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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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The new information on berdaches--and from now on, for reasons to be detailed, I shall refer to all such figures across the western hemisphere as berdaches--that has been generated by these inquires to the south and the north of the present--day United States obviously renders previous studies of just "American" berdaches of dubious general value, and makes it imperative that we integrate what is now known so as to reexamine the state of the problem. Among the many questions that might be raised regarding the berdaches, none proves more important and controversial than the origins of the social type, and that question will be the focus of the following paper. Why has this problem of origins proved nettlesome? Part of the answer is undeniably rooted in contemporary sexual politics. For some, today's thankfully less closeted gay lifestyle puts a premium on the view that individual gays have become what they in truth always were. Stated inversely, gays sometimes fiercely combat any implication that they have bec ome what they are because of some constraint in their upbringing. This means that gays, but not they alone, often resist the notion of social construction in favor of biological determinism. Thus what began as an anti-imperialistic anthropological and historiographical romanticizing of native male Americans has been to some degree converted into a gay view that the large majority of those who became berdaches, in Will Roscoe's words, "did so entirely of their own volition." Indeed, Roscoe assures his readers that "most recent works see the berdaches not as passive but as agents, with free will." (11)

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While I obviously will not suggest that mature berdaches did not at times act with something like free choice, the present paper will show that, as far as the origin of any given berdache is concerned, free choice is surely an untenable proposition if it is applied to young boys and children below the "age of reason," while the making of berdaches out of adolescents among the Plains nations will prove to also be a social construction. I will try to integrate what we now know about the origins of the berdaches encountered during the Spanish Conquests, first with those documented only recently in the Inuit north, including Greenland, and then with the berdaches discovered within the borders of the present day United States from about 1800 until the present. Through the study of origins, I hope to render transparent one or more underlying characteristics of the berdache before the variety of time, place and conquest produced the incredible diversity that now makes the comparative study of the berdache so dauntin g.

1. Latin-America at the Time of the Conquests.

I begin with an overview of the institution of the berdache as the Spaniards encountered it, stretching from their original contact with these peoples in the early sixteenth century until their last entrada, into California, in the mid-eighteenth century. (12) Until the late seventeenth century, Spanish soldiers and missionaries and several mestizo sources as well described the berdaches of this huge area as follows. Berdaches--the word was brought to America by the first missionaries and appears in colonial ethnographic literature for the first time in the later sixteenth-century (13) -- always transvested as women. More often than not, these transvestites are said to be involved in homosexual behavior, in which they always played the passive role opposite another, usually older, male, who penetrated their mouth or anus. To judge by the Spanish sources, these berdaches were neither curanderos nor healers, and in no way acted as spiritual mediators or shamans or priests between the material and spiritual worl d. This did not mean, however, that they had no religious function, and I have shown in Sex and Conquest that, in different areas of what is today called Latin America, during divine services curacas or caciques penetrated these berdaches while the latter assumed a submissive posture of prayer. (14) As a general proposition, it appears that these berdaches served as representational emblems of subordination in their tribes, the "women" whom the "men" ruled as part of the de facto political order.

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

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

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