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

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book is a path-breaking ethnographic study of the culture of transgender males. . .[and] much more than a study of Southeast Asian sex/gender patterns, being a finely nuanced account of how minority ethnic, religious and gender identities are constituted in terms of multiple sets of relations. [...] Johnson's book marks an important step forward in research on Southeast Asia." --Canberra Anthropology

"Sensitive ethnography can (itals) be accomplished, as Mark Johnson aptly demonstrates. His ethnography serves as a vehicle for the voices, concerns, and political agendas of a marginalized community." --American Anthropologist

"The . . . study is an important contribution to our knowledge of sexuality and of the region . . . The monograph communicates a sense of the cultural complexity and violent history which characterize this part of the world." --Cambridge Anthology

" ... this is a well-written, very detailed, and closely argued ethnography which is a significant contribution to the anthropology of sexuality and gender." --Anthropological Quarterly

Product Description

This compelling study of gender and sexual diversity in the Southern Philippines addresses general questions about the relationship between the making of gender and sexualities, the politics of national and ethnic identities and processes of cultural transformation in a world of contract labourers and transnational consumers. The book focuses, in particular, on the meaning and experience of local 'gays' -- transvestite/transgender-homosexual men -- who are at once celebrated as purveyors of beauty (defined in terms of a global American otherness) and valorized as impotent men and defiled women. In short, America functions both as a sign of their abjected status and as a space for imagining and reformulating various gendered identities.

This innovative work -- one of the first ethnographic studies to be published in the aftermath of the region's civil unrest -- will be of interest to anyone working on gender, the body and sexuality. Not only does it extend the boundaries of cross-cultural studies of non-mainstream genders and sexualities by directly engaging the entanglement of local sensibilities with global images and discourse, but it also demonstrates that there is nothing ambiguous about ambiguity -- gendered, sexual or otherwise. Rather, this ambiguity is the specific product of different historical relations of power through which various cultural subjects are created and re-create themselves.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Berg Publishers (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859739253
• ISBN-13: 978-1859739259
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,643,437 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Transgendered males in Sulu (the southern Philipinnes), June 24, 2008

By	Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

0 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beauty and Power : Transgendering and Cultural Transformatio, April 1, 2000

By A Customer

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