The Interactional Production of Narratives on Trans Categories: The Role of Body Modifications

Abstract

In this article, we investigate how participants self-identified as travestis and transsexual women negotiate gender identity categories during meetings of a support group in a non-governmental organization in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We are interested in (a) how trans categories become relevant in talk-in-interaction and in (b) how these categories are constructed vis-à-vis biomedical discourse about transsexuality. The corpus of this research is composed of seven hours of video-recorded interaction, which were analyzed and transcribed following Conversation Analysis (CA) theoretical principles and methodological procedures. Our results point out that participants oriented to the role of body modifications in stressing identity category differences among travestis, transsexual women and gay men. We noticed that narrative analysis inspired by CA emerges as a powerful apparatus to understand the process of membership categorization. Data are in Brazilian Portuguese.

Keywords

• Gender
• Membership Categories
• Biomedical Discourse
• Transsexuality
• Travestility