Untranslatable Subjects

Abstract

This article employs Bruno Latour's notion of “translation” to examine the ways by which anglophone discourses of transsexuality are deployed in the Brazilian context. The author argues that transsexuality is utilized by the medical class in ways that refuse to medicalize the bodies of travestis, delegitimize their access to health care, portray them as inauthentic and improper women, and render their identity untranslatable and thus invisible. In order to get access to medico-legal rights, travestis and transsexuals have formed a united political front that seeks to reduce the importance of sex-reassignment surgery as a signifier of authentic gender variance, while at the same time asserting travesti subjectivity as unique and distinct from both transsexuality and transgender identity. The author concludes that the academic community needs to develop new methods of analysis to critique the pathologization of gender-variant identities in different sociocultural contexts, avoiding a Eurocentric frame of reference.

The failure of postmodern biopolitics: some notes on travesti beautification technologies and practices

“…Likewise, and as Jarrín analyzes in his study on plastic surgery in Brazil 13 , the country's public health system has limited resources to perform it on patients with fewer resources. Plastic surgeons and psychologists have to decide which patients "deserve" surgery based on the idea that, formally, only the reconstructive surgeries can be covered.…”

“…Biopolitical technologies are not deployed in the same way on all populations. We know that in public Brazilian hospitals, poor people are asked to assume the risks of experimental plastic surgeries before these procedures enter the market and produce significant economic returns 26 . We can then speak of a biopolitical hierarchy where some bodies matter more.…”

El fracaso de las biopolíticas posmodernas: algunos apuntes sobre las tecnologías y prácticas de embellecimiento travestis

“…Asimismo, y como Jarrín analiza en su estudio sobre la cirugía plástica en Brasil 13 , el sistema de salud público del país cuenta con recursos limitados para realizarla a pacientes con menos recursos. Los cirujanos plásticos y psicólogos tienen que decidir qué pacientes "merecen" la cirugía de acuerdo con la idea de que, formalmente, solo se pueden cubrir aquellas cirugías reconstructivas.…”

“…Las tecnologías biopolíticas no se despliegan de la misma manera sobre todas las poblaciones. Sabemos que en los hospitales públicos en Brasil se les pide a las personas pobres que asuman los riesgos de las cirugías plásticas experimentales, antes que estos procedimientos entren en el mercado y produzcan grandes rendimientos económicos 26 . Podemos hablar, pues, de una jerarquía biopolítica donde algunos cuerpos importan más que otros.…”

The MSM category as bureaucratic technology

“…In the case of the former, anthropologists ask: how can biomedicine and public health do better when it comes to serving MSM (or, in today's parlance, key populations)?4 In the case of the latter, they ask: What are the shortcomings of the MSM (or other gender/sexuality identifications) category itself? How does it fail to capture the complexity of local, culturally inflected sexual and gendered identifications and behaviors?5 Between and beyond these two important threads in the literature, a number of anthropologists have traced the travels and workings of sexual and gender categories, showing how they act as important levers through which people make claims toward resources, medicine, and monies, often theorizing categories as artifacts of the AIDS industry and its intersection with the globalizing discourse on human rights and systems of resource distribution (Boellstorff 2011;Cohen 2006;Boyce 2007;Lorway, Reza-Paul, and Pasha 2009;Nguyen 2010;Benton 2015;Jarrín 2016).…”