Maternity institution on trans children

Possibilitating joint of emancipatory transformation

Abstract

This is an initial investigation, which is carried out within the framework of a Master's thesis in Communication and Human Rights and addresses how being the mother of a trans person confronts us with a discursive void, the lack of vocabulary to name the experience, which questions us first in the semantic field, and then in the field of our "own" sexuality, to finally feel in the body and the conscientious stiffness of the Institution of Motherhood. It works with mothers of a group that integrates and accompanies trans children, whose first advances will be presented to the debate.

The reading of Gender in dispute by Judith Butler (2007), helps us to reflect that this lack of vocabulary is the result of a systematic plan of invisibility produced by the heterosexual normative framework, because “the legal structures of language and politics create the current field of power; there is no position outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of their own legitimizing actions” (Butler, 2007: 52). On the other hand, "for Laclau, social relations are structured discursively: the social order cannot be thought of" pre "or extradiscursively because the meaning and discursiveness of practices is a condition of their intelligibility" (Rapisardi, 2019: 16 -17).

With regard to the intitution of motherhood, it differs from the expierence in that - as Rich reflects - “the universe of experience, once opened, does not contain what the institution expected” (Rich, 1976: 19). Now, when this maternity is exercised on people who manifest a gender and sexual self- perception different from what they are instilled, the experience challenges the institution.

The institution requires that the mother, in addition to providing her body for reproduction, ensure that the child becomes a subject, adult, mature, fit for life in this society in which its main function will be the reproduction of the same model. In the case of raising trans infancy, this turns out to be specifically against the system. How to do to comply with a rule that institutes as a mother but in the same act excludes dissident children? We will take the concept of performativity, of Butler, to apply it to the institutionality of motherhood as this would also result from a performative exercise and we will articulate it as follows: She states that "the iterable thing about performativity is a theory of the capacity for action (or agency), a theory that cannot deny power as a condition of its own possibility" (Butler, 2007). Iterable means that it has the ability to repeat itself, but not the certainty of the same action, that is, it can be repeated, however, as an iteration, it will not necessarily be identical to the previous repetition. In Butler out of itself, Malena Nijensohn (2017) argues that: Butler wonders where the discourse gets the authority to realize what he names through repetition. […] Legitimation is obtained through a repeated act, that is, through an iterative practice of citation. […] And it is in this iteration process that the possibility of its failure is instituted (Nijensohn, 2017: 176). And later expresses "every normative instance, every instance of power, is stalked by its own failure" (Nijensohn, 2017: 180). Then, the mothers of trans people would be generating “a space in which the force of the regulatory law can turn against itself and produce re-articulations that call into question the hegemonic force of those same regulatory laws” (Butler, 2018: 18), because in the institutionality of motherhood, it is precisely this repetition that entails the possibility of transforming that institutional framework, but the content of the performative act of the mother of trans children, which, as a result of the attempt to resolve the contradiction and the urgent need to force the semantic field to broaden the discursive structure and make the experience of dissident nurtures intelligible-,this, as a re-iterative attempt, tends to an emancipatory transformation of the regimes of production of the visible and the enunciable.

This research is about the experience of being a mother of trans people in a society normalized and organized in binary, heterosexual (and therefore exclusive of diversity), patriarchal and capitalist code and the concept of content will allow us to articulate performativity of motherhood with trans childhoods.