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No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. For a vast majority of transvestites and transgender women, early expulsion from the family home and the educational system results in having to resort to prostitution as their only option for surviving. Police edicts and other similar devices are used to penalize prostitution and persecute transgender people in public places, showing that prejudice and violence against their identities also manifest in the control of urban space.
Here I present the results of an in-depth qualitative linguistic analysis of a television news report about the temporary relocation of the transgender sex workers from their usual location in the Bosques de Palermo , the biggest public park in the City of Buenos Aires. The theoretical frame is Critical Discourse Analysis and the methodology is inductive and qualitative. These methods revealed, in the first place, that the transvestites and transgender women are represented as mere occupants of public space through their close association with the discursive category of Space.
Finally, the lack of work alternatives to prostitution for the transgender community is naturalized through the persistent association of the discursive categories connected with transgender people, prostitution and urban space. If we compare these results with those of previous research, we can see that these discursive featuresβnone of which challenge the status quoβremain one of the basic components of the socio-discursive representation of transgender people elaborated by the mainstream media.
Keywords: critical discourse analysis, socio-discursive representations, social exclusion, city of Buenos Aires, urban space, prostitution, transgender, transvestites. This work deals with the socio-discursive representation elaborated in a television news report about the transgender and transvestite sex workers 1 in the City of Buenos Aires.
