Sentidos e significados da intersexualidade na literatura: silenciamentos da vida e da arte

Abstract

The terms intersex and intersexo refer to people born with chromosomal, genital or gonadal characteristics that deviate from traditionally established models of a female or male body. Based on the framework of Socio-Historical Psychology, this study aims to investigate the conceptions of intersexuality, its sense and its meanings in scientific and artistic literature. A historical review of the continuities and ruptures in the conceptualization of intersexuality was developed, highlighting its use in research in Psychology, in addition to exploring the possible interconnections between the fields of Art, Literature and Psychology. The methodology is developed in five phases: exploration, crossing, refinement, description and interpretation. In the exploration phase, the mapping of literary works, through the social cataloging site Goodreads yielded 165 titles, which were systematized and stored in our own database. Through the crossing, one duplication of material was excluded. During the refinement, the following inclusion criteria were considered: stand-alone fiction books, of the genre novel, written in Portuguese, English or Spanish, with an intersex main character. Then, the 27 books that met these criteria were described. It was identified, in the historical series, the earliest work − Raptor by the author Gary Jennings, published in 1992 −, and that the years 2013 and 2015 feature the most publications (5). It was also found that in the synopsis of 14 books, the intersexuality of the main characters is not explicit. In these, the themes of silence and secrecy are presented as emblematic. In the final stage, the complete reading of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides was conducted and passages, plot points and speeches by characters that refer to intersexuality were delineated. Four thematic discussions of parts of Middlesex (Books One, Two, Three, and Four) were used– through the contradictions experienced during the reading – to analyze fragments of the work and possible dialogues between gender, intersexuality and Vygotsky's theoretical assumptions were analyzed. Subsequently, the thematic axes of meaning (gender, body, biomedicine and silence) were discussed as central aspects of the tangled construction of the concept of intersexuality in the work. The senses and meanings of the work were discussed, among which the following stand out: silence as coming from fear, shame, ignorance, oppression and the untranslatability of certain experiences into words; gender as a mutable category, socially, historically and culturally constructed; the body, which is crossed by social determinations while also being a biological body; and biomedicine which takes the body as an object of study and produces binary discourses of (a)normality. The final considerations allow us to reaffirm the fruitfulness of the use of online mapping tools for research in Psychology and the potentiality of the interlocution between Art, Literature and Psychology. In conclusion, the secret and the silence are configured as prominent elements in the experience of intersexuality in both life and art, appearing in emblematic ways in the historical rescue, in the Middlesex work and the analyzed synopses. Finally, it reinforces the importance of studies on the phenomenon of intersexuality in Psychology and the construction of bridges for dialogue between Psychology and Art.