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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

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Thus de Liette solves Marquette's "mystery" by explaining that Illinois boys were forced in childhood to assume that role, or in La Salle's judgmental words, were set apart from childhood for this detestable purpose." This was to be sure not the only means by which the Illinois created berdaches. As in many other tribes, some of the warrior age who had been dressed as women because they had been branded as "cowards" remained in that garb for life, and thus joined the berdache ranks. (53) We see this image of the berdache in the well-known painting of the Dance of the Berdash by George Catlin, representing either a Sauk or Fox ceremony dedicated to, even while ridiculing, the berdaches of these tribes, closely affiliated as they were to the Illinois. (54)

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The same image of berdaches created at an early age to fulfill the social needs of a particular tribe may also be viewed among other tribes of the area. Landes for example was told in 1936 that in earlier times the Prairie Potawatomi young boys would have been guided "by elders and their own visions" to mature as beadworker-berdaches, her source thus combining the constraint of elders with the allegedly individual vision, which we will soon examine. (55) And further down the Mississippi River the berdaches here as elsewhere provided warriors with not only sexual but also other "womanly" services during war. As early as 1687 we find the "chef des femmes" of the Natchez accompanying the warriors on campaign, dressed as a woman and "doing the things women do." (56) Exactly the same role--as sexual providers inter alia, was encountered among the tribes of Texas in the eighteenth century, and so on deep into Zacarecas and beyond. (57) Naturally, this sexual service did not rule out other types of service for the warriors, including not only cooking and cleaning and the like, but, at least in the area of the Plains berdaches serving at times as trusted purveyors of information between tribes. (58)

Before directing our attention to the next area of contact of Europeans with our figure--the Plains--let me emphasize by way of summary that to this point in time, roughly 1800, no evidence exists suggesting that Americans thought of themselves as choosing to be a berdache, let alone evidence that they in fact had exercised choice in this regard. Probably some adolescents did in fact choose in this fashion, but to date, all the available evidence shows that communities or couples or individual adults applied force to convert children of one sex to the opposite gender. A second point also needs to be emphasized. With rare exceptions in the ethnographic record to that date, there is little talk to the effect that a divinity had ordered a person to become a berdache, that is, little sign of supernatural legitimation for the assumption of the status of berdache. (59) Instead, overwhelmingly, the legitimation offered by different nations to this point has to do with demographic and other socio-political considera tions faced by the various nations in stabilizing the relation between boys and girls in individual nations.

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

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