Brazilian transvestites, immigrants and sex workers in Portugal and Europe. A trilogy of subalternizing discrimination. Structuralism or agentic capacity of the subject?

This article seeks to delve deeper into the role of structural and infrastructural powers in the co-production of identities, through an exercise tacitly delegated to socialization institutions, passive or negotiated by its recipients. In this context, there are authors who have organized their academic careers emphasizing another perspective of approach, commonly known as structuralism or subject agency. Structuralism, as its name indicates, comes from structure and finds in discourse and its action shaping behavior one of its privileged means. The capacity for agency and self-determination of subjects, in turn, is based on an argument that aims to substantiate the relevance of performativity as being, simultaneously, a consequence and source of discourse, maintaining with it a close relationship of dialogically conditioning reciprocity. In this context, we will seek to analyze authors who adopt one or another theoretical position, using as reference not only their bibliography, but also the case study of Brazilian transvestites who, at a certain point, considered emigrating to Portugal with the aim of dedicating themselves to the professional activity they perform in the sex industry, trying to achieve, like other migrants, better living conditions. To this end, we use participant and non-participant observation - through semi-directive interviews - and we also analyze the evolution of gender relations, which have historically been very hierarchical. The fundamental question we raise is whether the expression of gender, the activity developed and the migratory project undertaken by Brazilian transvestites are situated within the scope of social constraints that pressured them to do so, or whether, on the contrary, such phenomena occur having as their fundamental origin their agency capacity within the superstructure, or even if they result from diverse social combinations between both poles of approach.