Don Kulick is a professor of Anthropology. The center for the study of sexuality and gender's director is Don Kulick. He is a professor at New York University. He did his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in Anthropology in 1990. His book “A Man in the House,” also talks about the same topic as he has his specialization in. He has talked about the Brazilian travesties, in his book. Travesties are male prostitutes, who like to dress like females. A travesti is a homosexual male, who has a feminine gender identity and is primarily sexually attracted to non-feminine men.
Discussion
The Brazilian travestis got highly stigmatised in Brazilian culture, apart from those rare cases where they become celebrities and achieve wealth and admiration. Kulick claims that:
“This travestis, the ones that most Brazilians only glimpse occasionally standing along highways or on dimly lit street corners at night or read about in the crime pages of their local newspapers, comprise one of the most marginalized, feared, and despised groups in Brazilian society. In most Brazilian cities, travesties so discriminated against that Making a living by working as prostitutes, which does not necessarily mean always taking the passive role, the travestis has organised themselves in ghettos, in the most notorious areas, in Brazilian cities. They usually occupy a tall building, where they all live together, and their lives centre around their boyfriends, who they call maridos, meaning husbands. These husbands are the centre of their attention, for they are a basic constituent of their sexual, economic and social life and identity. Whereas with their clients they can take the passive and regularly the active role possibly, an alleviation of guilt on the client's part, so that his manhood and image of masculinity not threatened, with their boyfriends they refuse to take the vital role.
That would indicate that their boyfriends are not men, since to be passive or simply gay, for them would mean to be feminine, in essence a woman. Through rigid classification, as we learn from Kulick, the travesti believes that (Cameron, pp. 101-123):
To be or to claim that you are gay is frowned upon and it does not make you a man, since to be gay or a homosexual is a tautology of being passive;
Gay cannot be used to characterise their boyfriends' identity. That would mean that they are not men; and
His homosexual/gay ones do something unnatural.
Despite of the ways in which the travestis conceptualize their own sexual identity, what is more, interesting is their social behavior and attitudes towards their boyfriends. Solely relying on the prostitute's wages, the boyfriends provide absolutely nothing to their travestis as partners apart from a confirmation of their gendered roles. These boyfriends are not pimps, and they do not necessarily provide, any protection to the travesti. They are there to receive presents, money and food. Some of them have girlfriends and the travesti's wages end up spent on them: 'Travestis are fully aware that some of the money they give to their boyfriends gets spent by them entertaining their girlfriends.' In Some cases that Kulick examines, even the boyfriends' families got supported by the travesti's earnings. Mainly used to show off to other travestis, the boyfriend draws immense attention from his travesti-girlfriend, occupying a social space where he 'feminized'. The travesti has the money, therefore, the power.
Conclusion
This, according to Kulick, would be too simplistic. Leaving aside Kulick's assumptions on Western culture where love relationships got supposed to be based on reciprocal efforts at generating incomes, the issue of the boyfriend being the actual prostitute seems to be of high significance. The boyfriend in Kulick's articles has no share in the linguistic strategies that define the highly stigmatized travesti. It all depends on the point of view someone has concerning what prostitution is or what the gift and money exchanges could mean between the travesti and the boyfriend. Laura Growing's examination of accusations of whoredom towards women in Renaissance England finds that money exchanges for sex do not necessarily point to prostitute practice. As she notes, more regularly, the word whore conveyed not so much the exact meaning of prostitution as a range of connections between money and sex.
According to Kulick, he wrote that “Are travestis so generous by nature that they happily give a substantial amount of their hard-earned income to males who not only not impassioned with them, but who do not even do anything to help them either at work or around the house? An outsider coming from a culture where intimate relationships got supposed to be based on love, mutually felt emotions, and reciprocal efforts at generating incomes might easily see travesti accounts and practices of giving as delusions -fantasies of the agency that travestis spin in order to mask the harsh fact that they are, in fact, exploited by greedy, manipulative gigolos.” fantasies of the agency that travestis spin in order to mask the harsh fact that they are, in fact, exploited by greedy, manipulative gigolos
Works Cited
Cameron, D., Kulick, D., “The language and sexuality reader”, Taylor & Francis, (2006), pp. 101-123.
