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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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(19.) J. Arlegui, Cronica de la provincia de N S P S Francisco de Zacatecas (Mexico City, 1851), (dated 1737), 143-4.

(20.) For details on the mss. of this work, see Trexler, "Gender Subordination," at n. 67.

(21.) See below.

(22.) M. Sauer, Account of Billing's Expedition (London, 1802), 160.

(23.) G. Langsdorff, The Voyage to the Aleutian Islands and Northwest Coast of America. Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, 1803-7 (London, 1814), 47. See also A. Hrdlicka, The Aleutian and Commander Islands and their Inhabitants (Philadelphia, 1945), 168.

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(24.) L. Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde, avec dos portraits de sauvages d'Amerique, d'Asia, d'Afrique, et des iles do Grand ocean; des paysages, dos vues maritimes, et plusieurs objets d'histoire naturelle; accompagne de descriptions par M. le baron Civier, et M. A. de Chamisso, et d'observations sur les crahumains, par M. le docteur Gall (Paris, 1822), 8. Russian settlers in these parts put boys to other uses. They kidnapped them as hostages, hoping in this way to force amicable relations upon the natives. If the latter rose up, the Russians threatened, inter alia, to rape the boys; cited in Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 186, n. 9.

(25.) J. Robert-Lamblin, "L'influence de l'education sur l'identite sexuelle: Un exemple chez les Inuit," in Cote femmes: Approches ethnologiques (Paris, 1986), 100f.

(26.) J, Briggs, "Eskimo Women: Makers of Men," in Many Sisters: Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. C. Matthiasson (New York, 1974), 271.

(27.) J. Briggs, "Expecting the Unexpected: Canadian Inuit Training for an Experimental Lifestyle," Ethos 19 (1991): 266.

(28.) J. Robert-Lamblin, Ammassalik, East Greenland--end or persistance of an isolate? Anthropological and demographic Study of Change (Meddelelser om Gronland, 1986), 42. Saladin d'Anglure found the same percentages in his area; B. Saladin d'Anglure, "Du foetus au chamane: la construction d'un 'troisieme sexe' inuit," Etudes Inuit 10 (1986): 68.

(29.) See how these things worked in my "From the Mouths of Babes: Christianization by Children in Sixteenth-Century New Spain," now in enlarged form in my Religion in Social Context, 250-92.

(30.) By way of comparison: In his "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans," Rene Gremaux states that very few of the Sworn Virgins among the Albanians returned from male to female gender and married after having lived for a considerable time as sworn virgins in male disguises; Herdt, Third Gender, 270.

(31.) The practice of converting girls into boys may have been one way of avoiding female infanticide, well known among the Inuit. Thus making girls into boys may be seen as an intermediate step between that practice and the elimination of gender bending that is happening today.

(32.) Saladin d'Anglure ("Du foetus," 64) disagrees with this finding, apparently only because of what "most authors" say. Needless to say, most authors only describe the existing institution.

(33.) Robert-Lamblin, "L'influence," 100f; and by the same author, "`Changement de sexe' de certains enfants d'Ammassalik (Est Groenland): Un reequilibrage du sex ratio familial?" Etudes Inuit 5 (1981): 120. That damage can occur to infants forced to be the opposite gender is clear in the notorious recent case studied by J. Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York, 2000).

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

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

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