clothes. Mapuche women often criticize Marta
as being “excessively feminine and urban”,
and her everyday femininity is seen as unique
among machi in contemporary Mapuche
society (Mapuche Man/Woman Shaman 444).
Marta’s permanent, and some would
say, excessive, femininity is also conflicted
with the attitudes of other opinionated
women machi. They often see Marta as being
entirely too feminine to be a woman machi
because of the fact that women machi tend to
carry on more masculine roles alongside their
feminine ones than other Mapuche women.
At the same time, however, Marta’s male
anatomy limits her perceived femininity
(Mapuche Man/Woman Shaman 445).
On November 24, 1995, Marta left the
Navidad men’s jail in Southern Chile after
being held for twenty-four hours on the
charge of “homicide by poisoning” (Mapuche
Man/Woman Shaman
440). Marta was
released from jail when an autopsy revealed
that the seventeen year old boy on whom
Marta had performed a hea