Gender and sexuality are hot topics in contemporary social theory and anthropology, and no topic is hotter than that of the newly emerging category of transgender. As with any social category, transgender has its own history and cultural location, but it is being used increasingly in cross-cultural descriptions of people whose expression or subjectivity does not match their ascribed gender. Sometimes referred to as third (cf. Herdt 1994), such categories of people present particular problems to anthropologists trained in contemporary social, feminist, and queer theory which see sexuality and as distinct, if related, categories of experience. Indeed, lesbian and gay (if not queer) anthropologists have struggled for some time now over how to describe non-normative genders and sexual categories or subjectivities that seem to defy easy explanation along either a homosexual/heterosexual binary (the realm of sexuality) or as third gender/transgender (the realm of gender). But the question that plagues many researchers still is how to define these terms - and sexuality themselves and how to describe the relationship between them. Most bluntly put, the problem is: who decides counts for gender and counts for sexuality? Two books that take on these issues (among others) in very useful ways are Don Kulick's Travesti and Mark Johnson's Beauty and power. While Kulick and Johnson take different routes to the goal, each makes an important intervention in opening up the relationship between and sexuality in the particular locations in which they work. Both books complicate in most productive ways how contemporary U.S. (and European) categories of sexual and gendered identity are read onto - and are read by - non-U.S., non-European people. A comparison of these two ethnographies is useful indeed in that both texts explore how Brazilian travesti (for Kulick) and the gays/bantut of the Southern Philippines (for Johnson) are not ambiguously gendered or sexed subjects. Rather, both authors argue, these social categories do an enormous amount of cultural work in shoring up local ideas about gender, sexuality, and personhood. Gender and sexual ambiguity - or rather, the perception of particular and sexual roles, identities, and practices as ambiguous - are, both Kulick and Johnson argue, the products or effects of particular, historically and culturally located ideas about personhood, and and sexuality themselves. Kulick's book has as its central question, what do travesti practices tell us about the ways in which is imagined and configured in Brazilian society? (p. 11). Kulick's study of a group of poor Brazilian travesti prostitutes (which the title glosses as transgendered; more on this later) in the northern city of Salvador is a rich exploration of the gendered and sexual subjectivities of a group of people who are routinely subject to violence, public humiliation, and, not infrequently, murder. In his introductory chapter Kulick sets out he sees as an myth (p. 7) in Brazilian society, that travestis are accepted and celebrated because they embody a broader cultural ideal of inversion, most evident in Carnival. Certainly, this seems on the one hand to have some validity for, as Kulick points out, in the 1980s the person widely regarded as the most beautiful in Brazil was Roberta Close, a travesti. Kulick argues, however, that recourse to a cultural inversion model is a smokescreen that effectively diverts our attention away from the ways in which travestis are concentrations of general ideas, representations, and practices of male and female. Thus, rather than simply inverting them . . , the argument here is that travestis elaborate the particular configurations of sexuality, gender, and sex that underpin and give meaning to Brazilian notions of man and woman (p. 7, emphasis in original). Kulick is after a deeper logic, one that can explain both the celebration of inversion that is supposed to be a feature of Brazilian culture, and the gritty facts of violence against travesti prostitutes. …