Isthmus genders

between Mexicos, women and muxes

Abstract

In Juchitán de Zaragoza, a Mexican city in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region, there is what is conventionally called the ‘third gender’, the muxes. To discuss the possibility of the existence of a non-binary gender space in non-Western societies, the question was posed: what can muxes inform about the possibility of thinking from a less binary gender perspective? For this, the theoretical-methodological basis was taken from Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the production of space and its three conceptual dimensions: spatial practice; the representations of space; and the spaces of representation. From a historiographical reconstitution of the geographic space, the condition of women and the construction of the muxe identity, it was concluded that the space produced by muxes’ bodies is a differential space that resists colonial impositions, negotiates with the discourses of the media, dialogues with academic spaces and emerges as a questioning of the forces that try to hide them.