"Linda, doce, fera": A construção de corporalidades políticas no concurso de beleza Miss T Brasil.

Abstract

This thesis aims to contribute to a reflexion of the process of constitution of travestis and transexuals as political and a right subjects by an analysis of discourses and practices that involved the Miss T Brasil beauty pageant, contest exclusively directed to the trans population and organized by the Association of Travestis and Transsexuals of State of Rio de Janeiro (ASTRA-Rio), in partnership with the State Superintendence for Individual, Collective and Diffuse Rights (SUPERDir) of the Rio de Janeiro State Secretariat of Social Assistance and Human Rights (SEASDH/RJ). It was made fieldwork in the 2012, 2013 and 2014 editions of this contest, as in the 2013 and 2014 editions of the Miss International Queen, world beauty pageant for travestis and transsexuals, held annually in Thailand, in which the Miss T Brasil winners has participated as candidates. This fieldwork data was complemented by a selection of written sources and interviews related to beauty pageants as this one in the past that now are invocated by the Miss T Brasil discourse, both as a tradition as part of a broader idea of trans culture . The Miss T Brasil was analyzed as a ritual of legitimacy, consecration or institution that, in a literal way, embodied and socially projected certain image or representation of the trans women . In comparison with the social imaginary that had restricted and still restricts travestis and trans women as defined by the stigma of social and political marginality, embodied in excessed and vulgar corporealities, the trans women projected by this pageant, constitute herself as a political citizenship that built a slim and health body, congruent with a type of beauty named as universal. In a subjective way, a notion of a reflexive, interiorized and voluntarist subject was promoted. Paradoxically, this distintion, constructed in a restricted group of misses, was extended to the whole trans population , for which the Miss T Brasil pageant built, as an ideal model, a political and moral subject that embodied a specially beautiful and feminine body.