Abstract

CECCARELLI, Paulo Roberto. The foreign body. Ide (São Paulo) [online]. 2008, vol.31, n.47, pp. 54-60. ISSN 0101-3106.

The text deals with the question of the construction of the psychic representation of the body and the acquisition of sexual difference. Based on the studies of transsexualism and of the so called “intersex states” the author discusses how the body is perceived in these two psychic configurations and analyses the elements that are present in the construction of the sexual identity and its relations to the body. Transsexual individuals feel their bodies as a foreign one, therefore in disagreement with their feeling of sexual identity; intersexual individuals are informed that their bodies became a foreign one and that he or she no longer belongs to the sex that he or she had been attributed to, which produces a Real that corresponds to none of the anatomic universals of the masculine and the feminine. As for the difference of the sexes the question is: what does this difference consists on? Where to place it? In language? In law? Or is it just an operator?

Keywords : Own body; Sexual difference; Intersex states; Sexual identity; Transsexualism.

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