Suchergebnisse

'Brazilian 'Travesti' Migrations offers a rich and nuanced analysis of the cultures of travestis in Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona. Emerging from a feminist ethics and paying particular attention to embodiment and aesthetics, it tells a moving and often heroic story of gender diverse lives, loves and bodies. This is a wonderful addition to sexuality and gender research.' --Sally Hines, Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, University of Leeds, UK. 'Vartabedian's fascinating ethnographic account reveals not only how some performances of femininity are valued more than others, but how these performances are simultaneously a way of enacting exoticized versions of Brazilianness. Importantly, she showcases the limitations of eurocentric sex/gender taxonomies for accommodating travesti ways of being and suggests that transgender studies further work to do if it is to interpret travesti lives without doing epistemological violence to them.' --Susan Stryker, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona, USA, and co-editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly This book analyses the embodied and spatial experiences of Brazilian travesti sex workers who cross both, gender and (trans)national borders. Based on a multi-sited ethnography, it explores travestis' bodily transformations, their involvement in sex work, and the transnational migrations to Europe that many make. This engaging account combines rich ethnographic research with incisive analysis that draws on feminist and trans studies, queer theory (and its critiques), social and queer geography research, sex work and trans migration studies. It will appeal to students and scholars of migration, gender, sexuality and transgender issues. Julieta Vartabedian is a researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK. In her work she combines gender studies, feminist theory, ethnographic and embodiment research. Her articles have been published in Qualitative Research and Sexualities.--

This article offers an exploration into the ways in which the researcher's body enters into a permanent dialogue with the practices and the discourses of the research participants, and is transformed into an essential investigative tool. Based on my ethnographic experience amongst a group of Brazilian travesti sex workers, I will show how my own 'imperfect' body, according to the travesti canons of feminine aesthetics, became an element that awarded me visibility and served as a bridge to interaction with them. At the same time, I was accidentally interpreted by the group as the 'photographer'. From this corporeal interaction, and via the medium of the camera, I was able to legitimize my position amongst travestis and open a new field of theoretical enquiry, developing, therefore, Wacquant's proposal (2004) on a 'corporeal sociology' in the understanding of the active role that the body takes in the research process.