Trans* Atlantic Religion

Spirit Possession and Gender Ideology in Cuban Santerı́a

A L E JA N D R O S T E P H A NO E S C A L A N T E

Abstract This article is about spirit possession in Cuban Santerı́a and how the relationship between
an orisha and their devotee reveals an unstable gender identity that avails itself to trans* studies.
Taking an ethnographic scene from the work of Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, wherein a female devotee
named Belkis is possessed by her male orisha Changó, this article argues that Santerı́a offers a
genderqueer way of understanding the relationship between gods and humans. It makes use of Jack
Halberstam’s differentiation between “trans*” and “trans,” in which the former allows for myriad
gender identities and contradictions that the stability of “trans” might otherwise seek to concretize.
The modification of “transatlantic” to “trans* Atlantic” allows for a consideration of the fluidity of
genders and sexuality that is often missed in black Atlantic studies and highlights the important role
of religion in gender and black Atlantic studies.
Keywords trans*, Santerı́a, assemblage, spirit possession

Black, Atlantic, Religion

T he waters of that Atlantic Ocean are in constant flux. This continuous motion
means one particle of water could ostensibly travel hundreds of miles over
a series of centuries and never lose its ties to the Atlantic Ocean. No matter how
far these waters might travel or change, the body of water that connects Africa,
Antarctica, North America, South America, and Europe remains “the Atlantic
Ocean.” Such stability in naming, coupled with an unstable nature, points to a
helpful way to understand the complex gender performance that takes place when
a devotee is possessed in Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion that traces its lineage
back to West Africa.
The process of spirit possession is often described in equestrian terms like
horse and mount with the gods, who are called orishas, being the mounts and the
devotees being the horses. They work together, like physical horse and rider, to
perform certain tasks.1 As Elizabeth Pérez (2016: 59) notes, “the orisha simulta-
neously enters the everyday world while the animating force and personality of

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DOI 10.1215/23289252-7549484 ª 2019 Duke University Press

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 ESCALANTE * Spirit Possession in Cuban Santerı́a 387

the initiate leaves it.” Important to note here is the physical presence of the horse
remains while the animating force behind that is supplanted by the orisha. Thus
the orishas, who are godlike spirits of the Yorùbá (an ethnic group who straddled
modern-day Benin and Nigeria), make their presence known in the bodies of
another through particular dances, sounds, and gestures that indicate who is
present (268). For example, Changó, the orisha under consideration in this essay,
who is considered to be a “womanizer and drinker,” manifests himself through
“accentuated hip movements” meant to highlight his eroticism and virility (Fer-
nández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 51, 82). It is this performance of gender
that is the focus of this essay. Specifically, this essay is interested in how orishas
make themselves present in bodies that do not correspond with their own gender
ideology. That is to say, when a female devotee is possessed and a male orisha
possesses her, the body they now share reveals a trans* gender performance that is
neither solely the orisha nor the devotee.
Trans* in this case refers to a gender that is not yet decided, not stable, in
flux. The asterisk leaves open the possibility of what could be. Like the movement
of water from one end of the Atlantic to the other, the instability of gender in
spirit possession never negates the presence of either orisha or devotee, nor of
either’s gender. The application of trans* here is intended to suggest that the
relationship built between gods and their devotees in spirit possession disrupts
both gender and religion and thus creates “trans* Atlantic religion.” The inter-
vention that this essay makes, then, is in the combination of trans* studies and
religious studies. Marking a departure from studies of gender and sexuality in
Afro-Caribbean religions, this essay takes up the implicit, but rarely explored,
fluid nature of gender in these traditions. Applying Jack Halberstam’s theoriza-
tion of trans* to an ethnographic vignette of Santería in Cuba, this essay argues
that spirit possession reveals subterraneous genderqueer modes of being, which
should be understood as “any gender (or lack of gender) that would not be ade-
quately represented by an either/or choice between ‘man’ or ‘woman’” (Titman
2014).

The Black Atlantic, Santerı́a, and Gender Ideology

Scholar of African American religions Albert J. Raboteau (1978: 16) writes: “The
gods of Africa were carried in the memories of enslaved Africans across the
Atlantic. African liturgical seasons, prescribed rituals, traditional myths, and
languages of worship were attenuated, replaced, and altered, or lost.” Without a
doubt, the perverted “baptism” of enslaved Africans in the waters of the Atlantic
Ocean via the Middle Passage changed everything. Separated from their land,
families, languages, and their gods, those bought and sold as commodities found
themselves in the new strange land of the Americas. This separation, though, did

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not mark an extinction of African peoples. Instead, in the wake of the violence of
slavery, these diasporic people reinvented themselves despite the violence done to
them. As German anthropologist Stephan Palmié (2008: 32) argues, “‘Africas’
have been proliferating in the New World ever since the first slaves stepped
ashore on the western littoral of the Atlantic.” On their arrival, enslaved Africans
began proliferating “Africas” in the Americas simply by way of existing but also
by the way they began piecing together what it meant to be in a new land of
new languages and considered someone else’s property. From these experiences
we have the cosmologies and genealogies that make up Santería, Palo, Vodou,
Candomblé, and a host of other “black Atlantic religions.” Black Atlantic here
refers to the “transoceanic and political economy” that took shape as a result of
the enslavement of people from the continent of Africa (Matory 2005: 1). Palmié’s
expansive notion of Africa is helpful for pointing out the way that “Africanity”
does not refer to one thing. Anticipating the following section, we can say that
Africa is trans*, not one thing, fluid, and ever expanding.
However, to say that the enslaved carried their gods with them “in their
memories,” as Raboteau does, does not fully convey the way the gods were
transported to the Americas. To suggest that the gods arrived via memory is to
suggest that the gods themselves did not travel with them, that the gods traveled in
the minds of the enslaved, as part of their experiential index they could later refer
to. Against this memorializing of deities in the black Atlantic, I argue that the gods
were carried corporeally —in and as the bodies of the enslaved. When anthro-
pologist Joseph Murphy (1988: 143) asks a devotee of the orishas what an orisha is,
the devotee responds without hesitation, “I am.” At the heart of this “I am” is an
understanding that when you see the devotee you see the orisha. Instead of car-
rying the gods in their memories or some other nebulous place, the enslaved
Africans, I contend, carried their gods with them in their physical bodies to the
point that divine-human assemblage in the black Atlantic religions reveals a
gender spectrum between gods and devotees that is full of possibilities that go
beyond strict gender classification.
Along with Candomblé in Brazil and Vodou in Haiti, Santería is one of
the many Afro-Caribbean religions that formed as enslaved West Africans from
Yorubaland brought their theologies and cosmologies with them to the Americas
and subsequently assembled them together with indigenous and European the-
ologies and cosmologies. Arriving in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the enslaved brought
together “beliefs and practices associated with the worship and veneration of
African orishas” and combined these with “Catholic Christianity and native
traditions” (Murrell 2010: 96). Often characterized as a “syncretized” mixture
of Catholicism and African religion, Santería can better be described as the
assemblage of European, African, and indigenous religious knowledges and

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traditions. Though they adapted and modified, the enslaved retained their pan-
theon. Part and parcel to this pantheon is the understanding that there is a single
God, named Olodumare, who created the earth but does not manage it. Man-
agement of the earth is left to the orishas, who are like divine intermediaries.
Nathaniel Murrell (2010: 107) describes orishas as “multidimensional
mythological beings with human-like characteristics and personality. They rep-
resent forces of nature but function as sacred patrons or guardian angels of
devotees . . . as beings who participate in and govern the daily routines of their
devotees; they defend, deliver, console, and come to the aid of their followers the
same way relatives do.” He goes on to say that they are often described as deities
because they are revered and served directly through prayer and sacrifice, unlike
God (Olodumare), who would be considered more distant and unconcerned with
daily activities and does not receive prayer or sacrifice (107). Often the work of
orishas is accomplished through spirit possession, just as the work of the rider is
accomplished through the horse. When the spirit takes hold of the devotee’s body,
they act in unison, as one, as an assemblage—with each part as vital to the
integrity of the other.
In her book Electric Santería (2015), Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús tells the story
of Belkis, a santera (practitioner of Santería) and priestess of Changó, from
Havana, Cuba, and her experiences of being possessed. After her first encounters
with being mounted by Changó, her oricha (as it is spelled in this Cuban com-
munity), Belkis had to modify how she dressed because Changó, who is con-
sidered to be a very proud and macho spirit, would rip off any clothing that he
did not feel corresponded with his gender. Beliso-De Jesús writes, “Being a female
horse that is mounted by male spirits, she has to wear pants to ceremonies because
in the past her copresences had ripped off her skirt or dress because they disliked
feminine attire” (97). Indeed, the oricha, or “copresences” as Beliso-De Jesús calls
them, go to extreme lengths to perform their gender scripts in possession rituals.
She writes elsewhere: “Practitioners (horses) mounted by [spirits], whether male
or female, have been known to display grandiose forms of unruly masculinity.
I have seen them walk on glass, chew on lit candles, or stab themselves in the
chest with machetes without harming their horses’ bodies. Congo copresences
are known to demand liquor and tobacco, and rub up on female bodies as a sign
of their hypersexuality and virility” (142). Indeed, Changó makes his presence
known in the body of Belkis; he is not incorporating her such that she disappears.
They form an assemblage. Though the rider indicates to the horse what action to
take, it is the horse who takes them; they work in unison. We see that, in spirit
possession, Changó and Belkis share a body to the point, I argue, that they share a
gender—it is neither wholly one or the other, but both of theirs. As Beliso-De
Jesús notes, it is Belkis who dresses in a dress, but it is Changó who removes it.

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There is an identity struggle between Changó and Belkis that is both internal
and external.
The Belkis scene from above helps us situate gender expression in this
Afro-Cuban religion. It is this scene and this gender ideology that I want to put
into conversation with Halberstam’s concept of “trans*” (keeping in mind the
fluidity that this refers to) to develop a way of understanding black Atlantic
religions as trans* Atlantic religions. While there has been work considering the
gender of the orishas in isolation or sexuality of practitioners of Santería, little
work has been done on the gendered relationship between orishas and their
devotees, especially when these are seemingly in conflict. Studies that do address
transness (as distinct from my usage of trans*ness throughout this article) in
Santería fall into one of two categories: either they attempt to address the transness
of the orishas or they address the transness of the devotees. With regard to the
potential transness of the orichá themselves, Melissa Wilcox (2018: 84) tells the
story of Corrine, who identifies as a woman at home but outside the four walls of
her home identifies as a man.
According to Wilcox, Corrine found that “[her] orichá is trans; [Changó]
not only accepted her but sought her out as someone who identifies as female and
lives as a man” (85). While Wilcox does not go into detail as to how this is known
or demonstrated in her life, it is interesting to note that the transness of Corrine is
what made Changó seek her out in the first place. Wilcox’s emphasis is on the
transness of religion and the gender complexities of gods and deities. While her
wider argument lies outside the scope of this article, Wilcox’s point that religion
is already trans is a helpful way of understanding the transness of gods and
deities. To argue this point, Wilcox reflects on Corrine’s mentioning of the avatar-
like relationship that Changó and the Catholic St. Barbara have as evidence for
Changó’s transness. Historically in Santería, Changó, who in Yoruba society would
be associated with the color red and thunder, among other things, is “syncretized”
with St. Barbara, who in Catholic iconography is dressed in red and associated with
the “thundering cannons of the Spanish artillery cannons” (Fernández Olmos
and Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 43). Thus Catholic iconography will often be used in
Santería as a way of channeling the orichá. Here we can already begin to see
some of the implicit genderqueerness of Changó and, subsequently, of Santería:
Changó, the male orichá of male beauty and virility, a macho, drunken wom-
anizer, is personified by a female Spanish Catholic saint. Wilcox (2018: 85), noting
how this was not lost on Corrine, writes, “A person who lives a complexly gen-
dered life, she is the child of an orichá who does the same.”
The other category is practitioner-focused transness. Salvador Vidal-
Ortiz’s (2005) sociological analysis of this can be found in his chapter entitled
“Sexuality and Gender in Santería” wherein he analyzes the gender and sexual

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identities of santeros, with overall attention to the sexuality of the santero. His goal
is straightforward: “There has been little published scholarship on the partici-
pation, reception, and identification of LGBTs in Santería” and that his chapter
seeks to “illustrate how ‘gay’ identities are understood in Santería and, in turn,
how individuals often labeled as ‘gay’ are interpreted” (117). Gay here becomes a
stand-in for LGBT and thus a conflation between gender and sexuality, which is
not to say they are not related, only that they are not the same thing. Moreover, as
is suggested by his usage of gay and homosexual throughout, his chapter is focused
on the participation of same-sex desiring men with only passing analysis of les-
bian women or transgender people. His discussion of transness is mentioned in
the latter part of this chapter but overshadowed by how it can be read as conflated
with drag performance by the people he worked with. His most sustained treat-
ment of transgender santeros occurs when he relays the beliefs of one practitioner.
A participant in his study named Amaury told Vidal-Ortiz that the “Orishas ‘did
not like transgenderism,’” and he went on to quote a friend of his saying that
“[it’s] okay if you are gay, but if you are gay you are a man, you should be a man”
(131). That different religious communities will have very different understand-
ings of the same question should come as no surprise. However, what can be
gleaned from Vidal-Ortiz’s study is that the respondents to his study felt that
orishas did not approve of trans*, or even trans, santeros.
Vidal-Ortiz and Wilcox are both helpful in their own ways for under-
standing the relationship between gender and sexuality in Santería; however, what
trans* Atlantic religion attempts to do is understand the embodied trans*ness
of orishas and devotees simultaneously as the presence necessitates the other, just
as Murphy’s interviewee indicated earlier. Pulling together the important work
that Wilcox and Vidal-Ortiz have done, then, trans* Atlantic religion builds a
more robust framework for understanding the immateriality, mobility, and flu-
idity of these black Atlantic religions.2
Belkis, the santera from earlier, once mounted by her oricha, begins to
perform a different gender script; her movements are no longer her own but the
combinative manifestation of her and Changó. It is interesting to note, though,
that the oricha has no problem in mounting a woman. That is to say, his gender
script, which is just as socially constructed as Belkis’s, does not prohibit him from
riding a woman (Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 82). Changó is not
concerned by the “material reality” of Belkis’s body, her genitals, or breasts. The
walking on glass, the drinking of liquor, and smoking of cigar all display a form of
perceived masculinity that overshadows what is materially present. They share a
subjectivity with the gods such that the spectrum of their selfhood confounds
Western epistemologies of the self. Western epistemology would suggest an
autonomous self, an individual. However, in spirit possession, the self is not a

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singular subjectivity but rather a set of mutually influencing subjectivities. They,

Belkis and Changó, exist simultaneously alongside each other, what Beliso-De
Jesús calls “copresences,” both situated simultaneously. Thus, what is revealed is
the array of subjectivity in spirit possession. One is not simply a singular self;
the possessed person exists in multiplicity, as an assemblage. The multiplicity,
though, should not be understood as binary; that is, there is a definite cutoff
that marks the oricha and the devotee. Instead, they exist on a spectrum, like the
fluidity of the Atlantic that brings the coasts together, and thus it is impossible
to demarcate at which point one begins and one ends in possession. In using the
language of “copresences,” Beliso-De Jesús (2015: 8) is pointing us to her reading
of assemblage in Jasbir K. Puar and the way that her work helps us attend to the
“distinction, fluidity, intensity, dispersal, and temporal-spatial impermanence of
categorizations that are mobilized in surprising and often conflicting ways” in
Afro-Caribbean religion. In Puar (2007: 211), we see that an assemblage is “a series
of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks, [which] draws together
enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, [and] organic and nonorganic
forces.” In the divine-human assemblage that I am calling attention to here, there
is no beginning of the divine in so much as the divine can be traced, drawn out, or
specifically differentiated from the mount. Puar goes on to argue that what are
considered disparate subjectivities are not separable —they are interwoven and
indeed form something that is neither subject nor object (211–12).
In thinking about assemblage as Beliso-De Jesús has deployed it here, we
should pause to consider the implications of thinking about gender as it relates to
Belkis-Changó. Their interwovenness suggests a neither/nor subjectivity, one that
is not simply “Belkis and Changó” (“both/and”). They are the resulting assem-
blage of the two; this assemblage, however, is not like water in oil, where one
would be able to see where the other ends and one begins. If we were to look in a
strictly material sense at Belkis-Changó, we would only be met by the Cuban
woman Beliso-De Jesús introduces us to. However, Changó and his extreme
attempts to assert his presence necessitates that we do not only consider what is
“materially” present (read: vagina, breasts, chromosomal composition). Belkis-
Changó’s gender is one that is beyond what can be contained materially and
therefore refuses rigid classification; they are the “impossible reality,” to use
Halberstam’s (2018: 21) phrasing, of a human-divine, male-female composition
that is not stable—just like the waters of the Atlantic. Instead, both of these are
coconstitutional in the manifestation of the other. Though they each exist only in
certain modalities of expression of intensities, physicality, for instance, they
cannot be separated completely; they can only be traced or expressed or con-
sidered, but not without the other modality of expression.

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From “Transatlantic” to “Trans* Atlantic”

Here I combine and build off the work of black trans* studies and black Atlantic
religious studies proposing “trans* Atlantic religion” as a theoretical framework
for thinking about the intersecting constellations of race, gender, and religion
in the Atlantic world, especially as it is affected by the history of slavery. While
“transatlantic” helps situate a kind of crossing that illuminates movement, it does
not indicate the same kind of fluidity of movement and instability that “trans*
Atlantic” suggests.
The asterisk (*) in trans* has been around for quite some time now. Sevan
Bussell (2012) says that as early as 2010 internet transgender communities were
using trans*, a term that “came from internet search structure. When you add an
asterisk to the end of a search term, you’re telling your computer to search for
whatever you typed, plus any characters after.”3 As Bussell notes, the asterisk
serves as a kind of catch-all intended not to limit what might be included in the
results of a search. Thus, Bussell and others differentiate between trans and trans*,
with the former indicating a kind of teleological destination. Instead, trans* refers
to a more fluid understanding of gender as flexible and without terminus.
According to Avery Tompkins (2014: 27), part of what was happening
during the 1990s was that transgender had come to be the catch-all term for gender
variance. But many found this term unyielding in that it reinforced certain aspects
of gender binaries that one’s particular gender could not conform to. Oftentimes
this had to do with physically conforming to a gender identity by going through
top surgery, for example. Tompkins continues, “Trans* is thus meant to include
not only identities such as transgender, transsexual, trans man, and trans woman
that are prefixed by trans- but also identities such as genderqueer, neutrios,
intersex, agender, two-spirit, cross-dresser, and genderfluid” (27). The desire to
move beyond binary notions of gender and to include gender variation on a wider
scale drives the motivation to include the asterisk. Thus in the shift away from
“transatlantic” to “trans* Atlantic,” the focus is not only on the physical movement
that happens across the waters but also on the nonmaterial movement of spirits
and flesh, of gods and humans, of the orishas and their devotees. To this Halber-
stam (2018: 4) adds the following regarding trans* over trans in his book Trans*:

I have selected the term “trans*” for this book precisely to open up the term to
unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of
gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by
refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, or a specific
shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off
the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the
meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorization.

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Moreover, he continues to question the nature of classification altogether as a

colonial project. The inclusion of the asterisk looks backward at the inherited
violence gender classification has done and destabilizes the rigidity of early
anthropology and Christian missionary work. He notes that gender categoriza-
tion has always come at the expense of people that lie outside classificatory sys-
tems, like those who are possessed by orishas and have a gender that exceeds
medical classification. Pointing to the 1890s, he argues that “our current invest-
ments in naming of all specificities of bodily form, gender permutations, and
desire emerge from this period” wherein the European sciences were concerned
with drawing distinctions in “botany, early anthropology, and sexology” (6–7).
These colonial markers have left us with insufficient language to describe gender
variance and embodiment such that the asterisk can actually prove to destabilize
the supposedly stable state of things. Thus, shaking off the medical and colonial
history of gender in a way that goes beyond opening up possibilities of
embodiment, the term “trans* also signals the insufficiency of [colonial] classi-
ficatory systems” (50).
His emphasis on coloniality here is an important reminder of the history
that brought Africans to the shores of the Americas. The violent movement of
enslaved Africans, and their subsequent classification as “slaves,” as “nonbeings,”
should not be regarded as completely distinct from their simultaneous gender
classifications or lack thereof. As C. Riley Snorton (2017) has shown in Black on
Both Sides, the very notion of possessing a proper gender was not available to
enslaved women. Thus white women were considered fully human and the
enslaved were considered flesh, a simulacrum of women (5). Not possessing a rec-
ognizable gender, Snorton argues that blackness, as a racial category, and trans-
ness, as a gender category, might mean that feeling black in the Americas might be
akin to feeling trans (8). Snorton’s provocative suggestion helps us move beyond
some of the already existing theorizations in black gender studies to consider the
way black people and black religion have never been adequately human or reli-
gious. Indeed, trans*, as I am using it in this essay, points to the fugitive ways that
black people have moved throughout society in an attempt to survive.
Christina Sharpe (2016) understands this well. In her book In the Wake, she
uses the wake, the unstable water that is left behind as an object moves through it,
to describe black life. Building off the work of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Sharpe
writes, “We might add that the Black and queer Atlantic have always been the
Trans*Atlantic” (30). Tinsley (2008), for her part, had argued that in the hold of
the slave ship, queer relationships formed between sex-segregated people in the
Middle Passage. Missing from the work of black Atlantic studies, she argues, is
attention to bodies, to their genders, to their sexual proclivities, and to the
restrictions of these desires. For her, it is impossible to talk about the waters of the

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Atlantic without talking about the inherent queerness the waters reveal via the
slave ship. Ultimately, she argues, “the black Atlantic has always been the queer
Atlantic” (191). Sharpe’s augmentation of Tinsley, I argue, helps to trans* the
Atlantic. Instead of focusing on the external relations that manifest on slave ships,
Sharpe focuses on the individual and on their complex gender expression in the
face of what I, echoing Snorton, would call “nonbeing.”
Sharpe (2016: 30), like Tompkins earlier, calls the asterisk a “wildcard” that
exposes the limits of language when used to describe bodies, especially bodies at
the limit of social understanding such as black, genderqueer, and trans* bodies.
This wildcard of possibilities is vital to our understanding the uncertain, unstable
gender that is presented in assemblage of Changó-Belkis and ultimately in black
Atlantic religions, what I am calling “trans* Atlantic religions.” They are not sim-
ply a mixture of two selves; instead they are the combined and undefined gender
that trans* refers to and, moreover, the impossible reality of existence beyond
enslavement.4 Sharpe’s use of Trans*Atlantic is a compelling concept for what it
can bring to the study of religious communities in the black Atlantic as they work
to navigate and negotiate gender identity in the face of colonial classification.
Thus I would modify Sharpe’s theorization of the “Trans*Atlantic.”
My modification of Sharpe’s Trans*Atlantic to trans* Atlantic does two
things. First, to coincide with Halberstam’s usage of trans* (with a space follow-
ing, disconnected from Atlantic) so that trans* can do the work of allowing pos-
sibilities without being linked to the Atlantic. Definitionally, I think Halberstam
and Sharpe coincide quite nicely; the variation in spelling and my decision to keep
one over the other should not suggest otherwise. Instead, my usage of trans*
Atlantic over Trans*Atlantic signals a move away from the potential misreading
of trans* as a prefix that necessitates something that follows, some kind of sta-
bility. Instead trans* Atlantic allows the wildcard asterisk to do its work of open-
endedness. Moreover, its detachment from the Atlantic points back to the loos-
ening of foundations and origins as a result of enslavement. In the wake of
enslavement, as Raboteau earlier has suggested, there is a loss of self that cannot be
regained —even by “returning” to the point of origin. As Saidiya Hartman shows
in her book Lose Your Mother (2007), a return to Africa does not mean a return
to origins. Instead, in her experience of visiting Africa, she felt a kind of loss.
Stepping out from the airport in Ghana, she is greeted with the words “Obruni,”
stranger. In what should have felt like a homecoming, Hartman is confronted
with the reality that enslavement means one is separated form their own history.
In separating trans* from Atlantic I am attempting to show linguistically what
occurred in the wake of enslavement: loss of identity, origin. In its place, then, the
asterisk allows for variation of meaning, for contradiction, for messiness.

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The second modification I make is from Trans* to trans*, which is meant

to indicate a movement away from a proper noun, away from stability of per-
sonhood, from knowability to movement and flight. As with the above aug-
mentation of Sharpe’s language, this is meant to highlight the multiplicity
inherent. As Snorton (2017: 2) says in Black on Both Sides, it is about “movement
with no clear origin and no point of arrival.” In keeping with the understanding
that trans* refers to a kind of instability and movement, Trans* would seem to
indicate a kind of proper place of study in gender studies. That is to say, trans* is
meant to indicate that what is under consideration is simultaneously under
construction, subject to change, unstable.
By queering the black Atlantic, Sharpe points our attention to the violent
gendering and gender classification that occurred during the Middle Passage. This
violence, though, did not signal a lack of gender for the enslaved Africans but the
way in which their gender presentation or embodiment was deemed illegible and
inauthentic. This is why Halberstam’s distinction between trans and trans* is so
important. I do not argue that orishas and their devotees identify as trans or even
are trans, some kind of stable or recognizable singularity; rather, the divine-
human assemblage in Santería reveals a gender that is more than what is mate-
rially present. Changó’s gender and his performance of his gender in the devotee
are just as real as the devotee’s gender and her performance of her gender, and as
an assemblage they cannot be seen without the other. Without the devotee, for
example, Changó cannot make himself known.
Recall the question Joseph Murphy (1988: 143) asked a santera: “What is an
Orisha?” The santera responded immediately: “I am.” The santera’s response
reveals that when you see a devotee, you simultaneously see the orisha. Impor-
tantly, this illustrates the way santeras believe themselves to be not only carriers of
the divine but also that which makes the divine present. Thus, in the case of
Belkis-Changó, seeing one is seeing the other; seeing Changó remove skirts and
blouses that he feels do not reflect him and the subsequent actions Belkis takes to
enact his gender —wearing trousers, shirts that are deemed masculine —the deity
affects the gender ideology of the devotee, and the gender identity of the devotee
affects the deity. What is trans*, then, is not that Belkis’s gender is somehow in
contestation with the one assigned to her at birth. Indeed, according to Beliso-De
Jesús’s account, we know very little about how Belkis’s various identities. All we
know from her account is that Belkis is a priestess of Changó who, after being
mounted by Changó, has modified how she dresses. Instead, what is trans* is the
way that the divine-human assemblage reveals a gender ideology that is unstable.
Unstable in as much as it cannot be pinned down to one or the other. The divine-
human assemblage confounds stability of rigid gender ideologies that seek to
maintain limits and contain excesses, whether they are of race or gender.

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 ESCALANTE * Spirit Possession in Cuban Santerı́a 397

Conclusion
This essay began by pointing to the movement of oceanic waters as a helpful
allegory for understanding trans* identity. The water that makes up the Atlantic
Ocean is both known and unstable, named and constantly shifting. Similarly,
trans* refers to a movement, a shift, and a flight; it is a signifier whose signification
is not yet determined. Applying this to black Atlantic religions, I have sought to
uncover the ways that gender ideology is made flexible and unstable in moments
of spirit possession in Cuban Santería. As the orisha mounts and rides the dev-
otee, they share a body that is neither fully the orisha’s nor the devotee’s—they
become an assemblage. By assemblage, I refer to a coconstitutional relationship
between interdependent components. In this particular case, the orisha requires
the mount, and the mount requires the orisha. Given that they are an assemblage
of mutually required parts, the gender they possess is more than what is materially
present. Indeed, masculinist orishas like Changó are not overly concerned with
finding the most masculine-presenting men; Changó will choose whichever mount
he wants, regardless of gender identity.
The waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the various land masses that it
connects form an assemblage. As the tide moves in against the shore, the land can
seemingly do nothing but be engulfed by water. Bringing together disparate lands
and animals, islands and continents, peoples and languages, it is not simply a
medium or channel through which connection occurs but is the perpetual
enactment of fluidity and movement. However, the very shape of the land, the
formation of the sand, the reefs just offshore, and the human-made piers all affect
how the water comes to shore. At the same time, the water moves against the rocks
on the shore, slowly breaking them down and smoothing them. The tide also
moves the sand, built structures, and naturally occurring reefs, and so on. The
land and sea coexist, each shaping the other. So too it is with gods and their
devotees. Water is not merely a metaphor for the assemblage I have traced here; it
is literally that which carried the bodies of enslaved Africans; that which contains
the bodies of those same enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard to reduce
weight, to get rid of the dead, or simply out of pure animus. The water that stirs
now in the ocean contains that violent history, not as something in the past but as
something not yet passed and that continues to shape history (Sharpe 2016). So
too with the devotees in Santería who are not merely collections of memories but
the complex physical and gendered embodiment of the orishas.

Alejandro Stephano Escalante is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill where he is currently researching the relationship between gender, sexuality, and religion
in Puerto Rico’s Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol.

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 398 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

Notes
1. There are myriad Afro-Caribbean orthographies and none of them more “accurate” than
any other. Each differentiation in spelling and diacritics all suggest an attempt to hold on
to particular traditions. Thus, Santería is also called “Lucumí” (with a c) or “Lukumí”
(with a k) and both with or without diacritics. Still others call it “regla de ocha.” Likewise,
the spirits of this religion are variously called “Orisha,” “oricha,” or “santos.” Lastly, the
ethnic group from which these religious practices originated is spelled both “Yorùbá”
(with diacritical marks) and “Yoruba” (without). In this article, I will follow the spelling
convention of the author being quoted or under discussion, as their spelling reflects the
communities they worked with when conducting their research. My goal is both an
attempt to be true to their work but also to show the inherent instability, fluidity, and,
therefore, “trans*ness” of Afro-Caribbean religions—even in their inherited names and
spelling.
2. That different theologies exist between different communities should come as no sur-
prise. However, it is interesting to note the varying degrees to which practitioners of
Santería will claim aspects of trans*ness. In Vidal-Ortiz’s chapter, practitioners noted
how the Orishas were strictly against trans* people. However, in Wilcox’s work, the
orichá specifically sought trans* practitioners because of how that aligned with the
deities’ own trans*ness.
3. This history and definition of the asterisk (*) appeared in the inaugural issue of TSQ,
which was intended as an indexical volume of key terms. Interestingly, there is no entry
for religion, faith, or spirituality. There is, however, an entry for Islam and Islamophobia.
The lack of attention to the role of religion in gender studies might suggest that religious
people do not experience the same critical reflections on gender identity and perfor-
mance that nonreligious people might. However, this assumption belies the fact that
entries (such as the one on Islam and Islamophobia) reflect the often complicated rela-
tionship between gender and religion. It is too much to speculate here why this entry is
missing, but only to note the oversight and remind the reader that transgender and trans*
people of faith exist in many religious communities and almost certainly all religious
communities.
4. It is important to keep in mind that part and parcel of the program of enslavement was
the Christianization of indigenous and African populations. The survival of the Yoruba
theologies in the Americas points again to the wake that Sharpe theorizes. Santería (along
with Vodou and Candomblé among others), then, is the religion formed in the wake,
formed in survival and for survival.

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