(The Reinvention of the Body: Sexuality and Gender in the Transsexual Experience)
Author: Berenice Bento
ISBN: 85-7617-100-7
Publisher: Garamond
A version of her doctoral thesis, defended in the Graduate Program in Sociology at the University of Brasília/UnB, The Reinvention of the Body: Sexuality and Gender in the Transsexual Experience, sociologist Berenice Bento focuses on transsexuality as the object of a deliberately provocative reflection: What is the subject’s capacity to subvert gender norms?
The author does not discuss gender based on biological reference, but rather on the performances that subjects – such as those who undergo sex reassignment surgeries – enact in their everyday practices in order to be recognized as legitimate members of the gender with which they identify. To this end, Berenice presents a historical review contextualizing the transsexual issue, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century as a pathology, to the present, in which the involvement of the Social Sciences and the voices of the subjects themselves seek to deconstruct “transsexualism” as a disease.