Luzes, Wonder, Ação! Subjetividades travestis em São Paulo, décadas de 1970 e 1980

Abstract

This research aims to historicize the emergence of transvestite subjectivities in São Paulo between the seventies and eighties, through a montage of the crossed stories of Claudia Wonder, Andréa de Mayo, Brenda Lee and Thelma Lipp. The focus of the thesis is on practices of subjection and subjectivation, taking Wonder's autobiographical texts, the filmic records of his performances and modes of self-elaboration as a guiding principle. I emphasize dissubjecting strategies, the construction of oneself by the other and by oneself, stylized aesthetics, provisionally stable. I privilege practices that trigger other ethics and policies, arts of the self, renewed ways of being in life, of being what one was not before, ceasing to be. I argue that these practices, updating the sayable ways of existence and relationships, show the ambivalence of power that allows the processes of subjectivation. I highlight gender performances that indicate subjectivation as a doing that opens up new situations and twists within a field of probabilities, of possible ways of seeing and appearing.