Gulf “alter-latinas:” Cross-dressing Women Travel Beyond the Gulfs of Transnationality and Transexuality

. . . y así se construyen los relatos verdaderos, los relatos rizomas, los relatos manglares, donde el que escribe un silencio y una acción siempre está en el medio de las cosas, acá y allá, adentro y afuera, solo y comunicante en la red de relatos, telaraña de telarañas a lo largo del cuerpo de Dios.

. . . and this is how you build a true story, a rhizomatic story, a mangrove story, where s/he who writes a silence and an action is always in the middle of things, here and there, inside and outside, alone and in communion in the web of stories, web of webs across the body of God.¹

— Antonio Benítez Rojo, Mujer en Traje de Batalla (Woman in Battle Dress)

The shifting boundaries that converge in the Gulf and the watery lines between “Caribbean” and “Southern” open interstices where “alter-latinas” can invent and reinvent themselves. For our purposes, these “alter-latinas” are the cross-dressing heroines in Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Mujer en Traje de Batalla (2001) and Confederate soldier Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s memoir, The Woman in Battle (1876). These two narratives highlight the transgender and transnational journeys of their protagonist-avatars: the fictional Henriette Faber and the self-authored subject Loreta Janeta Velazquez. Here, we will examine how border transgressions of gender and nation go hand in hand in both texts, and how one disavowed relationship loosens others and opens new possibilities.

Cultural exile seems to have prepared the way for “gender exile” in Henriette’s and Loreta Janeta’s narratives — as their capacity for acting as either men or women is sharpened by their capacity for moving from one culture to the next. Their knack for switching wardrobe, and switching accents, prepared them for performances that push the limits of national, political and sexual identity. As Judith Butler explains, “bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled,” but rather rematerialize and spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of the law (xii). Butler’s observation helps us examine how the heroines of these two cross-dressing texts rearticulate the gap by which “the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses/disavows other identifications” (xiii). Henriette Faber, the fictional protagonist of Benítez Rojo’s Mujer en Traje de Batalla, is an avatar of many scripted (dis)guises, playing the role, for example, of a European woman posing as a Cuban man in order to gain access to medical training in Paris. Henriette rehearses and foreshadows this key performance in several earlier narrative episodes. First, she disguises as a Turkish messenger to infiltrate Napoleon’s army and meet up with her husband. She is later instructed by Maryse — a mother-figure and a performer herself — during a set of adventures in Maryse’s traveling circus. There are other instances in which Henriette practices or repeats performances that test her ability to blur her own gender and national boundaries, as we will see later. Loreta Janeta Velazquez, for her part, also takes on mentors of gender performance — practicing cross-dressing with the help of a tailor and the support of her own husband whom she persuades to accompany her to camp to test her ability to pass for a soldier. Both Benítez Rojo’s and Velazquez’s texts portray the details of their protagonists’ physical transformations and dress changes, including Loreta Janeta’s elaborate wire net shields to bulk up her appearance (58), and Henriette’s “man’s habit” to conceal her female figure (290). As cross-dressing performers in military theaters, both characters dread the physical exam more than any war danger for fear of being exposed as impostors, and considerable narrative space is given to planning their disguises, demeanor, and linguistic patterns. As cosmopolitan gypsies, neither one of them is easy to describe in terms of nationality or identity politics. Henriette might be Swiss or French, or Cuban, depending on the stage. Loreta Janeta might be West Indian, Cuban, French Creole or Southern...