By God you are his son: religious belief, gender and sexuality in a Pentecostal evangelization group of prostituted transvestites

Abstract

It is a research work on Pentecostalism, gender and sexuality carried out with a Pentecostal evangelization group that seeks to reach prostituted transvestites in the Constitución neighborhood of the City of Buenos Aires. The analyzed corpus was built based on intense fieldwork, observations with participation and in-depth interviews with leaders and group participants. From a performance perspective in the analysis of religious and generic identifications, this article reflects on group participation and spiritual warfare (which takes place both at the level of the territory and of the bodies understood as territories) as a way of creating, reaffirming and also emphasizing the relationships between religious affiliation and the gender and sexuality identifications that it requires. The narrative of sexual restoration that appears in the practitioners' discourse is analyzed as a specific form of healing that supposes an imaginary return to an ideal of continuity between sex, gender and sexual desire orientation. The study of the corporal and discursive practice of evangelical activism allows for a new way of approaching the complex and tense process of social production of subjectivities through which bodies are moralized and generic and religious morality materializes.