The term “transgender” is most helpful in discussing the modern gender systems and identities around which it came into use; in other contexts, like the study of pre-colonial America, using trans as a framework can erase differences in how gender functions in times and places that are known primarily through the study of archaeology and historical texts. What should scholars of gender nonconformity do when talking about such histories?

Photo by Janusz Z. Wołoszyn and Katarzyna Piwowar. Courtesy of Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany.

Transgender or Transexual?

Allucquére Rosanne Stone’s 1987 essay “Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto” is considered to be a founding document for the academic field of transgender studies. Without using the term, Stone’s essay made room for “transgender” to replace transsexual as a broader word – in both academic and popular discussions – for people whose gendered lives depart from the socially expected roles linked to their sex. But as anthropologist Pamela Geller argues, when it comes to studying the complexities of gender in historical cultures, “[t]he use of trans- more generally to describe identities or experiences in the bioarchaeological record points to effacement of recent sociopolitical processes, as well as a disregard for dimensions of sex/gender systems that are contingent and dynamic.”¹ That is, transgender is most helpful in discussing the modern gender systems and identities around which it came into use. In other contexts like the study of pre-colonial America, using trans as a framework can erase the differences in how gender functioned in times and places that are known primarily through the study of archaeology and historical texts.

Warped Scholarship

Contemporary ideologies of gender and sexuality can enable scholars to put forward poorly-supported conclusions. We can see this by observing at the academic study of erotic vessels from the Moche culture, a people who lived in the Andes around C.E. 100-800. In their article “”Sodomites, Siamese Twins, and Scholars: Same-Sex Relationships in Moche Art,” authors Janusz Z. Wołoszyn and Katarzyna Piwowar critique how some 20th and 21st-century scholars have pointed to a small sample (4 pieces) of extent Moche pottery representing same-sex intercourse to derive widely varying conclusions about homosexuality and gender-nonconformity (“gender liminality” is their term) in Moche culture.

With a liberal stance toward LGBT issues, some scholars “…reach out cavalierly for Moche material… to demonstrate the antiquity of gender liminality as a social institution.”² Alternatively, others argue “that male–male sex [and forced transvestitism]… was used by the indigenous societies of the Americas as a brutal tool for punishing and humiliating, establishing a hierarchy, introducing subordination, and showing domination of the strong over the weak.”³ Both camps used few examples and narrow-sighted analysis to draw broad conclusions which, when read and cited, had outsized impacts on their academic fields.

Facing Gender Diversity

Reviewing much research about gender ideologies and practices across Mesoamerica, anthropologist Miranda K. Stockett indeed finds that “both the sexual body and cultural expressions of gender appear to have been made malleable through social context and social performance, which sometimes resulted in more than two kinds of bodies and more than two kinds of gender.”⁴ Because of this, she says, “[t]he probable existence of more than two genders… ultimately illuminates shortcomings in models based on binary biological sexes and their automatic equation with binary genders and gender roles.”⁵

As Geller points out, using “trans” as an alternate framework for thinking about such gender non-binarism in Mesoamerica may have similar shortcomings, because it became useful as a term for distinctly modern gender relations. Though not identical, this is analogous to the scenario of Wołoszyn and Piwowar’s case studies; scholars in two opposing camps used little data and erroneous interpretations to back serious claims about the role of gender-nonconformity in a pre-Columbian Andean culture.

It seems that any claims about Pre-Columbian gender practices are inescapably fraught with current contemporary biases. So how should we study or even think about gender non-conformity in Mesoamerica? Unintuitively, I think the answer lies, in part, with a key point of Stone’s “Posttransexual Manifesto.” Stone claims that there are “intertextual possibilities of the transsexual body;”⁶ meaning that transgender people’s lives can only truly be understood through the relationships between supposedly distinct narratives (“male” and “female” lived experience) which they embody.

Without the need to use “trans” as a model for Mesoamerican non-binary gender, we may still look at differing gender ideologies as bridges between discrete models of gender. Though non-Indigenous scholars can’t study Pre-Columbian gender without imposing an external lense, they can use instances of difference - such as the “gender-liminal” and homosexual representations in Moche art – to recognize and work from the inherent incompleteness of their ways of studying gender. As Geller puts it, there is no such thing as a “transgender skeleton.” That said, archaeological and historical study can use the idea of intertextuality (“the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience’s interpretation of the text”⁷) to understand the flaws in contemporary and colonial theories of gender.

This is what as Stone means when she writes that an intertextual view of trans life leads to a “productive disruption of structured sexualities [and genders] and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.”⁸ To study a past culture which is not fully recuperable, scholars must be ready to learn something beyond their own ingrained notions about gender.

Bibliography

Geller, Pamela. “The Fallacy of the Transgender Skeleton: Deep Time Perspectives on Contemporary Issues,” 231–42, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93012-1_10.

“Intertextuality.” In Wikipedia, March 1, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intertextuality&oldid=943378702.

Stockett, Miranda K. “On the Importance of Difference: Re-Envisioning Sex and Gender in Ancient Mesoamerica.” World Archaeology 37, no. 4 (December 2005): 566–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240500404375.

Stone, Allucquére Rosanne. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” (4th Version) Accessed April 17, 2020. https://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back.pdf.

Wołoszyn, Janusz Z., and Katarzyna Piwowar. “Sodomites, Siamese Twins, and Scholars: Same-Sex Relationships in Moche Art.” American Anthropologist 117, no. 2 (June 2015): 285–301.

Notes