The In-betweenness of the Travesti as Creator of New Ways of Existing and Being in Las Malas by Camila Sosa Villada

Las Malas (2019) or Bad Girls by trans Argentine writer and theater, film, and television actress Camila Sosa Villada narrates the experience of a group of travesti sex workers who build a community of friendship and solidarity in Cordoba, Argentina. In this essay I will address how the in-betweenness of the travestis portrayed in the text allows them to build new ways of existing and being, different from the ones proposed by hegemony. I will use the Spanish word travesti throughout the essay and not an English translation because it would not express or contain the realities of the Latin American experience, which is a postcolonial, ethicized, and racialized one. The travesti is a deviant figure present in Latin American culture since before the colonizers arrived in the region that was condemned and punished, taken by the colonizers as a sign of weakness, cowardice, and betrayal (Domínguez Ruvalcaba 17).

Before delving into my analysis, I would like to acknowledge that the experience of each travesti is unique, and, like Chilean travesti, transfeminist, student of history, musician, performer, and activist Sofía Devenir, I contend that there is no “true travesti,” (Devenir 8). That said, I align with queer philosopher Giuseppe Campuzano who understands the travesti as a being that adopts features from the opposite sex. Although this is a legitimate purpose, it turns out to be a composite of male and female features which, while common to everybody at different levels, the travesti makes more explicit as they unveil the inadequacy of the existing gender norms—the exclusionary male and female” (Campuzano, Museo 89). Moreover, along with Campuzano, I consider that the travesti implies “a full range of possibilities between the extremes of the masculine and the feminine” (Museo 8) and is not “the quest or production of another identity for the long existing list.” Rather, it is, specifically for the Latin American context, a “transformative post-identity, [that moves] away from the clean racial and racist distinctions and towards ethnic overlappings” (Campuzano, “Giuseppe” 10).

Along with Campuzano’s understanding of the travesti, I also consider Argentine social psychologist, writer, and transgender rights’ activist Marlene Wayar to inform my own understanding of the same. Wayar considers that travestis are not women “locked in the body of a male,” but “we are automatically travestis” (115), explaining that in her particular case, being a travesti doesn’t mean renouncing her “masculinity”:

In Wayar’s case, the desire to incorporate “female” markers to her subjectivity does not make her “masculinity” invisible. For her, the travesti is a figure of ambiguity, movement and change. This implies that travestis, by means of their travestismo, distort the notion of subjectivity and the idea of an “original,” as defined or contemplated by the binary masculine/feminine standard imposed by patriarchal social conventions. In turn, the travesti signals that the very notion of an original is, in fact, a construction. That is, the travesti does not work as an individualized or defined subjectivity. Their existence would not be, to say it with Néstor Perlongher, a “conscious” existence, but a traveling existence, always adrift, in the multiplicity of flows, in the randomness and instantaneity of encounters (103).

Wayar’s and Campuzano’s understanding of the travesti allows me to propose the notion of the in-between regarding this same figure. In the case of Las Malas, I see the in-betweenness of the travesti in the way most of the characters embrace their composite of male and female features, although they refer to themselves as women. Nadina who “de día era un correcto enfermero y de noche se convertía en una belleza de metro ochenta que dejaba azorados a los transeúntes que se cruzaban con ella” (55) is a good example of this. Moreover, Laura, Nadina’s parter, falls in love with her in-betweenness as expressed in the following quote, “Laura se había enamorado del enfermero, pero también de la compañera de ruta, que venía en el mismo cuerpo” (55). This does not mean, though, that these travestis want to embrace (only) their masculine self. As the narrator of Las Malas states, “era demasiado horrible todo para querer ser un hombre. Yo no podía ser un hombre en este mundo” (62). That is why the travestis of Las Malas are “joyas barbudas” (101) who show “los rasgos indomables del varón que somos” (117) and are considered, in some cases, “una mujer con pene” (129).

I also find the in-betweenness of the travestis from Las Malas in the characters who fluctuate between human and inhuman as expressed in the narrative’s descriptions of travestis that have “unas manos tan grandes que podrían cubrir el sol entero” (21) or those who have “las branquias abiertas, las fauces en tensión” (21). This same in-betweenness is explore through the character of Natalí, “la séptima hija varón en su familia … en las noches de luna llena se convertía en lobizona… era dos veces loba, dos veces bestia” (103-104).With this, we could say that in the case of the travestis that inhabit Las Malas, the “in-between” has to do with their state of fluctuation, fluidity, impermanence, inconsistency, and mutability (Mirassol 2), not only regarding their genders and sexualities but also their humanity.

This twist of reality performed by the travestis of Las Malas is related to the survival techniques and resources they have to develop in a world that rejects them and generates violence against them. This elaboration of survival strategies and strategies of selfhood that “initiate new signs of identity” (Bhabha 1) corresponds to what Homi Bhabha denominates the “in-between.” Moreover, these techniques imply ways of relating, of loving, but also of experiencing sexuality in many different ways, as practices of “collaboration and contestation … of domains of difference” (Bhabha 2).

Along with trans and travesti writers such as Claudia Rodriguez and Sofía Devenir, among others, Sosa Villada adds to the Latin American travesti archive with Las Malas. This is important because hegemonic literature in Spanish has “ignore[d]… specific subjectivities, cultural organizations and world views or cosmovisiones” (Falconí 34) such as the travesti ones. With this, the Latin American literary archive has been, and remains, incomplete. Numerous subaltern subjectivities have been denied representation, or if they have been represented, they have been represented as disposed of power and agency. This is the case of the travesti, who as Lohana Berkins, one of the most well-known Argentine travesti leaders explains, “has been and it is still used as a synonym for thief, HIV positive, outrageous, infected, marginal” (5). Contrary to this image, in Las Malas, Sosa Villada connects and represents the travesti as a symbol of struggle, resistance, dignity, and happiness.

Las Malas narrates the story of Camila, who arrives to Córdoba and joins a group of travestis at Parque Sarmiento to be a sex worker. Here she meets Tía Encarna or Auntie Encarna, the “mother” of all travestis and sex workers. Tía Encarna teaches them to survive the violence against their subjectivities and provides them with a sense of belonging, practicing a kind of pedagogy in which one can learn to be travesti and how to survive in dialog with other lives.

To narrate this story, Sosa Villada uses a language different from the hegemonic one, what we could call a linguistic deviation. This language, as the narrator expresses, is “destruido, enfermado, confundido, incomodado, despedazado para hacerlo renacer” (172-173). It is a language that in Diego Falconi’s words, “tries to break with the binarism of Spanish and also of the academic world… in order to rethink language and its power of representation” (11).

Spanish sociologist and transgender activist Miquel Miseé states that “language plays a very important role in our identity because we define ourselves, think, act, and, in fact, exist through it” (106). Following this idea, the language Sosa Villada uses in Las Malas describes reality as it is experienced and negotiated by the travestis, figures that inhabit an “in-betweenness” of genders, sexualities, and humanity. It also constitutes the means these travestis use to communicate with other travestis and to experience themselves, inside their communities, but also inside the heterosexual, hegemonic world that excludes and marginalizes them. If “speech about marginality is integrally tied to the naturally codified character of language” (16), as Canadian scholar Matthew Edwards states, then this language, a language that creates different ways of existing, can resist the marginality produced by language that forms and deforms in-between subjects. As I will explain, we could say that what Sosa Villada does in Las Malas is to deviate language through the in-betweenness of the travesti to inscribe other ways of existing and experiencing life.

I would like to mention, first, that besides deviating normative and hegemonic language, the author also deviates a normative and hegemonic Latin American literary style, the real maravilloso or marvelous real one. This style describes the magical realism in Latin American literature which crosses the boundary between reality and fiction. The term was coined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949 in the preface to his novel The Kingdom of this World. He explained how his stories were inspired by the marvelous but were still real phenomena of reality. He found lo real maravilloso in daily life, in indigenous beliefs, traditions, or legends, in the extremes and wonders of nature.

Lo real maravilloso was also adopted by Latin American writers such as Maria Luis Bombal, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez, though, has been considered the pioneer of what has been called magic realism, which is a literary style informed by real maravilloso. Sosa Villada uses this same literary style to narrate travesti subjectivities and as she deviates it, she deviates a heteronormative literary tradition that has excluded travesti writers. Moreover, if lo real maravilloso and magic realism were used to represent Latin American realities that excluded these subjectivities, Sosa Villada corrects this by inscribing in-between subjectivities under these literary styles, reinscribing and recreating them.

For example, in Las Malas there are characters that become animals, such as Natalí, who becomes a wolf, and María, who changes into a bird. There are also men without heads that are friends with the travestis sex workers working at Parque Sarmiento. As previously stated, Tía Encarna is represented as the mother of all these monsters, not just the shape-shifters but the zombies, too, which the novel likens the travestis to. These monstrous characters are considered by hegemonic logic inhuman. As North American scholar Judith Butler states, “the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined” (Gender 23), as is the case of the travestis in Las Malas. The bodies that Sosa Villada narrates in her novel are indeed “improperly or inadequately gendered” because of their in-betweenness. They experience a double exclusion due to the race and class to which they belong. They are socially categorized as “inhuman,” or “less than human,” as they are “'marked by class subalternity and a bodily incongruity that leaves them exposed to economic precariousness and transphobic and sexist violence” to put it in Butler’s words (Butler, Gender 37). However, due to these same characteristics, these bodies resist a reduction to single principles. As in-between bodies, they come from a non-decipherable place, even beyond the human, insofar as they are figures of absolute alterity. This is why they represent a break away from the certainties of the known and the usual, insofar as they are in constant alteration. Therefore, and following Chilean feminist critic Alejandra Castillo, we could think of these same bodies as bodies that are a “place of dominance but also of resistance” (Castillo 29). With this, I refer to the fact that these in-between bodies, because of their heterogeneity, can interrupt hegemony’s unitarian force and propose new ways of living and building realities, reinscribing and expanding concepts such as motherhood and the family.

In his article “Desencantos y maravillas: comunidad, fracaso y utopia queer en Las malas de Camila Sosa Villada,” Chilean scholar Ignacio Sánchez Osores states that Las Malas is a novela del fracaso or a novel of failure, as understood by the scholar Jack Halberstam, because it narrates the stories of failed lives, in this case, the lives of travestis. The potentiality of these narratives of failure, according to Osores, is that they deviate and degenerate hegemonic projects from the nation such as motherhood, reproduction, the normative family, and success, among others. Osores’s ideas are related to the fact that queer lives and queerness “attach themselves and transform the normative, pointing out its instability, its transitory reshaping” to quote North American scholar Joseph Pierce (Argentine 27).

This transformation of the normative, though, generated by the failed lives of travestis as explored in Las Malas comes with different exclusions and extreme violences these subjects experienced. For instance, Tía Encarna, “muchos golpes ha padecido… botines de policías y de clientes han jugado al fútbol con su cabeza y también con sus riñones. Los golpes en los riñones la hacen orinar sangre” (19). Travestis’ bodies are inhabited by a historical pain (25), as Las Malas recounts that the violence perpetuated on them started during childhood and intensified during adolescence, especially from parents and classmates. This violence is a response, a reaction to these bodies’ alterity that, as I mentioned before, are considered monstrous and inhuman because of their in-betweenness. Travestis commit “the worst body crime” (Falconí 191), as they don’t have a gender expression suitable to the masculine/feminine binary, placing them in a space of vulnerability because of their monstrosity.

Nevertheless, Las Malas argues that it is from this vulnerability and monstrosity that travesti bodies find their strength and power to survive such violences as a community because, as the novel states, “el dolor de una era el dolor de todas” (123). The narrator and main character Camila, expreses, “Yo no estaría acá, hoy, si ellas no me hubieran defendido de policías y clientes de mierda. Estaría en una zanja seguramente” (8). With this Las Malas acknowledges the power of the travesti community, “esa hermadad de travestis mal miradas, mal queridas, mal tratadas, mal pagadas, mal juzgadas, mal habladas” (9), but also the transformation they, together, united, perform of “la vergüenza, el miedo, la intolerancia, el desprecio y la incomprensión” (9). As Las Malas states, “las travestis se han transformado a sí mismas” (17) which is translated into a “saber transmitido” or a transmitted knowledge (120) that propose new ways of living and building realities, reinscribing and expanding concepts such as motherhood and the family. Tía Encarna for instance, finds a baby and raises him. She calls him el Brillo de los ojos. The novel presents them as an alternative family and they are not the only ones. Nadina, a travesti, and Laura, a cis woman, also raise children together. All the travestis in the novel wanted to be mothers, a reality that is not conceived by normative or hegemonic narratives. After all, as Marlene Wayar states, travestis are building other possible futures… “by breaking language as this allows us to break our thoughts, our feelings and actions… we invite other people to disidentify with everything that has been pre-established to rebuild an identity (124). We should add that through the in-betweenness of the travesti, a different temporality from the linear one is proposed. Tía Encarna, for instance, is one hundred and sixty-eight years old and it is explained that a year of life of the travesti is equal to seven human years (104). Death is also resignified in Las Malas as for the travesti it means something different than for the rest of the population.

With this, Las Malas proposes that the travesti and their in-betweenness inhabit other possible ways of existing and being in the world, performing “Una magia de índole más mundana. La que cualquiera podría hacer y no hace” (217).