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 soci-
ologist Annick Prieur explores the
social construction of gender among
effeminate working-class homosex-
uals and transvestites in Mexico
City (referred to as jotas or vestidas), and the “masculine” men or mayates
who are their partners. Prieur exam-
ines the ways in which jotas under-
stand and live out their identities
through a variety of corporal prac-
tices, like body modification and
sex. She also analyses their solidarity
networks and familial relationships,
and contrasts these to dominant cul-
tural 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 educa-
tor and former sex worker from
Ciudad Nezahualc6yotl, a working-
class district in Mexico City. The
people whose lives and experiences
form the core of this book, many of
whom are adolescents, regularly vis-
ited 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 also examines the other
sites of social activity that comprise
the cultural universe of thejotas and
their mayates, giving her analysis
remarkable ethnographic depth.
While there is an extensive bibli-
ography on Latin American homo-
sexualities, authors rarely focus on
how constructed notions of femini-
nity mediate same-sex male desire,
or on the elaborate negotiation of
homosexual practices among “mas-
culine” partners. Prieur challenges
interpretations that present the role
of the “active” partner in same-sex
male intercourse as stigma-free, not-
ing that she and other researchers
have had difficulty finding infor-
mants who would speak openly
about such experiences. Instead of
simply dismissing their silence,
Prieur carefully develops a reading
that accounts for it.
The book’s most valuable contri-
bution is its discussion of the dif-
ferences between the ideological
discourses of appropriate identity
traits and the constructions of self
and sexual practices of her infor-
mants. 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 cate-
gories-Prieur’s study offers a
more nuanced understanding of the
relationships between gender, sexu-
ality and identity than those that
limit male homosexuality to the
sphere of masculinity or that claim
that male homosexuals are just like
women. The author carefully differ-
entiates perceptions of specific
masculine and feminine traits and
looks at the process by which indi-
viduals incorporate some and reject
others. She also offers a critical
reading of accusations of homosex-
uality among men, suggesting that
these not only refer to actual homo-
sexual practices, but also serve as a
means of enforcing hierarchies of
power and domination.
Prieur does not offer her book as
an all-encompassing framework for
male homosexuality in Mexico. As
she is careful to point out, upper-
and middle-class men who engage
in sex with men are more likely to
follow European and North Ame-
rican models of “gay” identity. Fin-
ally, the author accounts for the im-
pact her presence may have had on
the findings of her research, offering
an honest and refreshing contrast to
other texts which fail to problema-
tize such questions.
