Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche

CHAPTER 7. The Responses of Male Machi to Homophobia: Reinvention as Priests, Doctors, and Spiritual Warriors

CHAPTER 7 The Responses of Male Machi to Homophobia: Reinvention as Priests, Doctors, and Spiritual Warriors Eugenio and Daniel—both longko of their respective communities— drank a carton of Gato Negro wine as they mused about my research on male machi one summer evening in December 2001. The two drew on Chilean homophobic discourses to joke about the manliness, gender performances, and sexuality of male machi. They applied to male machi the derogatory Chilean terms “coliwilla,” “maricón,” “marica,” and “homosexual ” and viewed machi as effeminate, transvestite, deceitful, cowardly, and passive. Yet, paradoxically, Daniel and Eugenio also respected male machi and recognized the importance of their traditional co-gendered performances and transvestism during rituals that ensured health, wholeness , and well-being. The longko’s ambivalent response to male machi as people whom they at once respected and deplored reflected their competing Chilean Catholic and traditional Mapuche ideologies of gender and sexuality. Like most other Mapuche, Eugenio and Daniel tried to reconcile these conflicting perceptions by legitimating male machi’s co-gendered identities and spiritual practices as being akin to those of celibate Catholic priests and by masculinizing their healing practices as being like those of medical doctors: eugenio: Why is it that male machi are coliwilla [effeminate homosexuals]? DAniel: Male machi are powerful, but they like pigs’ legs [men’s bodies]. Both men laugh. MAriellA: Just because they use head scarves and shawls in ritual doesn’t mean they are coliwilla. Besides, what’s wrong with that? eugenio: How is it going to be normal for two men to be together? Responses of Male Machi to Homophobia 165 You’ve been around too many gringos. How many male machi have kissed you? MAriellA: None. [Daniel and Eugenio laugh.] eugenio: You see—a man who is macho would at least have tried. eugenio’s wife, AureliA, chides him: How can you say that? Not all male machi are like that. Machi José and Sergio are special, like priests, like doctors. They have power, we have to respect them. DAniel jokes: You never know what the priest hides under his robes. You never know what the doctor hides under his coat. You never know what the machi hides under the shawl. [We all laugh.] AureliA: They say that because they are drunk, but when the community did not want Machi José to perform at the ngillatun, Eugenio defended him. They laugh now. But when they are sick, when they need a ngillatun, they go begging the male machi. DAniel: That’s true. There are few male machi, but they are stronger [than female machi] . . . eugenio: They may be stronger, but they wear women’s clothes. Machi Jacinto wears women’s clothes to work. He must like pig’s legs. MAriellA: Jacinto is married and has children. You say he is coliwilla just because he wears a killa [woman’s shawl] during rituals? eugenio: If I wore a skirt and a shawl, what would you think? DAniel: Mi’jita rica [Gorgeous babe]! In calling male machi “coliwilla,” Eugenio and Daniel subscribed to Catholic discourses in which any form of sexual or gender variance is viewedasunnaturalandthreateningtofamilyvalues,society,andmorality. They saw homosexuality partly as a matter of choice of sexual object, and they labeled male machi, whom they believed engaged in sexual acts with other men, “abnormal.” Partly, they viewed it as associated with gender transitivity and sexual positions, and they called male machi whom they viewed as transvestite “effeminate,” or those engaging in passive sexual acts “coliwilla.” The discursive act of labeling a male machi “coliwilla” and as “liking pig’s legs” was a form of rejection because it placed the machi in an inferior position vis-à-vis national power dynamics, state-defined masculinity, and Catholic morality. Machismo, the ideology of male dominance and superiority that feeds aversion toward and stigmatization of effeminate men, who are thought to be penetrated by others, remains strong among Mapuche. Machismo 166 Shamans of the Foye Tree structures the relationship between men and women but also that between men. It is “a system of produced identities, desires and practices: it defines what a man is, and what he isn’t, what he should want, and what he shouldn’t; what he may do, and what he may not do” (Lancaster 1992:277). By rejecting male machi as coliwillas, Eugenio and Daniel attempted to assert their masculinity in terms of its national signifiers.1 Mapuche men like...