Encruzilhadas do parentesco: relacionalidade e transição de gênero nas experiências de homens trans e suas famílias no Brasil

Abstract

This thesis analyzes how the gender transition of Brazilian trans men reconfigures family relationships, highlighting relatedness as a processual, unstable practice permeated by disputes. Based on an ethnography conducted between 2020 and 2023 with nine trans men and eleven cisgender relatives in three cities in the Northeast of the country, it demonstrates that transition does not imply a definitive break with “conventional” family models, nor a simple reproduction of cisheteronormativity. Rather, it is a process of rearticulation in which subjectivities and bonds are transformed amid negotiations traversed by power relations. Each chapter examines different dimensions of this process: the forms of recognition and constitution of the gendered subject; the politics of emotions mobilized, especially by activist mothers; the effects of transition on the stability and continuity of kinship; the disputes around language and acts of naming; and the centrality of materialities, such as bodies, hormones, and other substances, in the mutual production of gender and kinship. The central argument is that gender transition constitutes a relational process in which relatedness and gender are mutually remade. Within this dynamic, relatedness emerges as a porous and constant transformation, capable of both incorporating and excluding dissident forms of gender. Thus, the thesis shows that kinship can be a site of acceptance, but also of coercion and hierarchies.