“Utopia, my body is not my body” is a documentary photographic project that seeks to question the place of silence and concealment that transsexual identities have lived while encouraging a more respectful and inclusive social dialogue with sexual diversity.
Through this visual tour, the experience of bodily change is shown from the transition from one gender identity to another in an exercise of re-signification and discovery of one’s own feeling.
The transformation of the body is explored from a biographical perspective and from, which shows the lives of young people who materialize this transformation. In this exercise of encounter, the past dialogues with the present in a testimonial story where the transsexual body leaves the space of silence to enunciate and make itself visible. This gesture exposes more than just the scars of a surgical operation or traces of a re-inhabited body, it also seeks to account for the political exercise that exists in the right to a sexual identity in a context where this decision is denied.
The photographs presented seek to delve into childhood memories, the traffic conflict and the construction of the self. The work gathers different experiences around being and living as a transsexual in Chile. The protagonists, representatives of different ways of inhabiting gender, show how the experience of identity migration is lived in a context where the hegemonic construction of gender questions and tries to invalidate – through different types of violence – any expression outside the norm. Subversion is in the very gesture of assuming transsexual: using hormones, genital reassignment operations or heels are some of the elements that plastically conform to a definition of identity, expanding those structures that closely define the feminine and masculine. Each of those portrayed is shown in front of the camera in complicity with the search for a record that accounts for the intimacy of the body, its transformation and the vital resistance that inhabiting the desired body means.
Text Constanza S. Gómez
