On the act of naming

for a tranarchist way of language

Abstract

From the second half of the 20th century, medicine and psychiatry in Europe and the United States focused on discovering the 'truth' of transsexuality. Transsexuality was conceptualized as a diagnostic category, to the detriment of an ideal concept of body and sexuality. Thus, the naming of the ideal body was aligned with the notion of the modern, natural, pre-discursive Self, while the trans body became the Other. It is in the sense of denaturalization that the concept of cisgender emerges, outside of scientific academia and in spite of its norms. In Brazil, this emergence is due to transfeminist movements. Cisgenderity is hidden behind what Viviane Vergueiro calls a "descriptive silence": while naming the Other, the Self camouflages itself behind this silence, as an unnamed but continually reiterated nature. When named as such, academic cisgenderity often refuses to recognize its own naming. I aim, as general objective, to relate the notions of descriptive silence, naming and scientific authority, in order to support three lines of argument - namely: that there is no pre-discursivity; that the refusal to recognize the naming of the norm denotes the fragility of the dichotomies between the normal and the pathological; that language, from a tranarchist perspective, is a disruptive tool in the very act of naming the norm. As a methodology, I mobilize a bibliographical discussion between anarchist authors and critics of modernity/coloniality.