In the Image of a Woman: Spirited Identifications and Embodied Interpellations Along the Betsiboka Valley
Amidst ongoing political turmoil and economic instability across Madagascar, sarimbavy (male-bodied, same-sex desiring and/or gender-expansive persons) are increasingly conceived of as timely subjects by HIV-prevention industries, homonationalist LGBT rights projects backed by the United States Embassy, and Christian religious publics. Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Betsiboka Valley, this dissertation both considers and diverges from these biomedical and moral panics by attending to the dynamic and often ambiguous relationship between sarimbavy and tromba spirit mediumship. In focusing upon the epistemological and hermeneutical labor that possession provides for those who live “in the image of a woman,” tromba (spirits of former reigning members of the Sakalava monarchy), and the wider social worlds in which they all reside, In the Image of a Woman offers a portrait of burgeoning sarimbavy counterpublics in Antananarivo, Mahajanga, and the rural district of Ambato-Boéni. This dissertation charts how these queer networks have flourished within the entangled milieus of possession pilgrimage, the use of an in-group “secret” sociolect, and the development of MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) activism. In the Image of a Woman bypasses strict functionalist explanations for the affinity between tromba and sarimbavy subjectivity. Nevertheless, this dissertation meditates upon how future-oriented MSM/LGBT rights-work and its attendant HIV-prevention activism (widely conceptualized by interlocutors as modern phenomena connected to foreign intervention) were uncannily facilitated through spirit mediumship (generally articulated by interlocutors as a longstanding “custom of the ancestors”). In thinking alongside these shifting temporal allegiances of sarimbavy medium-activists, the ethnography contained therein intervenes in the literature on global LGBT rights movements and religiosity by troubling the assumption that their relationship is inherently antagonistic.
LGBT, Madagascar, queer, religion, Sakalava, spirit possession
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