Reviews
Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence M. La
Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos by Annick Prieur, University of Chicago Press, 1998, 264 pp., S50.00 (cloth), S16.95 (paper). In Mema's House, Norwegian...
...As she is careful to point out, upperand middle-class men who engage in sex with men are more likely to follow European and North American models of "gay" identity...
...Prieur does not offer her book as an all-encompassing framework for male homosexuality in Mexico...
...Finally, the author accounts for the impact her presence may have had on the findings of her research, offering an honest and refreshing contrast to other texts which fail to problematize such questions...
...The book's most valuable contribution is its discussion of the differences between the ideological discourses of appropriate identity traits and the constructions of self and sexual practices of her informants...
...While there is an extensive bibliography on Latin American homosexualities, authors rarely focus on how constructed notions of femininity mediate same-sex male desire, or on the elaborate negotiation of homosexual practices among "masculine" partners...
...Instead of simply dismissing their silence, Prieur carefully develops a reading that accounts for it...
...She also offers a critical reading of accusations of homosexuality among men, suggesting that these not only refer to actual homosexual practices, but also serve as a means of enforcing hierarchies of power and domination...
...She also analyses their solidarity networks and familial relationships, and contrasts these to dominant cultural formations in the gay enclaves of North America and Europe...
...The book describes a community organized around the figure of Gerardo Rub6n Ortega Zurita, also known as "Mema," an AIDS educator and former sex worker from Ciudad Nezahualc6yotl, a workingclass district in Mexico City...
...In Mema's House, Norwegian sociologist Annick Prieur explores the social construction of gender among effeminate working-class homosexuals and transvestites in Mexico City (referred to as jotas or vestidas), and the "masculine" men or mayates who are their partners...
...Prieur examines the ways in which jotas understand and live out their identities through a variety of corporal practices, like body modification and sex...
...The author also examines the other sites of social activity that comprise the cultural universe of thejotas and their mayates, giving her analysis remarkable ethnographic depth...
...By linking effeminateness and homosexuality to a broader sex-gender grid-one in which men are located in opposition to women, but which also allows for gradations within these categories-Prieur's study offers a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between gender, sexuality and identity than those that limit male homosexuality to the sphere of masculinity or that claim that male homosexuals are just like women...
...Prieur challenges interpretations that present the role of the "active" partner in same-sex male intercourse as stigma-free, noting that she and other researchers have had difficulty finding informants who would speak openly about such experiences...
...The people whose lives and experiences form the core of this book, many of whom are adolescents, regularly visited and sometimes lived in Mema's house-a safe space where they were free to dress up, listen to music, see boyfriends and have sex...
...The author carefully differentiates perceptions of specific masculine and feminine traits and looks at the process by which individuals incorporate some and reject others...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 4
