Unlikely Sex Change Capitals oftheWorld: Trinidad, United States, and Tehran, Iran, as Twin Yardsticks of Homonormative Liberalism Elizabeth Bucar and Anne Enke Surgically turning a man into a woman is as easy "as skinning a rabbit" in . . . Trinidad, the tiny town stranded in the middle of the dusty Colorado prairie that . . . has earned the title Sex-Change Capital of the World. —Molly Watson, Evening Standard (London), August 15, 2000 Transsexuals aren't a cultural marker typically associated with reli giously inflexible dictatorships, but they are common in Iran—by some estimates, there are 150,000 Iranian transsexuals, and the coun try hosts more sex-change operations per year than any country outside Thailand. —Jesse Ellison, Newsweek, February 18, 2008 In the turbulent first decade of the twentieth-first century, Trinidad, Colorado, a predominantly Catholic town with a population hovering around 9,000, came to share its long-standing title as "the Sex Change Capital of the World" with Tehran, Iran, a city of almost eight million and the literal capital of an Islamic theocracy. Or so it would seem, if one reads the articles published in international mainstream media outlets (such as the Los Angeles Times and the London-based Guardian) that write in astonished terms of the support for and purported popularity of sex reassignment surgeries (SRS) in Iran. Despite Newsweek's hint at a global Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 301 302 Elizabeth Bucar and Anne Enke statistic about which countries host the most surgeries, the media's concept of "capital" actually has little to do with comparisons or with numbers; rather, it revolves around the way that specific locations have garnered significant attention because the practice of SRS in these places at first seems to challenge Western mainstream conceptions of "liberal ism" regarding sex and gender.1 Given that Tehranians are predominantly Shi'i and Trinidad's popu lation is predominantly Catholic, the news reader might assume that SRS would be religiously contested in both "capitals." However, part of the media-generated surprise is that both Tehran and Trinidad have legiti mated their SRS practices locally with the support of religious norms, leaders, and institutions.2 The media's use of "unlikely" plays off the presumption that transsexuality and the practices associated with it can be supported only in places already known for permitting the visibility of nonnormative subjects (such as San Francisco or Bangkok). The corollary presumption is that rural places or places in which religion governs social structure (such as Trinidad or Tehran) would not generally support transsexuality. Mainstream media representations of transsexuality are thus thoroughly dependent on a very specific spatial imagination that draws on normalizing ethnic hierarchies. Working at the intersection of cultural geography and queer theory, we and other scholars recognize the mutual constitution of place, iden tity, and power.3 As our analysis shows, the phrase "the unlikely sex change capital of the world" suggests that it is the places that are "un likely"; it is the places that are made to do the work of culturally con structing the meanings associated with transsexuality. Our aim is not to determine the truth or falsity of the shared classification of Trinidad and Tehran. Nor do we propose any interpretation of SRS or of transsexuality apart from our media assessment. Instead, we focus on the work that these two places are made to perform via their association with SRS and how associations with and assumptions about each of these cities make this work possible.4 Initial surprises notwithstanding, in most journalistic rhetoric, SRS in Trinidad comes to signify the Western achievement of sex and gender freedom, and SRS in Tehran comes to prove that Muslim states are resolutely oppressive around sex and gender. Elizabeth Bucar and Anne Enke 303 What we find is the resilience of homonormative frameworks that carry ethnosexual5 judgments of these two places in the media coverage. In order to conceptualize the interaction of place and sexuality, we draw on transnational approaches to ethnicity, in which ethnicity is understood to be not only constituted through language, religion, and culture but also through various kinds of social and geopolitical borders and boundaries.6 As Joane...
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Oct 22, 2024
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Open Access