Reflections on beauty and sexual practices among Brazilian travesti sex workers

In this paper we will consider how travestis beauty experiences and sexual practices situate them in an ambiguous position in relation to heteronormative ways of understanding bodies.

Travestis are hardly recognized in political and academic discourses on (trans)gender identities and sexual work. This paper contributes to recent efforts to make them visible as social subjects with a chameleon-like acting ability that tampers with the boundaries of femininity and masculinity, contributing to complicate sex, gender and sexual interactions. In this paper I will consider how travestis’ beauty experiences and sexual practices situate them in an ambiguous position in relation to heteronormative ways of understanding bodies and gender identities. Drawing on my field research with Brazilian travesti sex workers in Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona, I analyse how the desire to transform their ‘original’ masculine bodies into beautiful and feminine ones organises travestis own gender experiences and locates them in different positions within their social hierarchy. Beauty is lived as an immediate and ephemeral process that operationalises their desire to become travestis and empowers their sense of self and personhood, as perceptions of self-esteem seem to be directly related to the level of beauty ‘achieved’. Simultaneously, they interact socially and sexually with their clients and husbands through a ‘penetrate/being penetrated’ continuum which complicate the ways in which their gender roles are performed and interpreted. Therefore, it is through their beautiful and sexualized bodies that travestis are being attracted by a heteronormative model of femininity and sexual relations (mainly with their husbands) and, simultaneously, it is that same heteronormativity which rejects and stigmatizes them as abject subjects who interpellate the binary sex/gender system in society.