Customer Reviews

Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines (Explorations in Anthropology)

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Mark Johnson, who lived in the in the southern Philippines as a child of missionary parents, undertook ethnographic fieldwork in the predominantly Muslim, Tausug-speaking town of Jolo, Sulu. His somewhat difficult-to-read book is focused on ethnic and post-colonial national identities within uneven globalization as much as it is about sexuality and gender.

Johnson shows that the prestigious "modern" American term "gay" has been appropriated by stigmatized transgendered male homosexual stylists to distance themselves from the negative and socially circumscribing implications of the derogatory traditional term "bantut:" -- though reacting with disgust to the suggestion that gays in America exchanged what they regarded to be mutually exclusive penetrating and penetrated roles.

Johnson systematically analyzes forty life history interviews of "parloristas" (males working in beauty parlors). He also presents data from survey research from larger nongay samples.

The Sulu "gays" did, however, resist any suggestion that "as men they were in any way physically deficient or incapacitated." In contrast to some writings about some transgendered roles, Johnson is unequivocal that the transgendered males he studied have male sexual partners. Their performances of beauty and what is believed to be American modernity do not seem to be attempts to become women and retrreat to the domestic sphere of demure housewives.

Sympathetically researched as the book is, Johnson's book is sometimes fuzzy from his conscientious hedging of assertions and difficult to read because of the number of topics (and theories) he wants to address.

I felt this book gave a good understanding of the traditional versus modern life i the Phillipines. I felt this book could have been written better but it wasn't so, I only gave it 2 stars