2.2: The Americas

North America

North American Indigenous conceptions of nonheteronormative sexuality and gender practices were documented by settlers, missionaries, and explorers. The individuals engaging in these practices traditionally held integral social roles that fulfilled particular social and ceremonial functions within their respective tribes. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century white French settlers and missionaries labeled such a person a berdache (the term, denoting a passive homosexual partner or slave, is now usually rejected as a slur) (figure 2.2). Settler colonialists eventually discouraged these roles and violently eliminated those in them. Indigenous groups in the 1990s adopted the term two spirit to emphasize an individual’s experience of dual gender and spiritual embodiments. Two-spirit embodiment, while holding specific meaning and terminology intratribally, commonly signifies a religious or healer role. In Cherokee, the two-spirit term asegi translates to “strange” and is used by some as the modern connotation of queer.

Figure 2.2. Dance to the Berdache (1835–1837) by George Catlin. (Public domain.)

Berdache and Two Spirit

The origin of the berdache role is unclear, and various reasons for the presence of two-spirit individuals have been offered. Some scholars interpret historical material as showing that communities probably assigned this social role, possibly foisting it on a feminine boy or extraneous son to be a passive sex partner, to bolster and reinforce a hierarchy.^[11] However, this interpretation is largely rejected by the two-spirit community and is contradicted by the firsthand accounts of two-spirit individuals, such as Osh-Tisch. Also known as Finds Them and Kills Them, Osh-Tisch was a Crow badé (or baté; a male-bodied person who performs some of the social and ceremonial roles usually filled by women) who lived from 1854 to 1929 and famously fought in the Battle of the Rosebud. The story of Osh-Tisch suggests two major points about agency in Crow two-spirit social roles: (1) the role was a cultural institution and chosen by individuals who exhibited exemplary traits, such as excelling at women’s work, and (2) two-spirit individuals could also perform the roles of traditionally gendered males or females, as Osh-Tisch’s part in the Battle of the Rosebud suggests. Similarly, the idea that demographic necessity dictated who would be a two-spirit person is not sufficient to explain female two spirits. Many Crow women took on the traditionally male warrior role, making it difficult to classify two spirits as a response to a shortage of men. A well-known instance is Bíawacheeitchish (Woman Chief) of the Crow, 1806–1858.

What Does "Two-Spirit" Mean?

Learn more about the history of the word two spirit from Geo Neptune on this episode in the InQueery series. (https://youtu.be/A4lBibGzUnE)

The most common explanation for two-spirit embodiment suggests that the person prefers avocations traditionally associated with the opposite sex, experiences cosmological dreams and visions, or both. The conception of gender as a binary is challenged by two-spirit notions of being neither male nor female or being both male and female. Further, Inuit (culturally similar Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar North, Arctic Canada, Alaska, and Greenland) conceptions of nonheteronormative gender and sexuality were often connected to the Inuit shamanic role of an angakkuq. Although an angakkuq is not always or even usually nonheteronormative, inclusion of nonheteronormative people in its traditional social role shows an association with LGBTQ+ ways of being. Two-spirit people have also been noted in other Arctic cultural contexts, such as among the Aleutians, in Western Canada, and in Greenland.^[13]

Check Your Knowledge

• Describe the history of the term two spirit. Why was it important for Native American activists to create this umbrella term?
• In what ways is the meaning of two spirit similar to, and different from, gay and queer?
• Were there elements of the history of the development of the term two spirit that surprised you? What were they, and why were you surprised.Two-spirit presence has been noted in more than 130 Native American tribes. Among the Great Plains Indians alone are instances in the Arapahos, Arikaras, Assiniboines, Blackfoot, Cheyennes, Comanches, Plains Crees, Crows, Gros Ventres, Hidatsas, Kansas, Kiowas, Mandans, Plains Ojibwas, Omahas, Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Poncas, Potawatomis, Quapaws, Winnebagos, and the Siouan tribes (Lakota or Dakota). Female two spirits, although documented among the Cheyennes, were more widespread among western North American tribes.^[12] These practices were often, but not always, associated with nonheteronormative sexuality as well as nonbinary gender. Some two-spirit people engaged in same-sex or queer sexual or romantic and marriage relations.

Latin America and Central America

The Zapotec in Mexico call themselves Ben ’Zaa, “cloud people.” They are Indigenous peoples concentrated in southern Mexico and especially in Oaxaca. Third-gender Zapotec roles such as muxe or muxhe in Oaxaca and biza’ah in Teotitlán del Valle receive more respect in regions where the Catholic faith has less influence than elsewhere and are believed to bring good luck to their communities. They are often thought of as caretakers of the community and of their families (figure 2.4). The Western notion of gender dysphoria does not describe the third-gender experience. Muxes are culturally accepted as not being in an either-or position. They are not placed on only one side of the male-female gender binary. Muxes have various sexualities that are not necessarily determined by their gender variance, which has local categories based on dress, including vestidas (wearing women’s clothing) and pintadas (wearing men’s clothing, sometimes wearing makeup). Also, if a muxe chooses a male partner (called a mayate), neither is necessarily thought of as a gay man or homosexual male.

Figure 2.4. Lukas Avendaño, a Zapotec muxe who is an artist and anthropologist from Mexico. (CC-BY-SA Mario Patiño.)

South America

In South America, travestis are a well-studied LGBTQ+ group. The term is shared among Peruvian, Argentinian, and Brazilian cultures. Travestis are assigned-male-at-birth individuals who use female pronouns and self-identify on a gender spectrum. This spectrum runs the gamut from transgender to a type of third-gender role that is distinct from transgender identity. Travestis are often working-class sex workers. Their societal positions are precarious but also openly recognized. They are open to body modification and transitional surgeries and tend to favor black-market industrial silicone enhancements and intensive hormone therapies. Don Kulick’s study of Brazilian travestis, however, found that they had generally negative attitudes about gender-affirming surgery, preferring to retain their penises for their sex work. They also view transness itself as abnormal to some extent.^[14] For these urban Brazilian travestis, gender was a men–not men binary, in which the not-men category encompassed women, homosexuals, and travestis. The travesti category describes a wide spectrum of self-identifying gender-nonnormative individuals,^[15] a spectrum that often shifts with changes in politics, legislation, gender, medical science, and cultural conceptions of self.