Suchergebnisse

Amid ongoing political instability, sarimbavy — same-sex-desiring and/or gender-expansive male-bodied persons — are increasingly rendered opportune subjects ripe for intervention across Madagascar by HIV prevention industries, homonationalist LGBT rights projects backed by the United States Embassy, and many Christian institutions. This article diverges from these biomedical and moral panics by attending to the shifting temporal allegiances of sarimbavy spirit medium-activists. Interlocutors' roles as mediums to spirits of former reigning monarchs (tromba) necessitated an onerous dedication to Malagasy history (tantara) and tradition (fombandrazana); simultaneously, many sarimbavy mediums were also men who have sex with men (MSM) activists, and thus deeply committed to moving beyond what they saw as the stigma-ridden past and present. These activist engagements and the sarimbavy counterpublics that they produced were uncannily facilitated by mediumship social networks. Through these practices of monarchic veneration, sarimbavy medium-activists implicitly challenged Western expectations that queer social movements must emerge through the subversion of social norms and secular, liberal, democratic reform. In surrendering to the seemingly antidemocratic weight of divine queen-kingship, sarimbavy mediums became "possessed" by political organizations irreducible to the modern nation-state and its colonial genealogies and, furthermore, produced human-spirit relationalities that thwarted Western juridicolegal visions of a bounded, rights-bearing subject.

Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity revolutionized the way that academics conceive of gender, and has subsequently become a critical perspective for feminist and queer analyses in a variety of disciplines. The new anthropology of genders and sexualities uses this theoretical framework and focuses specifically on "institutions of ambiguity" that challenge gender dichotomies across the globe. Such institutions highlight the importance of understanding gendered and sexualized categorizations as cultural constructions embedded in a specific historical, spatial and cultural context. Continuing in that tradition, this paper is an examination of drag queens in contemporary American culture, with a specific focus on the politics of drag performance. With historical roots that can be traced back to Shakespearian theater, the practice of drag performance in the United States has evolved over time, yet it continues to challenge traditional notions of masculinity and femininity in American culture. Data collected from literature, fieldwork experiences, interviews, film, and social networking and video sharing websites will be utilized to examine the meaning of drag and the lives of those who perform in it.

Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, a series of troublesome encounters unfolded between several French colonial medical doctors and gender-variant, male-bodied persons (sarimbavy in Malagasy). Medico-ethnographic texts were published in academic journals in the French metropole based upon these doctor-sarimbavy interactions. This article reveals how sarimbavy were situated within the biopolitics of colonial penal, labor, and medical infrastructures in Madagascar. Additionally, by following the bibliographic trail of the sarimbavy figure in documents published in England and the United States, this article exposes how initial encounters in the colony were entextualized and deployed as evidence for sexological arguments in Europe and North America. Throughout, sarimbavy were read variously as asexual and sexual, as externally perverted and internally inverted, as artistic, degenerate, and ill. The ways in which the spectral figure of the sarimbavy moved across multiple empires highlights the colonial impulse at the heart of the Euro-American endeavor to further sexological theory.