Transfeminilidades na literatura brasileira contemporânea

Abstract

This research investigates the representations of travestis, transexual, and transgender women in Brazilian contemporary literature, in order to understand how these individuals have been currently presented and which silences and/or flaws still are present in the way these subjects are constituted as characters. We have selected five works that have, in common, the transfeminine protagonism, as well as memory, aiming to analyze how trans subjectivity is constructed in each one and how the narratives are influenced by the author’s social position (DALCASTAGNÈ, 2012): A Princesa (1995), the biography of the transsexual woman Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, co-written by Maurizio Jannelli while both of them were prisoners in Italy; Do fundo do poço se vê a lua (2010), fictional novel by Joca Reiners Terron, which presents, as a protagonist, the transsexual narrator Cleópatra; Luís Antônio-Gabriela (2012), a book elaborated from a documentary-show by Nelson Baskerville, in which he presents his autobiography pervaded by his older sister’s biography, the travesti Gabriela; O nascimento de Joicy (2015), a journalistic report by Fabiana Moraes, a writer from Pernambuco who followed the experience of Joicy during her genital reassignment surgery by Brazilian public health system, as well as her healing process; and E se eu fosse puta (2016), an autobiographical work that gathers the histories of the travesti Amara Moira about when she worked as a prostitute, released in a second edition with the title E se eu fosse pura (2018). By using theorizations about identity (HALL, 2006; 2012), gender performativity (BUTLER, 2010), and regarding medical dispositives that have emerged and developed aiming to exercise control over human bodies (FOUCAULT, 1988; 2016), we look for explaining how travesti and transgender identities were coined as pathologies and are still considered as such. Going through elements from the history of Brazil, from the condemnation of “transvestism”, and of criminology as an instrument used to associate effeminate homosexuals to perversion, we intend to expose how society have always framed deviant subjects under the sign of stigma. Later, starting from the groups that have organized themselves since the 1980s, in order to fight against the HIV/aids epidemic and to protect themselves from police violence, we describe how the travesti identity has evolved so that these people could become agents of their own battle. We elaborate the notion of transectionality, looking for further applying the crisscrossing of oppressions besides intersectionality. We understand, through this research, that the transfemale voice still is little present in Brazilian literature of wide distribution, mainly regarding trans authors.