Prazer da existência reconhecida (Per): experiências de travestis e transfemininas na educação formal

Abstract

This thesis examines the experiences of travestis and transfeminine individuals in formal education during their transitions and the assumption of gender identity, conceiving formal education as a paradoxical territory of in/exclusion and, at the same time, of affirmation, belonging, pleasure, and satisfaction. The study aims to understand how these experiences are configured by articulating interactions of gender and sexuality, educational norms, and non-metaphysical perspectives such as feminist theory and queer theory, with particular attention to the pleasures that emerge along these trajectories. A qualitative approach is adopted, grounded in narrative interviews that privilege participants’ self-recognition and the situated production of knowledge. The fifteen narrative interviews were conducted between 2022 and 2025 with participants from different regions, states, and cities in Brazil, selected through snowball sampling, involving subjects aged 23 to 59 whose trajectories form a mosaic of contexts, generations, and educational pathways. The analyses indicate that, although traversed by violence, cisheteronormativities, and in/exclusions, these trajectories enable the elaboration of the “pleasure of recognized existence,” presented as an analytical operator constructed from excerpts of the interviews. This pleasure manifests across three interconnected axes: interpersonal recognition, a sense of competence, and the valuing of knowledge. These axes create fissures in hegemonic logics, activate displacements, and sustain the social incorporation of diversity and the affirmation of singularities within spaces of formal education. It is thus reaffirmed that, for travestis and transfeminine individuals, formal education—even when permeated by in/exclusion, normativity, and normality—also constitutes a space of pleasure grounded in recognized existences.