Transgender Studies

Despite significant advances in recent years, Argentina's transgender community still faces structural social exclusion. For a vast majority of transvestites and transgender women, early expulsion from the family home and the educational system results in having to resort to prostitution as their only option for surviving. Police edicts and other similar devices are used to penalize prostitution and persecute transgender people in public places, showing that prejudice and violence against their identities also manifest in the control of urban space. Here I present the results of an in-depth qualitative linguistic analysis of a 2018 television news report about the temporary relocation of the transgender sex workers from their usual location in the Bosques de Palermo, the biggest public park in the City of Buenos Aires. The theoretical frame is Critical Discourse Analysis and the methodology is inductive and qualitative. The analysis centers on the linguistic resources that define the socio-discursive representation about the transgender sex workers in relation with urban space and the city's government. The bases of the analysis are the Synchronic-Diachronic Method for the Linguistic Analysis of Texts and the Method of Converging Linguistic Approaches. These methods revealed, in the first place, that the transvestites and transgender women are represented as mere occupants of public space through their close association with the discursive category of Space. In the second place, they are represented as fundamentally passive in relation to the Government of the City of Buenos Aires; while, at the same time, the government's responsibility for their displacement is systematically mitigated. Finally, the lack of work alternatives to prostitution for the transgender community is naturalized through the persistent association of the discursive categories connected with transgender people, prostitution and urban space. If we compare these results with those of previous research, we can see that these discursive features-none of which challenge the status quo-remain one of the basic components of the socio-discursive representation of transgender people elaborated by the mainstream media.

Este trabalho discute sobre os percursos de uma estética gay e queer, demarcando contradições entre os dois termos, com o intuito de pensar acerca das
possibilidades de empoderamento e diferença. Em diálogo com exemplos históricos
e contemporâneos, tensionamos os desdobramentos de uma estética totalizadora, e
propomos alternativas para pensar gênero nas produções visuais e de moda.

The issue of sex reassignment first came up with Bülent Ersoy in the Turkish legal practice. Ersoy, after sex reassignment surgery in London
in 1981, requested to change the gender register written as “female” to “male”. Bülent Ersoy’s requests were rejected by the Supreme Court
each time. Seven years later, the legislator made the provision for sex reassignment and legal recognition of sex change was achieved. This
amendment was made by Law No. 3444, also known as Bülent Ersoy Law.
The experiences during the procedure of this law, especially the reasons of the Supreme Court, give important clues about the gender
problem and violations of transgender individuals’ rights. When we look at the media and judicial decisions of the period, it is seen that
hostile or condescending behaviours towards transsexuals are dominant. While it may be easier for the media to use freedom as
arbitrariness, the judiciary is expected to provide justification for its decision. Therefore, judges sometimes referred to the body and
sometimes to the soul when making decisions about Bülent Ersoy. However, in both cases, these references were intended to reinforce
gender stereotypes. When physicians did not allow transsexuality in their reports, the court used this as a justification and stressed the
spirit. When the physician's reports stated that Ersoy was a woman spiritually and physically, the judges did not recognize this report and
this time emphasized the body.
Nevertheless, legal regulation 3444 has been a turning point for the recognition of transsexuality. Although the concepts of body and soul
were intended to be used as a means of control, it led to a conclusion that enabled freedom. This provided the legal basis for meeting the
demands of transsexuals.
Keywords: Gender, Body, Soul, Transsexual, Sex Reassignment

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.