CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This paper focuses on tensions related to pathologization and depathologization as well as medicalization and demedicalization brought up by recent Argentina?s Gender Identity Law. In May 2012, the Argentine National Congress approved the Gender Identity Law, which regulates the change of name and sex of people whose gender expression does not agree with the one legally registered. Moreover, the law includes the provision of hormone treatment and surgical intervention in the public health programme. This represents animportant advance in state recognition of the demands of transvestites, transsexuals and transgendered people, as a result of work undertaken by the LGBTTTI movement in Argentina. On the basis of this fact, and from a queer-feminist perspective, in this paper we inquire into the political and institutional discourses that circulated during parliamentary discussion of the law. We analyze this process focusing on tensions related to processes of pathologization and depathologization as well as medicalization and demedicalization. From a biopolitical view, heteronormativity organizes populations under healthy/unhealthy and normal/abnormal categories. This is why subjects whose bodies, identities and desires are located outside the norm are pathologized. On the other hand, by medicalization we understand a process that reduces the complexity of vital processes to medical or psychological issues, focusing the cause in individual problems, underestimating social causes, and deactivating individual and collective potential. We analyze the law itself and arliamentary debates from an exploratory point of view, using qualitative content analysis. Within this perspective the meanings involved on those discourses are addressed. Next steps will consider inquiring about the Law?simplementation in the medical field.

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