367.5
Transforming Genders: Subjectivity and the Struggle for Recognition of Transgender People

Monday, 11 July 2016: 09:00
Location: Hörsaal BIG 2 (Main Building)
Oral Presentation
Gustavo MARIANO, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
Fernanda FERREIRA, Universidade Federal de Goias, Brazil
This research aimed to investigate the search and guarantee of transsexual rights in Brazil in comparison with European (France, Spain, Portugal) and Latin American (Argentina, Chile) countries.  

In order to do so, it makes use of both carnivalized and queer epistemologies (Warat; Butler, Colling, Preciado) in an effort to recover subjectivity in science (Feyerabend and González-Rey) so as to understand the links between queer theory/transfeminism and Law.  Questionnaires and interviews were conducted to get closer and to give visibility to the reality of these marginalized identities.

Considering transsexuality as a differentiation between sexual pleasures and body parts (Soley-Beltran) and also its gender performativity and vulnerability (Butler), it was observed that the movements claim for: facilitation of both name and sex changes in the civil registry; access to the transition process; depathologization of the trans identity; and respect of gender identity in every social context, such as family and the job market. There is no identity gender law in need of approval in Brazil and neither in France nor Chile, while there’s already legal grounding in Argentina and Spain.

It was noted that, in these countries, the legislative changes occurred after a change in the jurists’ own “theoretical common sense”, who started to listen to the subjects of rights, becomings and desires.  On the other hand, the demands that are still not met, such as the Brazilian law of gender’s identity, are demonstrations of the treatment given to transsexuals as abject bodies. Even though the concept of woman has been extended to comprehend transwomen, there’s still sociolinguistic resistance. In this regard, alterity and education are pointed as ways of deconstruction of oppressive paradigms. 

All changes, even being slow, show themselves as subversions of socially constructed standards of an imaginary that excludes queer, in a revolution of alterity of the waratian transmodernity.