Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira
Black transvestite, PhD in education from the Federal University of Paraná.
In my corner,
In my little chair,
I can be what I want to be!
On the wings of my fantasy
I can fly to a new world
And the world will open its arms to me...
(Jess Jennings, 2007)
The colors pink and blue represent, in a very specific way, in various cultures, the female and male universes respectively, in order to inform, even before birth, the correct way each child should be treated. This in order to strengthen the constitutive elements of their femininity or masculinity, directly associated with their biological sex. Rogério Diniz Junqueira¹ (2009, p. 20) uses the studies of Elisabeth Badinter and Gláucia Eliane Silva de Almeida to state that masculinity is considered something to be hard-won by males, while femininity is perceived as a woman's natural component. In the work of César Sabino, also studied by Junqueira (2009), masculinity is associated with demonstrations of strength, fearlessness and virility, constructed in opposition to certain characteristics considered feminine.
Thus, the codes of conduct taught to children establish that “the only inhabitable place for the feminine is in women's bodies, and for the masculine, in men's bodies” (Berenice Alves de Melo BENTO, 2008, p.25), rewarding those who are normalized with respect and opportunities, and punishing those who are different with contempt and obstacles (William PERES, 2009, p. 237), exposing, quite objectively, that in patriarchal societies there is no other possibility than adjustment.
It is the heteronormative family, that is, the one defined by the practice of “well educated or standardized sex, that is, heterosexual, monogamous, consolidated by marriage and reproductive practices” (Maria Rita de Assis CÉSAR, 2009, p. 43), the model of social organization that must be preserved. Therefore, people need to be taught, from a very early age, to act in such a way that they can reproduce it in the future.
This is the view of Christian churches, which over time have striven to impose unique standards of behavior that take cis² heterosexuality as the only model of existence. As society changes and proposes ruptures, the religious discourse is updated, as well as its control mechanisms.
In 1997, Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, current Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, reinforced in his writings that biology would determine gender and that “women's liberation serves as a nuclear center for any activity of liberation, both political and anthropological, with the objective of liberating the human being of his biology” (RATZINGER, 1997, p. 142). Ratzinger then kicked off the emergence of a debate that today is known as gender ideology.
In Jorge Scala’s definition, discussed by Richard Mikolski and Maximiliano Campana (2017), gender ideology is a political-discursive instrument of alienation with global dimensions, which seeks to establish a totalitarian model with the purpose of “imposing a new anthropology” to society. provoke the alteration of moral guidelines and lead to the destruction of society.
By directing an attack on feminist struggles and pointing the way to the development of the concept of gender ideology, Cardinal Ratzinger sought to reach, according to Mikolski and Campana (2017), the Beijing World Conference on Women, organized by the United Nations , in 1995, for daring to propose replacing the term “woman” (which had been the main subject in the three conferences that preceded this one) by the concept of “gender”, allowing this category to be expanded, not being restricted to biological issues only.
Thus, “at this conference it was recognized that women's inequality is a structural problem and can only be addressed from an integral gender perspective” (MIKOLSKI; CAMPANA, 2017, p. 727), drawing attention to the need to look at the multiple subjects who express female identities, such as transvestites and transsexual women.
Such statements
placed the category “gender” at the center of debates that revolved around the role of women, provoking an important reaction on the part of various conservative religious sectors and, in particular, the Catholic Church itself. Thus, because of this conference, Pope John Paul II, in his “Letter to women”, referred to the need to defend female identity from an essentialist perspective and, a few years later, in the “Letter to bishops”, of 31 May 2004, spoke out against the feminist discourse, reiterating that motherhood was a key element of female identity (point 13). (MIKOLSKI; MAXIMILIANO, 2017, p. 727)
By highlighting motherhood as an essential element of female identity, Pope John Paul II took a position in relation to transvestitism and transsexuality, agreeing with situations of exclusion and violation of rights that fall on them. By fleeing the pre-established standards of society, transvestites³ and transsexuals ⁴ are exposed to situations of discrimination and exclusion, and may develop resistance strategies to guarantee their right to be or else seek means for an adaptation that guarantees at least their survival, almost always characterized by speeches and acts of submission and passivity (PERES, 2009).
In the case of transsexual children, there is still the aggravating factor that they can be seen as having a pathology, which needs and must be treated, going through experiences that show how much they are at odds with pre-established standards and how necessary it is to change your way of thinking and acting so that you can adapt to the anatomical sex and thus lead a “normal” life.
The charges imposed on transsexual children come from various segments of our society – from the family, the church, neighbors, school, etc. – leaving little or no room for them to construct themselves as subjects. This is even more evident when their claims to adopt a gender identity different from their biological sex are ignored, treated only as mere childhood fantasies, since, in general, childhood is subaltern in relation to the world of adults (Manuel SARMENTO; Maria Cristina Soares de GOUVEA, 2008, p. 19).
These issues are observable in the 1997 film My life in pink5 (Ma vie en rose), a cooperative production between Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, directed by the Belgian Alain Berliner. The film tells the story of Ludovic Fabre, a seven-year-old transsexual6 girl . Although it is a work of fiction, it has strong similarities with the childhood of many transgender women. However, I believe in the possibility of other forms of relationship between transgender children and their families, schools and society in general. Therefore, I will establish a dialogue between the film and the documentary My secret self, produced and presented by the ABC television network in the United States of America in 2007, which also discusses transsexuality in childhood. The real stories of two transsexual girls, Jess Jennings and Riley Grant, narrated in the documentary, will be used to dialogue with the situations experienced by the fictional character Ludovic Fabre in the film My life in pink.
Both productions, although they have different purposes, are considered mass media precisely because they are available “to a plurality of receivers” (John B. THOMPSON, 2009, p. 287) and are inserted “within a theory of cinema queer, a term that emerged in the late 1970s/80s, after gender studies, justifying the high permeability and artificiality between gender identities” (Alisson MACHADO, 2011, p. 11).
Queer, which has no exact equivalent in Portuguese, “can be translated as strange, perhaps ridiculous, eccentric, rare, extraordinary” (Guacira Lopes LOURO, 2004, p. 38). For Judith Butler (2002, p. 58), identified as one of the precursors of queer theory, the term has operated as a linguistic practice with the purpose of degrading the subjects to which it refers: “queer acquires all its power precisely through the reiterated invocation that links it with accusations, pathologies and insults”. Therefore, the proposal was to give a new meaning to the term, to make it positive, starting to understand queer as a life practice that goes against socially accepted norms.
Queer, then, can be interpreted as a process, a movement, and approaches the reflections of Michel Foucault (1979) on the concept of device. For him, every device “is always a device of power” (Sueli Aparecida CARNEIRO, 2005. p. 38), a means by which certain subjects gain visibility when they are interpreted as the counterpoint of order.
Thus, the concept of device seeks to demarcate
a decidedly heterogeneous set that encompasses discourses, institutions, architectural organizations, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions. In short, the said and the unsaid are the elements of the device. “The device is the network that can be established between these elements. Second, I would like to outline the nature of the relationship that may exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, such a discourse can appear as an institution's program or, on the contrary, as an element that allows justifying and masking a practice that remains silent; it can even function as a reinterpretation of this practice, giving it access to a new field of rationality. In short, among these elements, discursive or not, there is a type of game, that is, changes of position, modifications of functions, which can also be very different. Thirdly, I understand device as a type of training that, at a given historical moment, had as its main function to respond to an urgency. The device therefore has a dominant strategic function”. (FOUCAULT, 1979, p. 244).
However, the same Foucault (1982) who manages to perceive an infinity of control mechanisms, such as the discourse of gender ideology, operating in a coordinated and simultaneous manner, also identifies mechanisms for their opposition and states that where there is power, there is resistance.
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Excerpt from the article by Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira. Black transvestite, PhD in education from the Federal University of Paraná. Read the full article here.
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1. For defending a non-sexist education, in addition to using the female and male gender to refer to people in general, the first time an author is cited, I transcribe his/her full name to identify the gender ( gender) and, consequently, to provide greater visibility to researchers and scholars.
2. Cis is short for cisgender. The notion of cisgenderism is proposed by the transsexual Julia Serano, in 2007, in the work Whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. “From the exercise of analyzing the origin of the terminology – trans-: the other, the maladjustment. Spontaneously, unexpectedly, chemical crosslinks. The opposite of this, the term -cis-, also exists in the field of organic chemistry: it would be the expected chemical bond, the most common to occur between elements. The “normal” chemical bond. However, the molecules of organic chemistry are unpredictable. Just as subjectivities are unpredictable. Therefore, cisgenderity indicates the existence of a norm that produces effects of a regulatory ideal, that is, effects of expectations and universalization of human experience. In general terms, what different activists and transfeminist movements have proposed is that the cisgender norm is one of the normative matrices of social, political and patriarchal structures, whose regulatory ideals produce extremely rigid effects on life and identity attribution. The identity attribution, compulsory at the time of registration of each person, defines and naturalizes the assignment of a person to one of the poles of the sex/gender system at birth, based on a restricted reading, based on the appearance of the genitals. In addition, the cisgender norm states that this designation is immutable, fixed, crystallized throughout the person’s life.” (Maria Luiza Rovaris CIDADE, 2016, p. 13-14).
3. A transvestite is a person who experiences a female gender role, but does not recognize herself as a man or a woman, but as a member of a third gender or a non-gender (Jaqueline Gomes de JESUS, 2012, p. 17).
4. A transsexual woman is every person who claims social and legal recognition as a woman (JESUS, 2012, p. 15).
5. This film was chosen because it was released in the same year that Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, today Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, initiated the debate that is now known as gender ideology.
6. In this article, I recognize Ludovic Fabre's feminine identity because I understand that it is perfectly consolidated in his speech, although he is subjected to a treatment in the male gender by the society where he is inserted.
