O discurso de um lugar (im)possível: considerações sobre o potencial paratópico de travestis e transexuais

Abstract

At present, Brazil is not only the country that kills most transvestites and transsexuals in the world, but it also the largest consumer of pornography involving trans people, according to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and specialised sites. Taking this social and cultural context into account, the purpose of this thesis is that of discussing, within the scope of French Discourse Analysis, the problematic insertion of transvestites and transsexuals in the universe of discourse. For this reason, in the first chapter, on investigating the current notion of ―place of speaking‖, from its very genesis, and establishing a parallel with the prevalence of a system based on places and on the discourse positions of coenunciation and overenunciation (Maingueneau), we consider that the strength of identitary self-representation and its influence upon the production of knowledge do indeed amount to a kind of discursive and epistemological change that, to a certain extent, destabilises the construction of academic knowledge. In the second chapter, apart from the statistics that confirm the high rates of violence against trans people within Brazilian national territory and steps taken to tackle transphobia, we also show some possible definitions for the terms ―transvestite‖, ―transsexual‖ and ―transgender‖ which appear in different discourse spaces, highlighting the sheer complexity of gender identity issues. We now move on to the third chapter where, based on the notion of the discursive formula (Krieg-Planque), we analyse a series of occurrences of the syntagma ―LGBT‖ in several news reports, and deduce therefrom the relations of power and opinion that emerge within language practices, due to the difficulty in referring to those people who would be represented by the letter ―T‖ in the above acronym which represents diversity. Then, in chapter four, we gather normative documents of the legal, medical, artistic and educational fields, which regulate trans people‘s right to existence, to their bodies, and to their names. This compilation backs up both the paradoxical belonging of transvestites as part of society, given that their full right to citizenship is sometimes confirmed and other times rejected, as a result of the political interests of the groups that alternate in power, and also confirms the effects of establishment of decisions taken by the judicial sphere, given the value of truth that legal discourse grants unto itself in order to become legitimate, even though this can also be done by resorting to other types of constituent discourse, especially those of a religious or a scientific ilk. In addition, we establish the state of the art of the very concept of paratopia (an exchange between place and non-place) over twenty years of Maingueneau‘s work; after that, we propose that the study be continued, which would make it possible to link the study to artistic expression of several different genres of discourse that do not correspond exclusively to literary works of famous authors. In the fifth and final chapter, we select the autobiography Vidas Trans – a coragem de existir [Trans Lives – the courage of extisting] (MOIRA et al., 2017) and make use of the notions of the paratopic clutch and also use the seven instances of identity paratopia (namely familial paratopia, sexual and/or gender paratopia, social, maximum, physical, moral, and psychic paratopia) as categories for analysing some excerpts. Finally, just like in the case of the literary canon, we reach the conclusion that autobiographical characters mobilise their paratopic creative potential to generate the paradox of their (non) belonging to society, thereby constructing, both in and through their ordinary discourse, a place hitherto impossible