Critique of Anthropology

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Mister Don't Touch the Banana: Notes on the popularity of the

ethnosexed body south of the border
Pedro Bustos-Aguilar
Critique of Anthropology 1995; 15; 149
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9501500202

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Mister Don’t Touch the Banana
Notes on the popularity of the ethnosexed body south of
the border

Pedro Bustos-Aguilar
Department of Anthropology, New College of California

Chang6 es el dios del trueno

y los negros africanos
lo visten de rojo y blanco ,
Ileva un hacha en la mano
en el dia de su fiesta
los negros tocan tambor
y con ron y frutas frescas
le expresan su adoraci6n
y todos cantan ...

entre muchos invitados

a esta fiesta de Chang6
habia tres americanos
tentados por el folklor
viendo la mesa de frutas
ofrenda de amor y fe
uno cogio un platanito
pues creia que era un buffet
Zpues creia que?
pues creia que era un buffet
alguien grit6 iisacrilegio!
Madrina se desmay6
hubo uno que comi6 muerto
y otra que se despoj6
y otra que tenia hecho santo
muy furiosa le grit6
imister don’t touch the banana,
banana belong to Chang6!
(Willie Chirino)
There is a perplexing moment in Paul Friedrich’s ethnography of a
Tarascan village near my hometown in Michoacdn. In laying down
Critique of Anthropology (Ç) 1995 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 149-170.
149

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150

methodology and conditions of his research, the anthropologist asserts that

he chose to go to Mexico (and ended up writing, publishing and capitalizing
on Princes of Naranja, 1986) because it was ’closer and cheaper’. That and
other statements in the book seem to be in keeping with recent
recommendations by another white anthropologist, James Clifford, who in
’Traveling Cultures’ (1992) suggests that anthropologists displace the
politics of location (a ’fixed’ place of origin, the institutional home of the
anthropologist, and a ’fixed’ destination, the place of fieldwork) as they
currently constitute ethnography in favor of a notion of travel. Neo-
ethnography as journey, however, does not displace the classical object of
ethnographic enquiry (the ’native’, ’local’, etc.), and refocus on the
traveler, ethnographer, writer, anthropologist.’ Natives continue to be
perfectly amenable to study, only now the traveler-as-neo-ethnographer
works with a notion that his travels have an equivalent in the visited
cultures, his informants being fellow-travelers, so to speak. But only so to
speak. There seem to remain the problems of the finances of traveling, the
idiosyncrasies of transportation, the restrictions in time and space of
certain occupations, the patrolling of certain geopolitical lines, one of
which is certainly that between the place where the neo-ethnographer
originates his trip and the place of his (temporary) destination, and an
international division of labor in which travel, tourism and displacement
(theoretical and otherwise) are national[istic] prerogatives of knowledge
and leisure with no possible symmetry across the border.22
As some in the advanced lines of the anthropological imperial industry in
the USA are having this sort of debate (and we should all take very
seriously its pedagogic implications),’ there is a large and heterogeneous
group of travelers/ethnographers/observers/activists that without a ’prob-
lem’ continue eliciting money from their grant bureaucracies in the First
World and information from their data apparati in the Third World, all of
which will surely result in a recapitalized re-entry into the teaching
machine. The following are some schematic and obsessed notes about this
latter group, followed by observations about one area of the many in which
the pedagogical value of the (even unaware) ethnographer’s word is made
drastically evident in all its pervasive scope. I end with a commentary on
direction and methodology, as proposed by Gayatri Spivak, inspired by the
Subaltern Studies Group, and attempted by two ’natives’.

Maybe you should just stay home

A group of ethnographers in the camp of the blissfully ’unaware’ travelers
has been writing accounts of [homo]sexuality as (more or less) ’out’ gays.

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 151

Here the unanimously recognized precedent seems to be Esther Newton,

who in the mid-1960s anthropologized a couple of urban gay bars in the
midwest US and wrote her results in a book, Mother Camp (1972). Newton
is different from her own august predecessors in that she conjured a plural
first-person empathic subject, rudimentary and contradictory as it was, and
proceeded to write anti-homophobically even as she remained ’closeted’ in
the text, politically and epistemologically. She is different also in that she
did not leave the USA, therefore participating differently - with a lesser
repayment, as it turns out - in the workings of the anthropological
industry. A first wave of post-Stonewall ethnographers followed, some of
whom are still reporting from the field, and a second wave, which can be
characterized as post-gay, or queer, are beginning to make their work
known. Since the case of those who followed Newton and ’fieldworked’ in
the USA poses its particular set of problems,4 I shall limit myself here to
the case of those with a passion for Latin America. And I shall review the
male narratives exclusively - lesbians have not published all that much in
the wider academic/popular circuit on (homo)sexualities in Latin America.
I have an anecdote that illustrates the problematic that this article
addresses. A lesbian graduate student in anthropology at the University of
Southern California got my name from someone and wrote enquiring
about zapoteca lesbians who migrate to Mexico City. Baffled, I never
responded to the enquiry, much to my subsequent regret. She must think I
am selfish or rude. I had questions, though. How do you recognize a

zapoteca lesbian when you see one? And where does a zapoteca lesbian
exist? These questions may seem disingenuous, or may be read within a
teleology of nationalism that benevolently signals the place of an answer in
a future ’post’ of no more silenced, oppressed, inarticulate sexual identity.
This paper proposes a critique of teleology that proceeds by examining
methodological and theoretical givens such as ’visibility’ and ’expression’.

The surplus of savage sexuality

Joseph Carrier got a book dedicated to him, Male Homosexuality in
Central and South America (Murray, 1987), in recognition of his pion-
eering into wild lands. He traveled to Mexico and Central America and
wrote the primitive version of what has come to constitute, with the
elaborations of subsequent years, a master narrative of tropical scientia
sexualis: the difference between US homosexuality and Latin American
homosexuality is that south of the Rio Bravo there is a machista culture,
the family is ever-present and obtrusive to the self-development of
homosexuals as such, and the homosexual regime consists of a hierarchical

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152

binary of activos and pasivos.6 Carrier and the tradition from which he
stems (the ’ethnographers of sex’, of exotic cultures and eccentric bodies),
as well as the tradition that he is somewhat acknowledged to have started

(the ’gayfication of [the continent of] America’), have a notorious

tendency to ’make the camels parade’, spicing their accounts with little
native words that are then explained away in English. This is their marker
of authenticity, of respect for the local (culture, etc.), their sign of
cosmopolitan savoir faire. For those who read with suspicions, such
practice is the mark of a veiled, generally disavowed, unequal exchange
that in the gay narratives will re-emerge as sexual (tension) but which like
the rest is also a market exchange, in the form that exchange is now
acquiring in the Free Production Zones. Sex re-narrativizes the allegories
of missionary salvation that ethnographies simultaneously serve and
justify. Sex and desire perform the act of transubstantiation that makes
viable the political alibi of the gay ethnographer; the mode of sexuality
substitutes market transactions for sexual encounters and erases their
traces. But ’no domination, even when born of violence, can last if it does
not assume the form of an exchange of services’ (San Juan, Thus 1991: 6).
the mode of production will inevitably leave traces.
This remarkable inheritance begins to bear too heavily, which prompts
Murray to add, in his ’Postscript’, the following:
I have come to feel a gnawing dissatisfaction with the standard claims about
the place of homosexuality in the Latino/ladino/criollo/creole/mestizo cul-
ture [sic] which supplanted, mixed with or largely exterminated indigenous
cultures. My dissatisfaction has focused on the imaginary undifferentiated
phallic supremacy of the hombre supposedly common to Iberian and former
Iberian colonies in the New World. It has become increasingly clear to me
that the activolpasivo (or hombrelmaric6n) dichotomy is just too neat.
Certainly there are individuals who impersonate these ideal types (essences),
but the sexually omnivorous hombre who doesn’t have any preferences in
’object choice’ - the man who ’fucks anything that moves’ - seems more a
maric6n fantasy than a plausible empirical observation. Projection of this
fantasy is undoubtedly flattering to the super-stud created in the mind or gaze
of the maric6n. A man, and still less a boy, insecure about his masculinity
certainly will not contradict flattering maric6n claims about how masculine
he is. (Murray, 1987: 192)

The dichotomizing paradigm is maintained intact. Murray will argue that

there is a measure of fluidity between the two polar oppositions (at the
same time warning that Parker ’overemphasize[s] &dquo;fluidity&dquo;’ (1987: 195).

’Empirical observation’, however, retains the upper hand. It still renders

manlboy and maricon. The book is rich in the use of this kind of
empiricism, with its concurrent political disavowals. The benevolent

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 153

gesture of goodwill in adding at the end a note of hesitation to reintroduce

the ethnographer’s sense of modesty is itself a well-known imperial
gesture.
The Carrier camp (Murray, dedicator of the book, Clark Taylor and
Peter Fry, all published and authoritative ethnographers of Latin
America), or the ’post-Stonewall’, ’gay’ camp, are characterized by a
common unexamined, under-theorized position of surveillance and a

magnanimous naivete at the level of the rapport/report. They have come to

speak as the phallic daughters of Malinowski, like him participating/
observing from their tent right next to the chief’s hut (Clifford, 1992). It is
the tropics that conjure in a pagan santeria moment of possession the
potency of the phallus of the daughter. It is the flesh locally appropriated
that permits the embodiment of the (straight) imperial ethnographer’s
nightmare: these participant-observers fuck ass and get their asses fucked,
but it is all a ritual, or the sensuousness of the essence, or south of the
equator there is no sin. (Indeed, there are no borders either. A
participant-observer ethnographer reports that in New Guinea he engaged
in ritual sex, his informants/fuckees thus placing him in a different, ’more
privileged’, position to retrieve information.)
Richard Parker, in his Bodies, Pleasures and Passions. Sexual Culture in
Contemporary Brazil (1991) is ingenuous to the point of pain in this
narrative of brave exploration, and his evocation of Barlaeus ’the austere
Dutch [seventeenth-century] historian’ is only symptomatic of the radically
blind epistemologies he brings into the discursive formation of a sex-
frenzied tropical country-as-drag-queen, or Carmen Miranda as the
definition of Brazilianness (a word he actually uses several times). For
someone interested in the constitution of a subject position vis-a-vis an

object at the same time desired, destroyed, negated, subl(im)ated and

subjected, here are a couple of lines that should prove fruitful:
I still remember being struck, during one of my first trips to Brazil, by the
comments of a Brazilian friend [who] asked me about the difficulties of
adapting to life in the tropics, Brazilian life ... I ... responded, truthfully,
that I could hardly remember having been happier and that it was difficult for
me to imagine ever wanting to leave. He smiled, as Brazilians do when they
sense a certain affinity with an outsider - an ever nascent appreciation of their

reality. ’Be careful,’ he warned, ’Brazil can be seductive.’ (Parker, 1991: 7)

The sexual commerce of the anthropologist is narrativized in terms of the
local words in a process of explication that is heavily coded through the
demands of an enterprise predicated on a structure of absolute difference/
differentiation. The historicity of the enterprise of transcultural retrieval/
dissemination of information is recuperated, by the suspicious reader, via

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154

this index of the colonial/imperial moment of reconnaissance, which is the

same moment the ’other’ acquires ontological status and a history,
someone else’s history, for the West.
The narrative of these sexual journeys of reconnaissance remaining
painfully repetitive, the object of study, difference-as-sex, gets locked in
the intricacies of translation.’ Each area/village offers a separate labyrinth
in which to look for a pre-scripted difference, but each labyrinth opens up
to the same onanistic phantasm. In the will to know avowed by the espousal
of an itinerant, inquiring profession like that of the ethnographer, there is a
negation of the limits of the self; thus, echoes of the same produce endless
repetition, always a copy, always tardy. This echo is the double fracture
that the ideological apparatus of modernity (the technologies of the
nation-state within a narrative of modes of production) produces in the
peripheries and then narrativizes in the metropolis as always-already lack,
always-already incomplete. The International Monetary Fund, not at all
extraneous to this historical enterprise, codes such inadequacy as ’(under)
development’.
The gay ethnographer, emasculated in his own culture, materializes in
his village of choice the imperial gaze and, like Flaubert’s photographer/
friend/traveling companion in Egypt, kills a native with the charm of his
camera.’ No memory of suffering the gaze or the charm back home seems
to come to the gay ethnographer’s mind. Once the notion of a surplus of sex
(available) in a regime of lack (which codes perennial arousal, constant
sexual discursiveness/provision, that is, desire-as-coming-into-conscious-
ness, which is made to pass for a difference in the ’ideology of the erotic’,
cf. Parker, 1991: 98-135) is established as paradigmatic to the tropics by
the rhetoric of the post-Stonewall gay camp, the field is subjected to
culturalist refinement in the hands of the queer camp. (Gay and queer in
the US have of course a specific historical diachronicity, but there are no
guarantees as to distinctions that could be made in terms of discourses that
should have changed historically. See Ian Lumsden’s Homosexuality,
Society and the State in Mexico, 1991, for prelapsarian, pretheoretical
anecdote as ethnography.)
Roger Lancaster offers us, with his trajectory as a Latin Americanist, the
opportunity to read in him the text of a regulative psychobiography in a
decolonizing reconstituted field. Lancaster, who had published a book on
Nicaraguan Sandinismo in the tradition of benevolent liberal US politics
([a] tradition that can be called the ’enlightened’ branch of the Monroe
doctrine: America as [us] the ’Americans’ see fit), published in 1992 Life
Is Hard, with the telling subtitle Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy
of Power in Nicaragua. Lancaster, recently out of the closet, chose to

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 155

continue his fieldwork in Nicaragua along the parameter set by his personal
itinerary.
In this book, Lancaster turns his attention from family as ritual (which he
had ’studied’ while in the closet) to family as sexuality (sex is an ’out’
thing). The culturalist refinement goes as follows: regimentation and
control of (homo)sexuality in Nicaragua is a function of the ideological
State Apparatus only indirectly; desire-as-masculinity, a complex nego-
tiation of perceived Third World subalterity and (male)-centeredness,
polices in Nicaraguan families the borders between a boy’s acceptable
sexual identification with men and the sin that is not (south of the
Equator). This is of course a thesis Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) presents in the context of
metropolitan queer studies, of which she is a matron-saint. That Lancaster
should remain insistently unaware of such a text and personage goes a long
way to confirm the ’pretentious self-marginalization of the sanctioned
ignorance of so-called interdisciplinary talk’.9 In the Introduction to
Between Men Sedgwick states the problematic as follows:
’Male homosocial desire’: the phrase in the title of this study is intended to
mark both discriminations and paradoxes. ’Homosocial desire,’ to begin
with, is a kind of oxymoron. ’Homosocial’ is a word occasionally used in
history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between
persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with
’homosexual,’ and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from
’homosexual’. In fact, it is applied to such activities as ’male bonding,’ which
may, as in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and
hatred of homosexuality. To draw the ’homosocial’ back into the orbit of
’desire,’ of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential
unbrokenness of a continuum whose visibility for men, in our society, is
radically disrupted... my hypothesis of the unbrokenness of this continuum
is not a genetic one... but rather a strategy for making generalizations
about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations
with other men. (1985)
Lancaster ’visibilizes’ with his anthropological gaze this continuum and its
policing as production and regulation of ’masculinity’. This is a newer,
culturalist version of an old colonial perception: that men of color are
brutal and exert a totalitarian control over their women (they are ’machos’)
due to a general retarded stage in their culture which renders the men
hapless victims of nature (instincts, drives and such) and their women (or
by extension, as in this case, their feminized men) both victims and
co-producers of the macho.
Two things are noteworthy: the historically constituted anthropological
gaze counts with apologizers and enthusiastic disseminators in various

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156

colonized areas of cultural production where these ’native’ experts are

very active, acknowledged and rewarded for their labor in the cause of
imperial mystification. The most notorious case of recent times is the
Mexican Octavio Paz, whose impressionistic, idealistic/lyric metaphysics
of essence (as embodied in works like The Labyrinth of Solitude, [Paz,
1961] for instance) are constantly redeployed, quoted, relied upon and
used as tools of legitimation (it is ’authentic’ because locally produced by
a ’native’) by the imperial brigades not only in anthropology, but in phil-

osophy, political science and literary theory as well. In the case in point, it
is obvious that the metaphysical Mexican (man and woman) produced by
Paz is being recycled for Nicaragua by Lancaster (who does not fail to
credit Paz). Which leads to a second aspect: just as Sedgwick shows a
tendency to speak in a limbo where no international division of labor
could possibly position differentially gender, race and ethnicity even in
this country, (thereby speaking ’whitely’ and disavowing race at the same
time, since ethnocentric philosophy does not conceive of white as a race),
so Lancaster and fellow postmodern travelers, supported by a tradition of
colonized Third World intellectuals, re-enact the blindness of whiteness
across the border proposing white theory and experience as tools that
need only gooda occasion and a dose of goodwill. Sexual economies, in
psychoanalysis and even most Marxisms, are never posited with a differ-
ence : psychoanalysis, Marxism and philosophy have simply inaugurated

History, Consciousness, Desire, etc. wherever the imperial ships have

taken them. The only chance a suspicious reader has is referring to a dif-
ferent historiography, which is a hard task, because nobody quotes the
(unassimilable) uncapitalized Third World intellectual.&dquo; Again, in Lan-
caster, we see the epistemic violence of a slippage over the object of
study. The code word here is machismo, a term so notoriously untheor-
ized, so persistently unexamined and so recurrently called upon to gloss
over the obscene lacks of tropical others as to constitute a scandal of
ethnocentric ignorance and racist indifference. ’Machismo’ is the mini-
mum common denominator in the universalizing rhetoric of Global Sis-

terhood, human rightsism and transactivism upon which the modem

crusades of salvation are built in the feminist/identitarian West for the
sake of the pre-modern non-liberated victims of Universal Patriarchy.
Machismo is the coded conflation of the conqueror’s desires with the
phantasmatic lacks and needs of the conquered.
Lancaster’s machismo, like Parker’s quintessential sensuousness, are
both notions at the core of interchangeable taxonomies. The phantas-
matic constitutive of both ethnographic diagrams is a prelapsarian un-
bounded, unlimited, and thus pre-morphous mass of desiring/indulging

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 157

forces whose concrete post-fall materialization is an indefinite repetition of

an ever-aroused, ever-potent, hard-dicked, colored man. Beneath the
tense sexual anxiety vis-a-vis an embodied colored fetish lies a dialectical
dream of a common language, with final accommodations and resolutions
that do not disturb the peace of imperial designations, because these
repetitive narratives are about control, about understandable mapping
and, in the end, about amenable objects (amenable to knowledge, to
being, to civilization, to the same, to the market, to sex).
And they are written, as is required, by civilized/ing men:
... to open the Brazilian sexual universe up to readers who have little or no
familiarity with it, to enable those who are already intimate with its contours
to reflect upon it in new ways, and ultimately, to suggest some of the ways in
which an understanding of its particularity might offer new insights about
human sexual experience more generally. (Parker, 1991: 5)

Traveling strategies
One should start by examining the developing pattern of (sexual) tourism
to the south as the preferred valve of escape for the tensed body/machine of
an overstressed, immobilized, privileged, working technobureaucratic

metropolitan class at the service of transnational regulador capital to

understand the sense in which ’traveling cultures’ in a (post) (neo)colonial
setting are normed by a problematized, rearticulated but nonetheless still
strictly colonial itinerary of displacement - strictly colonial in that the word
’displacement’ here retains in its two senses, phenomenological and
epistemological, the one same colonial enunciative mobile subject. The
possibilities and problematics of a reversal of the colonial itinerary by
locals is the topic of a different, but related, very difficult discussion:
The privileged Third World informant crosses cultures within the network
made possible by socialized capital, or from the point of view of the
indigenous intellectual or professional elite in actual Third World countries.
Among the latter, the desire to ’cross’ cultures means accession, left or right,
feminist or masculist, into the elite culture of the metropolis. This is done by
the commodification of the particular ’Third World culture’ to which they
belong. Here entry into consumerism and entry into ’Feminism’ (the proper
named movement) have many things in common. (Spivak, 1989: 221)

The regulation of such sexual marketplace necessitates, along with a

(in the international code of commerce, ’normaliz-
structure of pacification
ation of relations’), an expansive and accommodating technology of
information processing. Here the travelers, culture-crossers and infor-
mation-retrievers from academia should acknowledge the pioneering work

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158

of their fellow travelers from the military/intelligence complex and trans-

national investment think tanks, both of which make possible and at the
same time solicit the production of ethnographies. The price, tax-free

grant foundation money, never seems to be too high. This is illustrated by

the fact that military ear-marked money at institutions such as the Univer-
sity of Texas is being used to buy, for instance, medical student reports
from the state universities in Mexico. It is not (only) that the military have
developed an interest in rural medicine in Latin America. These reports all
open with an ethnographic account and provide sociological as well as
geographical data on the isolated areas the medical students serve. We
have to concede, at the very least, that not all allies of humanism are
good.&dquo; This does not make marines of anthropologists (in any simple
way). But intelligence gathering is indeed valuable to the military-industry
complex; disavowals of responsibility for the ultimate use, re-use or (re)
readings of the truth uncovered under the pyramids belittles the common
ground, ideological, epistemological and humanist, that makes possible
such transportation of knowledges/power across the professions.
In the context of this paradigmatic development of relations, the gay
ethnographer has made strategic interventions to produce effects unfore-
seen by his heterosexual fathers. ’Strategic interventions’ can be clarified

by the anecdote of an extra-friendly (US) gay ethnographer who visited the

(very sexually active) baths in Mexico City and elicited information from
the engaged/engaging clientele there, later writing and making public an
account that rendered, together with a pedagogico-theoretical description
of the symbolism of the goings-on there, the names and family particulari-
ties of the unalerted, unaware patrons. But the good end justified the
means. The didactic side of the gay ethnographer’s enterprise in turn bears
fruit. Enter the gay/queer activist. By no means a mutually exclusive
territorial binary, the academic and the activist camps share a highly
permeable wall. No-one is unaware at this point of the history of feminism
and identity politics in their interactive constitution of areas of political and
academic enquiry/pressure. As on the domestic front, in the traveling set
the inherited taxonomies and regimes of knowledge of the gay activist are
sobered down to austere vocabularies proper to street dissemination, and
in preparation for the activist ethnography, they are submitted to an
enterprise of translation. This is of course facilitated by the fact that there is
a working epistemological frame that has always-already ’identified’ equiv-
alents and fixed objects/bodies in accounts of moments of delirious hesi-
tation-reaffirmation that the traveling ethnographers experience on
discovering the New Worlds, literally ’taken by the word’ (another very
illustrious tradition).

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 159

Columbus’s Fourth Letter is perhaps the founding episteme of America-

the-New-World (see Major, 1961). Delirious, Columbus inscribes the land
with the logos of its History: Heaven with Heathen. ’Taken by the word’ is
a historical slippage of the Text. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) describes
an interesting argument on a common methodological naivete in anthropo-

logical enquiry, when in the theorizing of anthropology as the birthplace of

the other, the savage, ethnographers de-historicize themselves, their task
and their institutional homes, and blatantly ignore the power and grasp of
the Imperial Epistemologies that constitute ethnographers, anthropology
and savages as the anthropology/izing machines that constantly re-embody
and reconstitute that charged field(work). Columbus is not the first
ethnographer; his Letters have, however, foundational power in the
writing tradition that eventually becomes Philosophy, History and Science
and that articulates the unspeakable: the destruction exercised by the
processes of conquest and occupation of the New World, the void
produced by the insertion of Europe in the New Land, the violent birth of
the word ’America’.

Graphomania
The activist ethnographer becomes aware of the weight of his task; the first
realization in this direction is invariably that in the lands without sin there is
no liberation either, because, ’[I]n a relative sense, they feel and are

already liberated’ (Whitam, 1987: 37). Only in a relative sense. Sophisti-

cated megalopolises such as Sdo Paulo and Mexico City have failed to
produce identifiable, ’visible’ gay communities. Mexico City produced a
gay movement whose ’breakup [is] related to its demonstrated inability to
devise concrete responses to the oppression experienced by gays and
lesbians in their everyday life’ (Lumsden, 1991: 64). This in a country
where ’oppositional forces in general seem incapable of sustained organiz-
ation and cooperation’ (Lumsden, 1991: 65).
The ’oppression experienced by gays and lesbians’ at this point is a text
translated from queer radical discursive production and washed down to
ubiquitous queer nation jargon, in a style typical of the self-appointed
Meccas of gay/lesbian/queer cultures, New York, San Francisco, USA.&dquo;
Since the Third World has no history before or beyond the arrival of the
European ships, the third-worldist, living in the era of the end of history
(dixit F. Fukuyama) redeploys in situ the carefree privileges of a life in
limbo when he gets down to work his field south of the border. So it is that
not even minor gestures are needed when writing the texts-cum-histories of
his villages, as is evident in the quotes above. Now, as was made tradition

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by those who wrote in England the history of India and in France the
history of Egypt, and so on, the less the natives get in the way of the
writing, the better. Only now, as opposed to then when the British and
French historian wrote at home so as to be safeguarded from those
subjectivities brought about by closer acquaintance and the quotidian, the
new intrepid voyageurs venture abroad safely thanks to the inoculations

dispensed to them back in their home institutions. The progress of science

is such that one can nowadays travel with the guarantee that the securities
carefully cultivated at home are going to remain intact even with contact
with the heretics. Otherwise, how could one ever arrive at writing anything
with a semblance of logic when dealing with such mess as is found down
there?’3
David Thorstad, mobile and ubiquitous traveler, writing letters to
Christopher Street and other gay publications, reports, from Mexico and
Cuba, in a rhetoric that betrays a tension between what ’In matters of
sexual play and tolerance, Americans may have ... to learn from these
people’ (Thorstad, 1987: 52) and the pre-modern functioning of subter-
ranean sex systems not readily visibilized. The gracious tolerance to sexual

propositioning reported to be encountered among the natives is for the

activist ethnographer-cum-reporter a measure of the import of his
missionary position: there are so many brown bodies to be saved from
brown men by white men. The essence of these cultures is, it is never said
enough, their natural proclivity to ritualistic fucking, which is having sex
within a symbolic of basic primordial associations that culture (we the
ethnography writer/readers) decodes and recodes as an immediacy to, thus
contiguity with, therefore collapse into, finally fusion with nature/earth
(them).
The missionary position is a difficult one, though, for the activist
ethnographer must first convey to the locals a sense of the urgency of
participation in the gay crusade, so that an ultimate, world-wide alliance of
all gays and lesbians is achieved. Conceptualization of this alliance is bom
of the union of the New World Order and Transnational Feminism.
Transnational activism, or transactivism, borrows its theoretical under-
pinnings from the proclaimers of Transnational Feminism - white feminists
in the US tertiary education institutions. Noteworthy (though not unique)
in this area are Caren Kaplan’s declarations of a universal feminist dictum:
’New terms are needed to express the possibilities for links and affiliations,
as well as differences, among women who inhabit different locations.
Transnational feminist activism is one possibility’ (Kaplan, 1992: 116).
Kaplan’s is a re-enactment of the dialectic as the dream of a common
language, part of the charge of anxiety operating in the constitution of

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 161

politico/theoretical agendas within Western feminisms. A lot is owed here

to the recent US university debates over something termed ’multicultural-
ism’ : legitimizing associations (with the names of colored or diasporic
feminists) are sought (a mode of tokenism of old use) to safeguard the
vanguardist role of the white US feminist. This precarious gesture towards
’difference’ betrays one of the racist prerogatives of the Western Investi-
gative Subject: the wholesale ’translation’ of an other’s words into the same
language, i.e. European Humanism.
Transnational is the mode in which critical discourse must operate in the
age of postmodernity, according to transactivists. Their theoretical and
political unawareness of the complexity of the International Division of
Labor as it affects/effects them is prerequisite to their faithful belief in their
comfortable missionary position as allies of ’other’ people that implicitly,
somehow, need them. That need, as well as the terms in which it is
articulated, is a given that, ahistoricized, is the essence of transactivist
praxis.

TransAction
A prominent problem posed to transactivism is the refusal of certain locals
to ignore local politics (open up to exchange) and be fully gay (make visible
the possibility of a commerce of fluids, or a fluid commerce). This is
reported particularly from Cuba (Thorstad, 1987) and the former socialist
block, understandably, but the pressure of the report/rapport is fructi-
fying, and the market is changing from a past and present situation of
illegal exchange termed in the market ’prostitution’ to free exchange
(liberation). I will elaborate here, by way of illustration, on the ’illegal’ ring
of prostitution that is part of the genealogy of San Francisco’s International
Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) as an instan-
ciation of the links between free market, gay liberation and human rights
discourses as they constitute the fieldwork of transactivism today.
The discourse of human rights is omnipresent and ever expanding. The
humanism of those advocating the rights of others from within the West is
rigidly and violently imperial in its legislations, recognizing one type of
human only, the citoyen, the subject of the (Western) state and therefore
one set of rights that define/defile the citizen. The discourse of human

rights, by virtue of its historical inception, is amenable to use in a number

of particular ways. It of course inaugurates the modern democracy, so it is a
perfect vehicle for the expansion of the realm of the democratic. Close
readings of human rights rhetoric indicate that the notion of democracy in
the era of industrial and late capitalism produces a particular ideology of

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162

the individual and a peculiar type of paranoia: such an (ideological) in-

dividual is always endangered by forces extraneous to democracy, like for
instance the state apparatus of totalitarian countries, the ire of a dictator,
the force of military rule, etc.
The logos is democracy. The history erased in an epistemological coup
is that of the rise of the dictatorship of the modern democratic impulse,
including resistances it has encountered and continues to face. In the
post-Cold War era, human rightsism inevitably acquires preponderance
as propeller of postmodern crusades of salvation. Thus Rigoberta
Menchu has acquired the dubious honor of a Nobel Prize, with the hopes
that Swedish/Norwegian corporate/imperial money will buy off a whole
assassinated Guatemala. The burden of the responsibilities of Empire is
now borne by US shoulders. Europe has long entered the stage of dema-

gogic populism, as when it distributes Nobel Prizes. Enter here gay/

lesbian transactivism.
The picture is as follows: a certain day in Moscow, after the fall of the
Wall of Berlin, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union,
cameras were flashing away at the images of a jubilant, liberated Russian
market. A woman, lesbian and a US citizen, found herself in the way of
the cameras. She had come to the USSR as a tourist. She was a good
friend of a San Francisco tourism (gay) entrepreneur who had a passion
for oppressed Soviet sex-bodies, and who had succeeded in packaging
such passion in conveniently planned tours. Instead of getting out of the
picture, the US lesbian, fascinated by the bright lights, engaged them.
She made declarations (US citizens are most important, first-class citi-
zens, anywhere they go. They can always make declarations. They very
frequently do. They always make them in English, loudly, which is how
the English-speaking have historically communicated with everybody
else.) An international human rights web was then and there formed.
That was the beginning of the official, world-wide recognition that there
are ’gays’ and ’lesbians’ everywhere in the world. To prove it, IGLHRC
has joined the hordes of (primarily US) organizations that send declar-
ations, demands and ultimatums (historically favorite forms of address)
to heads of state around the globe, but particularly and much more assert-
ively to those places under barbarian rule where rights are not known.
Gay transactivism’s only original contribution to the tradition of human
rightsism is the recycling of the phantoms of the era of high imperialism:
shadows that sometimes appeared in the mirrors handed down to the
natives in exchange for oil, gold, land, local markets, etc., and that with
the reflections of the tropical suns returned images that conflated the
natives and the missionaries. Who’s who? But no repetition of history

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 163

here, Identity is transnational, global, as in global village or global

sisterhood.

Fractured epistemologies
Having established the contours of the violent, ethnocentric and racist
constitution of this field of study, with its concomitant impromptu creation
of an object of study, as Lumsden/Whitam/Thorstad and fellow travelers
engage it, I will take the liberty to mention two exemplary texts here,
perhaps in the hope that the necessity of working much more with them
and in their direction will be considered.
My first exemplary text is Luis Zapata’s El vampiro de la colonia Roma
(1979). There, the relation of knowledge to power ingrained in the process
of retrieval of information becomes acutely scrutinized by the ’informant’
in his alert evaluation of the territory that is being evoked/constructed with
his words by his ethnographer. The violence of the anthropological
episteme is conquered in a lyrical reconstitution of its traces in the literary,
as opposed to the ’factual’, ’retrieved’ ’matter’, by a writer that re-

linquishes his craft to the poetics of a memory of continuous pain and joy.
Moving away from the ethnographic reconstruction of the history of the
subaltern, Zapata turns to the fragments given to him in lieu of the solid
narrative of (under)development of character/History classically solicited/
extricated by the ethnographer. In those fragments he finds the intricate,
subtle and modest possibilities a committed writer ever has of writing
subalterity against the grain into the text of the class-overdetermined
historical and political agendas of the intellectual-as-a-class-in-and-for-
himself. Everyone should learn Spanish and read this book.
My second exemplary text is Nestor Perlongher’s 0 neg6cio do miche
(1987). Here, the interrogation of a profoundly personal and tormented
desire of impossible identification is torn by the contradictions of a radical
critical differentiation. Here the informants are not, no information is
elicited from the ethnographer’s encounters with them, and the result, or
part of it, is a complicated choreography of bodily expression of desire,
anxiety, availability, amenability, accessibility or their diametrical op-
posites, according to the positioning one is adopting. In 0 neg6cio do
miche the most salient and eloquent noise is that of the silence of the bodies
in question, their amenability not to language as order, but only to the
dance of a desiring drift. These are existences that elude apprehension by
the episteme of knowledge. The crevices allowed in the process of
information retrieval fail to open up, as windows, to the paradisiac
panorama of exotic otherness. The writer/reader glimpses, instead, at the

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164

multiple fractures of knowledge epistemologies, fractures that place,

instead of the certainties of the investigating subject, the possibilities of a
radically differing story: the beginnings of an alternative historiography,
outside of the imperial telos of History, painstakingly recuperated by a
poetics of politics. Everybody should learn Portuguese and read this book
also.
There are no panaceas to ethnography, in literature or elsewhere. It is
not a question of solidarity with one’s disciplinarity; I teach college
literature and have found no easy answers, no political or methodological
guarantees there. Which is precisely what forces in me an awareness of the
regulatory epistemological disqualifications that necessarily make Zapata
of no use to Lumsden, Perlongher of no use to Parker, and so on. These
comments are intended to insist on the importance of partisan, non-
English, national engagements, with an interest in anticipating the
enormous possibilities that open up to the suspicious reader of the

gay/activist ethnography when she, in making use of the prerogatives of

ambivalence vis-a-vis the fixation of the stereotype in the production of an
other (race), struggles to ignore the sanctioned propaganda of the
inferiority of the tropical races that the ethnographies in question have
always-already been interpellated to be/replicate. The suspicious reader
might be better off proceeding to read them as regulative psychobiogra-
phies that would examine in a radically different manner the emergence of
consciousness in Man. The proposition is that the local abandon the
native-informant mode and turn the apparatus of ethnographic surveil-
lance, or in a broader and more interdisciplinary mood, of the ’informatics
of domination’, upon the traveler/ethnographer/information retriever to
materialize in more advantageous and privileged circumstances the
panopticon to which the original ethnographer subjected himself unwill-
ingly, unwittingly, in setting his tent at the center of the village, right next
to the chief’s hut.

Parasite drag
The gay natives at the American Anthropological Association meetings in
San Francisco in the winter of 1992 asserted their right to access to the
production and contestation of meaning with the words: ’These natives can
speak for themselves’ on their T-shirts. The practicalities of such a
development, if indicative at all of what lies ahead of us in our relation with
the imperial anthropology machine, are that the gay activist ethnographers
are not going to be brought to silence, since the argument of what other
noises would fill the room if such silence occurred seems terrifying for those

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 165

with no desire to trade occupations. The background noise, nevertheless,

seems to be growing, and becoming very annoying, all the more since it
remains stubbornly obscure, cryptic, incomprehensible.
Though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We
recognize that it is destructive to existing patterns, but also that it has
potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power. Ritual recognizes the
potency of disorder. (Fry, 1987: 85)
We have indeed a lot to learn from our enemies.

NOTES
This article was written and rewntten with the close collaboration of my friend,
colleague and partner in crime, Randy Williams. His name does not author these
pages. It seemed preferable to not make this a conventionally ’co-authored’ paper
since the process that lies behind and beyond it had different mechanics.
Nevertheless, the thinking, theorizing and arguing that we have engaged in for several
years now, sporadic and discontinuous as it has been, is undoubtedly reflected in
these lines. I want to acknowledge as well Katie King’s (1990) words on the
theorizing/publishing/authoring processes, words that capture in a critical manner
part of the political economy of the/this text - one of the preoccupations present in
our work. I want to thank the careful readings granted this article by Ann Cvetkovtch,
Lisa Moore and Daniel Nugent.

1. James Clifford is one of the many anthropologists who have spoken against the
notion of turning the anthropological apparatus of surveillance onto the
anthropologist himself (that is, to ’fieldwork’ the institutional modes of anthropo-
logical production, the languages of ’nativism’ and the constitution of anthropo-
logical subjects) in the interest, he argues, of not collapsing into an undesired
and unproductive self-referentiality. But ’self-referentiality’ is a partial term (this
would not be ’self-referentiality’ for all Third World natives as anthropologists).
This standard of good and bad, like all standards, is ’flexible’: susceptible of a
different valuing. See Clifford’s essay, ’Traveling Cultures’ (1992), and the
discussion following, in Cultural Studies (Grossberg et al., 1992:96) for the
position he proposes as an alternative.
2. On this particular problem see Benita Parry’s discussion of the theme of
cosmopolitanism and travel, displacement and migration in the context of
Edward Said’s ’main "figure" ... the figure of crossing over’. Parry calls attention
to ’the chasm between the "optimistic mobility of the intellectual and artist
between domains, forms and languages," and the mass dislocations endured by
economic migrants or expelled refugees’, and points to the scarcity of
intellectual enterprises that actually ’avoid ... the conceit of conflating the
transactions with imperialism’s structures effected by the elite postcolonial with
the exigencies of the situations experienced by forcibly displaced populations or

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166

by unemancipated peoples’ (Parry, 1992: 20). See also Barbara Harlowe’s ’The
Palestinian Intellectual and the Liberation of the Academy’ (1992:98) for a
discussion of intellectual and institutional circumscriptions.
3. This article is necessarily schematic and elliptical. Amplifying or generalizing
gestures were required in order to bring home crucial points in an argument that
is historically
, and not only theoretically, charged and convoluted. Most of our
homework is not done here, and that is certainly consistent with the critique of
the Western construction of the Third World as an object of study for the social
sciences thatI am trying to present. Thus I have refused to engage in explication
the way it is common practice among the subjects of my critique:I chose the
more difficult, cryptic style of bastardization of theories in a semi-broken English,
which is tedious and hard to follow at times, and which constantly refuses clarity
or illumination. If as readers we react to this text with impatience or anxiety over
what goes unsaid, unexplained and so forth, part of the task of the article will
have been achieved: to make the ground of intelligibility of Latin America as an
object of Western knowledges unstable and non-navigable If as readers we feel
the need to know more, then it is in our hands to do some work to correct the
imbalance of ignorance that sanctions our ethnocentric imperialism. The limited
pedagogic value of this intervention should be read in the negative.
4. Most of the published work in this area still adopts and adapts uncritically the
politics and methodologies of information retrieval (i.e. interviewing, ’docu-
menting’, and so on) and thus perpetuate the powerful epistemes of social
knowledge inaugurated with the advent of European positivistic philosophies in
the nineteenth century. See Donna Haraway’s ’Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’
(1991: 183-201) for a recent critique of an old pervasive establishment.
5. ’Zapoteca’ in the racial text of contemporary Mexico is an ethnia living in the
southern state of Oaxaca in conditions of utmost poverty. Zapoteca in the
racialized text of intellectual/critical production (particularly its US-Mexican
practices, though certainly not only those) is a term of romantic colonial
overtones that so far has only been mobilized to effectively erase the traces of the
history of improverishment, exploitation and annihilation of such ethnia so as to
make room for the political allegories of imperial and neo-colonial intellectual
elites. Like us. Zapoteca is a trace that becomes less and less even that, as my
anecdote tries to point out.
6. See Carrier’s dissertation published as Urban Male Homosexual Encounters
(1975), and the ensuing series of articles all revolving around the same
ethnographic wealth and referenced by Murray and Lumsden in their own texts.
7. The issue of translation, though intimately linked to international crossovers,
could itself take us very far from these speculations. See Gayatri Spivak’s ’The
Politics of Translation’:

It is more just to give access to the largest number of feminists. Therefore

these texts must be made to speak English. It is more just to speak the
language of the majority when through hospitality a large number of

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 167

feminists give the foreign feminist the right to speak, in English. In the case
of the Third World foreigner, is the law of the majority that of decorum, the
equitable law of democracy, or the ’law’ of the strongest? There is ...

nothing necessarily meretricious about the western feminist gaze.... On

the other hand, there is nothing essentially noble about the law of the
majority either. It is merely the easiest way of being ’democratic’ with
minorities.... In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be
a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest ...
(1992:180)
Spivak’s discussion of translation politics and as theory, in the context of
as
’post-structuralism and theory’, carries the argument thatI
its effect on feminist
make further into the realm of Intellectual/political endeavor and offers a critical
methodology so as not ’[t]o be merely critical, to defer action until the production
of the utopian translator, which is impractical’ (1992:180).
8. In Flaubert’s account of his travels in Egypt, an Orientalist narrative in excelsis
,
one of the most revealing moments emerges in the anecdote of a native who,
required by Flaubert’s companion, a photographer, to stand still in front of a
camera, is said to have been fear-stricken and convinced of an imminent death
by the menacing instrument pointed at him. The Orientalist explains that the
camera was regarded by the natives as the medium of a deadly charm. The
natives, nevertheless, have been proven historically right in their distrust and fear
of such apparatus of representation - the camera and the camera carrier arriving
from ’the occident’. For gendered/gendering analyses on the impact of the
incursions of European travelers in Africa, India and South America at the time of
high imperialism (thus contemporaneous to Flaubert’s), beside the extensive
bibliography on the classics of the genre (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Isak
Dinesen’s Out ofAfnca, Forster’s Passage to India, Kipling’s Kim , and so forth),
see Westem Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance (Chaudhuri
and Strobel, 1992) and Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (Pratt,
1992). Two pieces that have become essential in the repertoire of critiques of
anthropology are ’The Language of Nativism’ (Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 1989) and
Eduardo Galeano’s tour-de-force, Open Veins of Latin America (1973).
9. ’The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic’ (Spivak, 1989). I
have liberally appropriated a number of the strategies Spivak proposes for
interventionist critical work on the Third World in the cultural arenas of the First
World.I have also bastardized her powerful methodological propositions in
trying to think of an aware position from which to speak to the emerging fields of
metropolitan gay/lesbian/queer studies as a non-white, displaced and to a
certain degree assimilated ’native’ of the peripheries. The most salient example
of this gesture of appropriation in this essay is my adaptation of her notion of
’regulative psychobiographies’ in my desire to turn around the machines of
imperial knowledge (critical theory, anthropology, History, ’the proper named’
discipline, etc.) towards their imperially invested protagonists, and inscribe,
against the grain, another story.

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168

10. In this sense, we in the West remain theoretically ’poor’ and imperially provincial.
See Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s discussion of theory and the role of the
intellectual in the context of the history of US-Latin American relations in the
decolonizing classic ’Caliban’ ( Caliban and Other Essays, 1989).
11. As a matter of fact, this is not an isolated case by any means: a cursory review of
published ethnographies will reveal that the academy competes with certain
state offices for the rights over such materials when the information there offered
is appropriate. The US Printing Office, for instance has an outstanding record in
the publication of ethnographic studies, especially from Latin America.
12. That style is imminently transnational, though. By the time this essay is
published, the Canadian Ian Lumsden will have finished another one of his gay
narratives, arriving at approximately the same conclusions and under a similar
(tentative) title: Homosexuality, Societyand the State in .... This time he went to
Cuba, and Cuban readers of his manuscript report that he was, as in Mexico,
experiencing ’dissatisfaction’.
13. Again, this is no originality of mine. I refer the reader, for an instance of how
these anxieties surface and resurface, with good and bad will, to Marilyn
Strathem’s article, ’Out of Context: the Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology’
(1987:267) where she ’admits, seemingly with relief and perhaps even
surprise, that the postmodem critique has not lead to an ethnographic
"jumble"’ (Fox, 1991: 7).

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Carrier, Joseph (1975)
Urban Male Homosexual Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chaudhuri, N. and M. Strobel, (eds) (1992)
Westem Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Clifford, James (1992)
’Traveling Cultures’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural
Studies. New York and London: Routledge.
Fernandez Retamar, Roberto (1989)
Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fox, Richard G. ed. (1991)
Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of
American Research Press.
Friedrich, Paul (1990)
The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Fry, Peter (1987)
’Male Homosexuality and Afrobrazilian Possession Cults’, in Stephen Murray (ed.)
. San Francisco, CA: Gai Saber
Male Homosexuality in Central and South America
Monograph 5.

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 169

Galeano, Eduardo (1973)

Open Veins of Latin America. Five Centunes of the Pillage of a Continent. New York
and London: Monthly Review Press.
Grossberg, L., C. Nelson and P. Treichler, (eds) (1992)
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Harlowe, Barbara (1992)
’The Palestinian Intellectual and the Liberation of the Academy’, in Michael
Sprinker (ed.) Edward Said. A Cntical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
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’Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects’,
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King, Katie (1990)
’Producing Sex, Theory and Culture: Gay/Straight Remappings in Contemporary
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Life Is Hard. Machismo, Danger and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua. Berkeley:
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Pratt, Mary Louise (1992)

. London and New York:
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Writing and National Liberation. Essays on Critical Practice. Diliman, Quezon City:
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