GUEVEDOCHE KWOLU-AATMWOL: GENDER DISTURBANCES

By: Kenji

Transamerica

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Guevedoche Kwolu-Aatmwol? Could this be the ancient Mayan term for the sacrifice of young boys to a fertility goddess? For all the blood lust, maybe it was common for women of the ruling class to own several male sex slaves. Or could it be a Nigerian director of little known low budget Nollywood films specialising in s &m, bondage and dominatrixes, an underground sub-culture in cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Kadun, but not yet to my knowledge the town of Mubi? Or an indigenous name for tribes ruled by women in the tropical rainforests of Latin America, later adapted by Westerners as the term Amazons?

In fact, the term Guevedoche or Guevedoces is Spanish slang for instances of gender mutation at puberty. There have been numerous girls transformed into boys in the Dominican Republic, where more than three dozen cases have occurred in the small village of Salinas, all descended from a single individual named Altagracia Carrasco. It stands for the colloquial expression huevo a los doce, which translates literally as “eggs at twelve” (“eggs” being a common slang term for “testicles”).

A similar cluster of cases among the Simbari of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea has the local name Kwolu-aatmwol (“female thing transforming into male thing”).

Documentaries on the condition include “Guevote: The Way I Feel Is How I Am” (“Guevote: So wie ich mich fuehle, bin ich”), 1996, by filmmaker Rolando Sánchez

As the phenomenon among tropical tribes came to mind, i thought i’d do a list about gender; physical and role distortions and variations from cultural norms. Tabloid by Errol Morris is a film recently added to the site which deals with the notorious 1970s case of the Mormon kidnapped at gun point, chained to a bed and forced to have sex with the infatuated Joyce McKinney.

I have also been reminded of James Barry (c. 1792-1795 – 25 July 1865), a military surgeon in the British Army. “After graduation from the University of Edinburgh, Barry served in India and Cape Town, South Africa. By the end of his career, he had risen to the rank of Inspector General in charge of military hospitals. In his travels he not only improved conditions for wounded soldiers, but also the conditions of the native inhabitants. Among his accomplishments was the first successful caesarean section in Africa by a British surgeon, in which both the mother and child survived the operation. Although Barry lived his adult life as a man, it is widely believed that he was born female and named Margaret Ann Bulkley and that he chose to live as a man so that he might be accepted as a university student and be able to pursue his chosen career as a surgeon. Thus Barry would be the first female-born Briton to become a qualified medical doctor. It has also been theorized that Barry was intersex” (wiikipedia)

Marleen Gorris’ film Heaven and Earth, on Barry, should be worth watching.
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Howard Hawks liked to play with gender roles, and Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn were dab hands.
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Suggestions welcome: transvestism, trans-sexuals, genetic gender mutations and social role reversal all included.