Beauty and power : transgendering and cultural transformation in the southern Philippines / Mark Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, M. (Mark)

Contributor:

George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Series:

Explorations in anthropology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cross-dressers--Philippines.

Cross-dressers.

Gender identity--Philippines.

Gender identity.

Philippines--Social life and customs.

Philippines.

Manners and customs.

Physical Description:

x, 264 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, England ; New York, NY : Berg, 1997.

Summary:

This compelling study of gender and sexual diversity in the Southern Philippines addresses questions about the relationship between the making of gender and sexualities, the politics of national and ethnic identities, and processes of cultural transformation in a world of contract laborers and transnational consumers. The book focuses on the meaning and experience of local "gays" -- transvestite/transgender/homosexual men -- who are at once celebrated as purveyors of beauty (defined in terms of a global American otherness) and villianized as impotent men or defiled women. "America" functions both as a sign of their abject status and as a space for imagining and reformulating various gendered identities.

This innovative work -- one of the first ethnographic studies to be published in the aftermath of the region's civil unrest -- will be of interest to anyone working on gender, the body, and sexuality. Mark Johnson's research compellingly argues that there is nothing ambiguous about ambiguity -- gendered, sexual, or otherwise. Rather, this ambiguity is the specific product of different historical relations of power through which various cultural subjects are created and recreate themselves.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-254) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

ISBN:

1859739202

1859739253

OCLC:

38047053