State Repression and Sexilio Transfemale bodies as disputed scenarios under Turbay Ayala's Security Statute

Abstract

The body as a territory and narrative structure of what we are has had to adapt to the socio-political conditions in which it lives, reconstruct its borders and agitate its needs and interests according to the historical moment in which it is enunciated. In contexts of war, being alive under a system of oppression that establishes a sex-gendered regime from the heteronorma1 becomes a political act of resistance. However, when the norm is transgressed, living is no longer a right, except for those who make violence a structural and theatricalized phenomenon that turns individual prejudices into military action projects (CNMH, 2015). That is why to talk about Decree 1923 of 1978, better known as the Security Statute, implemented by the government of Julio César Turbay Ayala between 1978 and 1982, is to recognize the failure that the national security doctrine had in Colombia. This decree violated the human rights of many people and in the case of trans women, it demonized them; it expropriated them of their identity and bodily autonomy; it tortured them and transmuted them into the internal enemy, making them deserving of annihilation and s-exile2. It is a moralizing reading of the body that transgresses its limits and exposes it to a violence that transfers the figure of the external enemy to one embodied in anyone who goes against the interests of the political order of the moment. In this sense, let us analyze in detail.