Gender

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2009 -janeiro/juin 2009

Gender, Politics and Hybridism in the Transnationalization of the Yoruba Culture [1]

This is an article published for the first time twenty three years ago, well before Judith Butler published the first edition of Gender Trouble. In it, what is today known as the “performative” nature of gender emerges from the ethnographic observation of an afro-Brazilian religious community. The author modifies the well known argument that attributes orixas’s religion cult-houses a welcoming and sheltering capacity towards men with non-normative sexualities. After exposing the non determinist, non biologist premises of the afro-Brazilian religious perspective, and the openness to transits of its practices and ideas about gender/sex and sexuality, the author defends that it is not the case of an “attraction” or sheltering capacity, as an accessory trait of the religious community, but that ideas about gender/sex and sexuality are constitutive and structuring of the world-view as a whole, and provide the foundation for forms of affectivity and eroticism that are undissociable from it.

Frequently, anthropological theories speak more about anthropologists than about their discipline (Edmund Leach, 1966)

…all knowledge of other cultures, societies, or religions comes about through an admixture of indirect evidence with the individual scholar’s personal situation, which includes time, place, personal gifts, historical situation, as well as the overall political circumstances. What makes such knowledge accurate or inaccurate, bad, better, or worse, has to do mainly with the needs of the society in which that knowledge is produced (Edward W. Said, 1997:168)

“Of course, the ‘I’ who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, ‘enunciated’. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always in context, positioned” (Stuart Hall, 1996: 110)

“The everyday paradox of third world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of “us”, eminently useful in understanding our societies (…) why cannot we, once again, return the gaze?” – (Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000: 28-29)

I will bring together, in this analysis, three different scholarly discourses about the gender ideas of Yoruba civilization and, despite their differences, link them to two historical moments, distant in time and circumstances, of the expansion of that culture. I will refer these three models to what I understand as the gender factor in the diffusion of Yoruba religious world-view. In the first part of the paper, I will describe synthetically those three academic discourses, showing how, albeit their differences, they strive with the available words to describe, within highly complex ethnographies, the sophisticated and very peculiar conception of gender in the universe of Yoruba culture. In doing so, they offer three different models, but concur to point to an after all shared perception: the high level of abstraction of Yoruba gender construction in relation to the anatomic signifiers; in other words, the absence of biological essentialism that such system of thought presents. In the second part of the paper, I will analyze how academic discourses are nationally and interestedly situated, and I will show that, quite independently, three authors, among them, have placed complex gender issues at the center of the discussion of Yoruba world-view. Reviewing briefly their writings, I intend to reveal how the position -ethnic and national- from which scholars produce their academic models affects their formulations. In the third part of the paper, I will briefly review my own ideas and argue that the complexities of Yoruba gender construction were central in the process of diffusion of Yoruba religion and its social context from Africa to the New World initially and, later, from Brazil to other countries such as Argentina and Uruguay, where there was no previous presence of them.

I address, here, three models of interpretation of the Yoruba ideas about gender, as expressed in religious themes and practices. The two models concerning the Yoruba of Nigeria were formulated by Lorand Matory, in 1994, and Oyeronke Oyewumi, in 1997, respectively. Both were published by the prestigious University of Minnesota Press. The third model derives from my own work about the Yoruba religion in Brazil, published in Portuguese around a decade earlier, in 1986 (re-printed in the same language in 1989, 1995 and 2000, as well as in English, in 1997). Although my publication on the theme came out earlier, I will start by the last to appear published and finish with my own work, for the sake of clarity of the exposition.

Oyeronke, a Yoruba herself, published The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses while she was assistant professor of the University of California at Santa Barbara, United States. Despite working in the same field, she did not make any reference there to Matory’s work on similar topic from his book of 1994. She referred only to his doctoral dissertation, presented in 1991 and by quoting him in two paragraphs, not exceeding the extension of one page.

For Oyeronke, “the assumption that a gender system existed in Oyo society before Western colonization is yet another case of Western dominance in the documentation and interpretation of the world” (1997: 32). In her view, colonialism introduced the vocabulary and practices of gender in the Yoruba religion, and Western scholarship - as well as Western feminism - misread the existence of gender in that culture: … “the usual gloss of the Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin as ‘female/woman’ and ‘male/man’, respectively, is a mistranslation.... these categories are neither binarily opposed nor hierarchical....”(1997: 32-33). This is so, in Oyeronke’s interpretation, because, as she argues:

1) “There was no conception there of an original human type (man, generic) over which the other variety had to be measured (the feminine, particular). Eniyan (in Yoruba) is the non-gender-specific word for humans” (different from (fe)male or (wo)man) (1997: 33)

2) “Obinrin is not ranked in relation to okunrin (both sharing the same neutral root, rin)” (Ibidem).

3) They only apply to adults. Children are all omode. Male and female animals are named ako and abo. Plants are abo when they germinate.

“Thus - she says in page 33 -, in this study, the basic terms okunrin and obinrin are best translated as referring to the anatomic male and anatomic female, respectively; they refer only to physiologically marked differences and do not have hierarchical connotations....”

Oyeronke also speaks of “ana-sex”: ana-males and ana-females: “to underscore the fact that in the Yoruba world-sense it is possible to acknowledge these physiological distinctions without inherently projecting a hierarchy of itself” but as “a construction of two categories in hierarchical relation to each other […] embedded in institutions” that, as such, orients expectations and orders all social processes (1997: 39). She states, once more, that such particular kind of ideological cell was absent among the pre-colonial Yoruba.

In regard to the deities of the pantheon, Oyeronke speaks of three levels. At the first level is “Olodumare” (God – the Supreme Being), that did not have a gender identity, and it is doubtful whether she (or he) was perceived anthropomorphically before the advent of Christianity and Islam in Yorubaland” (p.140). To support this, sources are quoted showing how post-Christianization scholars depicted Olodumare with masculine attributes and called the deity “He”, using the masculine third person, without any basis for doing so. However, Oyeronke gives no evidence of sources from which she could speak of this deity as not anthropomorphic or anthropomorphic but not gendered. A supreme god not anthropomorphic would be quite a rarity though.

At the second level of the pantheon of divinities, according to Oyeronke, there are the orisas, of whom it is said: “though there were ana-male and ana-female (meaning anatomically male and anatomically female) orisa, as in other institutions, this distinction was inconsequential; therefore, it is best described as a distinction without difference”. The author here supports her assertion by mentioning that some orisa of different anatomical sex shared some qualities (the “rage” she says, of Sango and Oya), or that some changed their sex from one locality to another.

This, in fact, also happens in the New World, where deities have specific personalities that are grouped using a gender criterion, despite the similarities that may be present crossing the gender line. Here, too, gender changes with locality or time. Sango is syncretized with the images of Saint Barbara in Cuba, and of Saint John in Brazil; Oya (Iansã) is said to have been male in the mythical past and turned female after becoming Sango’s partner[2]. Logunede, in Bahia, is half-year male and half-year female. This, however, as I believe, and pretend to show, is not the evidence of a symbolic construction marked by the absence of gender in this culture, but, rather, a coded commentary that reveals a specific conception of gender, a statement about gender, and a political discourse phrased in gender terms.

Reading Oyeronke, one is led to wonder why, if anatomy meant nothing socially among the Yoruba – as she states – the orisas, mythical entities, deities, free from human constraints, did have sexualized anatomy and behavior in their mythological representations. How could it be that such ideal anatomy of the gods of the pantheon, pure signifier, meant nothing at all for human affairs? In other words: why did the orisas had, in their mythical representation, a body marked by anatomical dimorphism and gender qualities if this did not bear, as Oyeronke indicates, any consequence on social relations, if this did not express anything relative to the imaginary of gender among human beings?

At the third level she places the cult of the ancestors, “both male and female, venerated by members of each lineage and acknowledged yearly in the Egungun masquerade.

” … the priesthood of various gods was open to both males and females […]. Yoruba religion, just like Yoruba civic life, did not articulate gender as a category […] The roles of the orisa, priests and ancestors were not gender dependent. (1997.: 140)

For Oyeronke, the dominant idiom in Yoruba society was the idiom of seniority - relative to age. What really mattered - and matters – states the author, is whether the person is a child, an adult, or an elder: omo means child, offspring (1997: 40-1); only lately, after nineteenth century, “omokunrin (boy) and omobinrin (girl) that have gained currency today indicate ana-sex for children” (1997: 41). They show that what is socially privileged is the youth of the child, not its anatomy. Similarly, when calling an individual either iya (mother) or baba (father), or obinrin (woman) or okunrin (man), the important designation is their identity as adults, in age of reproduction.

“The most important attribute these categories indicate is not gender; rather, it is expectations that persons of a certain age should have had children.” Iya (mother) or baba (father) “are not just categories of parenthood … They are also categories of adulthood, since they are also used to refer to older people in general. More importantly, they are not binarily opposed and are not constructed in relation to each other” (1997: 41).

By this the author emphasizes that the attribute of relative age and majority is more relevant, in vocatives as Iya of baba, than the implications of gender that the words seem to indicate.

Therefore, clearly, for Oyeronke, seniority prevails over gender and can introduce inversions in the order of gender when looked from Western gender frame. For example, an older or religiously invested obinrin can be regarded as a father by an okunrin. Oyeronke quotes from Johnson´s[3] observations on the relationship between the Oyo ruler and the official obinrin of the palace, who commands the worship to the spirits of the departed kings:

“the king looks upon her as his father, and addresses her as such [...] He kneels in saluting her, and she also returns the salutation, kneeling, never reclining on her elbow as is the custom of the women in saluting their superiors. The king kneels for no one else but her, and prostrates himself before the god Sango, and before those possessed with the deity, calling them ‘father’ ” (p.37-8).

As I will show later, a structure strikingly similar to this can be found in the Sango cult of Recife, Brazil; however, my interpretation arises from a different model. In fact, in Brazil as well, depending of the seniority and gender of her orisa, a priestess can be regarded as a “father,” and a wife can be said to be more “virile” than a husband. Moreover, still more revealing is the fact that the ritual greeting called “odobale” is removed from anatomy in a much more radical way than in the African Yoruba world. According to Oyeronke, in the African dobale (1997: 36) the form of the bow performed depends upon the sex of the person who greets and, in Brazil, it depends upon the sex of his or her orisa.

For Oyeronke: “…the challenge that the Yoruba conception presents is a social world based on social relations, not the body. It shows that it is possible to acknowledge the distinct reproductive roles for obinrin and okunrin without using them to create social ranking. In the Yoruba cultural logic, biology is limited to issues like pregnancy that directly concern reproduction.... I have called this a distinction without social difference” (1997: 36).

“The terms obinrin and okunrin merely indicate the physiological differences between the two anatomies as they have to do with procreation and intercourse … they do not refer to gender categories that connote social privileges and disadvantages. Also, they do not express sexual dimorphism because the distinction they indicate is specific to issues of reproduction” (1997: 34-35). “A superior is a superior regardless of body-type.” “Ori [the head, the vital principle] has no gender.” (1997: 38)

. We see here expressed an unusual meaning of dimorphism, as I ask myself: does she by the way imply that there are more than two morphological elements intervening in procreation?

Alternatively, what I suspect is that, detached from the body, gender names remain as an idiom of social relationships of some kind and organize at least some realms of interaction. But, for Oyeronke, on the contrary, only reproductive roles remain glued to, collapsed onto, and conflated to the body. Just to anticipate a part of my own argument, this seems to come very close to the pivotal role for the division of ritual labor that members of the Nagô or the Ketu cult [4] -- in Brazil attribute to anatomy. It is, precisely, ritual - and not copulative sexual - intercourse what reproduces the African religious lineages in Brazil, and the distribution of ritual gender roles is the only sphere of socio-religious life that follows the guidelines of sexual dimorphism, being strictly oriented by it. However, evidently, it is the symbolic aspect of that dimorphism, and not its biological dimension, what counts – since we are here in the realm of religious and philosophical reproduction of a spiritual, not biological or even racial Africa. Only when seen from this broader perspective given by the New World can we reach the hardcore of what was already at stake there and understand the amount of conventional, uncritical thinking that is present under the apparent radicalism of Oyeronke’s thesis.

If, on the one side, the reproduction and continuity of Africa in Brazil is processed through anatomically distributed ritual roles, this, on the other side, contrasts with all the other spheres - religious, social, psychic, affective and sexual – of the religious life. Just to give an example, even reproduction, child upbringing, and domestic organization are conceived, in the environment of Afro-Brazilian cults, as detached from biology. Here, the family – and domestic – unit of the cult, the so-called “family of saint,” operative for all matters of life, is not based on shared biological substance but on initiation, which is to say, in the shared ritual substance (called ase, inoculated in the body during initiation by the initiate’s “father of saints”). Sexual orientation and personality are freed from biological constraints as well. I could go on endlessly giving examples of a gender milieu that operates freely in relation to the biological and anatomical data, and where the Africa described by Oyeronke can be recognized vividly, but where gender terms – and, from a Western point of view, a subverted gender map – can be also recognized.

Moreover, Oyeronke incurs in a number of contradictions. One of them, for example, when, while denying any gender connotation of the words oko and aya, she traces the equivalence of these terms with positions in the household. She says: “the translation of aya as “wife” and oko as “husband” imposes gender and sexual constructions that are not part of the Yoruba conception (1997: 44).” To add then: “oko and aya [were, respectively] owner/insider and non owner/outsider in relation to the ilé as a physical space and symbol of lineage (in reference to the virilocal practice established in the culture). T

his insider-outsider relationship was ranked (my emphasis) with the insider being the privileged senior”- so, clearly and undeniably, gender terms are associated with status here. In a household, says Oyeronke, all the older members of the house, male and female, were considered oko – husband, elder - to the newly arrived wife - aya, even though she only had a marital sexual relation with her conjugal partner. It is also referred that when this latter died, only younger “anamales” of the house could claim sexual rights to her, “since this was a heterosexual world” (sic, my emphasis), and when an oko “anafemale” (senior) claimed inheritance rights to the widow, the sexual access was passed on to one of her “anamale” children.

Significantly, Oyeronke also lets us know that while men or women could be oko to other men and other women due to seniority, anamales could not be aya (wives) of either anamales or anafemales. They could only be aya to the orisas they worshiped and received in possession, this meaning that anatomical males did not cross the gender frontier downwards in the social field. Definitely, among the pre-colonial Yoruba, male anatomy was linked to a condition of status and prestige that did not combine with a wifely social role, except under the command of a supernatural entity. It surprises one that a point of such importance with all its consequences passes thoroughly unnoticed by the author. This, I believe, ends by putting a serious limitation to the efficacy of her model.

However, despite the ethnographic difficulties that her model seems unable to overcome, or perhaps, precisely as a consequence of this, the author offers us a look into the complexities of gender among the Yoruba, giving us a hint of the high malleability level of the system. This malleability in the Yoruba universe, played doubtlessly a crucial role in the relocation of the cosmology particular to this culture - and of the practices associated to it - in the New World, particularly in Brazil and, later, in the recent wave of expansion southwards, into the new national territories of Argentina and Uruguay.

Lorand Matory published Sex and the Empire that is no more in 1994, and at the time of the publication he was assistant professor of anthropology and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. His text also testifies for the existence of a complex gender construction in the traditional Oyo (Yoruba) world. He will try as well to express those complexities - which take gender schemes of Yoruba cosmology and religious practices almost to a condition of ineffability – by formulating a model based on the idea of transvestitism. However, Matory states, “the women remain the paradigmatic image of married wifeliness not only in the orisa religions but across the Yoruba religious spectrum” (Matory 1994: 108).

In Matory’s model, what he calls “sartorial iconography” and diacritical idiosyncratic ritual and work gestures mark what is womanly - women dressing or statuary/engraving/figures of women “kneeling to offer service and sacrifice, carry head loads, and/or tie a baby to their back.” (1994: 108). However, although they might be strictly dependant on these emblematic – and not anatomic – marks, the link with biological determinations is still established through women:

“Women’s marital and reproductive status directly affects their standing in every local religious organization. Menstruation compromises the participation of women of childbearing age” (1994: 107-108).

Transvestitism is, for Matory, the main “ironic” idiom of gender structures in Yoruba society, which allows, for example, for people of the same sex to enter in a social relationship as oko and obinrin (with or without sexual implications). Still, the paradigmatic standing of the female body and its anatomic, postural, or sartorial attributes as signifier of a feminine relational position (though a male body can enter into that position as well) reveals the existence of a cognitive map built clearly in gender terms.

For Matory, this map is neither verbal, nor nominated by means of lexical categories, but preferentially visual, scripted with icons, gestures and visual marks. Oyeronke, on the other hand, denies the importance of visualizing among the Yoruba and states the dominance of the audible. She also states, besides, as I said, that no words exist in Yoruba language for masculine and feminine as opposed positions or personalities (Oyeronke, 1997: 34) and that there only exist words for the relational positions of wife and husband (oko and obinrin), In Oyeronke’s model one is left wondering about the raison d’ être of verbal categories, statuary, carvings and genderized costume, if neither of them is meant to have any meaning in social life. In Matory’s model, we are entitled to interrogate why the generalized practices of transvestitism if gender social hierarchies were meant to be left in their place, untouched, in the Yoruba gender ideology.

Both authors, however, seem to agree about the existence of a Yoruba model where gender follows a radically different scheme than in the West. But, while in Oyeronke’s text there is belligerency and the premise of the collision of mutually untranslatable civilizations, one of them defeated and colonized, remaining only as a sophisticated and pure civilization anti-paradigm, in Matory there is a “lesson” to bring back home, as I will try to show.

It seems to me that the discourse I have presented so far, Oyeronke’s discourse, has its own hybridity introduced in her enunciation by her privileged interlocutor: the West. By stating an ancient Africa free from gender hierarchy – and she is clear about this -, she is upholding a pure, pre-colonial Africa, and has the introduction of genderized social and cosmological relations as the index of a Westernized, impoverished Africa. Matory’s text, to which I will refer now, has also a shadowed interlocutor. While Oyeronke is an antagonist, Matory is a reformist. It seems to me that he is bringing home the idea of transvestitism and gender centrality to the polis, to his fellows, to his country. As I will try to show, in his ethnography, he speaks on behalf of a hierarchic gender structure that can remain as an organizing principle of an also hierarchic society despite the fact that its dramatis personae change skins, cross-dress. His is a stable, not menacing, though transformative gender relational cell.

Ethnographers, as scholars in general, never cease to be politically oriented, oriented by interests and values, conveying a message to peers, bringing arguments home.

Matory shows us a world where transvestitism always leads to a hierarchical, genderized, asymmetric arrangement. “[B]oth male wives and female husbands are central actors in the Oyo -Yoruba Kingdom and village,” he says (1994: XII); “…all women are husbands to somebody and simultaneously wives to multiple others” (1994: 2); male transvestism in Oyo-Yoruba is not only an idiom of domination and not only the evidence of the independence of gender categories from biological sex but a practice that “transforms existing gender categories” (1994: 3).

However, the fact is that, in Matory’s model, the practice of transvestitism transforms gender categories in the narrow sense of universalizing their hierarchical structure onto the social field, projecting them well beyond the field of gender roles and sexuality, and, of course, freeing them from straightjacket biological constraints. In this sense, Matory takes from Marilyn Strathern the idea, formulated for societies of the Pacific, that “sexual/gender inequality is the irreducible “idiom” in which even inequality between persons of the same sex and gender is understood” (1994: 176-177).

At the core of Matory’s model, one finds the idea – common in the descriptions of trance experience in African religions at the Old Continent and in the New World Diaspora - of possessed humans “mounted” by gods. Rather simplistic bedrock indeed for such a complex system of thought as the one he deals with. He says: “the vocabulary and dress code of the possession religions…. illuminates the structure of that relationship. Recent initiates of Yemoja, Osun, Obatala, and Sango … are known specifically as “brides of the god.” They wear women clothes or attributes. And the god is said to mount those he possesses” (1997: 7). The god is invoked as “husband” and “lord” by the devotees. “The concept of ‘mounting’ (gigun) likens the priest (elegun) to a royal charger (esin) and to a royal wife (ayaba)” (1994: 135). In addition, pots and calabashes are icons of that hierarchical orderliness in patrilineal marriage.

Gender hierarchy does not mean superiority of one biological sex to another but asymmetry as expressed by the relationship of genders in marriage. “Upon marriage, a woman becomes a wife (iyawo) not only to the man she marries (okogidi) but to all of that man’s male and female agnates and to the women who married him and his agnates before her arrival. Conversely, not only the man she married but also all his agnates are classified as her husbands (oko)”(1994: 105). What we see here is a description identical to the one offered by Oyeronke concerning the wife newly arrived at her new home after marriage. In one word, wife and bride, in this social language, mean junior, subordinate. This typical organization is observed by Oyeronke too, as I showed, but while she interprets it as the absence of gender, Matory understands it as the generalization of gender terms as a classifying system in the hierarchical social field.

Gender and sexuality become an idiom for he hierarchical transitions characteristic of traditional Yoruba society. Perhaps, the clearest expression of this arrangement is provided by the fact that, when the senior male possession priest (elegun) receives the orisa in possession, he does it as the divinity’s bride, “mounted” by the god as a sexual metaphor. And it is believed by many that Sango’s mount, that is, the priest in state of possession, can himself “mount”, that is, perform sexual intercourse with a woman in the audience (1994: 170).

So, what I want to highlight here is the fact that the same social actor is described as subordinated in one relationship and empowered in the other, female to one partner, male to the other. I had pointed at this language of circulation of gender positioning for Brazil, too, though based on different ethnographic materials. The idea persists. However, its impact and destination are merely to organize social relationships and institute a hierarchy using the gender idiom but a certain undermining of patriarchy’s solid rock foundations too. In my analysis of the Brazilian material, the application of gender terms by cult people leads to the subversion of their usual application outside the environment of the religion. The aspects of the gender system that Matory calls “ironic” for the Yoruba are the core of the gender Afro-Brazilian plot .

I use here as a basis my ethnography of the Nagô (Yoruba) of Recife, which shows a gender order that remains recognizable as Candomblé in general for Brazil, notwithstanding regional differences in myth and ritual. The pantheon of the cult presents the appearance of a formally arranged family group at first sight. However, as soon as we scratch the surface we find a father – Orisanla (Obatala in Cuba) -, a patriarch, who, despite his ultimately revengeful personality, is not the acting authority among the orisas, once he is slow, impassive and weak. A mother – Iemoja – who, despite her apparently polite and meek countenance, is false and treacherous “like the sea,” they say, “since you see the surface but never the depths”. Echoes of an encoded memory of the middle passage may be heard here, since this element of her personality parallels the treason of the sea that separated and at the same time continued to link the slaves to their mother-land.

Iemoja is a mother who does not bring up her own children, leaving them to be cared for by a foster mother – Osun, the goddess of fertility who is not the child-bearer but the caretaker. In a coded form, we find here the historical split between the white mother, lady of the Casa Grande - the Manor house of landlords -, and the slave wet-nurse. The father - Orisanla - brings up very lovingly a daughter – Osun –, his favorite, though born from his wife Iemoja’s affair of infidelity with a more powerful god – Orunmilá.

There is also a wife - Iansan (Oya) -, who is said to had been male in earlier times and to be today more “virile” than her husband – Sango -, because she rules over the spirit of the dead – the eguns –, very much feared bySango. When Iansan finally agrees to marry Sango, puts as a condition never to be obliged to co-habit with him, since she simply and adamantly abhors Sango’s preferred food: Agbo, ram. A hard-working first-born son of the dynasty – Ogum -, had his throne usurped by his self-indulgent and cunning younger brother – Sango -, with the lenience of the mother – Iemoja –, who immediately realized the maneuver but did nothing to avoid it because, as it is said, “she fears anarchy more than injustice”. While the father – Orisanla – observed, either unconcerned or impotent, the injustice that was taking place. This is a “kingdom” in which the mother, and not the father, has the prerogative of crowning the new king and controls officially all the matters of the State. Not to be left unmentioned, at least two episodes of homosexual seduction between deities are narrated to support the social practices and a way of life relying on this mythology.

In sum, invoked and alluded to in ordinary conversation, an endless series of inversions transforms this apparently conventional hierarchical mythology in an ironic discourse about Brazilian society, where not merely biological determination is removed from its usual pivotal place in ideology but also patriarchy and hierarchy are undermined by everyday activities and references to myth. The patriarchal foundations of a privatized “domestic” state are also questioned. A fundamental doubt about the gender structures upon which the dominant social moral is built is inoculated into the political system as a whole (see Segato 1995 a and b)

Inversely, in Yorubaland, according to Matory, the system and its vocabulary are used to create a social regime marked by rigid hierarchical relative positions that cross the whole range of relationships – among humans and between humans and gods. Unfortunately, his work does not answer the central question: how does this really affect gender and sexuality, what is the feed-back between the social and the gender plan? The gender grammar is approached as the idiom of social hierarchies. The argument emphasizes that gender icons are designed fundamentally to express and keep in place social hierarchy. Despite what the author says, we find ourselves looking at a gendered system that, though detaching gender from biological sex, does not disrupt or undermine the gender regime but enshrines it as the paradigm of all relationships of authority in a world intensely shaped by hierarchies.

In the Yoruba system, as Matory holds, gender exists through predicates, and those predicates are sociological, relational or, at the most, theatrical. The feminine, as Matory leads us to understand, is “bridely”, and the masculine is not manly, but “husbandly.” Gender, once again, is a position in relation and not a biological essence (1994: 164). However, a rigid, heterosexual, hierarchical, power and prestige matrix prevails in this “technical” - as Matory calls it - , highly self-conscious, artificial, gender order. Distribution of rights and duties and the code of etiquette are marked by “gender”, thus understood as the language of relative ranks. Mobile, relational positions are contained within a fix institutional paradigm. “Beyond affirming or undermining existing gender categories, this sacred cross-dressing finances transformations of gender that make it the densest of all local emblems of power (ase) and subjectivity” (1994: 175).

Here, the act of “mounting” sets the scene of asymmetry (sexually, ritually and, as an allegory, socially). “Gender, then, is the idiom of relations between gods and priests, riders and horses, parents and children, seniors and juniors, kings and plebes” (1994: 177). Thus, “as a source of metaphoric predications on political hierarchy, economic privilege and personal health, gender ceases to be gender as we know it” (1994: 177-8). And the author wonders: “Does cross-dressing affirm or undermine hegemonic gender roles? What boundaries does the cross dresser cross?” (1994: 202).

I would say that he himself gives the evidences for the answer: no boundary is crossed. The fixed positions man/woman are substituted by the relational, mobile positions husband/wife at the core of the system. The husband/wife structure transverses the system organizing it hierarchically. Husband/wife turns into a permanent metaphor of the hierarchical religious polis. Thus, “sartorial and cephalic transvestitism” practiced in Oyo Yoruba is not seen by Matory as a “ritual inversion intent on manifesting the power of disorder […] Nor does it appear to undermine gendered power inequalities” (1994: 211). Rather, and clearly, Matory speaks of the conservation of an order by means of a secondary symbolization of that order, and transvestitism is taken then to the center of the institutional order as a structuring force in it. This in the precise sense that, in Matory’s own words, “transvestitism is not a marginal phenomenon. It is a central one, once codified and disseminated by an imperial state and now answering to the deepest aspirations of hundreds of thousands of Nigerians, Beninois and, as we shall see, Brazilians” (1994: 215).

While Oyeronke tells the West that gender did not exist among the pre-colonial Yoruba, claiming therefore the difference of her own world and her own difference, the news brought home by Matory seems to be that transvestitism and the transposition of fixed gender schemes into different skins is as efficacious an idiom of hierarchical social organization as a gender tailored by biology. This is so because, as stated in Matory’s model, what counts is the untouched hierarchical logic of the gender matrix, not the anatomies that embody it.

The complex gender system that these scholars try somehow to describe at work in the traditional Yoruba religious polis was one of the pillars, I believe, of the solid expansion of Yoruba religion and cosmology in Brazil, and from Brazil to other countries in present days. In fact, whatever was or is in Africa the precise organization of the system the authors quoted tried to describe, it is evident to me that an extraordinary work of preservation took place in the New World. It was not merely the elementary idea that the deity “mounts” its medium or “horse”, so widespread in the Afro-American world to indicate possession, what was preserved, but also, and very specially, the intricacies and abstractions of the social management of gender. That preservation work did not restrict itself exclusively to the formal, ritualistic and liturgical aspects of the Yoruba tradition in the New World that are unequivocally tied to the mode of sociability indicated by the authors for the African context, but it has widened and become more radical, affecting the aspects of the gender construction that are most ineffable.

In my writings, I use the image of an “afro-Brazilian codex” in order to make reference to this permanent hard core of an anti-essentialist posture that cuts across practice and knowledge of Candomblé culture (see Segato, 1988). With the term “codex” I try to emphasize a redundancy, that is, the meaningful repetition of some motifs. These repeated motifs point to the existence of a fixed code at work behind the observable practices, an encrypted inscription in a hidden layer that manifests itself constantly, however, in open discourse – mythological, social, sexual and ritual – at the Yoruba religious enclaves in the New World.

Indeed, it was very moving for me to find these two books, published around ten years after my first essay on the topic appeared. Other scholars have called attention to the peculiarities of the gender systems of African-American religions and the presence of homosexuals in them - in Brazil (Landes 1940 and 1967; Ribeiro 1969; Fry 1977 and 1986; Wafer 1991; and Birman 1995), as well as in Cuban Santeria (Dianteill 2000) and Haitian Voodoo (Lescot 2002). However, the specificity of my writing on it is precisely that I claim that the gender system is a structuring and crucial factor in the continuity of the tradition, the very core of it, and not a superfluous or additional element that could be absent without affecting the culture, the world-view and the Afro-American society around Candomblé. In other words, I deal with what could be called - not without a semantic margin of error- its homosexual and androgynous features, pointed so many times as a recurrent element in the sociability and sexuality of the cults, not as a separate element, but rather as a consequence of a particular construction of the gender system that is not merely a cult’s associated attribute among many, but constitutes a central and fundamental structure for understanding the universe of Candomble.

Much has been said about the reasons why the Yoruba civilization prevailed over other African cultures that arrived in the New World in forming a structured religion and its social world around. Two aspects are usually pointed out as crucial: 1. massive arrival of a Yoruba contingent after intercontinental trade was officially over, and 2. the solid institutions of the Yoruba empire in Africa. From what I have been able to observe in the African religious environments in Brazil and, lately, during the last twenty years, about the recent southern expansion of these religions to the countries of the River Plate basin (see Segato 1991 and 1996), I think it is possible to add a third and fundamental factor to those reasons, that is, the malleability of the gender system and, with it, the flexibility and anti-essentialism of family arrangements.

For the first wave, I would say - briefly, since I have written on it extensively before - that a non-essentialist use of gender and family terms found a fertile terrain in the Brazilian colonial environment. This was so because constituted couples and their offspring could not find stability as family groups and were often dispersed, demographic ratios between males and females were highly inadequate, and marriage between slaves was not enforced but hindered for a long time almost everywhere in the country (Segato 1996). Therefore, a construction of gender and a terminology for family organization that could be freed from conflation with biological determinants, anatomical signifiers or fix relationships was ideal for this setting. Moreover, in this new environment, the whole system came to affect sexuality too and did not merely operate as an idiom for relative social status, as described by Matory.

In the second wave, Afro-Brazilian religions of a Yoruba base (like the “Batuque” of Porto Alegre and the Candomblé of Bahia) expanded to Argentina and Uruguay. In these countries, as my interpretation goes (Segato 1991 and 1996), they provided the demarcation of a space of difference and symbolic inscription for groups without free expression or visibility in the society. Among those minorities, the homosexual one, traditionally asphyxiated in Hispanic countries and left without room for self-representation and recognition, found its niche for expression.

The Yoruba world restored itself in Brazil around the cult of the orisas as the ideal embodiment of personality types. Personality was the notion that remained when the local, lineage and family constraints for worshiping particular orisas were lost because of the slave trade. Marriage and the paradigmatic couple oko/obin described by Matory were also lost, and the line of ancestry and descendence was transposed into a ritually consecrated non-biological family. Genealogy ran through “mother” or “father of saint” to “children of saint” by means of initiation into the membership of the cult. Iyawo, for example, which means “wife” and, therefore, “wife of the orisa”, when referred to a priest in Yorubaland, becomes understood, in the Brazilian environment, as “child of saint”, and the “Iyawo’s coming-out” makes reference to the ceremonial presentation of the newly initiated “child” in cult’s society. The orisas remained divided by gender, what turned them, more clearly than ever, into a classification of personalities as masculine and feminine. In this truly gendered zodiac, a person with a female body can have a personality classified as male if the tutelary divinity is male. In this case it will be said that the person’s “saint owner of the head is a male saint”. And a person with a male body can be, in the same fashion, the ‘child’ of a “female” orisa.

It is personality, in this model, that is predicated by gender, and the ideal, paradigmatic anatomy of the orisas functions as the signifier of this difference. However, androgyny and transits of gender were ever present, embodied in some orisas’ myth: Logunede, in Bahia, is said to be six months male and six months female, and Oya is said to have been male in the past and become female presently, after her marriage with Sango, though still exhibiting a rather virile personality. A continuum is traced along the range of orisas in their quality as personalities, resulting that some female saints are said to be more virile than others and that there may be degrees of masculinity for “male saints”, to the point that, regarding some particular trait of character, a female saint can be “more virile” or “more masculine” than a masculine saint can be.

The profession of priesthood presents a organization closer to Oyeronke’s description. Though it may contemplate gender ritual roles that neatly follow the anatomical divide, it does not present any differentiation or specificity as regards social roles. Yoruba organization in Brazil also presents similitude to Oyeronke’s and Matory’s descriptions of the house, the agbo ile, called now ile, or “terreiro”. This cult-house where a “family of saint” dwells and performs its rituals is the socio-political religious unit, as in Africa the agbo ile is the socio-political cell of society. But, as I said, the family is constituted on the basis of ritual ties consecrated by initiation and periodical renovation of this vow. The biological criterion of descendence is then relegated to a secondary role. In this organization, the priest - or the priestess - is the sole leader of the domestic unit, but despite having his name marked by the gender difference – “father” or “mother” “of saint” - his or her religious office’s rights and duties are not specified according to gender; that is to say that the social role of a “father” or a “mother” “of saints” is exactly the same, and therefore an androgynous role, not responding to any gender difference. Similarly, a “son” and a “daughter” “of saints”, a “brother”, and a “sister” have no specific social privileges or obligations following the gender divide.

The reproductive labor, then, is ritual reproductive labor, in the sense that there, finally, the counterpart of the specific ritual tasks of a “mother” or “father of saints” becomes necessary. It is the unarguable required ritual presence of both, with their roles rigidly given by gender anatomies, that allows for the reproduction of the religious lineage. It is in this aspect that I find the greatest similitude with the “absence of gender” that Oyeronke attributes to the pre-colonial tradition of the Yoruba: the fact that sexual dimorphism is given relevance exclusively for its reproductive role.

Seniority of biological age, as it was in Africa according to the authors I am quoting, becomes in Brazil a non-biological criterion: seniority derives from time as a member of the cult, age as an initiate.

Finally, the anti-essentialism and the androgyny pervading the whole system have an impact on sexual practices as well, since they free sexuality from the ideology of anatomical constraints, present in Yorubaland for both authors. It is in this sense that Brazilian system seems more radical to me in the dissolution of the heterosexual and hierarchical ideological matrix, and more detached from Western symbolic structure.

From what I said, a four-layer scheme can be recognized in the gender system found in Brazil: ritual roles – anatomically marked -, social roles – androgynous -, personality – psychic dimorphism independent from anatomical determinants -, and sexual orientation – nomad - follow independent rules and are not tied together by a straight-jacket that binds them to a specific correlation with the anatomical data as in the dominant ideology of the Western system. Their interplay allows for gender mobility and open roads to androgyny. The overall gender of a person, that is, of a “child of orisa” is the outcome of an ever transitional situation in the complex intersection of those four layers. Gender circulation, as well as biological indetermination, are inscribed once and again in the codex. Of course, following the advance of the State and capital colonization of the cult, this fluidity may be withdrawing.

However, it is important to warn that in the Candomblé world, differently from what was pointed out by Oyeronke, gender terminology as well as the terms that denote different positions in the organization of a nuclear family, even though dislocated from biological determinism and the anatomical domain, have full validity. This validity refers not to their usual function of organizing the world in the fashion described by Matory, which is to say, as an idiom to assign, re-estate and reproduce relative social ranks, but rather as a scheme permanently subverted by practice, eroded by mythological commentary, and used in such a way as to disorganize the hierarchies they carry. The use of gender terms and of family classification – in the pantheon as well as in the “family of saint” – constitute an acknowledgement and formal acceptance of the hegemonic patriarchal landscape in force within the broader society, but transgressed and undermined by use.

We are hereby facing the case of the subaltern that replicates the language of the dominant but, in its use, shifts it, makes it worn out, de-stabilized, thus eroding the dominant-dominated dialects itself, black-white, Christian-Afro-Brazilian.

Here is at work what I have already described elsewhere as the peculiar “double-voicing”, the duplicity of the afro-Brazilian voice, using the Bakhtinian idea of the responsive and dialogical aspects of enunciation (Bakhtin, 1981). I am referring here to the fact that, even in the repetition of the hegemonic and totalizing discourse of the dominant, the subaltern – in this case the Afro-Brazilian –, by introducing the mark of his differentiated position in the terminology used, doubles his voice. By means of the same enunciation, manifests that he recognizes and yields to the presence of a circumscribing world hegemonized by the dominant patriarchal Western morality, but a sensible hearing reveals that such enunciation, in the way and the circumstances it is conveyed, carries a second voice. In other words, even though accepting the dominant lexicon for family and gender, a corrosive mark of doubt, of “bad-practice”, of insubordination is inserted, transforming the outcome of discourse. In this sense, what the cult’s insider says may come in a split-voice, double-voice, affirmative and negative, ironical (Segato, 1996).

In the first voice, the image of the world comes out as a positive print; there is recognition of how things should be. In the veiled, second voice, made up of slidings and inversions of the terms by use, a diverging image of the surrounding world is revealed, at the same time that, through the use of the double-voicing effect with its clues, it is created a sense of complicity among peer-members.

The subject of whom I speak, therefore, does not see himself as a substantive other; he is neither affirmative of his “other”, “distinct” reality, nor does he respond in a reactive form to the dominant order (as it is the inversely obedient reaction of fundamentalists), nor does he confirm the validity of that order. But rather he distorts the patriarchal family by the mimicry of the narratives about the members of the pantheon. This generates what I have called, in a different context, a “progressive mimesis” (Segato 2001): he imitates the master by worshiping a Jesus-like Orisala and a Mary-like Iemoja, responds to his expectations, yields to the image that the dominant order assigns him, whilst inserting an element of parody that transforms obedience into disrespect. What he says is: “such is the world, I recognize its existence and the fact that I must live with it; I am aware of my place and my ascribed image in that order, but by replicating it I only express that I acknowledge, not that I accept it”. It is all about an imitation that implodes that which imitates, as when a black person calls the other “nigger”: he is saying that he “knows”, and that he mocks what he knows.

It was possibly Homi Bhabha the one to offer the most precise conceptual framework for us to grasp this type of strategy, to which he refers using the idea of hybridism. “Hybridism”, for Bhabha, is a dynamic process, plentiful of the discursive tactics of de-stabilization as those I have just discussed. In Bhabhba’s sense, “hybrid” does not refer to quiet, mechanical mixtures of symbols brought together by the encounter between cultures, as those spoken in the texts about syncretism. Hybridity is not about the stabilized outcome of worlds’ encounters and the bricolage formation of a new cultural reality by means of mixture. The notion of hybridism has the advantage of placing the hybrid subject in motion, showing him in his dissatisfaction, in his uneasiness within the signifiers that, however, he is obliged to use. It denotes a subject that carries on the burden that weighs upon him, but does it introducing a twist in it, inoculating it with doubt, inscribing it with a mark of distrust, never fully obeying.

In his text “Remembering Fanon”, with which Bhabha introduces the 1986 English edition of Black Skin White Mask by re-inscribing Fanon in contemporary critical thinking after a decade of oblivion, he formulates a notion of identity produced as an enunciation adequate to its addressee, that is to say, as a sign for the other. This notion of identity, inspired by Lacan (“the transformation produced on a subject when he incorporates an image”, Lacan, 1977), is close to the Bakhtinian idea of responsiveness of speech mentioned above in the sense that the voice of the interlocutor is audible in the enunciation of the subject, thus producing the dialogic or polyphonic effect described by Bakhtin. In this way of understanding it, hybridism results from the ambivalence of subaltern discourse pressed by the expectations of the dominant discourse and its effort to adapt to such expectations while being other to it. The epicenter of hybrid discourse is, therefore, the ambivalence of the subject in the act of identifying and signifying itself to the dominant other counting on the elements that dominant discourse places at hand. Ambivalence derives from smuggling into hegemonic discourse an index of difference by the subaltern subject when making use of it. For this concept, Bhabha also relies on his reading of psychoanalysis:

There is an important difference between fetishism and hybridity. The fetish reacts to the change in the value of the phallus by fixing in as object prior to the perception of difference, an object that can metaphorically substitute for its presence while registering the difference. So long as it fulfils the fetishistic ritual, the object can look like anything (or nothing!). The hybrid object, on the other hand, retains the actual semblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues its presence by resisting it as the signifier of Entstellung [displacement, distortion, tergiversation, recognition] – after the intervention [and acknowledgement] of difference (Bhabha, 1994: 115; emphasis and clarifications in brackets are mine].

In other words, hybrid discourse preserves the signifier of power, but withdraws its value, still recognizing it (“after the intervention [and the acknowledgement] of difference”). Emphasis is placed in the subject´s internal dissatisfaction with the sign that the dominant discourse throws upon him, makes available to him for identification. The epicenter of the argument is not placed in the other as an interlocutor to whom I must oppose an image stating my diverging identity, but rather in the partial and ambivalent acceptance of his categories, including the one offered as a sign for identification, though never yielding to a totalized signification by it.

This seems to be the case when Afro-Brazilians replicate in sociability, social organization and mythology the apparent terms of hegemonic gender matrix and patriarchal family, but do it de-stabilizing these very signs in the way it articulates them in practice and in the daily use of myths. Under the well kept appearance that it is a religion as good as any other, a family as legitimate as any other, it operates a corrosion of those signs and slips them in the direction of the eroded and subverted to the point of turning them unrecognizable. It is due to this maneuver, as I have stated before (1995b), that this society’s mythological narratives are narratives of “after the fall”, of times following the Atlantic passage, belonging to post-colonial society that it knows its place, but it slips ironically outside it.

In this context, there is a divinity that epitomizes all that has been said. This is Exu, the gate-keeper. He is servant to the orisas, but a mighty servant, without whose collaboration no door is open - the ways remain blocked, the interpersonal relationships are hindered. Exu, who would grow locally to the point of acquiring a cult of his own – the Exu cult, a branch of Umbanda in clear expansion – is the divinity that symbolizes this progressive mimesis consisting in the use of elements from the hegemonic moral environment without endorsing them. The new, transformed Exus of the Umbanda cult are represented white, drink champagne and dress with elegant tuxedos and cloaks. But they are Whites from brothels, pimps, habitants of “the night”. Their elegance is itself the parody of real elegance, a subversion of good-manners in the performance of their underworld duties, an inverted sign inscribing their marginal world.

While writing on the Yoruba and formulating their models, Oyeronke Oyewumi and Lorand Matory are in fact internally in dialogue with their respective significant audiences, both Anglo-Saxon: she, as an irreducible antagonist; he, as I see him, instilled by a purpose of minimalist reform. One in want of her old world back; the other struggling to introduce the fragments, the spoils, of the old empire “that is no more” in the new empire, always anxious for self-completing annexations. Like them, to a certain degree, I do hide myself behind my “data,” practicing ventriloquism with the native in order to deliver my message, which is, I believe, not entirely removed from theirs.

Why is Oyeronke so emphatic in her effort to deny the existence of a gender structure – from her point of view, a Western category - among the pre-colonial Yoruba? Probably because her main interlocutor in discourse is still the West, to whom she puts her demands of recognition for her difference. Why Lorand Matory’s argument emphasizes so much social transvestitism, disciplining to the most whatever other divergences the Yoruba world may contain in relation to Western morality and the gender order, by means of translating it back to the tight heterosexual matrix of the dimorphic hierarchical map? It seems to me that the author’s underlying subject is the claim for rights within – and not outside –set standards of imperial morality and well in accordance with the established order. This is the struggle of the “good citizen” who, despite some superfluous peculiarity that could be contained as a hidden layer of behavior – for example, in relation to sexual orientation -, aspires to nothing more that an appropriate niche for himself just to fit in within the narrow and conservative limits established by dominant morality and in accordance to the canon of social and political organization.

Through ethnography, the first brings her field and praises it as an uncontaminated model to thus claim the recognition of her own radical otherness; while the second brings it as an argument for admission in a world that does not need to be transformed more than the strictly necessary just to incorporate a “sartorial” difference in it – using his own terms.

My discourse does not lack an addressee either, or perhaps more than one. On the one hand, I tell those who contend in the political arena set by State institutional idioms that the African descendents in Brazil have an encoded, cryptic way to criticize and disrupt the patriarchal foundation of Brazilian institutions that prevail around them. But this way is not that of the antagonism of political identities as the globalized West would expect, but rather a much more complex and ambivalent one. The African religious tradition installs itself in a niche within a dominant context initially colonial and later national. Its discourse is referred, responsive and disruptive, to the hegemonic values present in that context, by means of a hybrid undermining appropriation of its elements. There is, as I said, in that appropriation, the acknowledgement of the existence and dominance of a surrounding world, affirmed as other to the tradition. However, this is an otherness within which the tradition, in a very peculiar way, is a part. That other world was there, in power, when the cult was constituted, and continues to be there, with recognizable boundaries and exchanges across them. Because of that, the cult’s way of being is marginal, its identity is an identity at the margins and as margin, and this is the source of its strength. Not as a substitutive other, but as a supplementary other, in a Derridean sense (1976).

The “people of saint” do not seem to imagine themselves as constituting a separate world, but rather as an in-fold, a crease, in an already hegemonized world. Modern Brazilian history is represented, in the daily conversations that invoke cult’s mythology, as a landscape open to transits, there to be traversed, even, as I said, to be undermined by cunning misuse, but seldom as the result of autonomous political building or decision-making on the part of the members of the tradition. The surrounding landscape is believed to have been already there, encountered at the moment of arrival. To be a “passer-by” of the national history, in transit, does not mean to be a protagonist of its events. This installs the ambivalence between feelings of being there without plainly belonging into it.

Once, a prestigious member of the tradition told me: “ours is never a frontal, ostensive politics” (Segato 2003). I read, in this statement, the acknowledgement, by a representative member of the community, that the Afro-Brazilian political discourse is always formulated in the mode of the vocal duplicity, in the sense that was examined above: while they uphold a formal family in the pantheon of gods, they subvert it with their informal narratives about the a-moral behavior of its members and with the practices of cult’s sociability – including here members’ sexual practices. In the cult’s ironic commentary the patriarchal and hierarchical frontispiece of the mythological pantheon reaches its reversal: By focusing on the irony of the cult’s commentary on Brazilian patriarchal institutions, my interpretation seeks, unknowingly, to deepen this surreptitious erosion of the conventional gender system, but without clinging to any other hierarchic articulation that could replace the one I have just deconstructed. It seeks no alternative stabilized pattern or set of rules. It is neither done in the name of another order, nor in the name of an antagonist other. This seems to me as a more radical critical stand, and I believe to have found it in my field, as much as Oyeronke and Matory believe to have the answers for their respective quests in theirs.

Colonial hybridism is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures that may later be resolved as a matter of cultural relativism … it is not simply the content of the denied knowledges. […] To see the cultural not as a source of conflict – in the sense of different cultures – but as a result of discriminatory practices – the production of cultural differentiation as a sign of authority – change its value and its rules for recognition. (Bhabha 1994a: 114)

…the apprehension of a unified identity, integrated and dialectical, guides the Western way of thinking identity – the identity as an image that corresponds to its metaphoric, vertical, totemic, dimension. But identity is also displacement, given its metonymic dimension … because there is always something missing in the presupposition of the sign’s totality. It is necessary to recover its performative, although elliptic, although undefined, dimension, beyond the kind of dialectic discourse that simply repeats the other in its negation (Pechincha 2002: 199).

In this sense, among my shadow interlocutors are scholars and activists who, more than often, reduce the struggling for recognition of their own right to difference to mere claims of admission within the system, loosing sight of the need to frame and question the system itself by means of, possibly, its undermining and disruptive misuse (Segato 1998 and 1999). I engage critically against them and the reified notion of political identity with which they many times work - a notion that totalizes the subaltern condition, putting it in a reactive mirror position in relation to the dominant condition, inside a stagnant and anodyne paradigm of multiculturalism, with fixed places in a world map. The diffident, innocuous “diversity” of bourgeois multiculturalism opposes itself, in Homi Bhabha’ formulation, to the constant destabilizing inscription of “difference” in hegemonic texts (Bhabha, 1994 b:34).

If Oyeronke Oyewumi is the post-colonial antagonist, a nativist, someone who asserts the principles of her Old World as an entirely respectable Other in an uncontaminated condition; Lorand Matory brings home the idea of a society where transvestitism, an apparently moral heresy for the West, does not threaten the established order, but, precisely on the contrary, can contribute with power and be functional within hierarchical institutions. I myself speak on behalf of a tradition that runs besides and underneath the hegemonic voice of Brazilian patriarchal Catholic State and its institutions as a corrosive counter-discourse, an unpleasant supporting character, which, humorous and ironic, erosions, de-stabilizes and deconstruct the lexicon of domination.

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[1] I am grateful to Mario Rufer and Ernesto Ignacio de Carvalho for their suggestions and relevant information that helped me in the elaboration of this text

[2] See Segato, Rita: 2005 (1995), in particular the chapter “Yemanjá e seus filhos: Fragmentos de um discurso político para compreender o Brasil” (“Iemoja and her children: fragments of a political discourse for understanding Brazil). In

[3] See Johnson 1921

[4] Names for Yoruba religion in Recife and Bahia, respectively

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2009 -janeiro/juin 2009