WORKING PAPER 310 IDS_Master Logo Building Identity While Managing Disadvantage: Peruvian Transgender Issues Giuseppe Campuzano July 2008 IDS_Master Logo_Minimum Size X X Minimum Size Minimum Size X : 15mm X : 15mm About IDS The Institute of Development Studies is one of the world's leading organisations for research, teaching and communications on international development. Founded in 1966, the Institute enjoys an international reputation based on the quality of its work and the rigour with which it applies academic skills to real world challenges. Its purpose is to understand and explain the world, and to try to change it – to influence as well as to inform. IDS hosts five dynamic research programmes, five popular postgraduate courses, and a family of world- class web-based knowledge services. These three spheres are integrated in a unique combination – as a development knowledge hub, IDS is connected into and is a convenor of networks throughout the world. 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IDS WORKING PAPER 310 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Building Identity While Managing Disadvantage: Peruvian Transgender Issues Giuseppe Campuzano July 2008 Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9RE UK 01 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Building Identity While Managing Disadvantage: Peruvian Transgender Issues Giuseppe Campuzano IDS Working Paper 310 First published by the Institute of Development Studies in July 2008 © Institute of Development Studies 2008 ISBN: 978 1 85864 535 2 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. Reproduction, copy, transmission, or translation of any part of this publication may be made only under the following conditions: • with the prior permission of the publisher; or • with a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd., 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE, UK, or from another national licensing agency; or • under the terms set out below. 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IDS is a charitable company limited by guarantee and registered in England (No. 877338). 02 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Building Identity While Managing Disadvantage: Peruvian Transgender Issues Giuseppe Campuzano Summary Sexuality issues have gained considerable discursive space in the last two decades in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yet due to the attention drawn in the early years of the epidemic to homosexuality, this discursive space has largely framed men – both homosexual and heterosexual – as the primary sexual actors, whether as agents in sexual relationships or as transmitters of sexual diseases, and obscured all other sexual agents. Heterosexual women have been seen as unlikely perpetrators of either sex or disease. Lesbians, including bisexual lesbians, have been left out of the question altogether, as if the HIV/AIDS crisis has nothing to do with them. And transgender and intersex sexuality issues, including those related to the epidemic, have been sidelined by the rigidity of the male/female gender dichotomy that underpins the discussion. Sexuality only enters this framework as a factor of ill health or ‘risk’, which permits little of many peoples’ actual experiences of sexuality, including pleasure, to be recognised. This paper draws on a two-year research project with transgendered people (travestis) in Lima that explored issues of identity considered important by many travestis in Latin America and on the socio-economic struggles that most face. It begins with a consideration of some of the conceptual issues that confront travestis, in particular in relation to the polarised gender categories of male/female. It goes on to place travesti issues in a ‘development’ framework, emphasising the ways in which travestis actively manage and challenge the many aspects of their disadvantage and social exclusion. Rather than a litany of the effects of social stigma, the discussion offers some key points for development in ways that do not threaten travesti identity. It illustrates some positive examples of work with travestis, as potential ways forward. Keywords: transgender; sexuality; violence; discrimination; participation; citizenship; poverty. 03 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Giuseppe Campuzano is a Peruvian philosopher and independent researcher. Since 2003 he has run the ‘Travesti Museum’ project, an investigation on Peruvian transgenders (travestis) confronting authorised history with queer studies to develop alternative ways to reach diverse communities. This project provides a better understanding of contemporary travestis and is a useful tool for the empowerment of travesti communities. His publications include ‘Struggles for Gender Rights in Peru’ in Sexuality Matters (IDS Bulletin 2006) and ‘Gender, Identity and Travesti Rights in Peru’ in Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development (edited by Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Correa and Susan Jolly, 2008, London: Zed Books). He has just published a book that illustrates his four year research project on travestis, Museo Travesti del Perú (2008, Lima: IDS). 04 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Contents Summary, keywords 3 Author note 4 Acknowledgements 6 Preface 7 1 Introduction 9 2 Relationships between gender and sexuality 10 2.1 Challenging gender dichotomies 10 2.2 Contemporary travesti encounters with gender and sexuality in Peru 12 2.2.1 Negotiating gender identity 13 3 The travesti web of deprivation ... and resourcefulness 15 3.1 (Sex) work 16 3.1.1 Sex work as total exposure 17 3.1.2 International migration 19 3.2 Health 20 3.3 Violence 22 3.3.1 Direct violence 22 3.3.2 Structural violence 23 3.3.3 Cultural violence 24 4 Politics 25 5 Ways forward 27 5.1 Making resources accessible 28 5.2 Working on sex worker rights 28 5.3 Working on identity: the Travesti Museum of Peru 29 5.4 New forms of activism 30 5.5 Working on gender dichotomies 30 References 32 05 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Figures Figure 3.1 Travesti web of poverty disadvantages and resourcefulness 16 Figure 3.2 Travesti violence chart 25 Figure 3.3 Visibility-invisibility travesti body syndrome 27 Box Box 2.1 Known historical and contemporary transgender identities 11 Acknowledgements This publication was made possible by a grant from Sida, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and Swiss Development Co-operation (SDC) for the Participation Team’s Participation, Power and Change Programme. I want to specially thank my travesti friends and peers for making this paper possible with their encouraging stories of resistance, and Kirsty Milward who did a really great job with the editing. 06 IDS WORKING PAPER 310 Preface Sexuality has been sidelined by development. Associated with risk and danger, but hardly ever with pleasure or love, sex and sexuality have been treated by development agencies as something to be controlled and contained. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has broken old taboos and silences, and begun to open up space for the recognition of how central sexual rights are to everyone’s wellbeing. But more is needed to take us beyond the confines of narrow problem-focused thinking about sexuality towards approaches in which pleasure and desire play as large a part as danger and death do today. Sexuality is a vital aspect of development. It affects people’s livelihoods and security, their wellbeing, and sometimes their very survival. Sexual rights are a precondition for reproductive rights and for gender equality. Lack of sexual rights affects heterosexual majorities as well as sexual minorities – lesbians and gay men, transgendered and intersex people – who are so often denied basic human rights and subjected to violence and exclusion. In some countries, women are denied a choice of partner, subjected to coercive marital sex and restricted in their mobility. Pervasive homophobia places those married men who desire other men, their male partners and their wives at greater risk of HIV and AIDS. Adolescents schooled into abstinence learn little about their bodies or their desires, and may be more vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection as a result. And sex workers are routinely