Ancestral transplantation as a matter of gender: Narrating us, Wigudun

Abstract

In this short essay, we want to revive some reflections reported to us by Yineth Muñoz, a person of Guna origin, an Indigenous people from Panama, to think with her what gives form to gender. We intend to critically imagine (Hartman, 2019) what happens to this concept – a technology, a somato-political fiction, and a material cutout – once the elaborations, concerns, and agency recalled and presented by Yineth's narratives traverse it. In this sense, the effort is not to explain Guna's gender, meaning to understand it as an object of ethnological elaboration. We would like to consider what comprises gender when it comes to metaphorizing – as an equivocal concept – the problems and reflections posed by Yineth. We will begin by going back to Yineth's considerations, which implicate gender in a series of other procedures and recursiveness that, we think, assist in raising questions to complicate some of the metaphors underlying mainstream descriptions concerned with matters of gender. Therefore, ours is an exercise concerned with a transfeminist engagement with the problem: to implicate oneself in it, not to explain it.