ABSTRACT Through the life experiences of Marta, a Mapuche male transgendered shaman in Chile, I analyze how selfhood is gendered dynamically by individual desire and competing cultural and religious norms. Marta’s unique identity as a divine heterosexual woman is based on a spiritual transformation, her manner of dressing, and her gender performances. It challenges conventional notions of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality linked to sexed bodies. At the same time, Marta’s self is shaped and constrained by the normative gender ideologies of the Virgin Mary, shamanic lore, the Mapuche, and dominant Chilean society. [shaman, transgendered, selfhood, gender, sexuality, Mapuche, Chile] M achi Marta covered her face and sobbed as she left the men’s jail in the town of Navidad, southern Chile, on November 24, 1995. She had been detained for 24 hours on a charge of homicide by poisoning, the shocking result of a healing ritual she had performed for a 17-year-old boy from a neighboring Mapuche reservation. Most machi—Mapuche shamans—give their patients herbal remedies to drink as part of the healing process, but the boy’s mother thought Marta’s herbal medicine had been deadly. Police released Marta when an autopsy showed the boy had died of a heart lesion and lung infection. She left the jail dressed as a man for the first time since her shamanic initiation as a Mapuche machi 20 years earlier. ‘‘In the men’s jail they put men’s pants on me. This was not my destiny,’’ she cried. Reporters waiting outside the prison assailed Marta with questions. ‘‘Aren’t you a man?’’ ‘‘Why do you dress like a woman?’’ ‘‘Did you perform witchcraft?’’ To which Marta retorted, ‘‘God made me like this and gave me my name Marta when I became a machi. Now you have destroyed the machi. God will punish you.’’ The media publicly discussed the penis that Marta hid under her skirt, thereby destroying her public image as a woman and reconstructing her as a homosexual, transvestite man. Marta’s com- munity then reevaluated her gender identity, personhood, and spiritual powers according to machi norms and Chilean national gender ideologies. The community regendered Marta as a man, criminalized her—despite her demonstrated innocence—as an assassin, a deviant homosexual, and a witch, and expelled her. Marta was born Bernardo, a sickly boy who was teased by his male playmates for drumming on an old tin can by the river instead of playing football. Bernardo’s fevers, dizzy spells, and bodily sores, along with his shamanic visions, were typical of machi callings. His interest in wearing women’s skirts and makeup, his falsetto voice, and his overt, erotic interest in other men set him apart from other male neophytes. But it was Bernardo’s dream about the Virgin Mary and his possession by the machi spirit of his great-grandmother Flora that transformed him, at the age of 21, ANA MARIELLA BACIGALUPO State University of New York at Buffalo The Mapuche man who became a woman shaman: Selfhood, gender transgression, and competing cultural norms American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 440 – 457, ISSN 0094-0496. A 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.