2015/09/07 by Alfredo Mirandé · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Sex work and related issues #Media, Gender, and Advertising #Gender and Feminist Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/1097184x15602746
openalex publication_date 2015/09/07 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article interrogates West and Zimmerman’s Doing Gender paradigm by examining the Muxes of Juchitán, a little known third gender in El Istmo de Tehuantepec, Oaxaca México. After presenting preliminary findings based on personal interviews with forty-two muxes and forty-eight community members, distinguishing between muxes and gays and describing the wide variation in the muxe lifestyle, the essay concludes that muxes are a third sex/gender category that is actively redoing the prevailing Western gender binary as well as traditional Mexican conceptions of gender and sexuality. They are an indigenous third sex/gender category, which is less about Western conceptions of sexuality, sexual identity, or doing transgender and more about retaining the language, cultural categories, practices, and worldviews of indigenous communities.