GENDER, KNOWLEDGE AND MEDICAL INTERVENTIONS ON SEXUALITY: POSSIBILITIES FOR TRANSFORMATION AND MATERIALIZATION OF DIFFERENCES

Abstract

Based on anthropological studies on gender and sexuality, this article defends a feminist perspective engaged with the critical analysis of the processes of production of binary and essentialist norms and materializations. Its starting point is a series of situations in which medicine has shown itself committed to producing a substantialization of the gender difference. The concept of substantialization refers to the constantly renewed rooting of gender in certain bodily marks. The so-called intimate aesthetic surgeries are analyzed as an exemplary case of a new stage in the materialization of difference in bodies.