obtain mining titles and are likely to be evicted from a mining site once fullblown industrial mining starts” (128). Whereas artisanal miners sometimes had confrontations with farmers, industrial miners in Burkina Faso have faced acts of vandalism (128). Public concern for health and safety standards, corruption and environmental damage all now figure in the politics of mining (129). Industrial mining pushes against all modes of livelihood in rural Burkina Faso, including artisanal mining. With the second mining frontier, unlike the first, the country faces the danger or other states that have suffered a “resource curse” (130). “Mining frontiers in Africa” provides a good blend of historical and ethnographic materials, set in a framework that is sensitive to both local conditions and the broader political economy of Sub-Saharan Africa. As such, it offers an overview of developments and problems and indicates important questions for future research. Anthropologists working in other regions, like Latin America, Southeast Asia or the Pacific – where large-scale extractive industries are also growing in importance – will appreciate the comparative dimension this volume offers as well as the editors’ efforts to link artisanal and industrial mining in a context that encompasses extractive processes in different regional anthropologies. Bettina Beer, Lucerne
Katrin Vogel 2013. Hotel Glamour: Venezolanische Transformistas in Europa, Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2013, 316 S. Hotel Glamour is a book about the migration of Venezuelan transgender persons – or transformistas as they name themselves – to Europe. The Venezuelan transformistas in Vogel’s study identify as biological men who have been born with feminine behavioural traits. Vogel introduces us to their everyday lives, which are characterised by work in prostitution, frequent travel within Europe, body transformations and shopping for luxury clothes and accessories. Vogel’s study aims to answer firstly, how the Venezuelan transformistas are organised in Europe and how they organise their work; secondly, how they travel, to which locations and how they achieve this without legal immigration status; and thirdly, how they maintain and renew their community in the face of the highly individualised mobility of the actors. Most of the ethnography is conducted in Barcelona, but Vogel also makes a series of short trips to different European cities in which the transformistas have established social networks and connections which facilitate their engagement in sex work, and to their home country Venezuela to which they return either for visits or due to deportation. In Barcelona, Vogel lives in Hotel Glamour, an apartment in which the experienced transformista and sex worker Cyntia provides food and residence to others who have recently arrived from Venezuela and to transnationally mobile transformistas who are spending some time in Barcelona. Vogel’s role in Hotel Glamour includes helping Cyntia with the essential everyday tasks of shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as watching Sociologus 64 (2014) 1
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telenovelas together with the present residents and engaging in kitchen chat and gossip. Crucial to the transformistas’ self-identification is not the adoption of a female gender identity (as in the case of transsexuals), but their sexual orientation to men and their sexual practice with men (279). Vogel explains that the Venezuelan transformistas she talked to identify as homosexuals, and that their selfconception is based on sexual interaction with men who identify as heterosexual. Their self-identification thus relies on exogamy, which represents a significant difference from Euro-American concepts of homosexuality. In this understanding the heterosexual man contributes to reifying the transformistas’ femininity through being sexually attracted to them. Vogel’s ethnography highlights the interplay between agency and mechanisms of social exclusion that affect Venezuelan transformistas in Europe. On one hand, Europe provides them with an opportunity for the realisation of a hedonistic lifestyle, the perfection of feminine beauty and a space for adventure and personal fulfilment (280). On the other hand, the transformistas are affected by the immigration laws of Schengen Europe which illegalise them and lead to their social exclusion (280). As residents in different European cities, they form part of a transnational community of practice that reacts to these structural restrictions and tries to develop strategies to counteract them. Vogel produces a complex account of both the lived realities of the transformistas in Europe and of their lives back in Venezuela. Her research complements an existing body of literature on transnationalism and migrant prostitution which is riven by an analytical dichotomy between agency and structural forces (209). Her contribution expands the debate on the voluntariness of mobility. Vogel’s interpretation counters the persistent conception that transformistas only leave their home country because of repressive families and economic hardship. Instead, the transformistas’ narratives highlight that a desire for self-transformation and self-invention, as well as a desire to travel and see the world, form an important part of their decision to migrate. Thus, Vogel contends that approaches centred only on victimhood and survival do not accurately capture the breadth of motives for transformistas’ mobility (129). Distancing herself from the particular strand of migration studies literature that focuses on motivations for the movement of people as primarily located in repressive family relations, religion, the lack of labour opportunities or poverty, Vogel highlights individuals’ agency and their desire to travel, make new experiences and discover opportunities for themselves elsewhere. Vogel portrays the transformistas as “transnational entrepreneurs” who in pursuit of money and markets in which their bodies are considered desirable, cross state borders physically and establish work connections and social networks as they go (215). Following market rules, they have learnt to exploit the demand for novelty in each European city they visit, marketing themselves on the basis of their difference. Frequent movement within Europe allows the transformistas to escape from everyday routines and localised social relations, which enables them to continuously reinvent themselves (216). By focusing on how mobility can result in economic and personal advancement at home (152), and how migration can Sociologus 64 (2014) 1
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be emancipatory for young proletarians who become cosmopolitan subjects, Vogel follows the paradigms of transnationalism research, which focuses on networks, multiple identifications , transnational communities and decentred attachments , as well as fathoms the paradoxically empowering qualities that being in diaspora can offer. Yet, she avoids the pitfalls of some transnationalism research which uncritically celebrates the temporariness and volatility of the lives of transnational migrants. She clarifies that the relatively privileged mobility of Venezuelan transformistas cannot obscure that many are mobile because they cannot be at home anywhere (230). Furthermore, Vogel emphasises that that migrant sex work is constrained by local and national laws and policies to combat prostitution and mobility. The transformistas in Europe must continuously adapt to changing national and local restrictions and political strategies and accordingly change their location frequently, or face deportation (230). Vogel utilises the concept of liminality to understand the life histories of transformistas who frequently travel across international borders and transgress societal norms with regard to gender and intimacy. For Vogel, their position at the margin of society due to gender transgression and the practice of stigmatised work does also provide opportunities for freedom and autonomy (289). According to Vogel, their liminal position offers transformistas a sheltered space, in which emotional exchanges and transformative experiences can occur (289). Vogel’s multi-sited ethnography shows that the transformista community in Barcelona and other European cities provides a secure and safe space for the liminal process of self-transformation. The transformistas resident in Hotel Glamour form part of a community of practice; with other Latin American transforminstas in Europe they share a history of learning, experiences of reconfiguration of their own identities, physical pain, aesthetic surgery, of being desired, being marginalised, and being stigmatised as sex workers (269). They also share spatial and socio-economical mobility and the experience of performing and constructing a feminine identity through the acquisition of luxury goods, which allows them to perform an affluent, cosmopolitan and glamorous femininity. Vogel portrays the transformista community as a safe spatial and social context in which the “embodied striving for identity transformation and self-invention” is possible (271). However, she is careful not to romanticise this community of practice and their experiences either. She highlights that its internal structure is a hierarchical one, and secondly, that bodily transformation and a transformista lifestyle implies multiple liminality outside of the community of practice. Vogel’s ethnography allows us to gain insights into the complexity of the transformista community in Barcelona. While friendship and mutual emotional support are prevalent, the community is also characterised by a rigid hierarchical order along the principles of nationality and ancienneté (281). Their incomes from prostitution allow them the fun of travel, a hedonistic lifestyle, the realisation of a dream of advancement and the physical transformation of their bodies through access to cosmetic and medical technologies in Europe. Yet the study reveals that while they can be economically well-off, transformistas are subjected to social exclusion. According to Vogel, they rarely experience more than an Sociologus 64 (2014) 1
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imagined inclusion into the social groups whose consumption culture they share and whose lifestyle they identify with (287). In the minds of many Europeans, transformistas continue to be associated with street life, prostitution, criminality and poverty. The concept of liminality is productive in the context of migrant transformistas in Europe precisely because its focus on in-between spaces, process and change allows us to understand the ambivalent consequences of transnational migration, which can produce both personal advancement and vulnerability (291). National immigration and sex work policies limit the agency of transformistas and push them into marginal spaces in which they become vulnerable and socially invisible (291). Vogel’s analysis provides an excellent example of the interplay of individual agency and structural constraints, and of the way policies force individuals into liminal positions from where access to rights and social inclusion is extremely limited. Despite their multiple exclusions, however, the transformistas’ narratives tend to focus on the freedom and possibilities inherent in their liminality (202), and Vogel does justice to the complexity of their own perspectives on their lived experiences. This book is of particular value to scholars who study queer migration from the global south, who have an interest in exploring how migrants use their journeys to discover personal freedom, encounter emotional security, experiment sexually and reinvent themselves. The research for this book was conducted between 2005 and 2007. Vogel’s book makes curious about how these migrant experiences have changed since the financial crises began to shake Europe in 2008. It remains for future research to examine whether travel to Europe has since lost its emancipatory potential for working-class queers from the global south, with economic resources having dried up in southern Europe in particular. If Europe ceases to be signifier of modernity, progress and affluence, which other places are now attracting the attention of young transformistas with a desire for economic advancement, self-invention and glamour? Susanne Hofmann, São Paulo
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