“Male body with female gestures?”: a transvestite’s image made by nurses

Abstract

This is a qualitative research based on the Theory of Social Representations aiming at describing the transvestite’s image revealed by nurse(s). The Free Word Association Test (TFAW) was applied, consisting of the stimulus ‘Transvestite’, for 110 Postgraduate nursing students, from a public university located in Salvador city, Bahia state, Brazil. Twenty of them answered the semi-structured interview. The TFAW data processed by the free software Ensemble de Programmes Permettant L’analyse des Évocations (EVOC) subsidized the corpus organization of the interviews guided by the content analysis. The investigated group revealed an image about the transvestite from elements of biological and social, sexual orientation and gender identity dimensions, pointing towards the emergence of a progressive perspective on the way of being a transvestite.

Social representation; Transvestite; Nurse; Image