‘What’s in a name?’ The discursive construction of gender identity over time

ABSTRACT

In recent years the concern with gender diversity fuelled by the rapid expansion of transgender studies highlighted multiple possibilities for constructing gender through discursive enactments. As the self-declaration of gender identity gained legitimacy, personal narratives became increasingly relevant. Verbalizing gender identity is instrumental for extending the very notion of gender as belonging to the domain of individual subjectivity and amenable to as many names as people’s non-transferable experiences allow. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals in Portugal, the article examines the multiple terms used to self-describe and affirm gender identity over time. Reconstituted step-by-step through longitudinal lenses, each semantic journey illustrates how individuals appropriate different lexicons and self-describe at the intersection of multiple categories, resist biomedical codifications of gender transition and reinvent the terms of binary discursive regimes. Through their discursive practices, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in the Portuguese context challenge one-dimensional readings of gender identity. While combining narrative approaches with regimes of power, the paper mobilizes Foucault’s notion of discursive formation and Bourdieu’s concept of field. ‘What’s in a name’ is more significant than Shakespeare ever imagined. The more the nexus-bodies-names-identities is disarticulated, the more individuals gain semiotic agency for self-describing their gender identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Trans individuals
• gender identity
• semiotic agency
• semantic fields
• discursive regimes
• semantic self-description

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Trans is a provisional umbrella term applied apply to those who challenge the naturalness of gender as emanating from the sexed codification of bodies, whether they identify as transsexual, transgender or gender variant, such as genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid, among other designations. For an overview, see Stryker (2008), Valentine (2007), and Halberstam (2018).

2. In 1923, Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term ‘Transsexualismus’, from which David Oliver Cauldwell would introduce the English term ‘transsexual’ in 1949. Later, Harry Benjamin claimed to have been the first to use the term ‘transsexual’ in a public lecture in December 1953. Benjamin popularized the term in his 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon.

3. Within non-Western cultures, individuals from groups such as Berdache in North America, Kathoey in Thailand, Fa’afafine in Samoa, Hijra in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, among others, are sometimes considered to include a third gender, that is, gender identities that do not fall exclusively into the male/female or female/female categories. They may or may not identify as transgender or non-binary. In fact, non-binary is a more common umbrella term in the West. For an overview, see (Darwin, 2017).

4. Travesti derives from the Latin Trans+Vestitus, literally Cross+Dress, via the French or the Italian. As Vasconcelos (2016) pointed out, ‘the evolution of the term, from a meaning similar to that of transvestite (whatever the reason for it, but namely theatrical) to that of female trans sex-worker. This shift occurred first in Brazil and later on in Portugal. Besides Drag-Queen, Transformista is the present word used to designate “stage-only” female trans non-sex-workers. The word and the people it is supposed to described are often associated with South America, namely Brazil (but also Argentina or other countries). As if we would be speaking of a gender particularity of those countries. Of an untranslatable gender category.’

5. In 2018, Law 38/2018 of 7 August was approved. With this law, Portugal became the eleventh country in the world to impose a legal procedure for gender identity recognition based on self-determination, which allows the separation between medical protocols and legal rights. Individuals now have the right to choose their own gender without the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. That is, according to DSM-5, it is the ‘discomfort that may accompany incongruence between the gender experienced or felt and the gender assigned at birth’ (APA, 2013:451). For more information on Portugal, see Aboim, 2020.

6. The terms paneleiro or puto are derogatory terms that can be translated into English as ‘faggot’. The terms are voiced by Noa as fundamental element of his identity. The option for literally transcribing these terms is ethically grounded on the compromise of respecting all participants’ subjectivities and identifications. In a reflection on ‘Who can say faggot?’, Gordon (2019, p.3) notes that the ‘use of slurs is flexible regarding who and what they are describing, meaning that a slur does not always have to be slurring when used in the appropriate way or by the right people, such as when in-group members use them in reclamatory ways.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FP7 Ideas: European Research Council [615594].

Notes on contributors

Sofia Aboim

Sofia Aboim is a tenured research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Her research interests include gender, feminisms, masculinity studies as well as social theory, justice, inequality and postcolonial studies. She is currently working on book projects about gender futures, power and justice while developing research on the same topics. In the last five years, Sofia coordinated the project TRANSRIGHTS - Gender citizenship and sexual rights in Europe (Consolidator Grant) financed by the European Research Council (ERC).