More like a woman: Activa/Pasiva subjectivities in Cuba

Abstract

This article explores the gender and sexuality of activa/pasiva women in Cuba. The construction of activa and pasiva is very similar to other masculine/feminine female relationships around the world, often referred to in English as ‘butch’ and ‘femme’. In 2017, I interviewed 33 self-identified lesbian and bisexual women and 23 policymakers, officials, cultural contributors, and activists, in the cities of Havana, Santa Clara, and Matanzas. The women I met enjoyed and found power in their masculine/feminine partnerships. However, in contrast to a view of Cuba as increasingly tolerant and progressive towards LGBT people, my case study analyses how other lesbian and bisexual women vilify activas and pasivas in order to elevate themselves through distance, as a route to social inclusion. It demonstrates how political and social tolerance for lesbian and bisexual women is a gendered discourse that relies on their correct performance of white, middle-class, feminine gender normativity. I explore how feminine lesbian presentation is attached in Cuba to ideas of whiteness, modernity, education, and progressiveness, while masculine presentation is denigrated as old-fashioned, patriarchal, and replicating heterosexist norms. I analyse this discourse, showing it to be embedded in racist and traditional ideas of femininity which themselves uphold the gender binary. In particular, I argue that masculine women are made into abject others, using homonormativity theory and the black politics of respectability to show how gender normativity underpins social and political tolerance for lesbian and bisexual women.

Introduction

Across much of Latin America, studies on men who have sex with men have shown that gender performance and role-taking indicates sexual orientation, rather than internal desire for other men. Lumsden succinctly writes, ‘In Cuba, sexual orientation is inferred from gender identity rather than vice versa’ (Lumsden, 1996: 132). Constructing men as either macho ‘real men’ who penetrate (activo) or feminised queer men who are penetrated (pasivo) means that masculine or feminine gender performance is how people recognise sexual orientation. This is different from the common Global North understanding that partner choice indicates sexual orientation (Hirsch et al., 2012). The close tie between sexuality and gender expression means that men’s homosexuality in Latin America is sometimes conflated with effeminacy and conceptualised as a problem because of its public gender transgression of masculine norms, more than the private sexual acts in and of themselves (King, 2014: 69). While activo/pasivo role-taking is well documented among men, as yet there is little literature theorising the gendered aspects of sexuality for lesbian and bisexual women in Cuba (or Latin America), which I address in this article through the case study of activa/pasiva women. I interviewed a number of women who define themselves as activa and pasiva. Activas are masculine-presenting women who are dominant in their relationships with pasivas, who are often described as ‘normal women’. Activa and pasiva constructions are very similar to masculine/feminine female relationships around the world, often referred to in English as ‘butch’ and ‘femme’. While this is a commonly known relationship structure among Cubans, the academic literature has rarely touched on this Latinx gendered sexuality as a serious subject for study, and never in Cuba.

Beyond documenting the existence of activa/pasiva women, this case study shows how these gendered sexual subjectivities are used to create a dividing line of respectability, which other lesbian and bisexual women sometimes use to elevate themselves into wider social acceptance. Through distancing themselves from activa/pasiva constructions, other women are able to increase their own respectability and inclusion. As such, I am more concerned with what activa/pasiva subjectivities do, than what they are. The experiences recounted here show that social inclusion, homonormativity, and political tolerance or acceptance, are gendered discourses that require (raced, classed) gender normativity of lesbian and bisexual women.

I draw on homonormativity theory to examine the treatment of lesbian and bisexual women in Cuba. Homonormativity describes the desire of LGBT people to achieve normativity, or be considered ‘normal’, through carefully performing dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions instead of challenging them (Duggan, 2004: 50). Lisa Duggan describes the growing depoliticisation of gay culture in the USA, in favour of domesticity and economic consumption. She argues that the gay movement was redefined as a fight not for liberation, but equality, mainstreaming gay people into a vision of centrist, uncontroversial, ordinary life (Duggan, 2002). Homonormativity theory also analyses a central power dynamic among LGBT people where some people are empowered by their assimilation to socially approved structures, while others are further marginalised (Podmore, 2013: 264). In liberal democracies, the characteristics of ‘empowered’ subjects might include monogamous couples, married, middle-class, white, property owners, community contributors, and ‘good citizens’, as these are the attributes desired under neoliberalism. Those outside the norm are constructed as ‘abject others’, an oppositional category that can be excluded from the mainstream in order to highlight and enable the inclusion of the privileged few. I use this analytic to examine how an axis of femininity, underpinned by race and class, operates in Cuba to position some Cuban lesbian and bisexual women as respectably normal in comparison to other LGBT people.

I also make use of the ‘black politics of respectability’ discourse, which shows that respectability is often entangled with whiteness. Queer of colour scholarship has shown that whiteness and being middle-class are often considered the respectable norm against which other ethnicities, sexualities, or poverty are measured, producing blackness and queerness as abject others. People who aren’t born into middle-class whiteness can work towards respectability and assimilation by repressing some characteristics and carefully performing others, in particular through gender and sexual expression (Ferguson, 2003). This kind of ‘model minority’ behaviour demonstrates normative values in order to be accepted or tolerated by dominant groups (Strolovitch and Crowder, 2018: 340). Across Latin America and the Caribbean, performing whiteness has historically been a route to claiming decency and respectability, increasing black equality through assimilation rather than resistance to normative whiteness (Chant and Craske, 2003: 139). Joshi (2012: 419) analyses how respectability is produced by performative acts that align behaviours with social norms that are gendered, white, middle-class, and heterosexual. The ongoing scholarly discussion of how sexual and gender normativity is coded white (Cohen, 1997; King, 2009) is important to understand how LGBTIQ people of all ethnicities express their genders and sexualities, and how they are perceived or constructed by others through this expression and its relation to whiteness. I apply this analysis to my case study to show how gender, race, and class are entwined with sexuality to produce respectability.

Cuban context

As in other Latin American countries, Cuban society is machista, or patriarchal, where hegemonic masculinity gives power to men (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Men and women are regarded as strict opposites, complementary but definitively separate (Lundgren, 2011), and women expected to be modest and respectable, maintain sexual virtue, and prioritise their families’ needs (Kersh, 2017: 72). Although the socialist Cuban Revolution has improved gender equality and women’s status, the patriarchal system remains largely unchanged, with colonial norms of raced, classed, gendered, and sexualised morality underpinning social structures (Garcia, 2008: 99; Morad, 2014: 16; Stout, 2014: 16).

Heidi Härkönen (2015a, 2015b, 2016) shows that Cuban bodies are always on display, and that appearance is a highly important marker of correct gender performance. For women, ‘the adult female appearance favoured by both men and women consists of strong make-up, carefully manicured nails, and showy, skin-tight clothes that reveal the woman’s body shape’ (Härkönen, 2014: 19). The ideal body type for women is ‘la criolla’ or ‘la mulata’, a highly exoticised, racialised form with a narrow waist, big bottom, big breasts, and mixed-race brown skin (Härkönen, 2014: 20; Lundgren, 2011: 132). Desirable femininity has a distinctly racialised character in Cuba, with light skin and straight hair considered strongly attractive (Allen, 2011; Fernandez, 2010; Saunders, 2010; Stout, 2014).

The hierarchy of ethnicity in Cuba is very similar to the USA, the Caribbean, and other parts of Latin America – whiteness and Europeanness are constructed as racially superior, socially and culturally more ‘advanced’, and respectable (Saunders, 2010). This discourse remains today, if not always openly acknowledged due to the Revolution’s official ‘race-blindness’ (Fernandez, 2010; Garth, 2021). Cubans often follow white norms of ‘good appearance’ and ‘proper behaviour’ (Garth, 2021: 391), in order to be read as white as possible (Fernandez, 2010: 19). Garth (2021: 396) makes an important contribution by claiming that the Revolution’s discourse of equality seeks to bring all Cubans to a level of whiteness, rather than accepting the value of people of all ethnicities. The devaluation of Afro-Cuban culture has conflated black Cubans with criminality and sexual and gender deviancy in the popular imagination (Garth, 2021; Saunders, 2010), which many LGBT Cubans struggle against in their personal lives. The discourse of whiteness as moral superiority not only explains the denigration of Afro-Cubans, but works as a lens through which to view the moral respectability aspirations of LGBT people. Following Hill Collins’ intersectional ‘matrix of domination’, achieving cultural whiteness elevates people up the social hierarchy, despite other marginalisations (Hamilton et al., 2019).

White femininity among lesbian and bisexual women is analysed as desirable in the few studies which discuss the issue in Cuba. Hamilton (2012), Saunders (2010), and Stout (2014) agree that contemporary lesbian and bisexual women support the same standards of desirable femininity as wider Cuban society, seen most clearly in their ‘ideal woman’. Saunders (2010: 28) showed that, especially among white and mulata lesbians, desirability often equates to femininity including higher class, passivity, lighter skin, and thin bodies. Of Saunders’ 15 respondents, all but two said they liked ‘feminine women with long hair’ and ‘mujeres finas’ (refined women), usually code for white or light-skinned women (Saunders, 2009: 180). These women are consistently described by Cubans as ‘normal’, which has the specific meaning of women that look feminine and pass as heterosexual. Stout (2014) notes that, while supporting sexual freedom and challenging heteronormative behaviour, lesbian women continued to uphold traditionally gendered ideals of behaviour and dress for themselves and their partners.

Conversely, the literature shows that masculinity in women is often rejected by lesbian and bisexual women in the region. Short hair, men’s clothes, and being too macho were rejected in possible lovers by two of Stout’s respondents (2014: 124), which she analyses as an expectation and desire for gender conformity in their partners. Howe’s analysis of Nicaraguan activa/pasiva couples shows that masculine activa partners were stigmatised as gender transgressors, while their feminine pasiva partners were seen as ‘normal’ women (Howe, 2013: 18). Acosta (2016: 524) states that Latina women in the USA chose to dress in a feminine style, and suggests that black/Latina lesbians might reject masculine presentation to resist the hypersexualisation stereotypes applied to black women. She does not develop this concept, but I explore how ethnicity factors into the need to present selves as normatively feminine as possible. Previous Cuban studies have shown that blackness in lesbian and bisexual women is often conflated with masculinity, while both are considered unattractive (Hamilton, 2012: 186; Saunders, 2009, 2010). A popular perception remains that ‘Afro-Cuban lesbian’ is the bottom position in the social heap in Cuba (Smith and Padula, 1996: 173), although activists are reclaiming this subjectivity (Saunders, 2010). These excerpts from the literature suggest that white femininity continues to be a strong normative force for lesbian and bisexual women in Latinx cultures.

The narrative of female activa/pasiva relationships is just visible in the literature on queer Latin America, discussed in short sections or glancing references as far back as at least the 1980s (Sierra Madero, 2013; Whitam et al., 1998). Russo Garrido in Mexico (2020), Howe in Nicaragua (2013), and Williams in Peru (2009) contain single chapters discussing activa/pasiva, while masculine and feminine roles appear throughout Wekker’s monograph on Suriname (2006). The paucity of research shows the invisibility of women’s history, and the particular invisibility of lesbian, queer, and gender non-conforming women – they are in the background, but never made central. In this article, activa and pasiva women are central figures explaining how gender and sexuality are constructed in Cuba. I develop the argument that (raced, classed) gender normativity operates as a route to social acceptance for lesbian and bisexual women, through distance and othering of gender transgressors, especially activas. Further, I show how homonormativity and respectability politics are gendered discourses requiring femininity of lesbian and bisexual women.

Methods

In 2017, I conducted eight months of fieldwork in the cities of Havana, Santa Clara, and Matanzas. I interviewed 33 self-identified lesbian and bisexual women and 23 policymakers, officials, cultural contributors, and activists. I met respondents through the government-affiliated organisation, CENESEX (Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual; National Centre for Sex Education), and through snowballing methods. I also engaged in participant-observation at performances, events, church services, gay clubs, and conducted mapping exercises. I employed a Cuban research assistant to help me translate between English and Spanish in interviews. My primary method of data collection was audio recorded semi-structured interviews. Most interviews were one-to-one (with the research assistant), but a few were with couples or group interviews. Interviews typically lasted between one and two hours.

Best practice requires a note on my positionality, where the first and most important consideration is that I am not lesbian, bisexual, or Cuban. I am also white and middle-upper class, all of which mark me an ‘outsider’. This issue consumed me before fieldwork, given the colonial history of anthropology and international development. However, queer scholars point out that a shared ‘queer’ subject position does not necessarily lead to shared understanding nor more meaningful or insightful research (Browne and Nash, 2010). Engebretsen (2014) notes that being ‘the stranger’ does not necessarily mean a lack of access, and sometimes people find it easier to open up to an outsider rather than their peers. During fieldwork, I found that presenting myself as a feminist woman allied with other women (Hayfield and Huxley, 2015) seemed to justify why I was interested in lesbian and bisexual women’s stories and provide a sense of alignment or alliance. However, I do not identify that strongly as a woman, which I came to realise through the process of research. After experiencing the heavy pressure of gender expectations in Cuba, I wanted to appear more feminine in order to fit in better. I bought new clothes and started wearing jewellery, and received positive, affirming comments from my Cuban friends. After I returned home, I cut off my hair and found a new identification as non-binary. I now consider this episode indicative of the weight of gender norms in Cuba and the pressure to conform to certain codes of appearance, plus my researcher’s desire to fit in as well as possible. Like Rooke (2010), I was deeply self-conscious of my performance of femininity for credibility and acceptance, which in itself provided useful reflections on how gender normativity operates in Cuba as a route to social inclusion.

Respondents’ terms for sexual orientation fall within a few main categories: lesbian [lesbiana]; bisexual [bisexual]; or open [abierta]. 19 primary respondents said they are lesbian, three bisexual, and 11 used other terms or did not use a specific term. In the latter group, some people said they are ‘open’ to all sexual experiences, and some chose not to define their sexuality. I settled on ‘lesbian and bisexual women’ in my writing as these two terms are commonly used and understood by participants, and capture how most respondents think about sexual orientation. However, I do not use these terms as strictly boundaried identity categories, but as expedient shorthand to indicate a broad range of experiences and subjectivities of self-identified women who have a sexual, erotic, or romantic interest in other women. I include cisgender and transgender women, and people that only sometimes identify as a woman. I now turn to the specific women defining themselves as activa and pasiva, a subjectivity that encompasses both gender and sexual orientation.

Activas and pasivas

A small group of young women in the poor Cerro area of Havana introduced me to Cuban activa, pasiva, and completa relationships between women. The terminology draws from the well-known Latin American male/male relationship, where the activo penetrates and the pasivo receives. They described activa women as dressing in more masculine clothes – trousers, shorts, t-shirts, baseball caps – not wearing makeup, maybe having shorter hair, and behaving in typically masculine ways such as drinking beer, smoking and staying out late. In relationships, activas take the role of ‘the man’. In contrast, pasivas are ‘normal women’, which has the specific meaning of dressing in feminine clothes, wearing makeup, and taking the back seat in the relationship. Pasivas are often perceived as bisexual, heterosexual, or ‘not really lesbian’ in some way (because they are ‘normal’). Activas and pasivas enter into relationships together, and read similarly to butch/femme constructions in other parts of the world. In contrast, completa relationships are two women who do not follow these roles but may or may not dress typically masculine or feminine, take equal responsibility for family, money, and the household, and are seen as a balance of ‘two of the same’.

Daimary and Ofelia, a couple in their twenties living in a tiny rented room in Cerro, became central informants for me. I met Daimary through her friend Carmen, who responded to my Facebook post looking for interviewees, and through them both, six or seven other people who defined themselves as activa and pasiva women. It was immediately apparent that Ofelia was the pasiva in the relationship, as Daimary mainly wore shorts and tank tops, no makeup, and furiously smoked cigarettes and drank beer no matter the time of day of our meetings.

I asked both women to explain to me separately what activa/pasiva meant. Daimary said, ‘Let’s see, girly girls, I’m the masculine one. Girls, feminine, quite girly, those are the ones I like most. Girly girls. I’m the dude.’ [A ver, las hembras, el masculino yo. Hembras, femeninas, bien hembras, esas son las que me gustan a mi. Las hembritas. El varón yo.] I asked, ‘How can you tell who’s a girly girl?’ She replied,

‘By the clothing. … We’re the active ones. And the girls, like her [Ofelia], where you can’t tell anything, are pasivas. No, because those where you can’t tell anything, are those that have nothing masculine about them, you know? Like my girlfriend, she’s feminine, and looking at her, very, very girly, she’s feminine. She’s got nothing dude about her.’ [Y las hembras, así como ella, que no se le nota nada, son pasivas. No, porque los que no se le nota nada son los que no tienen nada masculino, entiendes? Como mi novia, es femenina, al fijarle, hembra, hembra, hembra, es femenina. Ella no reproduce nada varón.]

Ofelia said, ‘Activa is the woman who presents as male, masculine, who dresses like a man, T-shirts, pants, tattoos, male jewellery, things like that. The girl, the feminine, the pasiva, is the one who likes dresses, heels, to present as pretty’. Both women initially identify outward gender presentation characteristics, as is common in the butch/femme literature and accords with the wider Cuban association of gender with appearance. They both suggest that activas are easily identified by outward appearance, but pasivas are more like ‘normal women’, where you ‘can’t tell’ that they are attracted to women simply by looking at them. The repeated framing of pasivas as ‘normal’ women suggests that activas are perceived as ‘not normal’ in some way, which positions activas as gender transgressors.

While this description of activas/pasivas is straightforward, and seems to replicate a heterosexual opposites-attract model, in practice it was much more complex, as is well-attested in the literature on butch/femme pairings (e.g. Engebretsen, 2014; Halberstam, 2018; Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1981; Kennedy and Davis, 2014). Daimary’s ex, Belkis, said that what a relationship looks like on the outside, or aspires to be, may bear no resemblance to how it works on the inside. She told me that although Daimary took the masculine role, in reality Belkis had been the one in charge. Ofelia often referred to Daimary using masculine pronouns and word endings, not an uncommon practice among the other activas and pasivas I spoke to. But she also acknowledges Daimary’s flexibility, saying, ‘You know, in our relationship, she’s the active man, but you know she doesn’t feel like it at all. [She feels like a] man, sure, but she’s a woman and has her monthly period and so yeah, however much she calls herself a man…’ I once asked Daimary outright whether she felt more like a woman or a man, and she said, ‘Mas como una mujer.’ [More like a woman]. However, she embraces her gender fluidity and flexibility, describing how her voice changes when people address her as a man, and how she feels different day to day. Although Daimary is often perceived by both straight and LGBT Cubans as someone who wants to be a man, in accordance with a strict binary gender framework, in herself and with her partners she does not aspire to be one or the other, but moves comfortably between masculinity and femininity.

Global research on butch/femme female couples shows a variety of perspectives on how participants experience their gender and their partnerships. Analysis has often anxiously focused on whether butch/femme relationships are patriarchal or feminist, that is, if they replicate sexist hierarchies or instead transform gender relations. Among others, Kennedy and Davis (2014) and Halberstam (2018) have provided complexity to the histories of female masculinity, showing that, in specific communities, butch/femme relationships can make powerful challenges to misogyny through building new identities that exist outside male power. In the Caribbean basin, Wekker (2006) and Russo Garrido (2020) also found that butch/femme relationships may look inflexible from the outside, but on the inside, tend to be much more fluid, resisting easy categorisation. Daimary and Ofelia’s own perceptions of their gender suggest that they performed masculinity and femininity outwardly, but when on their own terms, were comfortable with a more flexible understanding. Since I am interested in what activa/pasiva categories do rather than what they are, I now provide an example of a social interaction to show how wider Cuban society does not acknowledge this flexibility but enforces binary gender.

The first time I met Daimary, we talked about piropos, the common Central American practice most easily translated as catcalling. Although the word itself means ‘compliment’, the practice is beginning to be analysed as a violent act of street harassment (Gaytan Sánchez, 2009). It is overwhelmingly directed from men to women. Piropos reveal how gender is highly contingent on everyday social interaction with others and constructed through performances of gender-coded practices, rather than part of an essential nature (West and Zimmerman, 1987). As such, piropos can erase or validate activa and pasiva gendered subjectivities through others’ responses to gender normativity. Daimary has a complex relationship with piropos, sometimes enjoying the compliment but mostly finding that they erase her masculine identity. When she is out and about by herself, she said:

‘But why do they do it if I’m masculine? Because for example I don’t walk like a girl. I don’t always look like a guy… I mean what do I have to do, cut my hair like a dude? Or I don’t know, it’s a bit weird. Of course they realise! They do, they get confused. Because I’ll look at them and say something bad, they almost always realise, you know’.

Although catcallers might realise she is a lesbian or an activa, calling piropos flattens this identity into simply ‘a woman’, because no other gender options for a social interaction currently exist beyond man and woman (West and Zimmerman, 1987). This interaction eradicates her gender identity and reduces her into a sexed (and sexualised) body. The erasure of her identity as a masculine activa couldn’t be explained more clearly than when she said: ‘Me lo dicen como si fuera una mujer.’ [They talk to me as if I were a woman].

Daimary uses ‘woman’ as a category here, meaning pasivas and feminine women: the kind of women who should receive piropos. Although she also identifies as ‘more like a woman’ on her own terms, her version of woman is activa, not a ‘normal’ woman, like Ofelia, for example. Daimary’s experience demonstrates the difference between how she feels her gender identity (activa) and how other parts of Cuban society see her (always and only female), an act of misgendering and erasure. Allen writes (2011: 36) that people who break gender norms, such as activas, transgender men and women, and effeminate men, are considered not respectable in Cuban society, and likely to experience a higher level of scrutiny on the street. As Sierra Madero has claimed (2013: 72), it is the performance in public of incorrect gender that is an affront to the social order, while bending the rules in private is usually acceptable. Men’s calling piropos reasserts the social order, violently insisting on Daimary’s ‘correct place’ in society as a woman. In this reading, butchness can be political resistance to dominant gender norms (Crawley, 2001), but piropos enforce binary gender by only seeing Daimary as a woman performing her gender incorrectly.

When Daimary and Ofelia are on the street together, both enjoy the validation of Ofelia’s attractiveness and femininity through the elaborate piropos she receives. However, Daimary also experiences jealousy, frustration, and powerlessness at her inability to be recognised as Ofelia’s partner. A piropo should not be aimed at a woman who is with a man, as that is considered a challenge to the man (Lundgren, 2013). However, Daimary is not understood by Cuban men as a man, and two women walking together are not usually assumed to be a couple. In this impossible bind, Daimary cannot be recognised as Ofelia’s partner as either a woman or a man. She expressed her frustration:

‘it’s bad, you know, it’s bad, there’s no reason to do it. None. No man has any reason to do it. If I’m alone I don’t care, actually I like it, but if she’s with me, why do it, you know? Why do those men think I can’t have a woman, why? They say, look at that, all rotten. They say what a waste because she’s with me.’

Daimary’s response suggests that her activa identity does not replicate patriarchal power relations in her relationship with Ofelia (i.e. that she wants to be recognised as a man), but that she seeks masculine status at the expense of heterosexual men (i.e. that she wants to replace men’s power with her own activa power) (Crawley 2001). In that sense, she claims masculine power as a woman, in a contestation of male hegemony (Crawley, 2001) and therefore threatening to male dominance (Schippers, 2007). Her partnership with Ofelia creates a unit that is beyond male control (Kennedy and Davis, 2014), which stimulates a knee-jerk response from men to reclaim that control through piropos. The homophobic comment ‘what a waste of a woman’ speaks to the wide attitude in Cuba that women belong with men, and that cannot imagine a woman’s worth outside of her sex appeal to men.

Piropos or catcalling assert male control of public space and performatively construct ‘proper’ gender roles and the gender hierarchy that places men as active and women as passive (Ahlsén, 2017; Lundgren, 2013). Piropos normatively position women as beautiful objects for male erotic pleasure, a central pillar of what it means to be a ‘real woman’ in Cuba, where men’s desire affirms women as women (Härkönen, 2014: 159). For activas like Daimary, piropos can be aggressive misgendering, acts of gender violence which undermine her masculine identity and seek to force her into her ‘correct’ place, but even she said she enjoyed them sometimes, suggesting that the male gaze remains a powerful force of social approval for many different women. Activa subjectivities in public spaces challenge heteronormative gender and piropos work to reassert correct gender for both women and men, showing the strength of Cuban binary gender norms.

Digging deeper into activa/pasiva constructions, as I have done here, shows that these subjectivities can be flexible and challenging to patriarchy. Activa/pasiva can operate as gender or sexual identities, erotic play, and/or political resistance to gender norms (Crawley, 2001). This is consistent with global literature on butch/femme relationships, which often shows how internally flexible they are, despite an apparently strict set of rules (Russo Garrido, 2020; Sinnott, 2004; Wekker, 2006). However, other Cubans I spoke to imagined activa/pasiva women as rigidly bound to gender norms, which they often saw as heteropatriarchal, old-fashioned, and ‘backward’. The following section shows how femininity is privileged by other lesbian and bisexual women.

‘It’s nonsense’: other Cubans’ responses to activas and pasivas

I have above given space to activas and pasivas to tell us about their gender and sexuality; I now examine how other Cubans see them. Activa/pasiva relationships, on their own terms, are regarded positively by the activa/pasiva women I spoke to. But other LGBT and heterosexual Cubans denigrate these relationships with a vehemence I rarely saw about other subjectivities. As with piropos, others tended to see activa women as performing female gender incorrectly, describing them in derogatory terms as backward, uneducated, low-class, heteronormative, and a relic of a patriarchal past that other LGBT people are trying to leave behind. This dividing line is reported in many places in the world, with outsiders (including other lesbian women) often viewing butch/femme relationships as a disappointing imitation of heterosexuality (Kennedy and Davis, 2014). Beyond showing the existence of this line in Cuba, my case study analyses how other lesbian and bisexual women elevate themselves through distance from activas and pasivas, as a route to social inclusion, demonstrating how tolerance for lesbian and bisexual women is a gendered discourse that relies on their correct performance of white, middle-class, gender normativity.

At 8 p.m. on a roof in Matanzas, I told Arianny that I’d met a group of women in Havana calling themselves activa and pasiva. Our interpreter, Eduardo, a 76 year old gay man, interrupted to say, ‘No, but people don’t use that anymore, it’s obsolete.’ I asked Arianny, who was only 19, if the terms meant anything to her. She said, ‘No, I didn’t know it before, but a lesbian friend told me about it and we had a good laugh because it’s funny. I understand it with men but not women.’ Eduardo replied, ‘Me neither, but not even with men, that’s a lie.’ Arianny agreed, saying, ‘Think about it. It’s nonsense.’ This exchange is typically how most LGBT Cubans responded to the idea of activa/pasiva roles when I asked, regarding them as a ridiculous sexual division, to be laughed at, and dismissed as nonsense rather than understood. Ana, from CENESEX, said, ‘they reproduce patriarchal models, or produce ridiculous divisions, like one is the female and the other one is the male, that is ridiculous’.

Making a joke of someone’s gender identity and sexuality can be a way to create a dividing line that places the joker on the side of moral superiority. A long history of queer scholarship has identified a central dynamic of othering and marginalising certain subjectivities in order to empower others (Podmore, 2013). Joshi (2012: 418) argues that distancing oneself from others who are ‘not normal’ is an act of claiming respectability through the abjection of others. In Cuba, I found a discourse among other lesbian and bisexual women that the activa/pasiva model is a remnant of the patriarchal past, which should be left behind. Most women who made this connection would then position themselves as contemporary Cuban feminists, whose liberal egalitarianism elevates them to a higher status. In this way, they positioned themselves along a linear timeline of LGBT history, where gender role play and patriarchy are in the past, and gender egalitarianism, feminism, and lesbian femininity are equated with modernity and left-wing progressiveness. Lumsden (1996: 150) already noticed this trend in Cuba in the 1990s among men who have sex with men, that activo/pasivo roles were regarded as changing and being left behind in favour of a more egalitarian, ‘modern’, model.

I was presented to Yanelis, an activist in Santa Clara, who aligns herself with CENESEX and is well-educated on current approaches to international LGBTI discussions and rights issues. She analysed activa/pasiva constructions as old-fashioned, which should be firmly relegated to the past. ‘There was a time when it was really common, you were either activa or pasiva, in fact, it was frowned upon when two pasiva girls were together’. In a follow up interview, she clearly expressed her distaste, ‘I don’t do that patriarchal machismo where a lesbian relationship must be the same as a heterosexual one’. She expresses an opinion that I commonly found, that activa/pasiva roles replicate a machista heterosexual model that oppresses women, and through her rejection of this model, positions herself as having moved beyond patriarchy, in line with her progressive, international brand of feminism. Lisett, a black middle-aged feminist activist in Havana, closely aligned with CENESEX, said of activa/pasiva women, ‘they repeat the same model that we want to eliminate’. In her work on queer Cuba, Stout (2014: 121) spent time with a lesbian couple who refused sexuality and gender categories to describe their relationship, choosing instead to call themselves modernas [modern women]. In Peru (Williams, 2009) and Nicaragua (Howe, 2013), women similarly describe female masculinity as old-fashioned, and lesbian femininity as modern. Importantly, the third ethnography discussing activa/pasiva constructions, Russo Garrido in Mexico (2020), does not explicitly show this discourse. It is possible that her respondents upheld the modernity/backwardness narrative, as those who claimed more egalitarian relationships and sex lives appear to be those engaged with liberal international activist organisations and discourses. But this is not a conclusion she reaches, suggesting that we need more empirical studies to understand these sexualities in Latin America.

I also found an association of activa/pasiva with low-class status, potentially uneducated or ignorant; a status reading that in Cuba is almost always conflated with blackness. In Cuba, blackness is often carefully alluded to as ‘low culture’, or ‘low cultural level’, in opposition to decency, moral worth, refinement, and high class – implicitly equated with whiteness and Europeanness (Fernandez, 2010: 134). Among Cuban lesbian and bisexual women, blackness is often equated with masculinity, and vice versa (Hamilton, 2012: 189; Saunders, 2009, 2010), meaning that activa women are likely to be seen as culturally and socially black, if not in actual skin colour. My activa/pasiva respondents were no more likely to be black than any other Cuban, but were demarcated by their low socio-economic status.

Blackness was usually taken up by other respondents in veiled terms of ‘education’ and ‘ignorance’. Ana, at CENESEX, said, ‘They have all of these unsolved problems and they are not even able to see it’. I heard this commonly repeated by activists and high-class respondents, that activa/pasiva women are victims of false consciousness, that they do not know any better and should be educated further. Daysi, a middle-aged white activist in Havana, said she thought activa/pasiva was a problem of low education. ‘The disinformation on these issues is so great, it makes people repeat and imitate these stereotypes of man and woman. But I am not a judge, I think it is a problem of misinformation, education, ignorance’. Yadira, who is young, white, wealthy, and unusually, has travelled a lot through her work, said she prefers straight bars in Cuba, because she regards gay clubs as full of ‘marginal’ people. She said, ‘Especially when it comes to the cultural level of the people who go to gay parties in Cuba, it’s very low, at least in my opinion…. I meant vulgar [chabacanos]. For example, I’ve gone to [name of club] sometimes and I haven’t felt comfortable because women there are not the type I like. They are stronger [fuertonas].’ Her commentary conflates ethnicity, class, and female masculinity, and demonstrates a casual prejudice, which was repeated across many interviews. The distaste from activists and higher class respondents is very similar to that found by Howe (2013: 85) in Nicaragua, where lesbian activists took a clear pedagogical direction that women should be educated out of activa/pasiva roles and into a modern, liberal, egalitarian paradigm, even describing their activism as helping women to become well-educated. Howe also found (2013: 82) that activa/pasiva women were conceptually located in the countryside, with all its associations of tradition, backwardness, and poor education. A classist discourse is visible throughout the wider literature, with butch/femme subjectivities often viewed as working-class, and middle-class lesbians as more gender normative (Crawley, 2001; Kennedy and Davis, 2014; Russo Garrido, 2020: 132). I suggest that the Cuban production of activa/pasiva identities as ‘uneducated’ is a moralising discourse which can be used by other lesbian and bisexual women to position themselves as progressive, and therefore more deserving of social inclusion, underpinned by longstanding cultural associations with class, whiteness, and respectability.

The descriptions of activa/pasiva women in derogatory terms bear startling similarity to how butch/femme relationships between women are described around the world. Among others, in China (Engebretsen, 2014); Thailand (Sinnott, 2004); Indonesia (Blackwood, 2010); Israel (Luzzatto and Gvion, 2004); the USA (Halberstam, 2018); Peru and Brazil (Whitam et al., 1998); and Nicaragua (Howe, 2013); there is a persistent discourse that butch/femme relationships are low-class, old-fashioned roleplay that replicates the patriarchy. In Global South ethnographies, a narrative emerges that associates egalitarian, femme/femme, and/or feminist lesbian relationships with modernity, ‘development’, and international LGBTI rights. Several scholars have shown that, in low-income contexts, butch/femme is often described by local people as traditional, patriarchal, or ‘backward’, and that contemporary lesbian women valorise what they describe as a modern identity that allows femininity and masculinity in equal measure, and strives for equality within the relationship (Blackwood, 2010; Engebretsen, 2014; Howe, 2013; Wekker, 2006; Williams, 2009). Notably, activist discourses in these ethnographies tend not to describe male activo/pasivo roles as backward, but respect them as authentic local forms of sexual expression, showing the stricter scrutiny and regulation applied to women’s practices and gender expression. As I have shown, and in other literature which centres the voices of female butches and femmes, these relationships are not necessarily patriarchal. I am here concerned with analysing why they are so strongly viewed in these terms by other women, and what that construction does.

I propose that discursively placing activa/pasiva women as patriarchal allows other lesbian and bisexual women to elevate themselves by claiming enlightenment and liberation in comparison. Drawing on Ferguson (2003), Allen (2011), and Saunders (2010) analysed how black Cubans have to over-perform white respectability in order to overcome prejudices. One important way to achieve inclusion is by constructing an abject other against which one appears more respectable. Similarly, I suggest that some lesbian and bisexual Cuban women strongly reject butchness and over-emphasise their adherence to white, respectable, feminine gender normativity, in order to present themselves as more deserving of inclusion in society. ‘Hegemonic femininity’ might offer a premium to women who can perform femininity adequately, but also makes them complicit in the oppression of other women (Hamilton et al., 2019; Schippers, 2007), in this case, activas. As Mayte told me, ‘As a lesbian if you are feminine and you have a steady relationship they look at you differently, they respect you more. But when you are the opposite of that, if you are the strong gay stereotype, people talk more, they discriminate more.’ Conflating activa/pasiva relationships with the patriarchal past, blackness, poor education, and low class uses widely recognised status readings to signal negativity towards these relationships, making activa/pasiva subjectivities into abject others (or Schippers’ pariah femininities) against which other lesbian and bisexual women appear more acceptable. This line of analysis suggests that tolerance of sexual diversity is a gendered discourse in Cuba, where inclusion and respectability rely on gender conformity and the correct performance of gender norms.

Conclusion

The experiences of activa and pasiva women show how different expressions of gender and sexuality can be mobilised to create dividing lines of respectability, and how gender normativity can underpin social inclusion and tolerance. Activa and pasiva respondents see themselves as perfectly normal, and while they may experience social discrimination, usually regard their own sexuality and gender as powerful, appropriate, and fun. Their descriptions of their relationships show that they can resist patriarchal norms by their very visibility, and that the internal dynamics tend not to be inflexibly heteronormative. But other aspects of social life do not recognise or respect activa/pasiva relationships. The example of piropos called by men show the strength of binary gender norms in wider Cuban society, where women are viewed only and always as women, through the prism of men’s sexual desire, lacking space for other gender expressions or desiring gazes. Piropos enforce binary gender, and show how Cuban society understands activas only as women performing gender incorrectly. The inability to recognise activa subjectivities as valid is reflected by other lesbian and bisexual women, who tended to view them as low-class gender transgressors, who replicate the patriarchy and need to be ‘educated’ about the proper, modern way to be a lesbian; that is, how to be lesbian and feminine. Activa/pasiva constructions are perceived by almost all LGBT and heterosexual Cubans I spoke to as backward, implicitly associated with blackness, and part of the patriarchal past that contemporary (feminine) lesbian and bisexual women are trying to leave behind. Through the construction of activa/pasiva women, especially activas, as gender transgressive abject others, gender normativity is reinforced by other lesbian and bisexual women in this research.

Beyond the existence of this dividing line, which is very similar to treatment of butch/femme constructions in other parts of the world, I have suggested that distance and othering of gender transgressors serves as a signal for social inclusion. Gender normative lesbian and bisexual women were sometimes able to create more space and tolerance for themselves through distance from activa/pasiva relationships, by conflating them with the negative status markers of the patriarchal past, blackness, and low class. Alongside Tanya Saunders, I suggested that the preference for lesbian and bisexual femininity in Cuba leverages deeply ingrained desires for whiteness and high class or ‘high culture’, revealing an embedded racism. In this line of analysis, the progressive feminine lesbian identity, in its newest iteration, is in fact produced through reference to traditional notions of what women should be – upholding patriarchal and racist gender norms, rather than resisting them. In Cuba, social and political tolerance for lesbian and bisexual women appears to depend on performing gender normativity correctly. These findings point out that the experiences of lesbian and bisexual women can be heavily imbued with racism and sexism, and that homonormativity analysis must deeply consider how gender (and race, and class) play out.