The Mother, the Daughter, and the Cow: Venezuelan Transformistas' Migration to Europe.

Venezuelan transformistas migrate to Europe in order to occupy the lucrative niche of transgender sex work. With their earnings, they enhance the process of transforming their male bodies towards perfect femininity. Various forms of liminality are inherent both in transformistas' migration and in their bodily transformation. This paper aims at an understanding of how they arrived at their present situation by following their lives through time and space. It explores motivations for migration as well as the economic and affective dimensions of relations evolving from recruitment practices that are based on sexual identity and gender. The negotiation of love for their natural mothers through economic transactions is interpreted as a change of status that became possible in the context of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]