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Bodies
in Between Local Epistemologies and Institutionalized
Discourse
Jef
van der Aa
Ghent
(Gent/Gand) University
Belgium/Belgica
The case of Andrea Pésantes
Ortégas is not a pleasant one: struggling for shelter and
money to send home, this Ecuadorian transgendered woman
makes a living in Brussels North, Belgium, as a sex worker.
Recently, she reported to the police that she was beaten
up by unknown attackers, most likely resulting from trans-
and xenophobia. Instead of getting first aid, she was
immediately sent to a closed asylum centre in order to be
deported to Ecuador the next day.
A year ago, Italian program
maker Maria Tarantino produced a program for Canvas (Flemish
national television) that deals with Andrea’s gender
surgery in Ecuador. The interesting linguistic and
cultural construction of Andrea’s identity, which
consists of several liminal positions, contrasts sharply
with European or North-American transgender practices.
According to Kulick’s seminal study on the Salvadorian
transgendered scene in Brazil, “travestis do not speak
of women in terms of internal states and biologically
generated feelings”, which is “in stark and complete
contrast to North American and European transsexuals, who
lay claim to a female subjectivity and who discuss their
desire to be women in terms of predispositions and
essences”. (Kulick 1998:93) Since travestis do not claim
female subjectivity, nor do they intend to undergo a
physical sex change, their “doing feminine” can be
considered as both an act of fulfilling a certain desire ,
whether it be sexual and /or emotional and an act of
pleasure, admiration, selling their bodies, etc. It is
this last part, that travestis manage to market.
Although travestis wouldn’t
go as far as having a sex surgery, they would consider
breast implants and silicone injections. (Kulick 1998:
44-95) Going back to the transsexuals from the quote above,
which Kulick mainly situates in Europe and North-America;
we can broadly see them as desiring to become of the
opposite sex by taking on internal and external biological
features of that sex , to be biologically in accordance
with their true gender. I’d have to refer to Butler’s
understanding of the difference between sex and gender, as
Kulick points out that “Butler demonstrated that the
concept of a biological sex is itself a gendered notion,
dependent on culturally generated notions of difference”.
(Kulick 1998:230) However, it is precisely this
understanding of culture, and especially so in the
Latin-American context, that creates “Otherness”, “Thirdness”,
while a more fluid understanding of sex and gender would
make sure that transgendered individuals or groups would
not be excluded from the classical dichotomy between man
and woman.
Exactly this “Otherness”
is discursively homogenized by the institutional practices
of, Belgian parliament, which stresses one particular
aspect of Andrea’s much richer identity and succeeds in
foregrounding this element to make a political point.
Looking at the video, speaking to some of Andrea’s
colleagues in the Brussels North area and reading
institutional texts about the matter, I wonder what kind
of epistemology we can build as a researcher being
constantly in between these two representations? In this
paper, I am analyzing discourses from parliament and from
Andrea, both from a discursive analytical/ethnographic
point of view. I argue that local and official
epistemologies that do not pay sufficient attention to the
micro-liminal axes or to the macro-institutional contexts
of such groups or individuals, especially those ones on
racial and sexual crossroads, ultimately culminate in a
threefold discursive exclusion, based on race, gender and
legal status. Keywords: Linguistic ethnography and
institutions, trans studies, language and the body
Reference: KULICK, Don. (1998). Travesti. Sex, Gender and
Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes.
About Jef van der Aa
Jef Van der Aa recently
graduated with an MA in African languages and cultures
from Ghent University (Belgium) and is currently working
as a diversity consultant. Next to this, he is conducting
fieldwork in multilingual sites in Belgium and the
Caribbean. His research focuses on the glocal
intersections of language, gender and race as inscribed in
bodies.
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