January 25, 2019

Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Catarina Martins e Ana Cristina Santos

The thesis aims to produce a dialogue between postcolonial studies and queer theory in order to make visible the experiences of Brazilian travestis who are sex workers that immigrate to the Iberian Peninsula. Travesti is a non-Western dissident gender identity within the transgender spectrum with presence in Latin America. Unlike transsexuality, their identity is constructed upon a violent encounter with the cis-heteronormative norms of society. The displacements of travestis who are in the sex work industry - understood as professional occupation, a space of recognition and often a place of positive experiences - signalize a shared field of values, hierarchies and belongings named in the literature as "field of travestilities". The construction of the body, the earned incomes and social recognition outside the traditional spaces of their circulation are amalgamated in worldviews that have in the European figure (an emic term that refers to travestis who emigrated to Europe for a short or long period of time) a position of great prestige. I depart from the concept of "travesti migrations" to observe the symbolic, corporal, territorial and social displacements of these women based on a field work that involved biographical research based on life stories and observation of their professional activity in the cities of Barcelona and its surroundings and several cities of the north and center of Portugal, besides the city of Porto. From the fieldwork, this thesis organizes: the motivations to emigrate, the issues involved in the international transit of sex workers and forms of organization of life and dislocations within Europe. From this movement of departures and arrivals, this thesis articulates the experiences of travestis from the macronarratives and borders that make them simultaneously hypervisible and invisible in academic literature, sex work and trans activism. At the same time, enacting auto-ethnographic strategies, they articulate their own spaces of enunciation and re-existence to these discourses that relegate them to the space of the abject. Therefore, I characterize travestis as post- colonial subjects given that they seek to broaden the understanding of gender beyond cis-heteronormativity by subaltern logics of re-existence thus negotiating values and belonging in this fractured locus, from where travestis elaborate their material and symbolical means (and meanings) of existence.

Keywords: Travesti; Queer; Post-colonial; Transgender; Queer migrations