Transidentities and the epistemology of sexual difference

Signs and spaces of socio-legal vulnerability

Abstract

This article discusses how the normalizing discourse of sexuality, as a device of power, stigmatizes trans-identities in Brazil, which leads global rates of violence due to transphobia. This condition is established from the existence of spaces of vulnerability, as conceptualized by Feito (2007), within social structures, in terms of how these individuals have been hampered from their legal-political autonomy and their own existence, since the data confirm the susceptibility the violence. Through a bibliographic deductive methodology, the course of the work starts from the theories developed in the field of vulnerability, considering its ontological dimension, extracting perspectives from Fineman (2021), as well as its social dimension. Thus, this work identified how the epistemology of sexual difference, according to Preciado (2022), produced in such bodies, a condition of bare life, according to Agamben (2007), or of precariousness, in Butler (2022). By exposing the intentional condition of omission by public-state institutions in the face of the existence of trans people, the need to mitigate existing spaces of vulnerability is revealed, in order to strengthen the capacity for political action and the exercise of their right to self-determination. trans, with the aim of enabling a condition of full dignity and effective citizenship in the political field.