Entre o objeto e o sujeito de pesquisa: reflexões autoetnográficas de um cientista transmasculino nas ciências biológicas

Abstract

To introduce this work and explain the reasons that led me to produce this thesis, I recall part of my history and its connections with the biological sciences, linking experiences and memories. As a transmasculine scientist in biology, I experience the practice and life of science in a dual manner: as a subject and object of research. As I transitioned gender during my academic life, I got to know and re-know academia. I moved through social locations as a person and researcher, in a scientific field that, historically, has woven theories and hypotheses about people like me without considering our voices. And it is from this dual position that I seek to reflect on the possibility of emancipating silenced voices in biological sciences. I do an autoethnographic analysis combining a theoretical perspective “from above” - through theoretical references from the philosophy of biology, theories about science and its relations to values, and feminist and transfeminist references - with a view “from below”, based on my experience as a transgender scientist in the biological sciences, being the first and, at times, the only one at the institute and research groups that I am part of. My analysis is guided by the following questions: what are the impacts and tensions of the presence of trans bodies and experiences in the scientific practice of the biological sciences? What possibilities for epistemological reformulations would foster a production of knowledge beyond cisnormative limitations? In the first section, I discuss institutional policies, starting from Brazilian universities and expanding to the international context, regarding topics related to the trans and travesti community, using two case studies that have already been widely discussed and relating them to the current situation, after ten years of struggles and achievements of human rights. In the second section, I discuss the friction and dialogue between borders as a transgender researcher, illustrating through my experiences the cohabitation of diverse social locations of scientists. In the third section, I discuss scientific practice permeated by cisnormativity and paths towards plural possibilities that take into account transfeminist points of view.