Universidade de São Paulo

Graduate Student, Departamento de Antropologia

Thesis Title: Nomes e Diferenças: uma etnografia dos usos das categorias travestis e transexuais (Names and Differences: an ethnography of the uses of categories transvestite and transsexual)

About

The point of my master´s work is to discuss the uses of the transvestite and transsexual categories, related to sexual and gender identity, based on observations and interviews conducted between 2008 and 2009 with participants of the meetings called Terças Trans, that happen fortnightly at the Centro de Referência em Diversidade (CRD), a public utility service directed to LGBT in São Paulo, Brazil. I tried to explore two analysis ways. The first was focused on the observations results from the interactions and debates between the participants, during the meetings, especially with regard to how they work out differences between
transvestites and trassexuals. The second was focused on the life histories narratives of three participants, who reflect on their sexuality and gender experiences. Although the
conventions of medical discourse are key references for the definition of bodies, subjectivities and identity of people surveyed, it was possible to note also a variety of reelaborations and displacements of meaning in the life histories and in the identities production, that are directed related to social situations experienced in the present and with the varied contexts of dialogue. I try to develop the argument that transvestite and transsexual categories are performatives, and that this performativity is not limited only in statements of gender and sexuality, but can also be expressed by means of contingent articulation which refer to differences of class, color/race and generation.