female elder of the Watiianmin clan
This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of some key images of androgyny
in the cultural imagination of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of the West Sepik
hinterland of Papua New Guinea.1 It represents, however, only a sketch of
certain features of a cultural map of a complex terrain of variously gendered
phenomena. The analytic focus of the endeavor is the articulation of some
central contours of androgynous images on a more general landscape of
constructions or representations of gender among Bimin-Kuskusmin. Indeed,
notions of the androgynous form a powerful, yet often tacit foundation of
Bimin-Kuskusmin understandings of the very possibilities of being gendered.
Images of androgyny are often an epistemological puzzle for societies in which
a cultural dichotomy of male and female seems altogether “natural” and
anchored to the very foundations of human “reality” in which a duality of
gender is firmly inscribed in culture, nature, and society. The prominent
cultural marking of images of androgyny among Bimin-Kuskusmin, therefore,
is of particular interest in a community that otherwise often draws rather
sharp, pervasive, and powerful dichotomous boundaries between female and

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male in myriad sociocultural contexts, and infuses those boundaries with

considerable ideological significance and sociopolitical force. Yet, afek’aan
maag’maak migiim men (“Afek’s double-gendered children”)—androgynous
images both human and non-human—are culturally elaborated in a number
of social contexts and are most significantly embedded in the Bimin-Kuskusmin
cultural imagination focused on notions of procreation and maturation and
in contexts of myth and ritual in which gender is formed and transformed.
The analytical ambitions of this chapter are founded upon a particular
theoretical framing of certain puzzles of gender. Gender, whether dual,
androgynous, or otherwise, invariably inflects fundamental senses of
personhood, 2 which pervade any “culturally constituted behavioral
environment” and the diverse contexts of social action, experience, and
orientation that such an environment encompasses.3 Any particular image of
gender implicates only some facets of an always complex and often subtle
repertoire of cultural ideas arranged and rearranged in contextually instantiated
representations or schemas, embedded in social “force fields” of varying
ideological composition, and manifested in discursive configurations that are
held together in tension not only with other and intertwined dimensions of
identity,4 but also with other recognized possibilities of gender enabled in
different cultural arrangements and social crystallizations.5 Gender is indeed a
combinatoire of profound, multifaceted, polysemic, and often elusive
complexity—neither monolithic, nor fixed, nor stable, and immutable.6 Thus,
constructs of gender, constituted through cultural representations or schemas
in their social instantiations, are complex, polyvalent signifiers without a singular,
inevitable, and essential link to a fixed referent. Particular gender constructions
become momentarily crystallized in their contexts of social embeddedness, only
to be disarticulated and rearticulated in kaleidoscopic patterns as they are
refracted through the lenses of new discursive figurations of different cultural
images under other social circumstances. They are constantly and intricately
reworked, sometimes subtly and at other times dramatically, as they are
culturally enunciated in fluid social fields of multiple and changing meanings,
in arrangements that tacitly exhibit variability in kinds and degrees of
connection, and in shifting contexts in which they are variously being put into
social play, tentatively or forcefully, in community life.
Certain configurations of gender, however, may be privileged in the senses
that they come to be constituted through, articulated with, legitimating of,
and encased in dominant ideologies; enshrined in prominent, powerful, and
pervasive stereotypes; and deployed in centrally institutionalized or otherwise
significantly marked arenas of social action. Yet, these ideologically,
stereotypically, and institutionally marked models of gender, although often
deeply embedded and strongly sanctioned in many realms of social life, are
sometimes personally oppressive and problematic, admit imaginable cultural
alternatives, and, thus, are not always beyond debate and challenge.
However the resources and constraints of gender categories may be

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negotiated through the contestations and resistances of turbulent historical

moments of socio-cultural conflict, none the less, they are also—and
always—negotiated in the more quiescent ebb and flow of everyday social
life as persons navigate the courses of their ever-gendered lives in the currents
of their community experiences. The multifaceted, open-textured characters
of gender constructs and their discursive or imaginative possibilities,
articulated through cultural frameworks within cultural horizons and, thus,
imaginatively constrained within any sociocultural world, are constantly in
play, tenuously qualifying, inflecting, or displacing (or, occasionally, more
radically revisioning) the momentarily (or, sometimes, more stably and
enduring) ordained forms of gender imagery through the recognition of
divergent, discordant images of gender.
At the forefront of these dominant ideologies, stereotypes, and arenas,
however, there is often some central epistemological assumption that the very
foundations of gender difference involve a “natural” dual classification of
male and female, although the organization of that duality may vary
considerably in terms of its foci and contours, its boundaries and
encompassments, and its trajectories of significant contrast and connection.
This dichotomous framework tends to give shape not only to local, but also
to analytical, understandings of gender. Indeed, the problems of the
preeminence of dichotomies pervade theories of gender in two interrelated
ways. On the one hand, it is generally recognized that cultural concepts of
gender are variably articulated with some cultural reckoning of “biological”
sex dimorphism as their “natural” foundation,7 and an elaborate edifice of
other “natural” gender differences—moral, psychological, or social—is
culturally built upon, or inferred from, that foundation. Gender images that
deviate from that foundational “logic” are often deemed anomalous or
pathological or are experientially distanced as a genre of self-conscious cultural
fantasy, illusion, or trope. On the other hand, it is often implied that this first
and foundational “natural” binary contrast renders sensible a theoretical
program of analytic dichotomies which are more or less assumed to be entailed
by and, thus, to follow from the form of the first contrast: natural/cultural;
domestic/public; reproductive/productive; and subordinate/superordinate; as
well as distinctions between women’s and men’s modes of consciousness and
feeling and motivation, moralities, relationships, selves, spaces, styles, values,
and so on.8 Yet, the posited rigidities and stabilities of such dichotomies of
gender, both local and theoretical, have often proved to rest on unwarranted,
simplistic assumptions, and have repeatedly failed to illuminate many of the
differently or, indeed, less structured complexities of the sociocultural forms,
foci, and forces of gender.9
In the backgrounds and at the margins of these privileged ideologies,
stereotypes, and arenas are, nevertheless, other figurations of gender, often
submerged, tacit, cast in metaphoric discourse, and manifested in such specially
bracketed contexts as myth and ritual, which bring into relief, illuminate,

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 FITZ JOHN PORTER POOLE

transform, permute, transcend, blur, blend, bend, bridge, unite, or otherwise

qualify, render ambiguous, challenge, defy, or subvert prevailing models of
gender through inversions, reversals, fusions, and confusions of the ordinary
and the ordained. The contours of the usual maps of the territories and
technologies of gender are disrupted, decentered, destabilized, disfigured,
disarticulated, diluted, and then redrawn. This imaginative cultural “work”
reveals other images, shapes, spaces, trajectories, articulations, and lines of
sociocultural force reconfiguring the centers, peripheries, and semantic fields
of the normal, normative, and ideologically privileged portraits of gender
that ordinarily prevail.
As Francette Pacteau maintains, gender implicates an unstable, fluid
“amalgam of signifiers,” and androgyny is often a particularly complex
semiotic configuration.10 Images of androgyne, androgyny, and androgynous
present a dilemma for the development of theories of gender, for they often
seem to confound normal, normative, and privileged dualities of female and
male that infuse much of community life in most societies.11 Yet, mythic,
ritual, and other images of androgynous phenomena—including images
embodied in community members and informing their experiences of
themselves—abound in diverse sociocultural settings.12 In a Western classical
tradition extending at least from Ovid and Plato, the androgyne appears as a
figure of primordial unity, created out of an integration of opposed forms
and forces, that has served artists and philosophers as a means of representing
a transcendental ideal or, in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, a “transcendental
signifier.”13 Indeed, in Euripides’ The Bacchae, the always ambiguous, ever
refigured persona of Dionysus—the embodiment of vitality—appears as both
woman-in-man or man-in-woman.14
Androgyny is an especially privileged trope of the romantic period, a
metaphoric vehicle of German idealist philosophies for envisioning the union
of subject and object and of material and spiritual realms.15 Like the schöne
Seele, a dominant theme in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, the
androgyne often functions as a figure of privileged language in which sign is
transparent to idea.16 More recently in this century, images of androgyny
have become especially elaborated in various genres of women’s fiction.17
Indeed, the androgynous imagery of women’s literature, the promotion of
androgyny as a social ideal by Carolyn G.Heilbrun,18 and the research by
Sandra L.Bem on the psychological and cultural significance of androgyny
and gender,19 have brought feminist interests to bear on the promises,
problems, and limitations of androgyny in understanding the cultural
imagination and social experience of gender.20
In this chapter, the idea of androgyny enfolds a variety of symbolic
mosaics constructed from varied local understandings of sex, gender, and
sexuality and their interrelationships, reconfiguring dimensions of gender
categories ordinarily anchored and framed in female-male dichotomies.
Thus, androgyny encompasses various dimensions of culturally constituted

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embodiment usually segregated in dichotomous gender reckonings, cultural

constructions of maleness and femaleness beyond bodily imagery, and
cultural visions of the erotic, of desire, and of heterosexual, homosexual,
bisexual, or asexual orientations. The notion of androgyny refers to myriad
and variably constituted cultural images of woman-in-man (female-in-male,
feminine-in-masculine), man-in-woman (male-in-female, masculine-in-
feminine), and other, more fluid, double-gendered arrangements, and yet
referentially it often remains anomalous, ambiguous, or even opaque. The
fluidity of androgynous images, nonetheless, enables them to provide diverse
and illuminating cultural mirrors in reflecting otherwise often unseen, tacit,
unacknowledged, or obscured aspects of more usual gender configurations.
In androgynous imagery, maleness (masculinity) and femaleness (femininity)
are disassembled, transmuted, and reinscribed in imaginative ways that
interweave, outreach, undercut, and sometimes overturn their ordinary
prescriptions of boundedness and distinctiveness, with various entailments
and consequences for the cultural reimagination of gender and its reinfusion
in varied social contexts and cultural experiences.
The notion of androgyny evokes a relaxation of the rigidities of gender
stereotypes, an opening of gender boundaries, a fusion or reconnection of
gender attributes, and, thus, an enablement of some genre of appropriation
by one gender of an “other.” Yet, particular cultural portraits of the
androgynous may reveal symmetry or asymmetry, balance or imbalance,
harmonious or tensive integration, or other structural characteristics which
suggest that such images commonly enfold and are shaped by more ordinary
distinctions of male (masculine) and female (feminine) variously recombined
or juxtaposed. Indeed, there is perhaps always some appropriation of the
androgynous by the dichotomous forms of ideologically marked and also
everyday gender reckoning, and, thus, images of androgyny often exhibit a
veiled dualistic cultural geometry of gender, a masked bifurcation of gender
difference recast and encased in tensive, fluid, or ambiguous singularity.21
Those enduring vestiges of duality, nevertheless, are commonly perpetuated
in the androgynous through bodily symbolism, which otherwise tends to
secure most fundamentally gender differentiation as “natural.” Thus,
androgyny is marked by a cultural obscuring of the very contrasts and
asymmetries that it ostensibly seems intended to decenter, deflect, suppress,
or overcome, creating a chiaroscuro of foregrounded and backgrounded
imagery. The consequent tension and ambiguity of the androgynous, often
met with ambivalence, nonetheless renders uncertain the referentiality of such
images vis-à-vis dual gender categories and opens an imaginative path toward
transcending such duality. In evoking a sense of some transcendence of
sociocultural encompassment and imprisonment by gendered dualities,
images of androgyny commonly imply some extraordinary power unleashed
in that transcendence—a power sometimes manifested in their prominence
as religious symbols.

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Fusions and confusions of everyday gender categories, therefore, may be

focused through the cultural imagination on a marked confounding of the
usual verities of ethnobiological understanding, sexual orientation, political
ideology, social action, or personal experience. Such imagery may articulate
cultural significata from dispersed loci on continua from the genderless and
asexual to the double-gendered and bisexual, whether marked as embodied
or disembodied, human or non-human, or real or illusory. Thus, androgyny
is often a precarious cultural construct which is simultaneously seen as
marginal, liminal, abnormal, and fantastical, and yet also as a reflection of
the normal and normative lineaments of gender articulations, boundaries, or
contrastive alignments mirrored back upon themselves but refracted through
a lens that disarticulates, unbounds, and disaligns their constitutive elements
in illuminating and provocative ways.
In consequence, androgynous images are not merely mediations of
dichotomous gender contrasts, for they are commonly bound up with some
form of cultural commentary on the inversions, reversals, inconsistencies,
contradictions, blurrings, and ambiguities that are perhaps always tacit
dimensions of the cultural imagination of the foci, contours, boundaries, and
possibilities of more ordinary representations of gender. By rendering the
tacit explicit, such imagery brings to the cultural foreground a wider and
richer range of gender possibilities than is ordinarily available for exploration
and contemplation. Narratives of the androgynous become cultural vehicles
for the imaginative construction of extraordinary connections of gender
attributes composed of disconnections and reconnections assembled from
dissections of the ordinary, ostensibly yielding new and differently gendered
phenomena. Indeed, the very idea of androgyny admits of myriad possibilities
of degendering, regendering, and double-gendering persons or instantiations
of personhood—some emphasizing images of wholeness, transcendence, and
undifferentiated being, and others illuminating recombinations of elements
of dual gender difference.
The multi-faceted, polysemic character of gender constructions, including
the androgynous, precludes its analytic capture by attending to only one set
of narratives, schemas, or instantiations, although ideological elevations of
particular images of gender do indeed often center on marked and privileged
genres of representations in certain contexts. In various myths, rituals, and
narrations of notions of procreation and maturation, Bimin-Kuskusmin images
of androgyny are central and highly elaborated, although often articulated in
bounded, esoteric contexts and forms of ritual knowledge and language in
their richest elaborations. Nevertheless, androgynous imagery, albeit less
elaborated, is infused in more ordinary, everyday contexts and experiences of
Bimin-Kuskusmin community life. At birth and at death, in sickness and in
health, throughout the rites of passage that punctuate the social life-cycle, in
myths that portray an enfolding sense of enduring “tradition”
(khaankharaak’khaan), and in the course of everyday life, diverse but often

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interconnected threads of cultural imaginations of androgyny are woven into

a fabric that ultimately envelops most Bimin-Kuskusmin understandings of
the esoteric “sacred meanings” (aiyem’khaa), fundamental “kernel meanings”
(dop aiyem), or everyday “underlying meanings” (miit maagamiin) which
illuminate the full cultural spectrum of the possibilities of being gendered.
Among Bimin-Kuskusmin, androgynous imagery, variably constituted in
sociocultural form and force, gives shape and significance to a broad range
of phenomena—rendering some as feminized but male or masculinized but
female, others as double-gendered without inflection, and yet others as
altogether ambiguous and unstable. Although many flora, fauna, geological
and meteorological phenomena, astronomical bodies, and spiritual forms are
seen to be variously androgynous, the dominant referents of the very idea of
“androgyny” (maag’maak migiim’aan) are two paramount ancestral figures—
Afek, with masculine attributes embodied in female form, and Yomnok, with
feminine qualities embedded in male substance—and the “totemic” creatures
with which they are most commonly associated—the cassowary and the
echidna or yom’saaganiim fruit bat—and their primordial and singular parent,
Gowpnuuk, often represented as a great monitor lizard.22
All phenomena identified as androgynous are marked as being not only
animate and sentient, but also significantly endowed with personhood or the
quality of finiik “spirit or life-force” and, thus, with judgmental capacity,
agential power, mystical potency, moral responsibility, and social
accountability. They are generally imagined to provide sacred linkages,
portrayed in myth and harnessed in ritual, with both the “ancestral
underworld” (kusem am) and the “time of the primordial ancestors” (anaak
khyrkhymin), in which the now “unseen images” (takhaak kiin’ba) of
androgyny could then be “understood” (khaim’khraak’khaanamin) more
clearly and completely. In the “time-places” (anaak aneng) of the primordial
era and of the ancestral underworld, all phenomena are powerfully
androgynous. Only with the coming of mortality and the retreat of the first
ancestors to the ancestral underworld did the gendered differentiation of the
realm of mortal humans and non-human phenomena begin to take place,
weakening human efficacy in many realms. Vestiges of this androgynous
legacy, however, still permeate the “center place” (abiip mutuuk) of all Bimin-
Kuskusmin and are embedded especially in ritual and myth as the foundation
of “sacred” (aiyem) power.
The mysterious Gowpnuuk, the primordial monitor lizard, emerged from
the roar and flash of thunder (male) and lightning (female) in the great storm
that created the sky, earth, and underworld and began to sculpt the landscape
with her/his gigantic tail. When the terrain was finally bounded by its great
rivers, Gowpnuuk retired to an enormous, deep cavern where he/she
impregnated herself/himself by thrusting her/his tail into two vaginas—one
in each buttock—cut open by flinging herself/himself on sharp stalagmites.
Then, he/she gave birth through a mysterious kind of fission in which her/his

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bodily substances dissolved and flowed together, congealing in two

androgynous shapes. From the left buttock emerged the “stone ancestral
spirits” (anuung kusem tuum), which retain the androgynous qualities of
Gowpnuuk and are represented by fossilized giant trilobites still found in
deep caves and enshrined in clan cult houses. From the right buttock appeared
Afek, embodied as a great cassowary, who was female but also endowed
with male anatomical attributes and mystical powers. She was to become the
great ancestress of all Bimin-Kuskusmin.
When Gowpnuuk had given birth, he/she emerged from the cave and drew
lightning to herself/himself, disappearing in flames and smoke, which was
borne by the winds to the east across the great Strickland Gorge. Then Afek
too left the cavern where she was formed and traveled throughout the land
giving parthenogenetic birth to significant fauna and flora and creating new
contours of the terrain. Once the center-place of Bimin-Kuskusmin territory
had taken shape, she ejaculated semen which she combined with her menstrual
blood to create Yomnok, embodied as a giant echidna or yom’saaganiim
fruit bat, who is identified as being at once her brother, son, and consort.
Yomnok was male but also endowed with female anatomical characteristics
and mystical capacities. Afek and Yomnok incestuously mated, and Afek
then gave birth to the immortal human founders and totemic ancestors, both
eventually female and male but at first androgynous, of all original patricians
of the Bimin-Kuskusmin. Afek then taught the human ancestors both ordinary
and esoteric secrets enabling the proper conduct of life, both domestically
and ritually, in the domain that she had created for them. With the advent of
a primordial dispute and the coming of mortality, however, Afek and Yomnok
began to differentiate the phenomena of the center-place into female and
male categories, leaving at first only a few androgynous forms as their sacred
legacy. They then departed for the ancestral underworld, but vowed eventually
to return their still androgynous lastborn to the center-place to reveal ritual
secrets then withheld from now mortal humans.23 She then left some additional
androgynous phenomena in the center-place, however, to enhance the efficacy
of ritual until that return.
The mythic and ritual invocations of Afek and Yomnok, narrated in the
sacred corpus of “afek myths” (afek sang aiyem) and sometimes accompanied
by ritualized hunting and sacrifices of cassowaries and echidnas or
yom’saaganiim fruit bats, evoke many powerful images of androgynous forms.
Such forms are revealed not only in the narrative portraits of myth and the
iconography of ritual displays, but also in esoteric genres of spirit possession
and trance associated with Afek and Yomnok and often focused on their
androgynous qualities.24 In these dissociated states, vivid “images” (takhaak)
of androgynous forms are commonly experienced and later recounted.25 Such
images frequently become the focus of special ritual divinations and mythic
interpretations to decipher their hidden realms of significance.26 Such
significance is usually believed to be bound up with the fertility or fecundity

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of not only humans, but also a variety of domestically and ritually important
fauna and flora. Indeed, numerous rites of fertility or fecundity ordinarily
focus elaborately on androgynous imagery—portrayed in myth, chant, and
prayer; evoked in ritually induced states of spirit possession or trance; enacted
by ritual performers as transvestites; embodied in human androgynes; and
encased in ritual icons of the androgynous.
Threaded through these myths, rituals, spirit possessions, trances, and other
vehicles of representations of androgyny, there are certain prominent images
that appear repeatedly and both constitute and enfold conceptualizations of
androgynous being. Among fauna, the cassowary and echidna or
yom’saaganiim fruit bat predominate as the most complex and powerful
images of the androgynous.27 Beyond these dominant symbols of androgyny,
however, are other semiotic configurations of androgynous significance.
Images of crystals, sheet lightning, rainbows, waterfalls, spirit paths, spider
webs, and phosphorus, all invoke the diffuse androgyny of the primordial
past, the ritualized present, and the enduring ancestral underworld, and cast
or capture reflections and shadows of androgynous images within themselves
or from beyond. The joining of sun (male) and moon (female) when an image
of the moon appears before sundown or in a solar eclipse, and of thunder
(male) and lightning (female) during storms, constitute the androgynous in
omens.28 The totemic qualities of the “wild red-mottled boar” (samiin
imok’maakhaan waam’aan),29 the diriim and duboor marsupials as siblings
incestuously mating,30 the venomous “androgynous centipede” (maag’maak
migiim’uur inaabuk) associated with Afek,31 the maag’kuurdaak larva,32 the
giant anung’amkyaak python, 33 the wild and never eaten ancestral
taam’maaginop taro (male) and kiir’maagubiik sweet potato (female),34 and
the wild kusem’am kandaak seaiir pandanus,35 all are representations of
powerful forms of androgyny both in mythic narrations and in ritual
performances and in the ancestral underworld. Although they are sometimes
objects of important sacrifices, they are ordinarily considered taboo vis-à-vis
any form of mundane human contact. Certain birds, portrayed as spirit
messengers from the ancestral underworld, are often believed to undergo
transformations from male to female as a sign of ancestral powers still
unfolding.36 The firaak, karoom, kasiim kiirang, kraang’en, and toyook birds
,
of paradise,37 the fuungen’en bowerbird,38 and the a’on kuuririip miiririip
ataan’bey night birds,39 are all among the most prominent exemplars of such
gender transformations. As transient inhabitants of the “sky world” (abiir
am), an androgynous realm mirroring aspects of the ancestral underworld,
these birds are constantly being reinvested with androgynous power as they
soar above the forests of the center-place.
These diverse androgynous images, portraying different facets of
androgyny, are particularly evident in two prominent genres of rituals—rites
of divination and curing at the occurrence of certain kinds of illnesses, and
rites of passage that punctuate the social life-cycle from birth to death.

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Within these ritual performances and the mythic narrations that they
encompass are vivid images of the androgynous portraying many of the
phenomena noted above, either framed in the special genres of mythic
discourse, or assembled in the distinctive iconographies of ritual displays, or
manifested in both. Mythic narrative portrayals of the androgynous often
seem to evoke the iconographic imagery of androgyny through non-iconic
discursive signs and, thus, to press against the limits of language. Thus, ritual
representations of the androgynous commonly interweave the iconography
of artifactual ritual displays and the semiotic assemblages of mythic
narrations, orchestrating a complex cross-referentiality of both
representational forms in synchronizing image and word in the distinctive
tropes of ritual speech. Indeed, image and sound envelop these rituals, which
are ordinarily staged at dawn or dusk and during storms when there is a
conjunction of the androgynous imagery of thunder and lightning—the voice
and torch of Afek—and sun and moon—the twins of Gowpnuuk.
These two kinds of ritual are intricately interwoven with ideas about the
procreative formation and maturational transformation of bodily substances
and processes that enfold capacities to think, feel, judge, be motivated, and
act. Bimin-Kuskusmin ideas of procreation and maturation are remarkably
elaborate.40 In brief, any female or male body is marked by male and female
anatomical elements. Female elements are deemed soft and external, connected
to bodily apertures of ingestion and excretion, prone to the weakening effects
of illness, and first to decompose at death. Male dimensions of anatomy are
said to be hard and internal, connected to bodily passages of the senses and
of sexual fluids, prone to the strengthening effects of ritual action, and last to
decay at death.41 Each “anatomy” has different strengths and vulnerabilities.
Located within the female anatomy is the kkaapkhabuurien “spirit or life-
force,” which represents the more idiosyncratic self, takes the imprint of all
life experiences, and dissolves at death. Centered in the heart of the male
anatomy is the finiik “spirit or life-force,” which is portrayed as the more
social person and site of significant cognitive-emotional and agential capacities,
absorbs ordained experiences of ritual socialization, and is transformed into
an “ancestral spirit” (kiir’kusem) at death. In being transformed into a
kiir’kusem, the finiik becomes highly androgynous and remains so when,
reappearing as a finiik, it enters a woman’s womb through a man’s semen to
animate a foetus at the moment of conception and then acquires varying
gendered forms and attachments from prenatal through post-natal
development until it is again transformed at death into an image of the
androgynous. At birth, during prenatal development, in illness, in dreams
and trances and spirit possessions, and at death, when the finiik is unstable in
or dislodged from its corporeal abode, it becomes variously but profoundly
androgynous; yet it also retains varying vestiges of this androgyny when it is
properly embodied. The states of a person, ever reconfigured through
“natural” and ritual maturation, are complexly bound up with varying

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balances and imbalances of khaapkhabuurien and finiik, with their

implications for the embodied constitution of the female, male, and
androgynous in any person.
Those illnesses known as maag’uuraniin maafagaarinuuk are distinguished
by their tendency to weaken or transform male or female anatomical structures
or processes and, thus, to create an imbalance in bodily constitution and in the
always delicate relation between finiik and khaapkabuurien. The etiology of
this class of illnesses is usually attributed to some breach of either food taboos
or other ritual prohibitions that are intended to ensure the gendered stability of
bodily substances and their interrelationships. Persons believed to be afflicted
by such illnesses are subjected to rites of divination and curing that are intended
to fathom and remedy some improper alignment of a distinctively male or
female and nonetheless simultaneously androgynous state of being. Divinations
attend to both “reflections” (fom takhaak) and “shadows” (ataan takhaak) of
the person, for it is within such images that the androgynous constitution of a
person is revealed in subtle signs. Curing involves a variety of bodily intrusions
in the forms of ritually prescribed substances to be ingested and sometimes of
ritual surgery. Because male and female illnesses of this genre affect both
correspondingly and differently gendered anatomical sites, their ritual remedy
requires both male and female and also androgynous diviner-curers, who
supplicate ancestral spirits of androgynous identity. Among these illnesses, the
most dramatic instance of androgynous imbalance is that of male suicide.42
Indeed, suicide marks a gender reversal in which the subordinate gender of
one’s asymmetrically double-gendered being comes to overwhelm the normally
dominant gender, with fatal consequences as the khaapkhabuurien “spirit or
life-force” becomes dangerously ascendant. Men, more essentially formed by
their gendered particularity as male, are more prone to the most dire
consequences of this reversal.
Rites of passage mark significant sociocultural transitions throughout the
life-cycle, and each maturational transition ritually marked represents a
realignment of the shifting balances of male and female substances in the
bodies of both females and males. From conception to birth, the androgynous
foetus constantly oscillates between female and male shapes until it comes to
rest at the moment of birth near one gendered pole. Birth is marked by
elaborate rites of couvade in which mothers and fathers take on opposite
gender attributes to ensure safe passage of their still androgynous child.43
When unnatural twins are born and the “non-human” twin is divined and
strangled, the surviving human twin is said to be forever marked
androgynously by the gender of the deceased twin, who is assumed to have
been either of opposite gender or itself androgynous. From early infancy to
the eve of middle childhood, girls and boys, seen as female- or male-inflected
androgynes, undergo together rites of passage to strengthen their finiik, ensure
against the ravages of high infant mortality, and prepare them for in-
corporation into community life as proper and, eventually, as distinctively

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gendered actors.44 Thereafter, the rites of males and females diverge in their
emphases on contrastively gendered being and in the gender-segregated realms
in which those rites occur, and androgynous characteristics become
increasingly veiled and manifested only through divination in the inner recesses
of body and spirit. For most women, female rites culminate in “female
initiation” (waneng men’faagumiin) in late adolescence at first menses,
enabling fertility, menstruation, and reproduction, and legitimating
marriageability. For all males, the am yaoor cycle of male initiation begins at
nine to twelve years of age, consists of ten stages, and continues for a decade.
For the first nine stages, beginning with the initial ais am rite, the ritual
emphasis is on expunging female and enhancing male attributes of the initiates
through myriad intense and ordeal-ridden experiences.45
In the final en am stage of initiation, however, an unanticipated revelation
of enduring androgyny unfolds to initiates who have experienced almost a
decade of apparently becoming ever more male and masculine. In this last
rite of initiation, they suddenly encounter a profound sense of powerful
and persisting androgynous inner being within their otherwise elaborately
masculinized bodies. Through myriad articulations of female (feminine)
and male (masculine) in mythic narratives and ritual displays, in
complementary acts of male and female initiators, and in their own acts of
rubbing menstrual blood from the residues of menstrual huts and semen
from ritual masturbation on their bodies, of consuming female and male
substances, of adorning themselves in dress and bodily decoration with
transvestite imagery, of inhabiting special huts for menstrual and birth
seclusion, and of simulating both female and male acts of copulation, the
initiates are forced to engage experientially the androgyny encased in the
bodies of male warriors—their own. Myths of Afek and Yomnok and their
androgynous characteristics are richly interwoven throughout this ritual
performance. Personal narratives and dream reports, however, reveal a
profoundly subjective sense, often marked by high ambivalence and some
anxiety, in the initiates of being androgynous.
During these experiences of the androgynous, the ritual structure of the en
am itself comes to be called the “men’s womb” (men am kunum), and each of
the initiates is ultimately enclosed in a large baatbat aiyem ritual netbag in a
foetal position, to be ritually reborn as a masculinized androgyne known as
kunum maag’maak migiim imok (“man male double-gendered”). Indeed,
various cultural arrangements of netbag as womb are distributed throughout
rites of passage, divination, and curing and always significantly mark the
androgynous qualities of whatever is encompassed by them.46 Thus, in the
rites of death, when the finiik of the deceased ascends to karst holes at the
summits of mountains to become transformed into an ancestral kiir’kusem
and descend into the ancestral underworld, the corpse is enclosed in a sacred
netbag on the burial platform in the high forest; and the bones are later carried
to clan cult houses and ossuary caves in other ritual netbags. In dying and in

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death, the transition to androgyny, already prefigured in procreative substance,

maturation, myth, ritual, and embodiment from conception to rebirth, is
symbolized in the image of a womb—male substance encased in a female
body, made fertile by female and male substances, animated by androgynous
ancestral spirits who will reclaim its issue at death, and cosmologically
represented as Afek’s mantle, which is portrayed as an enormous netbag
enveloping and shaping sky world, center-place, and underworld.
In the background or foreground of rites of divination, curing, and passage
that are bound up with the significant androgynous balances of persons are
two living ritual figures of special importance—the “paramount female ritual
elder” (waneng aiyem ser) and the “male pseudo-hermaphrodite”
(yomnok’min aiyem).47 Both are distinctively androgynous and are identified
as the living descendants of Afek and Yomnok, respectively. Paramount female
ritual elders are old, post-menopausal women, two of whom are selected to
undergo a special rite of installation as ritual elders of their clan. In this rite,
their androgyny is marked by a ritual veiling of their marriages and children,
ritual scarification usually associated with male initiation, and ritual
prestations of taro (male) and sweet potato (female) gardens, bows (male)
and digging sticks (female), male and female bones in female and male netbags,
and other assemblages of androgynous imagery. In ritual arenas, they are
commonly adorned either as transvestites or in a non-gendered fashion,
obscuring what lies embodied beneath as the gendered anatomical surface of
their ultimately androgynous identity remains visible as a cloak over their
hidden androgyny. When the imagery of the androgynous comes to the
foreground in diverse rituals, they become key ritual actors, enabled in their
very being to constitute and to manipulate efficaciously various extraordinary
and inherently dangerous linkages of female and male substances.
In turn, the yomnok’min aiyem are actually male pseudo-hermaphrodites,
who are seen to be born with labial folds, reared as girls, and then recognized
as being descendants of Yomnok when distinctive but diminutive male genitalia
descend into view on the eve of puberty.48 In this remarkable event, it is
believed that normal prenatal oscillations of foetal gender have mysteriously
persisted well into post-natal development as a sacred mark of special and
auspicious ancestral destiny. Once recognized, the yomnok’min aiyem is
deemed a powerful ritual repository of fertility, is specially initiated, is never
allowed to marry or engage in sexual intercourse, and is adorned with special
ritual markings distinctive of his status.49 The yomnok’min aiyem becomes a
celibate and solitary embodiment of androgyny. He wears both male and
female adornment in dress and body pigment, bears some of the ritual scars
of both female and male initiation, and is denied the phallocrypt that all men
wear at the inception of male initiation. Instead, his genitalia are covered
only with a flap of bark cloth in everyday activities and are exposed and
encircled by red parrot feathers during ritual performances. Unlike the
defective monorchid male strangled at birth, the yomnok’min aiyem becomes

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a revered ritual figure and exemplar and embodiment of androgynous power.

Together, the waneng aiyem ser and the yomnok’min aiyem, adorned with
cassowary plumes and echidna quills or dried fruit bat penises and embodying
the images of Afek and Yomnok, respectively, become ritual encasements of
androgynous fertility or fecundity and central participants in male and female
rites of divination, curing, and passage whenever articulations of both female
and male phenomena are the focus of ritual. Often abroad in the public arenas
of community life, they are also the living, embodied representations of
androgyny as a visible, tangible, and experiential reality for most Bimin-
Kuskusmin.50 Their own subjective experiences of their culturally marked
androgynous status in a community in which a duality of gender shapes most
realms of social life, however, are often fraught with deep ambivalence and
uncertain senses of “shame” (fiitom).
Also in the background of such rites are other androgynous figures that
are seen either to erode or to enhance ritual efficacy. At the negative pole are
tamam witches, anengmotiir forest spirits, and the male gabruurian and female
kamdaak waneng trickster figures. The ferocious tamam witch is a perversely
masculinized and exaggeratedly feminized figure who constantly exudes
polluting menstrual blood, copulates incessantly but is barren, and voraciously
destroys male substance in both women and men.51 The anengmotiir forest
spirits are truly double-gendered and attack both the rituals and the substances
that serve to enhance the dominant gender of any persons, causing their illness
or death. The gabruurian and kamdaak waneng tricksters are both complexly
androgynous and possessed of exaggerated male and female genitalia,
respectively.52 In myth, their penises and clitorides are often subjected to
various forms of castration and regeneration, for they are portrayed as
surviving terrible genital mutilations only to emerge as differently double-
gendered. They disrupt rituals and contaminate persons through promiscuous
dispersal of their polluting and infertile sexual fluids on and in the bodies of
persons of either gender, while draining fertile sexual fluids from the bodies
of persons opposite in gender to their dominant gender. As wanderers, they
are constantly gathering, incorporating, and transforming various gendered
phenomena into their ever more complex androgynous constitution. Witches,
forest spirits, and tricksters are all fiercely cannibalistic, devouring the gendered
substance of the dominant gender of any person, thereby weakening or
destroying them.53 Among these figures, anuses, mouths, vaginas, penile
apertures, and ritually formed openings may become orifices at once for
ingestion, excretion, and sexual intercourse.
At the positive pole are biis and kiimon sorcerers, kuutang utaang forest
spirits, and kiir’kusem ancestral spirits. The biis and kiimon sorcerers are
often male or female ritual elders who powerfully harness the ritual capacities
of the opposite gender to guard against intrusions of persons or spirits
disruptive of particular gender configurations into ritual arenas focused on
dichotomous gender alignments, and also to ensure the efficacy of male or

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female rituals by enhancing the power of androgynous images. The kuutang

utaang forest spirits are profoundly androgynous and inhabit ritual displays
of androgynous character, infusing “androgynous spirit substance” (diim kwan
maag’maak migiim’utaang) into such ritual assemblages and enhancing their
efficacy. The kiir’kusem ancestral spirits, representing the dead, unborn, and
primordial in androgynous form, are summoned through sacrifices to dwell
in human and other skulls during ritual performances in order to guide the
performance, enhance its efficacy, and protect the sanctity of its artifacts,
discourses, acts, and participants. Through their powerful androgynous
character, they are able to ensure not only that ancestral embodiments of
androgyny become harnessed as an integral part of rituals, but also, in part,
that ordinarily polluting contact between male and female substances does
not erode the efficacy of ritual performances.
An exploration of the forms and contexts of the androgynous enables
some understanding of the circumstances in which social and personal
access to this elaborated focus of the Bimin-Kuskusmin cultural
imagination is activated and anchored in various realms of community life.
This brief ethnographic sketch has only touched upon the cultural
complexity and subtlety of Bimin-Kuskusmin ideas of androgyny. Indeed,
the Bimin-Kuskusmin cultural imagination of the androgynous is rich,
varied, and variably infused in varying phenomena and realms of social
life. Although the most elaborated visions of androgyny are constituted as
esoteric knowledge and in ritual contexts largely restricted to aged elders,
androgynous images of variable construction, elaboration, and intensity
are also diffused throughout the personal trajectories of experiences of the
social life-cycle enclosed within the cultural horizons of the center-place of
the Bimin-Kuskusmin world. From early childhood to the threshold of
death, androgyny is marked not only as an everpresent feature of
community life and a counterpoint to pervasive gender contrasts, but also
as a part of one’s experience of being a person and a self that is etched into
one’s body and consciousness through procreation, maturation, and ritual.
Beyond those calendrically regular but nonetheless occasional ritual
moments when the cultural significance of the androgynous is brought into
the social foreground, however, the notion and image of the androgynous
remains a more or less constant background presence, appearing in
illuminated form now and again, fleetingly, and ambiguously, to alter
suddenly one’s sense of the forms, hues, and textures of gender, and then
recedes once more—leaving the landscape as before but imaginatively
remapped with memories of possibilities of gendered difference. As
enculturation proceeds, the recognition becomes enlivened and then
enriched in sensing that beneath, behind, or within the appearances of the
duality of gender so embellished in the discourse of the dominant
ideologies giving powerful shape to the contexts of everyday life, there is
another, different, but also powerful, gendered reality embedded in the

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cultural idea, social instantiation, mythic and ritual signification, and

personal experience of maag’maak migiim’aan (“androgyny”).
In the swirling imagery of Bimin-Kuskusmin androgyny, there is an
oscillation not only between singularity and duality of gender, but also among
embodied reality, iconic artifact, discursive construction, and cultural fantasy.
Androgynous images may be organized as fragile, tensive integrations of male
and female that nonetheless seem to remain forever partially segregated
internal to the images themselves. A centripetal momentum toward
androgynous union is often somewhat countered by a centrifugal return to
duality. Gender boundaries tend to emerge at the margins of narrative efforts
to suppress or transcend them and to reappear in the wake of narrative action,
sometimes deflecting narrative images back into their dualistic folds until
renewed discursive momentum regains ground and again, but only
momentarily, moves beyond them—only to be recaptured once again. Dual
gendered “reality” seems always threatening to close around androgynous
figures. The bounded indivisibility of Apollonian androgyny is rigid, removed,
and alien to Bimin-Kuskusmin imagery, in contrast to the fluid, oscillatory,
or transformative possibilities of a more Dionysian image of the androgynous.
Among Bimin-Kuskusmin, the androgynous can be only partially
(represented in a singular image, but neither arrested nor captured therein.
Its implicit fluidity overflows its particular overt images, transforming its
shapes beyond the pace and possibility of articulations of its representational
forms. Thus, most Bimin-Kuskusmin representations of androgyny are neither
complete nor autonomous, but interconnected and embedded in complex
symbolic mosaics of differently constituted and inflected images of both the
androgynous and the dual-gendered. In momentary isolation, therefore, the
androgynous seems to require a veiling that enhances ambiguity, for an
unveiling often brings some reversion toward either male or female poles of
gender dualism. In mosaics of images, however, the multifaceted character of
androgyny is better illuminated in an unfolding representational process
loosely interconnecting arrays of images in flux and without a stable center
or, perhaps, even a clear distinction between reality and illusion. As some
Bimin-Kuskusmin elders note, androgyny is only dimly seen at the nexus of
myriad reflections and refractions of a ritual crystal, in diverse images fleetingly
“matted together” (duunduun). The facets of androgyny presented in this
chapter are interwoven in mosaics in this way. In Bimin-Kuskusmin experience,
nonetheless, one begins and ends in androgynous states, being formed from
and then transformed into androgynous kiir’kusem, yet androgyny inflects
one’s femaleness or maleness throughout the intervening course of the life-
cycle. After all, Bimin-Kuskusmin still view themselves as the descendants of
Afek and Yomnok, who inhabit the center-place of their mountainous fastness
at the elevated hub of central New Guinea, and that vision deeply marks
their sense of who they are in that remote realm of montane valleys. As some
myths and rituals claim, they must be sensitive to the forest tracks of the

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cassowary, of the presence of Afek in their domain. In their cultural

imaginations, social institutions, and personal experiences, the complex
imagery of androgyny becomes a powerful, constant, and enduring inflection
of the more apparent but illusory dualities of gender ordinarily inscribed in
bodies, persons, and selves.

NOTES
1 The data presented here are drawn from field research among Bimin-Kuskusmin
between 1971 and 1973, and with the generous support of the National Institutes
of Health, the Cornell University/Ford Foundation Humanities and Social Sciences
Program, and the Center for South Pacific Studies of the University of California,
Santa Cruz.
2 As Elspeth Probyn notes for selfhood, personhood is always gendered. See Elspeth
Probyn, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, London:
Routledge, 1993, p. 2. On the concept of social “personhood,” see Grace G.
Harris, “Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis,”
in American Anthropologist, vol. 91, No. 3 (September 1989), pp. 602–9.
3 On the idea of a “culturally constituted behavioral environment,” see A. living
Hallowell, Culture and Experience, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1955, pp. 86–91.
4 A proper appreciation of the processes of the varied cultural constitutions of
gender must avoid a reification of gender difference or similarity as encased in
bounded, closed structures to the exclusion of other, interwoven facets of other
schemas of identity with which gender configurations interact and intersect (e.g.
age, class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and so on).
5 In turn, it must not be assumed that cultural constructions of gender are inevitably
framed or shaped by a singular, dichotomous “logic” of mutual exclusivity which
contrastively structures dual categories of female (feminine) and male (masculine),
relegating all images not unambiguously subsumed by these categories to be
peripheral, superficial, fictional, fantastical, or otherwise non-essential aspects of
gender reckoning.
6 By analogy, gender constructions may be imagined as multiple layers of variably
etched transparencies aligned in particular situations so as to reveal multi-
dimensional patterns of lines and shapes that constitute culturally particular,
socially contextualized figurations of gendered possibilities articulated with other
dimensions of situated identities, inscribing shifting patterns in fluid, open-textured
sets of potential gender arrangements. On the notion of “open-textured,” see
Friedrich Waismann, How I See Philosophy, edited by Rom Harré, Garden City:
Anchor Books, 1968, p. 199.
7 As Judith Butler suggests, the apparent facticity of sex difference, as it enters
into the cultural construction of gender categories as their “natural” foundation,
may itself be culturally constituted in significant ways. Biological sex
dimorphism, however it may constrain the cultural variability of gender
categories, is not simply mirrored in cultural configurations of sex difference,
and, thus, sex and gender become difficult to distinguish at some levels of
analysis. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 7–9.
8 As Suzanne J.Kessler and Wendy McKenna observe, cultural scripts of gender
become embedded in dichotomous frames and, through those dualistic schemas,
come to be connected to myriad other characteristics of the gender so framed. See

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Suzanne J.Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological

Approach, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 161–2.
9 See Sylvia J.Yanagisako and Jane F.Collier, “Toward a Unified Analysis of Kinship
and Gender,” in Jane F.Collier and Sylvia J.Yanagisako (eds), Gender and Kinship:
Essays Toward a Unified Analysis, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987, pp.
16–29.
10 See Francette Pacteau, “The Impossible Referent: Representations of the
Androgyne,” in Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations
of Fantasy, New York: Methuen, 1986, p. 80.
11 Images of androgyny in this chapter encompass images of hermaphrodites,
transsexuals, transvestites, and forms of “gender blending” (in Holly Devor’s
phrase). A.J.L.Busst, Holly Devor, and Robert J.Stoller variously note the analytic
difficulties in distinguishing among these terms. Indeed, such distinctions often
seem arbitrary, inconsistent, contradictory, overlapping, and of little analytic utility
when the focus of concern is cultural images of androgyny. See A.J.L.Busst, “The
Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Romantic
Mythologies, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967, pp. 1–95; Holly Devor, Gender
Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989; and Robert J.Stoller, Presentations of Gender, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985, p. 19.
12 Beyond institutionalized homosexuality and transvestism, anthropology has rarely
explored the phenomena of androgyny. For general views of cross-cultural
variation in androgynous imagery, see Hermann Baumann, Das doppelte
Geschlecht: Ethnologische Studien zur Bisexualität in Ritus und Mythos, Berlin:
Dietrich Reimer, 1955, pp. 129–249; Charles Callender and Lee M.Kochems,
“Men and Not-Men: Male Gender-Mixing Statuses and Homosexuality,” in Evelyn
Blackwood (ed.), The Many Faces of Homosexuality, New York: Harrington
Park Press, 1986, pp. 165–78; Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne:
Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, trans. J.M.Cohen, New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1965, pp. 78–124; and Richard Green, “Mythological, Historical and
Cross-Cultural Aspects of Transsexualism,” in Richard Green and John Money
(eds), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1969, pp. 13–22. Beyond ethnographic studies of androgynous beings and
images in a number of sociocultural contexts, special attention has been devoted
to berdache phenomena in aboriginal North America. See Evelyn Blackwood,
“Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-
Gender Females,” in Signs, vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn 1984), pp. 27–42; Sabine
Lang, Manner als Frauen—Frauen als Manner: Gescklectsrollenwechsel bei den
Indianern Nordamerikas, Hamburg: Wayasabah, 1990; Will Roscoe, The Zuni
Man-Woman, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991; Harriet
Whitehead, “The Bow and the Burden Strap: A New Look at Institutionalized
Homosexuality in Native North America,” in Sherry B.Ortner and Harriet
Whitehead (eds), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and
Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 80–115; and Walter
L.Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
13 See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in his Speech and Phenomena And Other
Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B.Allison, Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1973, p. 129.
14 See Thomas G.Rosenmeyer, “Tragedy and Religion: The Bacchae,” in Erich Segal
(ed.), Euripides: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1968, p. 154. See also Charles Segal, “The Menace of Dionysus: Sex Roles and
Reversals in Euripedes’ Bacchae,” in John Peradotto and J.P.Sullivan (eds), Women

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in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1984, pp. 195–212.
15 See A.J.L.Busst, “The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century,” in
Ian Fletcher (ed.), Romantic Mythologies, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967,
pp. 1–95; Sara Friedrichsmeyer, The Androgyne in Early German
Romanticism, New York: Peter Lang, 1983; J.-C.-L.Halley des Fontaines,
Contributions à l’études de l’androgynie: la notion d’androgynie dans
quelques mythes et quelques rites, Paris: Le François, 1938; Jean Libis, Le
Mythe de I’androgyne, Paris: Berg International, 1980; and Jean Molino, “Le
Mythe de l’androgyne,” in Aimer en France, 1760–1860, Clermont-Ferrand:
Actes du Colloque International de Clermont-Ferrand, 1980, pp. 401–11.
16 Indeed, Paul de Man interprets the figure of the schöne Seele as an embodiment
of the romantic ideal of the “unity of appearance (sign) and idea (meaning).” See
Paul de Man, “Crisis and Criticism,” in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983, pp. 12–13.
17 See Joanne Blum, Transcending Gender: The Male/Female Double in Women’s
Fiction, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988, and Kari Weil, Androgyny and
the Denial of Difference, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp.
144–69.
18 See especially Carolyn G.Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, New
York: W.W.Norton, 1973.
19 See especially Sandra L.Bem, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on
Sexual Inequality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Her work has moved
from an emphasis on an individual being both masculine and feminine in
psychological orientation to a focus on the significance of a culture’s concepts of
masculinity and femininity for an enculturated individual.
20 Feminist concerns about the problems and limitations of notions of androgyny
have largely attended to their subtle, veiled perpetuation and reinforcement of
gender polarity, emphasis on feminized males and heterosexuality, focus on
individual psychology or behavior and not on sociocultural realities, tendency
toward vacuous or unrealizable abstractions, and preoccupation with Western
images. See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1990; Barbara C.Gelpi, “The Politics of Androgyny,” in
Women’s Studies, vol. 2, No. 2 (1974), pp. 151–60; Daniel A.Harris,
“Androgyny: Hemley (eds), Gender and Nonverbal Behavior, New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1981, pp. 171–80; Janice Raymond, “The Illusion of
Androgyny,” in Quest, vol. 2, No. 1 (Summer 1975), pp. 57–66; Cynthia
Secor, “Androgyny: An Early Appraisal,” in Women’s Studies, vol. 2, No. 2
(1974), p. 164; and Catherine R. Stimpson, “The Androgyne and the
Homosexual,” in Women’s Studies, vol. 2, No. 2 (1974), pp. 237–48. Indeed,
Adrienne Rich suggests that the very lexical structure of the term androgyny
“replicates the sexual [gender] dichotomy and the priority of andros (male)
over gyne (female).” See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as
Experience and Institution, New York: W.W.Norton, 1976, pp. 76–7. Yet,
earlier feminist enthusiasms for androgyny as a social ideal for diminishing
gender polarity and enhancing gender equality persist in tempered form. See
Nancy T.Bazin and Alma Freeman, “The Androgynous Vision,” in Women’s
Studies, vol. 2, No. 2 (1974), pp. 185–215; Mary Daly, “The Qualitative Leap
beyond Patriarchal Religion,” in Quest, vol. 1, No. 4 (Spring 1975), pp. 20–
40; and Mary A.Warren, “Is Androgyny the Answer to Sexual Stereotyping?,”

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in Mary Vetterling-Braggin (ed.), “Femininity” “Masculinity,” and

“Androgyny:” A Modern Philosophical Discussion, Totowa: Rowman and
Allanheld, 1982, pp. 170–86.
21 The momentary reflective distance that androgynous images may enable vis-à-vis
normal and normative categories of gender often seems only a temporary
disruption that is quickly absorbed or enveloped by or enfolded in the contours
of dualistic difference. On occasion, however, the androgynous may be embodied
or be ritualized, mythologized, or otherwise institutionalized in a manner that
suspends that distanced vision in a more stable mode of signification, which may
provoke a different and less fleeting kind of cultural contemplation. Even so,
such androgynous imagery probably does not ever escape the cultural clutches of
a more ordinary and ideologically ordained gendered world, which almost
inevitably etches something of its dualistic structures of gender into the composition
of such images.
22 Gowpnuuk is represented as possessing birth canals connected to sexual orifices
and protuberances on forehead and buttocks and abdomen, rows of breasts and
penises along the back, and an immense “penis-clitoris” (maiyoob’mem fuun) as
a tail. The figure of Gowpnuuk, however, mostly remains shadowy and ambiguous.
23 The return of Afek’s lastborn child is often associated with the advent of Europeans,
who are sometimes believed to be androgynous.
24 Both Afek and Yomnok are vividly portrayed as androgynous in terms of bodily
structures and processes, sexual capacities, spiritual constitutions, and ritual
adornments.
25 On trance and possession, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Ritual Rank, the Self, and
Ancestral Power: Liturgy and Substance in a Papua New Guinea Society,” in
Lamont Lindstrom (ed.), Drugs in Western Pacific Societies: Relations of Substance,
Lanham: University Press of America, 1987, pp. 149–96.
26 On mythic and ritual interpretation, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Wisdom and Practice:
The Mythic Making of Sacred History among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua
New Guinea,” in Frank Reynolds and David Tracy (eds), Discourse and Practice,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 13–50.
27 By Bimin-Kuskusmin reckoning, the cassowary, a large, flightless bird with a
bony crest on its head, is not a bird but a unique and sacred creature. In general
appearance, behavior, and genitalia (a cloaca), it is thought to be complexly double-
gendered. In turn, the egg-laying echidna, New Guinea’s only monotreme, is
believed to be a descendant of androgynous birds and a totemic sibling of the
cassowary. The yom’saaganiim fruit bat is imagined to be a descendant of both
cassowary and echidna.
28 The androgynous characteristics of the “sky world” (abiir am) are said to be
analogous to those of the “ancestral underworld” (kusem am), with the center-
place and its gendered divisions wedged between and in tension with them. It is
that cosmological “tension” (biing’uum saanuniim) which is said to keep these
realms apart and, also through ritual effort, to keep remnants of the androgynous
in the center-place.
29 This wild boar, distinctive in its coloration, is sometimes said to be a feminized
male that never breeds but scatters its semen and menstrual blood to fertilize only
androgynous plants of ritual importance.
30 These different species of marsupials are totemically aligned as younger sister
(the ever-menstruating dirüm) and elder brother (the semen-filled duboor), and
their incestuous mating, as in other representations of close, sacred incest, is
thought to have strongly androgynous connotations.
31 This black centipede, which Afek wore live in her pierced nasal septum, is female

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on its left side and male on its right side, and its powerful venom is a secretion of
male semen and female fertile fluids that brings death to all non-androgynous
beings but gives life to new androgynous centipedes.
32 These large larvae are believed to oscillate between being male or female as they
consume female or male plants.
33 This enormous, androgynous python, a totemic descendent of the mythic
anaangan’temkyaak pythons that once laid eggs of sacred cowrie shell in Afek’s
time, metamorphoses in the decay of death into young pythons, who feed upon
its decomposing androgynous substances.
34 These ancestral taro and sweet potato, used only in special sacrifices and only
when bound together, are an androgynous sacrificial food of ancestral spirits.
35 This pandanus is said to produce female and male nuts within single nut clusters.
36 Beliefs in the gender transformations of certain birds claim that the less elaborate
plumage of females and immature males represents young male birds that will
become transformed into adult female birds with more spectacular plumage
(actually male birds).
37 These birds of paradise are believed to be special spirit messengers of Afek and
Yomnok and to exhibit multicolored plumage or long head or tail feathers at
maturity. Their distinctive arrangements of feathers are thought to replicate some
of the ritual adornments of Afek and to mask their always transforming bodily
characteristics of gender difference.
38 This bowerbird not only is androgynous itself, but also builds an elaborate nest
which always includes remnants of female and male flora in which to enfold and
nurture its androgynous young.
39 These night birds appear at dusk and disappear at dawn. As they cross the
threshold from day to night and night to day, they undergo a double
metamorphosis from being female or male during the day (the night of the
ancestral underworld) to being androgynous during the night (the day of the
ancestral underworld).
40 On the formation and transformation of substance and spirit, see Fitz John P.
Poole, “Symbols of Substance: Bimin-Kuskusmin Models of Procreation, Death,
and Personhood,” in Mankind, vol. 14, No. 3 (April 1984), pp. 191–216.
41 Women and men, while essentially but not entirely agreeing on the gendered
anatomical map, tend to attribute differing significance to differently gendered
anatomical elements.
42 On a high incidence of male suicide, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Among the Boughs
of the Hanging Tree: Male Suicide among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New
Guinea,” in Francis H.Hezel, Donald H.Rubinstein, and Geoffrey M.White
(eds), Culture, Youth and Suicide in the Pacific: Papers from an East-West
Center Conference, Honolulu: The Pacific Islands Studies Program of the
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and
The Institute of Culture and Communication of the East-West Center, 1984,
pp. 152–81.
43 On birth rites, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Couvade and Clinic in a New Guinea
Society: Birth among the Bimin-Kuskusmin,” in Marten W.deVries, Robert L.
Berg, and Mac Lipkin, Jr. (eds), The Use and Abuse of Medicine, New York:
Praeger Scientific, 1982, pp. 54–95.
44 On infancy and early childhood, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Coming into Social Being:
Cultural Images of Infants in Bimin-Kuskusmin Folk Psychology,” in Geoffrey
M.White and John Kirkpatrick (eds), Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring
Pacific Ethnopsycbologies, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, pp.
183–242.

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45 On early male initiation, see Fitz John P.Poole, “The Ritual Forging of Identity:
Aspects of Person and Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male Initiation,” in Gilbert H.
Herdt (ed.), Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982, pp. 99–154.
46 On analogies between androgyny and netbags among the neighboring Telefolmin,
see Maureen A.MacKenzie, “The Telefol String Bag: A Cultural Object with
Androgynous Forms,” in Barry Craig and David Hyndman (eds), Children of
Afek: Tradition and Change Among the Mountain-Ok of Central New Guinea,
Sydney: Oceania Publications, University of Sydney, 1990, pp. 88–108.
47 On the persona of female ritual elders, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Transforming
‘Natural’ Woman: Female Ritual Leaders and Gender Ideology among Bimin-
Kuskusmin,” in Sherry B.Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds), Sexual Meanings:
The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981, pp. 116–65.
48 This phenomenon among Bimin-Kuskusmin, a small and highly inbred population,
appears to be 5-Alpha Reductase Male Pseudohermaphroditism. For a portrait
of 5-Alpha Reductase Male Pseudohermaphroditism, see Julianne Imperato-
McGinley and Ralph E.Peterson, “Male Pseudohermaphroditism: The
Complexities of Male Phenotypic Development,” in American Journal of Medicine,
vol. 61, No. 2 (August 1976), pp. 251–72. For an analogous phenomenon among
the Sambia of New Guinea, see Gilbert H.Herdt and Robert J.Stoller,
“Sakulambei—A Hermaphrodite’s Secret: An Example of Clinical Ethnography,”
in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 11 (1985), pp. 115–56.
49 Unknown to Bimin-Kuskusmin, the yomnok’min aiyem is sterile, although capable
of sexual intercourse. By forbidding him to marry or have sexual intercourse,
however, empirical evidence of sterility is culturally masked.
50 Extensive and intensive interviews with several waneng aiyem ser and yomnok
‘min aiyem, nonetheless, reveal the complex personal problems, ambivalences,
isolation, and pain that being androgynous in a much gender-divided society and
being elevated almost to the status of a ritual icon can bring.
51 On witchcraft, see Fitz John P.Poole, “TAMAM: Ideological and Sociological
Configurations of ‘Witchcraft’ among Bimin-Kuskusmin,” in Social Analysis, vol.
8 (November 1981), pp. 58–76.
52 On trickster figures, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Morality, Personhood, Tricksters,
and Youths: Some Narrative Images of Ethics among Bimin-Kuskusmin,” in Lewis
L.Langness and Terence E.Hays (eds), Anthropology in the High Valleys: Essays
on the New Guinea Highlands in Honor of Kenneth E.Read, Novato: Chandler
and Sharp, 1987, pp. 283–366.
53 On cannibalism, see Fitz John P.Poole, “Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches:
Anthropophagic Images among Bimin-Kuskusmin,” in Paula Brown and Donald
Tuzin (eds), The Ethnography of Cannibalism (Washington, DC: Society for
Psychological Anthropology, 1983), pp. 6–32.

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 INDEX

actors: female (dressed as men) 6–7, Papua New Guinea 200–2; as unity
163; male (dressed as women) 6, 87; see also hermaphrodites; Papua
138–47, 170–2, 175, 181; see also New Guinea
drama Andronicus I, Byzantine Emperor 96
Adad 60 animals: avatars 4; and cross-dressing
Adam and Eve 87 4; shamans and witches becoming
Adriaens, Barbara 10 156; as spirits see guides under
Advaita philosophy 126 spirits; totemic 203, 204–5, 216; see
Aeneas 97 also bears; gladiatorial shows
Afek 197, 198, 203–10 passim, 212 annihilating the female 72–5
Africa 31–2, 35, 185 anthropology see ethnography
aggression: of deities 53–4; as male Antwerpen, Maria van 10
characteristic 79 Anu 62
Akkadians 60, 62 Anunnaki 61
Aksobhya 133 apocalyptic vision 72
Aleuts 190 Apocryphal Acts see Thecla
Alexander the Great 67, 72, 75, 83, Apollo 212
116, 117 Apollonaria 85
Algonquin 177 Aquinas, Saint Thomas 114
allegory of defeat of sexual desire see Araka
- 4
Thecla AraTyakas 124, 125
Amatarasi-no-Omikami 4 Arc, Joan of 10, 95
Amatarasu 5 arhat-ship 132
Ambrose, Saint 66 Aristotle 114, 115
Amerindians see North American army see soldiers
Indians Artemis 4
Amish 3 artha 124
Amitabha 133 Aryan religion see Vedic
Amur River groups 165, 168–70, 172–4, asceticism: and cross-dressing 83, 85–6,
175, 181 90; as female virtue 127 (see also
An see Enlil Thecla); Hindu 136
Anastasia see Eugenia Ashbrook, Susan 78
Andrews, Julie 7 Asia 16, 117, 185; religion see
Androgyni (race) 110, 113, 114–16, Buddhism; Hinduism; Shinto; see
117 also China; Japan; Papua New
androgyny 38, 156; becoming Guinea; Siberia
androgynous 71–2; Hungary 155; a-œ ramas 128

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Assyrians 57 Bible: Apocryphal Acts see Thecla;

Astarot (Dagon) 95 interdiction of cross-dressing 94–6
Atargatis 95 bigamy 118, 122
Athanasia (Athanasius) 5 Bimin-Kuskusmin people see Papua
Atisayana 127 New Guinea
ātman 126 binary constructions of sex and gender
Atsugewi 191 see dual gender
Augustine, Saint 112, 113, 114 biological determinism see genitals
authority of women 69–70 birth: male seen as superior see
auto da fé 118, 122 Buddhism; Hinduism; rites 34,
autonomy, female 70 207–8; of spirit animals to shamans
avatars 4 164, 169, 177; women as
Azande 31–2 embodiment of 131
Aztecs 3, 4 Black, Lydia 179
Blackwood, Evelyn 31
Baal 95 Blandina 69
Babcock, Barbara 176 Boccaccio, Giovanni 150
Babylonians 54, 57, 59, 60 bodhisattva-hood 132–3, 134
Bai Juyi 142 body language 20; conpostura
Bakhtyn, Mikhail 150 (composure) 108–10
balag-lamentation 57–8, 59–60, 61–2 Bogoras, Waldemar 165–7, 175, 178, 182
Balalaeva, Olga 181 Bolin, Anne ix, xiii, 20; on cultural
context 22–51
Balási, Erzsébet 155
bondage and discipline 10, 11
Balboa, Nuñez de 183
Bonner, Campbell 93
Balkans 8, 9, 157
Bonny, Anne 9
ballads see songs
Bornstein, Kate 14–15
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam ix; on
Boswell, Holly 38
Siberia 164–82 Boy George 15
Banerjee, Sumanta 136 boys: marriage 31–3; see also sons
baptism, Christian 68, 69, 71 Brahman 126, 127
Bardi, Girolamo 93 Bra-hmanas 124, 125
Bateson, Gregory 33, 35 brahmava-dini-s 127
Baudrillard, Jean 158 Brazil 16
bears 9; “bear-goddess” 4; bridal chamber imagery 88
ceremonialism and gender codes Britain 3, 6, 15, 16
169–74, 175, 181 Brock, Sebastian 75, 78
beauty and attractiveness of men Brown, Peter 72
dressed as women 97–8; Chinese Buddha 130, 131, 132, 133
actors 138–47 Buddhism 4, 5; gender and salvation in
beauty and attractiveness of women: 123, 130–6
and clothes 154; destruction of 73–5, Bulgaria 154
77–8; dressed as men 99–100; in Bullough, Vern and Bonnie xiii
Paradise 133; as temptation 72–3 Burchill, Julie 19
behavior, gender-linked 1–3, 27; see Burke, Peter 150
also work and social roles burning martyrs 67
Bem, Sandra L. 200 Burshatin, Israel ix, 9; on Spain in
Benjamin, Harry 41 sixteenth century 9, 105–22
berdache 37, 184; as outdated term 43; Burton, Robert 94
see also two-spirit tradition Butler, Judith 213
Bernardo 116–17 Bynum, Caroline 5
Besnier 55–6
bhakti (bhaktas) 128–30, 135 call-girls, clients of 12, 19

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Callender, Charles 29 class: and clothes 3; and Hindu salvation

Calliphanes 115, 116 125, 126–7, 136; Hungary 148; in
Camerarius, Philipp 94–6, 101 Sumer 59–60; see also social order
Campbell, Joseph 174, 181 Clement of Alexandria 89
Canada 168, 182, 192 clothes: and cultural context 27, 28–9;
Caño, María del 105–6, 107, 109, 110, Deuteronomy text on 94–6; of
112, 118 original sex retained 2; regulated 3;
Carbajal, Villalta de 107–8 signalling availability 154; signalling
careers and gender reversals see social chastity 80, 90; see also cross-
mobility dressing
carnival and reversals of ordinary 33–4, Coahuiltecans 183–4, 188
69, 92, 150–1; Siberia 170, 172, Cocopa 192
180 Cohen, Abner 150
Carter, Angela 11 color of clothing 3
Carthaginians 69 communitas 33–4
Casaubon, Isaac 96 community: of celibate women 75–6,
Castelli, Elizabeth xiii, 90 131, 132, 137; transgendered
castration 6, 26, 73 37–42, 44; see also cultural context
Castro, Rodrigo a 94 conceptual orientation 24–5
Catherine of Sienna 5 ‘conformism’ of transsexuals 15, 20
celibacy see chastity; Thecla; virginity conpostura (composure) 108–10
Céspedes, Christóval de 111 Constantine, Roman emperor 82
Céspedes, Eleno de, trial of 9, 105–22 Conte, Gian Biagio 114, 117
Ch’an Buddhism 137 continence see chastity
Chanteau, S. 29 cosmic gender crossing 87–9
Charles, Andre (RuPaul) 7–8 courage: as female virtue (obedience)
chastity: as female virtue 80–1, 90, 125, 80–1, 83; as male virtue 79, 84; of
127, 132; see also celibacy women 69
Chaussonnet, Valerie 179 courtesans, male Chinese actors seen as
Chernetsov, Valerii 181 138–47
China 174; girl babies killed 8; couvade 34, 207
imperial theatre 138–47 Crates 84
Chodorow, Nancy 13–14 creation myths 59, 89, 186–7
Chopin, Frederic 10 Crisp, Quentin 7
Christ, Jesus 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 86, Cromwell, Jason 37, 40, 185
87, 88 cross-dressing 3, 29, 209; and acting see
Christianity 4, 41, 148, 186; and actors; drama; and careers 2, 9–10,
appropriate clothes 3, 94–6; and 157; cultural context 40–1, 50; drag
cross-dressing 5, 6; Gnostics 87–9; shows 7–8; and religion 4–5; as
Inquisition and Céspedes case 110, transgressive act 92, 94–6;
114, 117–19, 121; see also ‘transvestite saints’ 5; see also
hristianity, early; martyrdom; female-to-male cross-dressing; male-
Thecla to-female cross-dressing;
Christianity, early, gender-crossing in Renaissance literature
79–91; female ascetics 82–7; female cross-gendered ritual 22, 23, 33–4; see
martyrdom 81–2; femininity and also religion and ritual
shame 80–1; gnostics 87–9 cross-gendered roles 22, 23, 30–1; see
Chrysostom, Saint John 72–3 also work and social roles
Chrysostom, Pseudo 77 Crow 192
Chukchi 165–7, 174, 175, 177, 179, Cullavagga 131
182, 186 cultural context 22–51; conceptual
Cicero 112, 113 orientation 24–5; cultural other see

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other; gender variance see five-form dominance and submission (mainly of

model; transgendered community men over women) 124; early
37–42, 44; Western gender paradigm Christianity 80, 83; in fantasy play
see dual gender; see also, in 11–13, 19; Hungary 148–9, 159
particular China; Europe; Hungary; drag shows 7–8
India; North American Indians; drama 6–8; cultural context 29; ‘divine
Papua New Guinea; Siberia; Spain; play’ 129–30; Hungary 151;
Sumer imperial theatre in China 138–47;
Curll, Edmund 101 Renaissance 92, 96; Siberia 170–2,
Cyprian 96 175, 181; see also actors
Czaplicka, Maria 174, 179 dreams 190, 192
dress see clothes
Dagon (Astarot) 95 Drusiana 73
dances 190; Hungary 150–3, 154, 158, dual gender paradigm, Western:
169, 170–1, 173 cultural context 23, 24, 30, 34–6,
d’Anglure, Bernard Saladin 168 39, 49–50; and North American
Darwin, Charles 37 Indians 185–7; and Papua New
Daston, Lorraine 114 Guinea 199, 201
daughters: killed 8; raised as sons 8–9, dualism:
.
naming 154–5, 161, 175;
192 S&mkhya 126; see also dual gender
Davidson, Julian 27 dukkha 130–1
Davis, Christian (Christopher Welsh) 9 Dumuzi 60
Davis, Natalie Zemon 150, 172 Duval, Jacques 94
death: gender differences in floating
bodies 108–9; Hindu son Ea 55, 62
performing sacrifice after 125, 128; Eastern Paradise 133
rites in Papua New Guinea 208–9; Edgerton, Robert B. 25
women becoming male at 133 education of women denied 125
deities 4, 5; Buddhist 132; female Egypt, ancient 15, 16
fertility 52–63; female God replaced Ehrhardt, A.A. 27
by male 40; gender equality of 56, Eighner, Hans (Lillie Elbe) 41
57; Greek and Roman 1, 4, 95, 97, Elagabalus, Roman emperor 15
200, 212; Hindu 4, 129–30, 132, Elbe, Lillie (Hans Eighner) 41
135, 137; male and female Eleno (Elena) de Céspedes 9
equivalent 54; and Renaissance Eliade, Mircea 168
literature 95; sexuality 61; Siberian Elizabeth, Empress of Russia 15–16
171; Sumerian 52–63; see also empire, Spanish and Portuguese 116–17
mythology; religion Enheduanna (poet-priestess-princess)
Dekker, Rudolph 9 62
Demetria 86 Enki 55, 56, 59, 61
Denny, Dallas 38–40, 42 enlightenment, Hindu 130
Derrida, Jacques 200 Enlil (An) 54, 55, 56, 57–9, 61, 62
Descartes, René xii Epic of Gilgamesh 62
Deuteronomy: text on clothing 94–6 Epstein, Julia xiii
devotion as female virtue 127 Erauso, Catalina de 9
dharma: Buddhist 131, 133, 135; Erech 55
Hindu 124, 126–8 Eregia 66
Dickemann, Mildred 22 Ereshkigal 61
Dietrich, Marlene 7 Eridu 55
Dionysus 4, 200, 212 eroticism see sexuality
domestic role see private and domestic Eskimo: Canada 168, 182, 192; Siberia
sphere 165, 175, 178

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Esmeraldus see Eugenia Christianity 79–91; North American

ethnography/anthropology 39–41; Indians 186, 192; Siberia 167, 176,
see also cultural context 178; see also salvation
Eugenia, Saint (Anastasia, Anastasius, Ferris, Lesley xii, 6
Eugenius, Euphrosune, Esmeraldus) fertility 126; goddesses in Sumer 52–63;
85–7, 92 see also birth
Euripides 200 films and television 7, 8, 152–3, 162–3
Europe 8, 9–10, 14–16, 172, 176; see five-form model of gender variance
also Britain; Christianity; Hungary; 22–3, 24, 25–34; see also cross-
Renaissance; Spain gendered rituals; cross-gendered
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 31–2 roles; hermaphrodites; two-spirit;
execution see martyrdom; torture woman marriage under women
Forde, Emmanuel 97
face 108, 109 Foucault, Michel 148
fantasy play 10–14, 19 Four Noble Truths 130
Farkas, Demeter 155 France 15, 151, 172
fasting 86, 89 Furst, Jill and Peter 164
Febronia 74
Felicitas (Felicity) 74, 81 Gaotang 143
female actors (dressed as men) 6–7, 163 Garber, Marjorie xii
female ascetics 82–7, 90; see also gay people see homosexuality and
Thecla lesbianism
female attractiveness see beauty Gayer, Evdokiia 181
female exclusion from learned text gaze, male see nakedness, female
readership 94 gender: codes 2, 169–74; crossing see
female fertility goddesses in Sumer gender reversals; culture defined 1–
52–63 3; defined 24; dictates 2; equality of
female life-force 206–7 deities 56, 57; ethnographic studies
female martyrdom see martyrdom see China; Hungary; North
female men see women-men under American Indians; Papua New
women Guinea; Siberia; Spain; Sumer;
female physicians 105–22 ideology 2; numbers and variance
female saints see saints, female see five-form model; transformations
female shame 80–1, 82 see gender reversals; see also cross-
female slaves see slave women dressing; cultural context; female;
female virtues 80–1, 83, 124–5, 127, gender reversals; male; religion;
128, 132 Renaissance; Thecla
female-to-male cross-dressing 5, 15–16, gender reversals, transformations and
167; ascetics 83, 85–6, 90; Biblical crossing 1–21, 96; cultural context
interdiction 94–6; and careers 2, 26–7; defined 2; fantasy play 10–14,
9–10, 157; Céspedes case 105–22; 19; gender variance, not 193; Hindu
cultural context 44, 50; and drama 129–30, 135; Hungary 150–7;
see actors, female; Hungary 150–2, transgenderism 14–15, 37–42, 44;
155, 157, 158; Renaissance see also carnival; Christianity;
literature 92–3, 99–101; see also drama; female-to-male gender
Thecla crossing; gender; mythology; religion
female-to-male cross-gendered roles and ritual; social mobility;
30–1 transsexualism; work and social
female-to-male gender crossings and roles
transformations 2, 9–10, 37; gender variance see gender under
Céspedes case 9, 105–22; in early multiplicity

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 INDEX

genitals: artificial 101–2, 107; astration 25–7; India 26, 156; North merican
6, 26, 73; defining gender and Indian 185–6; pseudo 25–7, 209–10;
inspection of 36, 106, 107–8, 112, as race (Androgyni) 110, 113,
119 (see also dual gender) ; female 114–16, 117; and Renaissance
as reversal of male 96; incomplete or literature 94, 96, 101; see also
ambiguous see hermaphrodites; androgyny
male, appearance and withering of Hermas 71
110–12 Heywood, Thomas 92–4
Germany 10, 16, 150 Hidatsa 189
Geshtinanna 60 hijra 26, 35, 156
Gilyak see Nivkh Hildegard of Bingen 5
girls see daughters Hinduism 5, 156, 174; deities 4, 129–30,
gladiatorial shows, martyrs in 68, 132, 135, 137; gender and salvation
81–2, 83 in 123–30, 135, 136–7
Gnostics 87–9 Hipparchia 84, 85
Gold (Nanai) 165, 168 Hoffman, Dustin 7
Golden Lotus, The 146 homophobia 120
Gondatti, Nikolai 170, 171, 178 homosexuality and lesbianism: as
Gönyey, Sándor 152 characteristic of cultural other 98;
Goodman, Felicitas 181 and cross-dressing 98, 99–102; and
Goody, Jack 148 cultural context 25–6, 28–9, 32, 35,
Gooraniin 197 42; Hungary 149, 152, 153–4;
Gowpnuuk (mythical) 203, 204, 206, North American Indians 42, 188;
216 suspected see Céspedes; taboo on
Gracian, Balthasar 176 writing about 94
Grambo, Ronald 165, 177 honor: female passive (chastity) 80–1;
Greece, ancient 79, 88, 113; male quest for 79–80, 82
cross-dressing 92–3; Hoover, J.Edgar 15
drama 6; religion 1, Hopi 177
4, 200, 212 hormones 26–7, 29, 38
Greece, modern 156 Huerta, Jerónimo de 119
Gregory of Nyssa, Saint 66 Humes, Cynthia Ann x, 5; on salvation
Gudea, ruler of Lagash 59 in Hinduism and Buddhism 123–37
guevedoce 26–7 Hungary 148–63; gender
Guifei, Yang 142 transformations 150–4; ritualistic
Gutiérrez, Alonso 107–8 gender reversal 154–7; shamans 154,
155–6
Haas, Dolly 7 husband worship in Hinduism (stri-
Hagnodice 93–4 dharma) 124, 127; see also marriage
hair cut by women to simulate men’s Hyginus 92
83, 86, 90, 167, 176, 191 hymns 54–5, 56, 61–2, 124–5
Harvey, Susan 75, 78
Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt 15 Iatmul 33, 34
heaven see salvation identity 5, 24–5, 37–8, 198;
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 200 new see gender reversals
Henri III, King of France 15 illness, ritual 207
Hera 1 Imperato-McGinley, J. 26–7
Herdt, Gilbert xiii, 22, 25, 27, 33, 36, imperial theatre in China 138–47
40 Inanna (Ishtar) 4, 52–63 passim
hermaphrodites 129; Céspedes as Incas 3
110–12; in five-form model 22, 23, India 16, 117, 134, 156, 185;

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hermaphrodites 26, 156; see also Kochems, Lee M. 29

Hinduism Kondakov, Vladimir 164
Indians, North American see North Korea 177
American Indians Koryak 165, 175
Indra 132 Kramer, Samuel Noah 55
infantilism 13 Krishna 4, 129, 137
Ingalik 192 Ksenofontov, Gavril 169
initiation 127, 170, 180, 208 Kurgarûs 52
Inquisition and Céspedes case 110, 114, Kürti, László x;
117–19, 121 on Hungary 148–63
Inuit 168, 182, 192 Kutenai 192
Irene 74 kwolu-aatmwol 27
Ishtar (Inanna) 4, 52–63 passim
Islam 3, 41, 110 labor see work and social roles
Italy 9, 150, 151 Laertius, Diogenes 84–5
Iupik 165, 175, 178 Land of Bliss Scripture 133
Lang, Sabine x, 31; on North American
Jacob, Giles 101 Indians 183–96
Jacobs, Sue-Ellen 43, 185 Laqueur, Thomas 96
Jade Bracelet, The 138–9 Latin America (South and Central) 3, 4,
James I, King of England 6 16, 26–7, 150, 183–4, 188
Jans, Hilletje 10 Latin language for literature on
Japan 4–5, 16, 133 sexuality 94
Jerome, Saint 66 LeGuin, Ursula 176
Jesus see Christ lesbianism see homosexuality and
Jide, Wang 140 lesbianism
Jilong, Shi 147 Levy, Robert 55–6
Joan of Arc 10, 95 Liang Shanbo 147
Jochelson, Vladimir 179 la-la- 129–30
John Chrysostom, Saint 72–3 liminality 33, 34
Jonson, Ben 95 Lincken, Cathrina 10
Juaneno 190 literature: Apocryphal Acts see Thecla;
Judaism 94–6, 110, 186 Buddhist 131–2, 134; and Hinduism
justice as male virtue 79 124–8; Latin language for learned
Juyi, Bai 142 works 94; Sumerian 52–65; see also
Bible; Renaissance literature
ka-ma 124 Lotus of the True Law Scripture, The
Kando, Thomas 15, 19 134
Kane, Ariadne 41 Luis 115
Kaniagmiut 190 Luiseño 190
Karanovic, Srdjan 8
Karjalainen, Kustaa 170, 171 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond 158
Karma, Law of 130–1 MacDonald, Dennis 70
Kaska 8, 192 McKenna,Wendy 186, 213
Kates, Gary xiii MacKenzie, Gordene 1–2, 14
Kempe, Margery 5 Mahayana Buddhism 4, 5, 131, 132–4,
Kessler, Suzanne J. 186, 213 135
Khanty 170, 172, 174, 181 mahi 156
Kimiqui 166 mahu 28–9, 35
Kirkpatrick, John 29, 31 Maimonides 95
Kiskunság 152–3 mako shark women 30, 31
Klamath 191 male actors see under actors

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male dominance see dominance and masturbation 94

submission material, women as 126, 134–5
male life-force 206–7 Matruna 85
male marriage (boy) marriage 31–3 me 55
Male Queen, The 139–46 Mead, Margaret 13
male saints see saints, male medicine persons see shamans
male salvation see salvation Meeks, Wayne 71
male suicide 207 men: men-women, North American
male virtues 79–80, 88–9 Indian 184–5, 187, 188, 190–2,
male women see men-women under 193, 194; see also male
men Mesopotamia see Sumer
male-to-female cross-dressing 4; Methodius, Saint 66
cultural context 33, 37–8, 39, 44, Mexico 16, 183–4, 188
50; and drama see actors, male; Middle East see Sumer
explicit 2; and fantasy play 11, midwives 93, 106, 159
12–13; Hungary 151–3, 156–7; Miles, Margaret 77
North American Indians 183–4, Milton, John 164
188–9; Renaissance literature 92–7; Miranda, Felipe de 105–6, 107
Siberia 166, 169, 179 misogyny 72–5; see also dominance and
male-to-female gender reversals and submission
transformations 9; cultural context Mohave 190, 191, 192
37–8, 39; Hinduism and Buddhism moksa 125–6
Molnár, Ferenc 163
129–30, 135; Hungary 155–6;
Moloch 95
Siberia 165–7, 176
Money, J. 27
Maleczech, Ruth 7
monotheism see Buddhism;
maleness/masculinity: acquiring 69–71;
Christianity; Islam
problems achieving 13–14; see also
Montanist movement 70
entries beginning male moral excellence see virtues
manly-hearts 22, 30, 34 Mos 170
Mansi 170 mother: identification with 14; see also
Manu 127 birth
Mao Xiang 139 multiplicity: femaleness as 87; gender
Marcis, Marie le (Marin) 94 and sex constructions 185–94 (see
Mari 59 also two-spirit); gods see polytheism;
Marin (Marcis) 94 lifetimes see rebirth
Marina (Marinus) 5 Munk, Erika 6
Marqesan Islands 29, 30, 31 Murphy, Jane 178
marriage: bigamy 118, 122; bridal music see dances; songs
chamber imagery 88; Céspedes case muskobanje 8
(two women) 105–22; continent 75–6; Muslims see Islam
of cross-gendered people 8–9, 10; Musset, Alfred de 10
cultural context 31–3; Hindu 124–5, mythology 95; Androgyni 110, 113,
127–8; Hungary 152, 153, 154; 114–16, 117; creation 59, 89, 186–7;
male (boy) 31–3; North American Greek 1, 4, 200, 212; Hungary
Indians 188, 191–2; rejected 72, 77; 156–7; Sumerian 55, 59; see also
Sacred Marriage Rite 61, 62; Siberia deities; religion and ritual
166, 167, 171, 178; woman 22, 23,
31–3, 35 nadle 25–6
Mars 95 nadleehe 188
martyrdom 81–2; see also Thecla nakedness: female 74, 75, 77, 81–2, 83,
Mary of Egypt 86 85, 86; male (dignified) 82; male
Mary Magdalene 87 (rare) 73–4

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names: female and male combined or Omani society see xanith

exchanged 154–5, 161, 175; female, organizations 37, 39–40, 41
taken by men 139; male, taken by Orphics 3
women 85, 106–7 Osage 188
Nanai (Gold) 165, 168 other, cultural: homosexuality and 98;
Nanda, Serena 25, 26, 40 see also hermaphrodites; race
Nandi 31 Ottoman Empire 3
Nanna 58, 62 Ovid 200
Nanshe 56
Navajo 25, 174, 177, 181, 188 Pacteau, Francette 200
Naven 33 Papua New Guinea 33; androgyny in
Bimin-Kuskusmin cultural
Nergal 59, 62
imagination xii, 197–218
Neroni, Juan Baptista 109
Paradise see salvation
nested gender-crossing 9, 140–1 Parker, Wendy 40–1
Netherlands 9, 10 Pastoral Epistles 70
Nicholas of Lyra 95 patiyoga 127, 128
Nidaba 54–5, 61 patriarchy 124, 148–9
Ningal 56, 58, 59, 60 patrilineal and patrilocal systems 148
Ningirsu 54, 59 Paul, Saint 66–75 passim, 83–4
Ninhursaga (Nintur) 54 Paul, Diana 134
Ninlil 58 Pelagia (Pelagius) 5, 75, 85, 86
Ninsuna 59 Perpetua, Vibia 69, 74, 81–2, 90
Nintur (Ninhursaga) 54 Peter, Saint 73, 87
Ninurta 54, 55, 56 Philip IV, King of Spain 9
nirva-na 131 Philip, Saint 87, 88
Nivkh (Gilyak) 165, 168–9, 173, 174, philosopher, female 84–5
181 Philostratus 4
Norbeck, Edward 180 Phloumene 89
North America see Canada; physicians 159; and definition of
United States gender 106, 120; female 92–3,
North American Indians xii, 2–3, 8–9, 105–22
174, 177, 181, 183–96; gender Piegan 192
variance 2, 25–6, 28, 156, 185–94 Pima 28
(see also two-spirit); men-women pirates, female 9
190–2, 193, 194; women-men 189– Plato 6, 85, 200
Pliny 108, 112–17, 119, 155
90, 193, 194
Plum in the Golden Vase, The 138
North Piegan manly-hearts 22, 30, 34
poklada 151–3
Novy, Marianne 103 Pokot 25, 185–6
Nuer 31 Pol, Lotte van de 9
number of genders see dual gender and Poland 16
gender variance under North Polanski, Roman 7
American Indians pollution, women as source of 34, 125,
Numi-Torum 171 130, 171
nuns 75–6, 131, 132, 137 Polycarp 73–4
Polynesia 28–9, 185
Ob-Ugrians 169–70, 171–3, 174, 181 polytheism 95; see also deities;
obedience as female virtue 80–1, 83 Hinduism; Sumer
Oboler, Regina Smith 31 Poole, Fitz John Porter x-xi; on Papua
Ochshorn, Judith x; on Sumer xii, New Guinea xii, 197–218
52–65 Popov, Alexander A. 177
Ojibwa 192 Por 170, 171, 181
Olympias 89 Portugal 116

227
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Potamiaena 74 renunciation as virtue 128

Potter, Sally 7 reversals see carnival; gender reversals
power of females: deities 53–4; high- Rice, Anne 12
class Sumerian 59–60 rites and ritual see religion and ritual
praktri 126 roles see work and social roles
Prince, Virginia 41 Romania 150, 152, 154
private and domestic sphere of women Rome, ancient 15, 79, 81, 88, 95, 97
80, 125, 128, 149; combined with Roscoe, Will xii, 40
men’s public role 124–5 Rosenbrock, Catherine 10
prostitution 29; see also call-girls; Rothblatt, Martine 2, 13, 14
courtesans Rózsa, Dániel 155
prudence as male virtue 79 Running Eagle 192
Pseudo-Chrysostom 77 RuPaul (Andre Charles) 7–8
pseudohermaphroditism 25–7, 209–10 Russia 15–16
public world of men 79–80, 82, 128;
combined with women 124–5 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 11–12
puriya 133 sacred: redefined in Siberia 174–7;
Pure Land Mahayana 133, 135 Sacred Marriage Rite 61, 62; see
Puritans 6 also religion
puruUa 126, 135 sacrifice as female virtue 127, 128
putradharma 128 Saddbarmapundari-ka S*tra 134
Sade, Marquis Donatien-Alphonse-
Qinxiao 139 François de 11
quadištu 60 sado-masochism 10–11
Quetzalcoatl 4 sadyodvadh*s 127
Quintillian movement 70 Sagarin, Edward 26–7
Ququnak patke 192 saints, female 85–7, 92; see also
martyrdom
race: hermaphrodites as see Androgyni; saints, male 5, 73, 87–8, 227;
see also slave women Augustine 112, 113, 114; Paul
Ramakrishna, Saint 129 66–75 passim, 83–4
Ramet, Sabrina Petra: on gender Sakha (Yakut) 164–5, 169, 174, 175,
reversals and gender cultures 1–21 176, 177, 179
Read, Mary 9 salvation: in Buddhism 123, 130–6; and
rebirth: Buddhist 131, 132–3, 135; gender crossing 87, 89; in Hinduism
Hindu 125–6, 128 123–30
religion and ritual 1, 4–5; and Sambia
.
27, 33
appropriate clothes 3, 4–5; and Sam. hita-s 124–5
cross-dressing 4–5; cross-gendered S&mkhya dualism 126
22, 23–4, 35; gender reversals Samodeic
.
170
154–7; rites of passage 202–11 (see sam sa-ra 125, 133
also initiation); Siberian 169–77; Sand,
.
Georges 10
Sumerian 52–65; see also Buddhism; san gha 132
Christianity; deities; Hinduism; Sanskrit literature 124–6
Islam; Judaism; mythology; Santa Domingo 26–7
salvation; shamans; Shinto; spirits sati- 128
and see under Greece Schleiner, Winifred: on Renaissance
Renaissance literature 92–104; cross- literature 92–104
dressing generally 92–7; female-to- scholars, women as 126–7
male cross-dressing 92–3, 99–101; Selden, John 95
male-to-female cross-dressing 92–7 Seleucia see Thecla

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self-control as male virtue 79 social mobility, gender reversals in 2,

Sellers, Terrence 13 9–10, 157
Senés, Andria Matiolo 117 social order see class; work and social
sererr 25 roles
sex: conflated with gender 35; sodomy 107, 121, 183; see also
defined 24 homosexuality
sexual intercourse: artificial aids in ‘soft man’ 166–7, 177, 179, 182
same-sex relationships 101–2, 107; soldiers: female 9–10, 157; men as
and enlightenment (Tantric) 130; warriors 79
pleasure from 1; pregnancy without Song Yu 143
133; rejected see celibacy; with songs and ballads 10, 156–7, 161; see
also hymns
spirits 168; see also prostitution;
sons: daughters raised as 8–9, 192;
sexuality and eroticism
given female names 154; performing
sexuality and eroticism 3, 23; deities
sacrifice after father’s death 125,
61; fantasy play 10–14, 19; and 128
Hinduism 126; Hungary 151, 152, soul 126
153; Latin used to write about 94;of Soviet Union, former 154; see also
male actors as women 138–9, 140– Siberia
1; masturbation 94; sexual desire, Spain 9, 16, 105–22, 183
allegory of defeat of see Thecla; of Spiegel, A. 29
shark women 31; suppression and spirits: ancestral 206, 210–11; guides
female shame 80; and violence 73–4; 164, 166, 167–9, 173–5, 177, 178;
of women as barrier to paradise see men as (puru?a) 126, 135; Papua
salvation; see also homosexuality; New Guinea 204, 206, 210–11;
sexual intercourse possession 204; tricksters 187, 210
Shakespeare, William 6–7, 100–1 Startsev, Georgi 170–1
Shala 60 status 24; see also roles
shamans: Hungary 154, 155–6; North Stein, Martha 12, 19
American Indians 190, 192; Siberia Stoller, Robert J. 24
164, 165–9, 173, 174, 176, 182 Straub, Kristina xiii, 6
shame, female 80–1, 82 strength: of men 88; of women 69
Shanbo, Liang 147 Stuart, Kim Elizabeth xiii
Shapiro, Judith 15, 19 submission see dominance and
Shasta 191 submission
Shi Jilong (Shi Hu) 147 Sudan 31–2
Shinto 4–5 suffering 130–1
Shoshone 191 suicide 207
Sukhavativyuha S*tra (Land of Bliss
Shternberg, Lev 168–9
Scripture) 133
Siberia 40–1, 164–82, 185, 186; bear
Sumer xii, 4, 52–65
ceremonialism and gender codes
surgery 29, 37, 38, 41, 186; ritual 207
169–74; (re)defining sacred 174–7; s*tras 134
shamans 164, 165–9, 173, 174, 176, Sverov, S. Ia. 162
182 Swinton, Tilda 7
Sidney, Sir Philip 97–8 sympathy notion 115–16, 117
silence as female virtue 80–1 Syncletia 86
Sippar 59
slave women 120; Céspedes as 107, taboos: clothing 12; homosexuality 94
109–10, 113, 115, 118–19; as Tahiti 28–9, 156
martyrs 69 Taksami, Chuner 173

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Tantric Buddhism 131 United States 16, 150; transgenderism

Tantric Hinduism 5, 130, 137 14–15; see also North American
Tapia 111 Indians
Teiresias 1 unity restored by becoming male 87–8
Tertullian 66, 70, 96 UpaniUads 124, 125–7, 128
Thamyris 83 Ur 58
theatre see drama Uruk 60
Thecla 66–78, 83–5; acquiring maleness Utu 56, 60
69–71; annihilating the female 72–5;
becoming androgynous 71–2; story Vaca, Alvar Nuñez (Cabez de) 183–4
of 67–8 Vajrayana 131
Theravada Buddhism 131–2 Vakh River 170
Therigatha 132 Valentine, Rudolph 15
Thomas, Saint 87–8 Vallabha sect 129
Tilu’wgi 166–7 varna 125, 126–7, 136
Timaffy, László 155 Vázquez 107–8
Tiszafüred trials 155 Vedas 124
Torjesen, Karen Jo xi; on Christianity Vedic religion 124–8
79–91 Venus 95, 97
Torquemada, Antonio de 115–16, 117 Vidal, Gore 7
torture and execution of women 67–8, Villon, François 150
73, 77–8, 120 violence: and sexuality 73–4; see also
transgenderism 14–15, 37–42, 44 aggression; martyrdom
transgressive act, cross-dressing as 92, Virág János 155
94–6 virginity 8, 106; see also celibacy;
transsexualism 36–7, 39; and cross- chastity
dressing, transgenderism as middle virtues: female 80–1, 83, 124–5, 127,
ground between 38; transophobia 128, 132; male 79–80, 88–9
15, 19–20; see also gender reversals Vishnu 4
transvestism see cross-dressing voice, feminine 138, 142
‘transvestite saints’ 5 Volpp, Sophie xi; on imperial theater in
Transylvania 150, 153 China 138–47
traversing gender 22–3; see also cultural
context Wang Jide 140
tricksters 187, 210 weakness of women 88
trivarga 124–6 Welch, J.L. xi; on Thecla 66–78
Tryphaena, Queen 84 Welsh, Christopher (Christian Davis) 9
Turkey 3, 157; see also Thecla Westermarck, Edward 34
Turner, Victor 33, 34, 35 Western countries: concepts of gender
two-spirit tradition (berdache) 156, see dual gender; see also Europe;
194; described 22, 23, 27–30, 43, United States
46; North American Indian men- Western Paradise 133
women and women-men 183–5, Whitehead, Harriet 26
187, 188, 189–92, 193, 194; and Wikan, Unni 29–30
Siberia 177, 182; and transgendered Wilgefortis (Uncumber, Saint) 5, 227
community 37, 39, 41, 42; and Williams, Robin 7, 40
Western dual gender paradigm witches 210; Hungary 154–5, 156
34, 35 Woman Chief 192
women: woman marriage 22, 23, 31–3,
Ukraine 154 35; women-men, North American
Uncumber, Saint (Wilgefortis) 5, 227 Indian 183–5, 187, 189–90, 193,

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194; see also entries beginning Yingtai, Zhu 144, 147

female Yingtao, Zheng 144, 147
“women’s ball” 150–1, 158 Yomnok (mythical) 203, 204, 208, 209,
Wood, Ed 16 210, 212
work and social roles 8, 85; cross- Young, William 34
dressing 2, 9–10; cultural context Yu, Song 143
22, 23, 24, 27, 30–2; dress codes 3; Yukagir 165, 168, 169, 179
hermaphrodites 25; Hungary 149; Yuku 191
North American Indians 183–4, Yuma 190
185, 187–90, 191, 192; Sumerian
deities 52–65; two-spirit 28, 29 Zelman, Elizabeth Crouch 34
Zen Buddhism 137
xanith 18, 29–30, 35, 36, Zeus 1, 4
156 Zheng Yingtao 144, 147
Xolotl 4 Zhu Yingtai 144, 147
Ziyun 139
Yakut see Sakha Zosimus 86
Y&ñavalkya 127 Zrinyi, Ilona 157
Yang Guifei 142 Zrinyi, Miklós 149
Yangzhi 139 Zuni 156, 190

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