Encarnando a europeia: Biografias corporais, (i)mobilidades e subjetividades de trabalhadoras do sexo trans e travestis em Lisboa

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand the construction of corporeal biographies and heritage dispositions of Brazilian trans women and travestis sex workers in mobility to Portugal and/or the European continent. Through comprehensive interviews, and theoretically oriented by a Sociology on an individual and body scale, I analyze the dispositions for body modifications and the production of the Self produced over the life course that pass through different social, geographic and historical contexts. The outcorporation of female gender identity makes visible, from an early age, the normatization dispositives of cisheteronormativity and the representations of abjection associated to the corporalities and subjectivities of the interlocutors. In this sense, I begin by analyzing how the social assumptions of feminine body markers interact with the inequalities of class, family support, racialization and age/generational that impact on the construction of corporeal biographies and the processes of subjectivation. Mobility to Europe is perceived as one of the most crucial turning points in their trajectories, by providing different experiences of sociability in public life and in prostitutional fields. Transnational mobility also changes the individual heritage of dispositions that guide the body projects, reflecting different gender expressions and different sexual practices. Mobility across the European continent collaborates in the construction of sex work strategies that enable the accumulation of economic capital and the attainment of a position of power in the field of sex work. Therefore, physical and geographical transits highlight processes of accumulation and conversion of various capital – i. e. of mobility, body, cultural, social and economic - which make it possible to acquire agency and autonomy in life course and sex work. Thus, different corporeal biographies correspond to different types of (i)mobility to/from Europe which, in turn, give visibility to different forms of inequality present on the European continent. The accumulation of economic capital that different experiences of (i)mobility provide, will give access to different biotechnologies of body transformation convertible into unequal forms of body capital, all of them, however, converging to the ideal of the embodiment of the European. The difficulties faced at the country of origin related to class inequalities and/or structural transphobia and representations of abjection to the body are thus re-signified throughout the experiences in Europe. This results in the acquisition of symbolic capital which recognition involves, to a large extent, the embodiment of resources and symbols associated with the representations of glamour and luxury attributed to the European experience.