Image politics and disturbing temporalities: on "sex change" operations in the early chilean dictatorship

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of images in the press coverage on the first trans woman in Chile who managed to successfully change her legal gender in 1974, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and who identified herself with the name of Marcia Alejandra. First, the author explains how sex change worked as a device in Chile during that period. Then, the author discusses a leaflet with photographs of Marcia Alejandra, configured according to the rhetoric of “before” and “after” her gender reassignment surgery, in order to analyze how these images published in the press disrupt our understanding of the political and medical narratives on the body that encode trans historicities, and even of a progressive temporality itself.