Heteronormativity: Good language and bad slang: Sex and gender roles of Brazilian travestis in the context of transnational prostitution

Abstract

Modernity and post-modernity correspond to the extension of globalizing phenomena, boosted by new technologies, both in the field of communication and in the economic interdependencies generated, highlighting processes of construction of dense urban networks, where it was possible to achieve anonymity in relation to erotic affinities or sexual orientation, experienced in a community context. The break in the unidirectional flow between sex and gender highlights asymmetrical and structural relationship schemes, as well as rooted models of thought. This cisgender collapse was, theoretically, possible when Rubin (in Vance, 1984), admitted the existence of two different systems of sex and gender, from an analytical point of view, operating, however, mutual influences up to the level of identity agency and life projects. In this way, Rubin highlighted the causes of the discontinuity between sex, gender and sexuality (Rubin, in Lewin, 2006, in Vance, 1984), seeing in them the justification for a biological sex not necessarily corresponding to a gender. The paradigm of this maximum systemic autonomy is achieved in the construction of a trasvesti identity in a context of transnational prostitution. The travestis, constituting themselves as a transnational group, marked by gender and geographic mobility, first within Brazilian borders and, later, in another phase of the project, to Portugal. The city, prostitution and migration emerge as key factors in geographic dispersion and the construction of the sexual/gender identity of this community. Language and slang play an important role in this identity.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.56238/sevened2024.010-039