Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

It is wonderful and weirdly fitting that one of the jacket blurbs for this work of social anthropology is by sex educator and former porn star Annie Sprinkle. Just as there is nothing dry or remote about Annie Sprinkle's delivery, there is nothing dry or remote about Don Kulick's. In fact, this may be the most readable and engaging study of transgenderism to surface in years. For seven months in 1994, Kulick lived in a household of "travestis"--Brazilian male prostitutes who live as women. He constantly tape-recorded their casual conversations, whether on the street soliciting customers or in their small rooms in the ghettos of Salvador, and has been able to trace the motivations behind their behavior and body modifications with plausibility and compassion. So absorbing are the details of the travestis' lives, as recounted by Kulick, that the reader can easily miss the author's equally acute analysis of their often bizarre transformations and of what travestis, with their exaggerated performance of "femininity," suggest about the construction of gender in Brazil. --Regina Marler