Minoritary mystique: the religious experience of transgender boys
Male Transsexuality; Religious Experience; Care of the self; Mystique-minority
In the current context of increased intolerance and conservatism regarding gender identities and sexualities, the incursion of transsexual men into religious congregations creates ruptures in the relations of power, knowledge and subjectivation. Thus, this thesis proposes as a research question: is it possible for religious transsexual men to have another subjective experience outside the framework of regulation imposed by religions? In the field of gender and religion studies, the thesis is situated in studies on religious experience and its general objective is to analyze this experience from the religious experience of transgender boys. The study seeks to approach an interdisciplinary perspective through a composition of ethnographic and cartographic methods, using the resources of search and mapping of religious practices on the websites of some inclusive churches, participation in events promoted by churches, and interviews with transgender boys; and also by the dialogue between different fields of knowledge: philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology and etc. The thesis proposes the concept of mystical-minority for the analysis of the religious experience of transgender men. For this, we use the concepts of "consumer production" and "mysticism" by Michel de Certeau, "care of the self" by Michel Foucault and "becoming-minority" Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Through this study we have reached some conclusions: religions are constituted from cis-hetero-normative theologies and doctrines, whether of Judeo-Christian, Kardecist Spiritist or Afro-American origin; there is on the part of the LGBT population the reinvention of new religious practices, elements that point to the production of life; despite prejudice, exclusion, discrimination and murders that express a desire to eliminate this population; in the daily lives of transgender boys, there is a creative and inventive production of religiosities that are constituted through an ethic of freedom, self-care, confrontation and resistance.