Transsexuality: a lonely journey of identity

Abstract

The book of João Nery, Lonely Journey: memoirs of a transsexual thirty years later, reveals the author's route in all the stages of his struggle for body change. Born in a woman's body, John seeks a way that matches his gender identity, male in this case. This work investigates the relationship between body, gender and heteronormative determinations. A society, still conservative and homophobic, makes more difficult the changes in body shapes, which has consequences in civil life, since these people are prevented from changing their names in the documents, practicing the profession in which they were majored in, because they had another body and another name. The transsexuality issue will be addressed by the theoretical bias of Judith Butler in two of her books—Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity and Giving an Account of Oneself—and Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, considering not only to gender and sexuality issues, but also the related pain when narrating. The text of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the closet, will be important to discuss the acceptance of sexuality to himself and to the other, discussing the relationship between public and private, from the social changes created by the LGBT population groups.