Manuel Fernández-Alemany: Manuel Fernández-Alemany receivced his Ph.D. in social anthropology at the University of Southern California, where he wrote his dissertation on heterosexism in Honduras.
Blossom of Bone documents spiritual traditions worldwide and in different periods of history that have included gender variant and homoerotically inclined people as shamans, priests, or as part of their creation myths.
The book is divided into four parts: “Bone” (concerned with shamanism from a cross-cultural perspective); “Earth and Moon” (about goddess reverence in different traditions); “Cauldron” (about the metamorphoses of the gay/berdache domain in the West in a diachronic context); and “Crossroads” (about the development of “Gay Spirituality” in the Americas after the clash, melting, and mosaic effect of diversity that different cultural groups have brought to the Americas).
This is not a book about homosexuality or homosexual behavior per se. The author's interest is on people who have incorporated in themselves three traits: gender variance or androgyny, same-sex eroticism, and the fulfillment of a sacred role or the performance of a spiritual task.
This work, however, does not attempt to cover all the different berdache-like traditions but the ones which Conner felt more familiar with and also the ones that he felt have not being properly covered in recent publications. His scope has also been purposely limited regarding female gender variants because he feels that the latter is a subject that should be covered by a lesbian-feminist scholar rather than him. Conner has also limited his discussion on HIV/AIDS-related themes since he feels other writers have better insights on the topic.
Conner recognizes that the concept of a transcultural/transhistorical berdachism is only possible within an essentialist theoretical framework, which he embraces to a point. Throughout the book he claims that berdache-like characteristics appear regardless of geographical location, culture, and historical period.
On the other hand, Conner strongly believes in diffusionism; that is, that similar cross-cultural traits on berdachism might have been borrowed from society to society through time and did not necessarily appear cross-culturally due to some beings' special nature or condition universally present (p.295). A local development of berdachism, culturally rooted but not necessarily explained through diffusionism, cries to be included in his interpretation as well.
Trying to conciliate essentialist and constructionist approaches to the berdache, Conner uses the concept of the double nature of things; things can be wavelike, and therefore fluid, and at the same time particlelike, and therefore fixed and defined. He borrowed this concept from quantum physics to refute social constructionists' and some postmodernists' objection to the concept of gay identity or gay spirituality as lacking fluidity. Basically the idea is that “while the particlelike aspect of identity might refer to the multicultural, transhistorical persistence of same-sex eroticism, gender variance, sacred role … [—]the wavelike aspect of identity[—]might refer to differences produced by cultural or historical influences” (p.297). Here, therefore, Conner takes an intermediate stance between social constructionists and essentialists by recognizing that “a relatively constant third or fourth gender identity and that of gender bending behavior and erotic fluidity … may coexist simultaneously … within the psyche” (p.296).
Third-gender theories or cross-cultural studies on gender variance—the creation myth approach—like Conner's, have played an important role in LGBTQ politics; this approach has influenced positively in radical and pioneering movements and activism within LGBTQ politics, like the formation of the Mattachine Society in the 1950s. This approach needs to be historically placed with two other approaches: the integrationist politics one and the postmodern/critical one.
Conner's approach brings to non-academic gay and lesbian-identified readers as well as to some activists insightful information collected from across cultures and historical periods on the connections between homoeroticism and the sacred. This information can be also constructively used by various researchers because of its rich compilation of data, if they are able to read beyond its controversially essentialist take on these issues.
commenting closed for this article