The discursive-media investment on the transexual body: the transexuality dispositive

Abstract

This article privileges the discursive-mediatic investment on the transsexual body in contemporaneity. Joining the theoretical-methodological assumptions developed by Michel Foucault, we launch a descriptive-interpretive look at a series of enunciative magazines, considering them as places of enunciation, whose function of existence makes possible to construct thematic routes that bring to the fore significant devices and configurations that produce meanings about transsexuality. We aim to understand the functioning of the transsexuality dispositive in discursive-mediatic practices materialized in covers of magazines that deal with the transsexual body. In the analytical gesture undertaken, there were three great ways of enunciating the transsexual body: the beautiful body, the innovative body and the exotic body. In this dispersion of meanings, the discursive unity of productivity was revealed, as an emerging need to participate in other social spaces that were until then restricted to these subjects. Productivity occurs in the rupture of subjectivities, which denounces a discursive emergence of the population's government for the production and validation of truths and, consequently, for the exercise of disciplinary and regulatory practices, thanks to the positivity of power. This is because these knowledges function as discursive strategies that meet a contemporary political demand, which consists in placing the transsexual subject in the social productive chain.