TRAVESTIS CITIES: THE RELATIONSHIP OF BODY AND CITY IN THE PRODUCTION OF THE CITY

• Grant number: 23/16650-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2024
• End date: September 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Urban Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Silvana de Souza Nascimento
• Grantee: André Rocha Rodrigues
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project aims to contribute to the field of urban anthropology studies from transvestite epistemologies. This is an offshoot of doctoral research that found the movements made by transvestites who work in sex markets as a way of being in the world. The general objective is to investigate how and which city is created by these transvestites in constant displacement, highlighting the relationship between the body and the city. The theoretical framework includes both the production of transvestite intellectuals present in academic spaces and the interlocutors with whom I maintained contact during fieldwork. This joins the proposal of anthropology of the city that considers the relationships, contexts and practices of city dwellers for the construction of the city, denying the city as a space given, a priori, natural and innate. For this research project, we intend to make use of the materials collected during the ethnographies already carried out for the master's (Rodrigues, 2015) and doctoral (Rodrigues, 2020) works, using the notion of "other memory" (Toledo, 2019) and of an "ex post facto anthropology" (Machado, 2019). It also proposes to consider transvestite expressions as providers of meaning (Wagner, 2012). It is expected, with this research, the production of knowledge about people's practices in the construction of cities, the dynamics and influence of displacements in the creation of the city, the knowledge produced by the bodies that live and produce cities, the epistemologies produced in these contexts and an anthropology of the city produced by non-hegemonic knowledge.