Bodies Beyond the Norm, Lives in Resistance: Practices of Desire and Survival among Trans Women Sex Workers in Lima

Rabines P.P. · Letras (Peru) (2026) · DOI: 10.30920/letras.97.145.11

Resumen

This article aims to analyze how regimes of truth, in dialogue with colonial and patriarchal structures, have shaped trans identities as deviations from the norm in Peru, legitimizing practices of exclusion and precarization. Based on a decolonial approach and an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lima between 2018 and 2019 with seventeen trans women sex workers, it examines the strategies of resistance they develop against normalization devices imposed by medical, legal, and social discourses. The results show that, far from being passive subjects, the participants affirm their lives and desires through everyday practices of dignity, affection, and collective care. In particular, the findings highlight processes of resignifying the body that challenge the boundaries between control and autonomy, as well as forms of agency that question the pathologization and historical silencing of sexual and bodily dissidences. The article engages with biopolitics (Foucault, 1976/2017; Agamben, 1998), the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; Lugones, 2008), and contemporary debates on normativity and dissidence (Butler, 2004; Spade, 2015), to show how the trans body becomes a contested territory. In this way, the article contributes to academic debates on biopolitics, bodies, and the production of the anomalous in sexuality, through a situated analysis in the Peruvian context.

Instituciones: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú