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 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).…”