RITUALIZED EXPERIENCES OF PAIN: Love and Domestic Violence among Transgender Women in Brazil

To understand the connections between gender and violence is necessary to take into consideration the overlapping between gender and other forms of social differentiation, like class, race and ethnicity. Even though there are some improvements in terms of intersectional analysis, accounts on how cisgender and transgender women are differently affected by violence are lacking. This chapter focuses on the perspective of the transgender women about domestic violence. The discussion is theoretically framed by the literature about gender, state, violence and precariousness. The findings show that violence is translated into other registers of language in which pain can operate legibly and verbalized. Since most of the narratives are based on intimate relations with relatives, intimate partners and friends, the experiences of pain are ritualized in both silencing and joking spaces. Here, the silence is a way to cope with the continued exposition to pain, danger and death they experienced. Further, transform pain into jokes and comic stories are a way to share information about critical situations. These ritualized experiences of pain are continued bureaucratic, institutional and intimate relations that entangle suffering and gender in transgender women’s daily life.