"As travas de jardim são unidas": etnografia da performance identitária das travestis em contextos rurais e interioranos do sertão potiguar

Abstract

Research on travestilidades is mainly presented in urban and metropolitan locus for the identity performance of travestis, with little knowledge of performance in other contexts, such as rural and inland cities. By ethnographic route, I followed five travestis between February and September 2019 in a rural/interior municipality in the hinterland of Rio Grande do Norte with some intervals, seeking to problematize and understand how they perform their gender identities and build their bodies and subjectivities. For this, I reflected on the fluidity and decentralization of these identity performances in the handling of symbols, forms of treatment and the spaces that are generated; and I analyzed, in the scope of otherness, the social visibilities and sociability built/present in the observed daily lives, based on the social markers difference of class, disability, generation and race. In one hand, we understand the agencies and diversity involved in travestilidades, corroborating the expansion of the mosaic and kaleidoscope of Brazilian and northeastern travestilidades, and highlighting the heterogeneity based on the different markers of subjectivation and displacement. On the other hand, the Northeast and its [rural] inland cities are demystified as “backward” and locus of conservative and repressive morality, and the geometry of spaces is problematized, which socioculturally propagates and defends the hierarchy of the “civilized” urban/metropolitan over the “primitive” rural/inland cities, claiming the recognition of cities as places of transit, where urban or rural municipalities are interconnected by multilateral displacements, calling into question the essentialization and binary nature of the rural, urban, inland cities and metropolis.