Ruth Landes. Homosexuality and Transvestisms in early XX century Anthropology

Abstract

This article analyzes the anthropological status of homosexuality and transvestism through an international discussion sustained between American and Brazilian intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth century. This debate happened around the ethnography carried out in Brazil by the American anthropologist Ruth Landes, specifically for her conclusions regarding the presence of transvestite homosexual men in some Afro-Brazilian places of worship. It shows how the anthropology of the time was profoundly influenced by disputes present in psychology and psychoanalysis, over the “pathologies of sexuality” cultural or individual character. This allows us to dip into the history of anthropology in Latin America and study how trans subjectivity and subversive sexual desires have been systematically denied in the anthropological texts of the twentieth century, particularly in those where the racial conditions of marginalized populations were explored.