FROM ESSENCE TO PROCESS. LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF DISCURSIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER IDENTITY IN TRANSGENDER PEOPLE'S LIFE STORIES

The human rights of trans people (transvestites, transsexuals, transgender, and non-binary people) have been, and continue to be, violated on the basis of pathologizing definitions of their gender identities. These definitions entail essentialist assumptions, regarding identity as fixed and immutable. This work presents some results of the linguistic analysis of oral and written texts in the first person produced by trans people. The corpus consists of life stories and autobiographical narrations produced in Buenos Aires City between 2012 and 2016. The methodological paradigm is interpretativist, the methodology is qualitative and inductive, and the theoretical framework is Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis is based on the synchronic-diachronic linguistic analysis method, the theory of information hierarchization and tonalization, the theory of processes and roles, and the theory of conceptual metaphor. The analysis highlights different strategies whose communicative aim is to construct a representation of gender identity centered on its dynamic rather than its static aspects. In this regard, linguistic evidence allows the claim that gender identity concerns dynamic processes rather than fixed essences. Thus, it can be concluded that the discursive representation of gender identity elaborated in these discourses challenges the essentialist assumptions of the hegemonic and pathologizing model, not just on the content level, but specially on the formal level.