Imagining trans: activisms and acknowledgments around the regulations of body sex changes

Author(s)

Bruno Cesar Barbosa

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2015-04-10

Examining board members

Julio Assis Simoes; Sérgio Luis Carrara; Regina Facchini; Martha Celia Ramirez Gálvez; Laura Moutinho da Silva

• Advisor: Julio Assis Simoes

Abstract

Based on fieldwork and bibliographical and documentary analysis during the years of 2010 to 2014, this research aims to comprehend the production of travesti, transsexual, trans and transgender categories throughout the relations between acknowledgments and activisms. I took the debates around the regulation of body sex changes as a conductor thread, arguing that these discussions are an important entrance door for the understanding of the relations between social movement and specialists, as well as the transnational movement and possible particularities built around these categories in Brazil. About the specialists analysis, I presented tensions between the biomedical and social acknowledgments. I argued about how the specialists build their own versions of subject that guide their professional practice on different methods and theories, producing political effects and relations between notions of (de)pathologization, autonomy and suffering. About the activists analysis, I presented how polissemic the use of the trans term is, mostly if we think its possible articulations with the categories of travesti, transsexual, women and people. I discussed the appereance of a travesti culturalism as a way to politicize a certain notions of culture as the center of travesti identity. This travesti culturalism produces a possibility to constitute an identity with pride, together with the notions of brazilian nation, constituting itself as a contraposition and interlocution to what I called transglobalisation, a global spreading process of the transsexual, trans and transgender categories. (AU)