Bordering the Unpronounceable Autobiography and Diagnosis of the “Sex Change” in Chile 1968-1975

This article addresses the “contract” between transsexual autobiography and medical diagnostic in an attempt to understand how the medical category of transsexuality was incorporated and understood in Chile during the late-1970s and the first years of the dictatorship, a period marked by both the intensification of repressive policies and the Catholic-conservative pro-creationist and familialist discourse, and by the progressive implementation of a neoliberal mode of governance. Resorting to the analytical and methodological tools of trans studies, I analyze how the relationship between the visible, the enunciable and corporeality was organized in a series of documents: medical writings published by the Chilean Society of Anthropological Sexology in 1968, the book Memorias de un cambio de sexo, the first transsexual autobiography published in Chile in 1975, and a series of press releases. Through an analysis of this corpus, I seek to examine the ways in which some transsexual subjectivities managed to combine permeability and penetrability in order to negotiate with the medical discourse and at the same time open a mode of individual and community self-enunciation, in a context prior to the emergence of organized trans groups.

KEYWORDS
Medicalized transsexuality; trans autobiography; Chilean dictatorship