João W. Nery e sua trajetória em busca de si: o embate das identidades de um auto-personagem

Abstract

The present research had as its focus of study the work Viagem Solitária: memórias de uma transexual trinta anos depois, which tells the life story of the author/character João W. Nery published by the publishing house Leya (2011). For this purpose, we analyzed the most important passages in the book in order to verify the journey of the author/character taking on own his gender identity We obseved through specific time frames important elements about the identity construction of the referred character being represented since his childhood until the adult life and old age considering passages from the book. Thus, we exam the issue in the book on the impossibility of João W. Nery being perceived as a man by the society, taking into account the fact that he was born, biologically, as a woman and also the body’s constraints to accomplish it. From then on, we came up with two opposite hypothesis for this reseach: the first is that even though he was born a woman, João W. Nery managed to be a man, and the second one elaborates on the impossibility of João W. Nery be indeed a man. The research used the concept of gender as performance presented by Judith Buttler (2016). With this in mind, we consider the idea of gender as being ficticious, once it is performed by repetitive acts, with the objetctive to divide the genders through binarism (male x female). Apart from this theoretical concept, we also used important parts of studies on transexual identity that have been researched among others,Bento (2006/2008) andTenório and Prado (2015), since one of the possible identities of the author/character is the male identity. At the end of the analysis, we consider that the author/character was able to construct for himself a male identity once he always recognized himself as “real man” since its early days of life.