Digitalização de si e transmasculinidades: a constituição de subjetividades gendradas e a produção de saberes no Facebook

Abstract

Male transgenderity refers to people who are not in conformity with the gender attributed to them by a compulsory cisgenerity and who constitute and express themselves as subjects in the spectrum of masculinities. We understand compulsory cisgenerity as the binary and biologizing normative logic that invariably links a materiality of the body to a gender identity by its sexual characteristics. In this thesis, using the genealogical method and with a qualitative strategy of data collection and analysis, we talked to trans men and analyzed their productions on the Facebook social network platform in order to understand the technological agency on the production of gendered subjectivities. We present the results showing the mutual constitution of a rationality in the conduction of the subjects in the micropolitical dimension (governmentality), those discourses that are considered to be true (veridiction) and the forms in which we become and are shaped to become an “I” with certain specificities (subjectification process) and their technological crossings over bodies and digitalized practices of transmasculine subjects. As a result we have found that Facebook is used by interlocutors to inform, debate, express and organize themselves, get to know each other, relate, help and be helped by other people, for professional purposes and to be entertained. It also allows access to crucial information about transgenderity (self-recognition, hormonization, political organization, rights and laws, access to services, etc.) and about masculinity policies. It is also seen as a network that promotes an activist performance on political causes. From the point of view of masculinity, the online production of these men seeks to denaturalize cisgender masculinity and normalize transmasculinities in their constitutive aspects. Their production is articulated especially in speeches that affirm that they are "real" men even without a flesh penis attached to the body, even without being violent, even with a body built with sexual technologies, undergoing transition or not, even if having to legally rectify first name and sex, and even if being able to get pregnant. The articulation goes in to the production of normality for transmasculine identities as a semiological battlefield. It is also configured in the theoretical movement that states the cisgender identities as a way to denaturalize their dynamics, hierarchies and actions of stigmatization, marginalization and dehumanization of those bodies that are at in disagreement with their normative matrices. However, when considering the algorithmic governmentality and data mining that takes occurs on Facebook, we come to the conclusion that the insertions between the experiences and the strategies of self-registration, narrating and relating in this environment are constantly generating data, whether it is consented or not by the users. These data are captured while they are not yet organized, and then processed and structured into the creation of a profile based on the relationships between them (profile that does not correspond to the “real” subject, but a machinical production based on this data relation). As a result, on the one hand, we have a greater cohesion of common ideas of affinity between transgender men, which facilitates political articulations between them, but which, on the other hand, creates an environment that is immunized to the possibility of difference.