This paper investigates the discursive and identity dynamics that emerge from speech events co-constructed by travestites who work as sex professionals and two female safer-sex outreach workers. Guided by a socioconstructionist perspective on the relations between discourse and social identities (MOITA LOPES, 2003), the study analyses the processes of (re)construction, (re)negotiation, and management of (perceived or constructed) differences among the interlocutors. More specifically, following Bucholtz and Hall (2003, 2004, 2005), I analyse the tactics of intersubjectivity produced by the interlocutors in the interactional process that put their differing identities in friction. The analysis indicates that identities are always fluid, multilayered, fragmented and changeable. This flexibility of social identities is highly visible in interactions that put differing identities in tension, bringing about the necessity of constant re-makings of subject positions to administrate the differences among interlocutors.
identity; intersubjectivity; language and gender; transgender; STD/AIDS prevention