Acceso usuarios
Santiago, Chile
Existe amplia literatura que da cuenta de la importancia que tiene el cuerpo para las personas transgénero y cómo la relación con este parece ser un nodo crítico en la conformación de su identidad. Las investigaciones en este tema se han centrado en cuestiones relacionadas con los procesos de afirmación de género, sin una consideración profunda del lugar del cuerpo más que como depositario de sentido. Nuevas líneas de investigación proponen una mirada centrada en los aspectos pre-reflexivos de la experiencia del género que relevan la importancia de lo sensorial. El énfasis en el estudio de la dimensión sensorial de la experiencia, comprendida como la interacción entre un sistema sensorio-motriz y el mundo que lo sostiene, genera una particularidad que responde a elementos tanto biológicos como culturales. Esta mirada permite el diseño de estrategias de intervención afirmativa y sensibles con las problemáticas situadas de quienes consultan por procesos de tránsito.
There is extensive literature that reflects the importance of the body for trans* people and how their relationship with it appears to be a critical node in the establishment of their identity.
Evidence for this has been provided by both queer studies and clinical research on the physical and mental health of trans* people. In this regard, studies conducted in Chile are consistent as well with international research, indicating that the body is a place where identity is subjected to tension.
However, when referring to the corporeity for trans* people, most studies address it as if would be a universal experience, an instrument of social functionality that makes it possible to be recognized as a feminine or masculine object. In an effort to understand the trans* phenomenon, authors have continued to establish disjointed categories and separate the identity from the body as a mere receptacle for the subject manifesting themselves, resulting in a gaze that thingifies bodies that dissent with gender stereotypes.
This type of approach reduces experience to a mere review of social categories to study conceptions of body image and determine how to fit a ‘container’ of binary expectations that are already internalized. This perspective is not only insufficient, but it also has the potential to become pathologizing, since it tries to explain experiences of gender dissonance as mere instances of social maladjustment.
A new line of research in trans* studies proposes that the gender experience in trans* people comprises proprioceptive and interoceptive components, which appear before the establishment of a body image and play a key role in the sensory dimension of gender. From this perspective, gender is part of the sense of self since one's feeling in one's body has the particularity of being gendered.
Fausto-Sterling proposes that it is the gendered attributes and attitudes of caregivers while interacting with the infant with female or male genitals that produce a spectrum of gendered behaviors and subjective inclinations internalized as symbolic interpretations of the world.
Thus, gender/sex identity, a psychological experience beyond genitals, emerges as a unique process of interaction between a specific sensory-motor system and the environment that it inhabits.
If the emergence of gender identity is an embodied, physiological, intersubjective, and historical process, comprising interoceptive and exteroceptive elements as well as recurrent events grounded in interactions with others, it is relevant to determine how a specific culture can influence this process. The knowledge about the embodied experience of gender is historical and situated: most of the evidence produced using this approach has been collected using caucasian cisgender subjects residing in the northern hemisphere. Studies suggest that integrated, consistent experience of the body differs across cultures and that embodied experience changes when the language of origin changes. An intercultural study that included more than 45 cultures detected a range of mentalizing profiles that could be ascribed to factors such as language, values, and parenting styles in each culture.
To enrich the comprehension of the phenomenon of embodied gender in trans* people in Latin American culture, it is fundamental to pose situated questions focused on the pre-reflective, non-representational dimension of said experience, in order to offer a situated and sensitive understanding capable of informing the support delivered in gender-affirming processes, involving the whole breadth of these experiences so that they can be true opportunities for liberation. Approaches like this has both methodological and ethical implications: it helps to design better support methods for gender affirming processes, and it nourishes the knowledge from experiences of trans* people, thus contributing to de-pathologization of trans* identities.
