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White cisgenderness, as a concept and category of analysis,in studies produced by transvestites and transsexual women

Abstract

In this article I discuss silence as an ideological strategy to maintain the distribution of power as it currently stands. I focus my debate on formal education spaces, more specifically on higher education, and thus problematize how silence acts to establish the heterosexual cisgender white man as a norm of humanity and silence as a strategy to deny the full existence of transvestites and transgender women, black and white, in the academic space. As a theoretical contribution, I use the concept of intersectionality developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and the concept of Epistemic Injustice (Miranda Fricker, 2007) and thus establish a dialogue with the field of social representations, with studies of ethnic-racial and gender relations, with transfeminist studies and, thus, question the extent to which stereotyped and reductionist views regarding transvestites and transsexual women, black and white, circulate in academic spaces and to what extent they reiterate the hierarchies related to the production of knowledge, producing silences and erasures, both as people and as producers of knowledge.

KEYWORDS: Silence. Transvestites. Cisgenderness. Knowledge. Whiteness.