The body as a bridge: materiality, gender and inequality in trans and non-binary trajectories

Abstract

This article proposes a materialist, realist and relational approach to trans and non-binary subjectivities, rejecting both biologicism and radical social constructivism. It argues that the body should be understood as a mediation between organic inheritance, embodied dispositions, symbolic systems of classification and social regimes of inequality, without forgetting “the biological force of things”, as Bernard Lahire puts it. Gender dissidence is analysed as a socially structured trajectory, marked by mobility within the gendered social space and by intersectional inequalities. The article advances a perspective that conceives the body in its imbrications, as an embodied social relation, historically produced, materially constrained and institutionally regulated.