- Author: Berenice Bento
- ISBN: 85-7617-100-7
- Editora: Garamond
A version of her doctoral thesis, defended at the Graduate Program in Sociology at the University of Brasília/UnB, A reinvention of the body: sexuality and gender in the transsexual experience, by sociologist Berenice Bento, focuses on transsexuality as an object of deliberately provocative reflection : What is the subject’s ability to subvert gender norms? The author does not discuss gender from the biological point of view, but from the performances that subjects – such as those who undergo sex reassignment surgeries – update in their daily practices in order to be recognized as legitimate members of the gender with which they identify. To this end, Berenice makes a historical review, contextualizing the transsexual problem, since its appearance in the middle of the last century, as a pathology, until the present day, in which, with the entry of Social Sciences and the voice of the subjects involved in the discussions, intends to deconstruct “transsexualism” as a disease.