Corpos visíveis: experiências de mulheres cuir desfeminilizadas

Abstract

This dissertation, entitled “Visible Bodies: Experiences of Defeminized Queer Women,” investigated the social, cultural, and political dynamics that permeate the experiences of defeminized women. The guiding question of the study was: how do defeminized bodies traverse and are traversed in a society oriented by heteronormative standards? To answer this question, the research sought to: a) identify social markers that distinguish male from female bodies; b) discuss, from a theoretical point of view, how heteronormativity affects women who do not follow normative standards; and c) analyze the experiences and resistance strategies of defeminized queer women. Anchored in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the research articulates the contributions of Writing-Reflection and Experiential Hermeneutics as theoretical and methodological paths to understand the experiences narrated by the research subjects. A qualitative approach is adopted, based on in-depth interviews with women who identify as defeminized, valuing their trajectories, memories, and ways of signifying their own bodies. The results show that defeminized bodies occupy a place of social ambiguity: while they are targets of control, surveillance, and delegitimization, they also constitute spaces for political creation, normative rupture, and the elaboration of new forms of subjectivity. By contributing to the visibility of these experiences, the research challenges normative categories of gender and broadens the debate on bodily dissidence in the Brazilian context, especially from a perspective situated in the Northeast.