Beauty and Power

Description

This compelling study of gender and sexual diversity in the Southern Philippines addresses general 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 labourers and transnational consumers. The book focuses, in particular, 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 valorized as impotent men and defiled women. In short, America functions both as a sign of their abjected 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. Not only does it extend the boundaries of cross-cultural studies of non-mainstream genders and sexualities by directly engaging the entanglement of local sensibilities with global images and discourse, but it also demonstrates 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 re-create themselves.

“This book is a path-breaking ethnographic study of the culture of transgender males. . .[and] much more than a study of Southeast Asian sex/gender patterns, being a finely nuanced account of how minority ethnic, religious and gender identities are constituted in terms of multiple sets of relations. […] Johnson’s book marks an important step forward in research on Southeast Asia.” —Canberra Anthropology“Sensitive ethnography can (itals) be accomplished, as Mark Johnson aptly demonstrates. His ethnography serves as a vehicle for the voices, concerns, and political agendas of a marginalized community.” —American Anthropologist“The . . . study is an important contribution to our knowledge of sexuality and of the region . . . The monograph communicates a sense of the cultural complexity and violent history which characterize this part of the world.” —Cambridge Anthology“ … this is a well-written, very detailed, and closely argued ethnography which is a significant contribution to the anthropology of sexuality and gender.” —Anthropological Quarterly Mark Johnson University of Hull

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