Woman-Not-Woman

Abstract During the yearly patronal festival las fiestas en honor a Santiago Apóstol ( las fiestas ), men from Loíza, Puerto Rico, transform themselves to become madwomen whose ribald and bawdy behaviour transgresses personal and religious boundaries of decency. In Christian colonial contexts, ‘decency’ is a racialised way of prescribing gender and sexual norms that posit the white Christian, heterosexual, male as ideal personhood. Known as la loca , this festal personage disrupts this idealised notion of personhood through gender transformations and engagement with repressed human and social behaviour. Historically understood figuratively and affirmatively, this article draws from ethnographic fieldwork with one loca , Carlito, and the work of philosopher and sociologist of religion Georges Bataille to examine the literal and negative aspects of this festival character. I argue that her vulgarity and gender-bending performances are a manifestation of the negative sacred, which has the potential to destabilise Christian colonial notions of personhood.