A professora de inglês trans: um estudo de caso à luz dos Estudos Queer e da Psicanálise

Abstract

This research-spectacle dares to bring to the stages of Applied Linguistics (LA) located at the Faculty of Arts of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (FALE/UFMG), the words of a trans English teacher in her relationship with the great Other of Culture, the radical alterity that interpellates her female subject (BUTLER, [1997] 2021). Mulan, 26 years old, makes herself exist daily in the Brazilian reality that is markedly cis-heteronormative, prejudiced and that kills the most LGBTQIAPN+ around the world. The research is based on the tripod composed of Applied Linguistics, Queer/Gender Studies and Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis as they have in languages the raw material that gives life to the three fields. Therefore, this study is a psychoanalytically oriented intervention research that makes use of the clinical interview methodology in the hope that the subject, in free association of her statements, can find answers to her impasses from the transference relationship with the researcher. This relationship allowed us to generate the corpus, duly recorded in audio and video, from five thematic interviews later transcribed. The corpus also included manuscripts produced by Mulan, our methodological innovation called “the mirror stage”. We asked her to watch the recordings and write everything that came to her mind in the bet that she could be “affected” by the very saying, shaking meanings and causing displacements. For our analysis through the lens of Psychoanalysis, we make use of both Lacan's Theory of Meaning ([1964] 2008) and his Theory of Four Discourses proposed in his Seminar 17 (1969). So that we could better understand this cis-heteronormative Other with whom Mulan bonded, we sought theoretical support for our critique of sex-gender power structures in Gender Studies, having as main references Sax ([2005] 2019); Spargo (2017), Weeks ([199] 2018), Louro (2013;2018;2018b), Monteiro & Ribeiro (2020), Barbo (2008), Foucault (1988), Gutman (2009), Edelman (2021), among others, and in Queer Studies addressed mainly by Butler ([1990]2003; [1993]2020) and Borba (2020). Our analyzes point out that: throughout Mulan's childhood and adolescence, her trans-ideal self sought to symbolize itself in the discourse of Brazilian cis-heteronormativity, but it was in the Culture of the Other (English language) that she placed her bets to dribble the impotence that the cis-heteronormative Culture imposes on her body, which is said to be deviated from the norm.In the bilingual schools market in which she worked at the time of this research, in order to sustain her teacher position, Mulan is forced to give up her jouissance as she surrenders to the master’s order imposed by the cis-heteronormative Culture, castrating her desire to be the trans-teacher inside the classroom. Finally, we realized, through our methodological innovation, that Mulan resignifies her relationship with Brazilian Culture, showing us an affection that was previously veiled.