Categories in suspense. Re-readings of the sexological, juridical and religious discourses around the “sex change” in the sixties in Chile

Abstract

This article discusses a series of sexological, legal and religious texts circulated in the 1960s by the Chilean Society of Anthropological Sexology in order to understand how ‘sex change’ became visible and enunciable in the Chilean context. This archive is approached from the analytical tools of biopolitical theory, trans* and queer studies, in order to show how the process of unblocking the medical notion of transsexuality can be regarded as one of the turning points that marked the passage from a vision of sexuality centered on a biomedical framework to one centered on its legal aspects, on consent and the notion of citizenship. The purpose of this approach is to propose a critical reading the cisexual framework that these discourses mobilized, but also to bring to the fore the ways in which they proved instrumental in opening up a space of intelligibility for trans lives. The re-reading of these historical texts, which so far have received scant attention in academic analysis, seeks to offer a situated study that allows us to historicize and complexify the ways we envisage the relationship of the trans* population with state institutions in Chile. Finally, this text also intends to contribute to the questioning and denaturalizing of some of the dichotomies that seem to pervade the current discussions around gender and sexuality.