Can the state depatologizate and demedicalizate our bodies? Questions toward Argentina´s Gender Identity Law

ANAHÍ FARJI NEER; ANA MINES CUENYA

CABA

Congreso; IX International Conference International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society; 2013

Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society

On May 2012 the Argentine National Congress gave approval to the Gender Identity Law that regulates the change of name and sex of people whose gender expressions do not agree with the ones legally registered. Moreover, the law includes hormone treatments and surgical interventions into the public health program. This represents an important advance in the state recognition of the demands of the groups of transvestites, transsexuals and transgendered people, due to the work developed by the LGBTTTI movement in Argentina. However, It also raises questions about its implementation in the medical field. On the basis of this fact, and from a queer-feminist perspective, in this paper we inquire the political and institutional discourses that circulated during the parliamentary treatment of the mentioned law. We analyze this process focusing on tensions related to patologization and depatologization´s process as well as medicalization and demedicalization. From a biopolitical view, hetero-norm organizes population under healthy-unhealthy and normal-abnormal categories. That´s why subjects whose organical process, identities and desires are located outside the norm are pathologized. That is, that they are identified with the sickness and abnormality. On the other hand, by medicalization we understand a process that reduces the complexity of vital processes to medical issues o psychological, focusing the cause in individual problems, underestimating social causes and deactivating individual and collective potential. We will analyze the law itself and the parliamentary debates from an exploratory approach, using a qualitative content analysis technique. Within this perspective the meanings involved on those discourses are addressed.