A History of Healthcare Rights and Brazilian Politics, 1964-2007

FAIN: FT-254532-17

Jose Amador
Miami University (Oxford, OH 45056-1846)

A book-length study about the politics of healthcare rights in Brazil, 1964-2007.

My book project examines how the institutions of medicine, media, and the state came to constitute “trans” as a flexible and politically useful category of identification. At first glance this might seem like a narrow historical topic, but the emergence of this category as an epistemic formation and a culturally-situated practice is central to the formation of Brazilian modernity. To reconstruct this history, the project traces the development of trans activism in Brazil from the mid-twentieth century to 2007, when the public health care system began providing free sex reassignment surgeries and hormone treatment. It follows the evidence trail left by trans persons, health activists, and cultural producers to reveal the struggles that led to state-subsidized transition therapies. Lastly, it offers new critical insights into the contingencies of deploying nonnormative categories by recovering the voices and actions of trans people who lived in rapidly changing political circumstances.