April 5, 2024

Feminist Studies

Ana Cristina Santos

This thesis aims to analyze the parenting experiences of trans men in Brazil and Portugal, in dialogue with the frameworks of intimate, sexual and reproductive citizenship in each context. To this end, the mechanisms for normative and social acceptance of health and parenting demands and the promotion of social policies were considered. Although some progress has been made on the subject, situations of reproductive vulnerability, social isolation and deprivation of rights were the focus of the 16 biographical-narrative interviews in this investigation. Through thematic analysis, it was possible to uncover some of the strategies used by the interlocutors to compensate for the absence of the state, such as peer support, which is fundamental in the search for acceptance and recognition, from a perspective of interdependence and the development of an ethic of trans care. Resisting the pathologizing tendency of the current biomedical panorama that informs policies and regulations, while challenging social representations of pregnancy, childbirth and responsibility for parental care, has relocated these men to different places on the scale of "being a man" in Western society. The establishment of parenting relationships, whether through biological pregnancy or as a result of affective relationships, has shown the development of skills, the learning of daily care and has allowed the re-signification of stories of abandonment and abuse that permeated their experiences. However, the lack of social and institutional recognition of these experiences revealed the systematic deprivation of access to citizenship levels, hindering the possibilities of generating offspring and exercising parental care. This situation means that not only reproductive technologies in the area of health, but also the guarantees of the law need to be put into effect, starting with the normalization of bodily and reproductive dissidence from a perspective of self-determination over sexuality, fertility and bodily and sexual integrity. As long as these experiences are excluded from regimes of intelligibility, models of reproductive practice and care will not be transformed.

Keywords: Parenting; Care and Ethics of Care; Trans Men; Reproductive Citizenship; Biographical Narrative Interviews