In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter two Gender Deviants “Cucurrucucu, paloma. Cucurrucucu, no llores” (dove, don’t cry), Blanca sang to me as she described the night a promoter found her singing in a nightclub. “Cucurrucucu Paloma,” a ranchera song, was made popular by Lola Beltrán, known in Mexico as the “queen of ranchero music.” In the early 1960s, at the age of twenty-five, Blanca took the stage persona of Lola Beltrán and started making her living singing in bars and nightclubs in California. She frequently used the word queen to describe herself, instead of the longer drag queen. She was very proud of her gifted voice, which, according to her, many compared to Beltrán’s. She could not make it as a singer, however, because she was not a “real” woman. Back then, you had to be honest to Mexican audiences. If you were passing as a woman and then revealed you were a man, it was a fraud. The only place I could sing and be Lola Beltrán was in a nightclub for effeminate men. Ironically, Blanca’s talent was also her affliction, as she crossed the gender boundaries set up by her society and her times.“Yo sufrí mucho”(I suffered a lot), she says of her early years in Southern California. Both of her Mexican parents were very religious. Her mother was Catholic and her father Pentecostal. Blanca was frequently scolded for what her parents and older brothers perceived as womanlike behavior.As a child, she used to play putting on her aunt’s dresses and lipstick.The kids in the neighborhood made fun of her, but she did not care. She enjoyed wearing the dresses. Her aunt did not mind and even defended her. She would tell Blanca’s mother not to beat her. “He is joto [faggot], and that’s the way he is. God sent him to you—accept him.” While on one of the weekend visits to her aunt, Blanca had sex with a seventeen-year-old cousin.“I was a child but didn’t say anything. I let him do it.”Blanca, speaking in a-matter-of-fact manner, explains that she did not try to stop the cousin because a part of her longed for sexual contact with a man. Blanca did not finish elementary school because she was“traumatized.” Children in the school would pick on her and sexually harass her, to the point that it became intolerable and Blanca stopped going to school.When she was eleven years old, Blanca was sent to a psychiatric hospital. One of her older brothers persuaded the parents that she was mentally ill and needed to be cured and made into a “normal man.” Initially, she was in the hospital for three months.The doctors told the parents she was not mentally ill and that there was nothing to be cured. Blanca’s father, however, refused to take her back, and she ended up staying four years. Soon after she left the hospital, Blanca left her family. Years later, she settled in San Francisco, where she became a community figure thanks to her talent as a “queen” singer. A year after I interviewed her, Blanca died from AIDS-related complications. She was living in a transitional home for homeless people. Blanca’s life was marked by the stigma attached to gender nonconforming behavior.As defined by Goffman (1963), stigma is the labeling of individuals or groups in a way that discredits them. Stigma is a social process by which a dominant group negatively labels a condition (e.g., homosexual desire) that deviates from the group’s standards of normality.This labeling involves the assignation of undesirable characteristics (e.g., weak, perverse, dirty), a social separation or distancing, and the use of discriminatory practices toward those labeled as“different”(Link and Phelan 2001; Link et al. 1997; Meyer 1995; Ramirez-Valles et al. 2005). Gay and transgender people, thus, are stigmatized because they deviate from the dominant gender ideology and threaten that same gender ideology or social order. In Blanca’s case, she was labeled as different because her thoughts, desires, and actions did not correspond to what her family, neighbors, and larger society expected from someone with a penis. She was labeled a “joto,” thought to be mentally ill, institutionalized, beaten and reprimanded, and used as a sexual object. Stigmatized persons may experience stigma in the form of acts such as name-calling, social rejection, or job discrimination. They may be aware...

Share