Sex and the Temple: Crossgender Practices in Spirit Possession Rituals in Vietnam

• In Event: Pleasure, Pain and “Perversions” in Modern Vietnam

Abstract

In this paper I explore crossgender practices within spirit possession rituals loosely associated with Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian cosmologies in southern Vietnam, performed by transgender and transsexual bodies. In a cosmological worldview where this world is considered as yang and the other (spirit) world as yin, sexually transgressive behavior that is usually dismissed as perverse in everyday life can become sacred in ritual time-spaces. In different ways and with different degrees of explicitness, spirit possession privileges male-to-female and female-to-male crossgender practices, constituting an arena of gendered license in an otherwise sexually restrictive cultural space. In this paper I look at ways in which transgender and transsexual categories converge with religious boundaries and simultaneously offer privileged conduits for communication between this world and the other world within the ritual time-space of spirit possession practices, often taking place in the context of village and temple festivals. The sexual ambiguity of transgender bodies affords privileged conduits for communicating between the two worlds – which is one of the purposes of ritual behavior – making them potentially efficacious mediums. Transgender mediums distance themselves from everyday heteronormative behavior within their kin groups and localities, and associate themselves with a separate, liminal sphere that usually characterizes ritual, thus forming new groups and creating new forms of sociality. I pay particular attention to the co-occurrence and articulation of religious, sexual, material and entertainment desires through sexualized transgender dance, music, juggling and bingo performances during a village festival and a temple festival at a Buddhist pilgrimage site.

Author

• Oscar Salemink, University of Copenhagen