Works offers a dynamic and coherent analysis of the disputes surrounding LGBTI+ rights in Brazil
The book Rights in dispute: LGBTI+, power and difference in contemporary Brazil has just been released by Editora da Unicamp. Organized by Regina Facchini and Isadora Lins França, the work brings together 32 researchers from various regions of the country in 20 chapters that debate the disputes surrounding LGBTI+ rights in Brazil.
The set of studies present in the publication, a comprehensive selection of works that mark the knowledge about gender and sexuality produced in the last 20 years in the Human Sciences, relates several areas, such as Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Education, Health and Law. The idea is to analyze the issue of the rights of the LGBTI+ population through interdisciplinarity and expose the achievements and setbacks of this trajectory that, in Brazil, began to be debated in the political sphere in the 2000s.
We invited the organizers, PhDs in Social Sciences and researchers from the Pagu Gender Studies Center at Unicamp, to talk a little about the book.
Unicamp publisher: Rights in dispute brings work on sexual and gender diversity from the last two decades in the Human Sciences. Could you talk a little about the context in which these texts were produced?
Isadora Lins França: The texts are all unpublished, produced in a context in which the debate on gender and sexuality has gained centrality in the public scene and political life in Brazil. This is a process that has been occurring since at least the 2000s, but is today marked by the rise of conservatism and the extreme right in the country, which has led us to a context of extreme insecurity from the point of view of the rights of the LGBTI+ population. In this worrying context, the authors of the book made an effort to produce an original reflection, some with research directly focused on the more immediate situation and others reviewing reference research, produced during the period of expansion of policies for LGBTI+ in Brazil, in light of the moment we live in. The book brings together 32 authors from different regions of the country in 20 chapters, offering a dynamic and accessible reading about the disputes surrounding LGBTI+ rights in Brazil. Our assessment is that the book makes an important contribution, given the comprehensive panorama drawn by the set of articles, covering fundamental themes for discussing rights in our society. Furthermore, we have authors from different institutions, from different generations, from different disciplinary backgrounds and who have recognized production in the area of gender and sexuality studies. For all these reasons, it represents a fundamental contribution to understanding the context we face in Brazil today.
Unicamp publisher: What was the role of the Pagu Gender Studies Center in the production of this book?
Regina Facchini: The Pagu Gender Studies Center is where we both work. I have been a researcher at Pagu for around 13 years and Isadora Lins França also began her professional career as a collaborating researcher at the Center in 2010, before becoming a professor at the Department of Anthropology and continuing as a researcher at Pagu. " Gender and Corporalities”, coordinated by the late professor Mariza Corrêa, one of the founders of Pagu. From this point on, issues related to sexual and gender diversity and eroticism gain greater prominence in the Center, which traditionally works with themes related to gender in conjunction with other social differences. Pagu is a center of excellence and is a reference in the production of knowledge and scientific dissemination on sexual and gender diversity nationally and internationally. The book is composed of authors who have become close to the organizers through their experiences in scientific meetings, thesis committees and intersectoral debates related to human rights and public policies over the last two decades. Hence its quality and its thematic, generational and disciplinary plurality.
Unicamp publisher: The formation of the LGBTI+ population is still a developing process. Could you talk a little about this history and how the acronyms used to describe the population have changed over time, especially in Brazil?
Regina Facchini: The entire process of establishing a framework to situate the struggles of a given social group is always in a constant process of construction and reconstruction. The LGBTI+ movement is just another case. Very interesting, from an analytical point of view, because it includes a very broad and diverse set of identities and differences housed within the same collective subject, making what already happens with “women” or “black people” a little more complex. In the book, several texts contribute to reflection on the processes of constitution and transformation of this imagined collective. The text I sign is the most directly linked to the theme and dialogues, based on contemporary research, with my master's thesis, defended at Unicamp in 2002. I maintain that the acronyms that name the collectivities imagined by the movement are produced contextually and situationally from from a very diverse set of political actors. Thus we have, for example, the term “homosexuals” in the period of political opening and the Constituent Assembly; the beginning of the use of acronyms bringing together various political subjects in the 1990s, when important international conferences were taking place that transformed the scenario of rights for women, black people and LGBTI+ and is concomitant with a process of building policies focused on Brazil; until the intensification of this process in the 2000s and the return to a critique of stable identities and priority action of the social movement through institutional channels and socio-state dialogue, especially in the period in which the presence of reactionary political actors expanded and became more visible. The article explores how there are different frameworks that coexist throughout the more than 40 years of activity of the LGBTI+ movement in Brazil. In them we can see a more pragmatic tendency, present in categories such as “homosexual” and “LGBTI” and a tendency that values attention to specificities and fluidity, which is present in categories such as “sexual and gender diversity” or “LGBTQIAP+”. .
Unicamp publisher: In some texts, the focus is to analyze not only public policies aimed at the LGBTI+ community, but also government practices that weaken and dismantle these policies. How do you see this point of conflict between the population and the government?
Isadora Lins França: The title of the book, Rights in dispute, points to a process of dispute around the rights not only of LGBTI+, but of black people, women, indigenous people, the poor, among other marginalized populations, in Brazil. This is not a clash between a certain population and the government, but a social and political dispute around the meaning of the very idea of “rights” and which groups are worthy of being recognized as subjects of rights in Brazil. In our case, those populations that were grouped under a paradigm of Human Rights protection, have their place as subjects of disputed rights and today find themselves threatened by the policies of dismantling social protection in Brazil. In the case of LGBTI+, but not only, the government's anti-gender and anti-sexual rights policies are also accompanied by hate speech, which has the effect of increasing the exposure of LGBTI+ people to prejudice, discrimination and violence. In this sense, the importance of the book transcends issues more immediately related to LGBTI+, as the articles offer a contribution to the understanding of a process that affects social protection in Brazil in a broader way and that, therefore, also has an important impact on the guarantee the lives of different populations.
Unicamp publisher: Brazil is one of the countries with the most cases of violence against the LGBTI+ community. How do the texts in the book deal with this theme and the relationships between gender, sexuality, social class and race in the sense of producing violence?
Isadora Lins França: The intersections between gender, sexuality, social class, race and generation end up running through the entire book, as we understand gender and sexuality as inseparable from other categories of difference, only gaining meaning in and through them. The theme of violence also appears in many moments of the book, if we consider, for example, hate speech as violence, the proposition of a “gay cure” as violence, the denial of the right to health as violence, among other topics covered. The articles generally point to the political mobilization of resentment surrounding the insufficient achievements of rights for the LGBTI+ population in recent decades and the creation of “moral panics” with a view to transforming this population — and those who defend their rights — into morally reprehensible subjects, who threaten the well-being of the nation. Even though violence, in its broadest understanding, is a theme that runs through the book as a whole, there is a section focused on the intersection between the categories of difference in the way they produce violence, and not only violence, but also bodies and subjects . These articles that approach the experiences of violence lived by subjects show how certain bodies are more exposed in our society, the lives of certain subjects being considered less worthy of social support that guarantees their preservation. On the other hand, these contexts of devaluation of certain bodies and subjects do not prevent hope from emerging, despite all the difficulties. My contribution to the book deals with precisely this: together with my student, Bruno Nzinga Ribeiro, we explored creative universes related to black and LGBTI+ people in the city of São Paulo, in a period that goes from the beginning of the 2000s to the current moment. In the article, we show how black and LGBTI+ people are exposed to prejudice and violence, but we also show how subjects often displace, challenge and negotiate these positions. We started from a samba aimed at black and LGBTI+ people in São Paulo and arrived at the emergence of a recent black LGBTI+ scene, reflecting on territories of affection and resistance that allow these lives to shine.
Unicamp publisher: Much of the current rejection of citizenship policies aimed at the LGBTI+ community originates from an articulation between religion and law, from the appreciation of the traditional form of family, through the idea of “gender ideology”, to a dispute over what “gender ideology” would be. human rights". How does the book address these issues that are so present in the current political scenario?
Regina Facchini: Alongside the perspective that considers the articulation between multiple differences, this is one of the central axes of the book. This indicates that there is a more general understanding among the authors gathered that there is a transnational process of reaction to social protection policies aimed at so-called “sexual and reproductive rights”. This process began as a reaction from religious sectors to resolutions of the United Nations conferences that took place in Cairo and Beijing, in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Over time, this reaction brought together a very diverse set of political support, within the scope of religious organizations, but also knowledge production and institutional policy. The category “gender ideology” is the construct around which this reaction is organized, which is why it brings us important clues as to how such processes of reactionary political articulation occur over time in different countries and continents. They only became visible — at least on a national level — as the category “gender ideology” began to circulate in apocryphal booklets distributed on church doors, on anonymous pages and on conservative institutions on the internet and in election campaigns. Those who mobilize it manipulate moralities and create “others” — “feminists”, “gay activists” — accused of seeking to corrupt “the family” and “children”. For this reason, education has been a field markedly involved in such processes in Brazil, whether within the scope of scientific production or public policies, but it is far from being the only one. As the chapters in this book indicate, “family” and “child” are emptied signifiers that cut across public policies in various sectors. These are abstractions that are displaced from what statistics show us about the structure of actually existing families or the living conditions of flesh-and-blood children in our country. The “moral panic” generated tends to place those who mobilize the accusations in a place of virtue. From this polarization, processes of devaluation of certain subjects, constituted as subjects of rights in previous decades, are set up and, in their place, abstract categories are mobilized, emptied of their connection with the plurality that marks Brazilian reality. This, of course, has repercussions on social protection as a whole, as there are several “others” created or affected by systematic defamation processes, and the connections with processes that have been approached based on notions such as anti- -intellectualism, post-truth, fake news, as well as political violence, the criminalization of political actors and social movements and the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism brought to power through popular voting.
Unicamp publisher: The current scenario presents a complete government disregard for public health as a whole. How do you see this issue when it comes to the LGBTI+ community?
Regina Facchini: It is no surprise that the current scenario has brought with it the mobilization of the concept of necropolitics. The neglect of governments, including and especially ours, with issues related to public health and human rights, leads us to think about the management and regulation of deaths and those who may be left to die. Looking at this process from the perspective of LGBTI+ people and the scientific reflections woven into studies on the health of LGBTI+ people takes us to lessons learned from another epidemic, AIDS, and another virus, HIV. The inseparability between collective health and human rights emerges as one of the main lessons learned in confronting HIV in a population for which, in Brazil, the category of concentrated epidemic is used. In addition to issues related to the growth in morbidity and mortality rates of LGBTI+ people, especially black and poor people, due to HIV, the articles in the book tell us about various risks from different empirical perspectives and disciplinary perspectives. Firstly, they tell us about a process of building more adequate health care for these subjects that is interrupted while still in progress. Thus, several chapters draw attention to the relationship between health care processes and the expression and reinforcement of social norms and how this affects the health of this internally diverse population. At the same time, they explicitly and repeatedly point out the ongoing setbacks, whether in the construction of a comprehensive health policy for LGBTI+, or in processes of depathologization initiated throughout the second half of the 20th century and which recently obtained in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), the exclusion of the last pathologizing residues. Another ongoing setback that involves other social groups is the resumption of an asylum model in mental health policies, involving the so-called “therapeutic communities” and the risks of repathologization and asylum of LGBTI+ and other devalued and pathologizable groups. The theme of Health appears in the book as an important field of disputes regarding the rights of this population and, at the same time, as a field intensely permeated by controversies, which develop in dialogue with other fields, such as legal and religious, and in the midst of dispute processes over who deserves to live and who can be left to die, whether in death or in life.
Unicamp publisher: Even in a reactionary context in relation to LGBTI+ citizenship policies, the book also indicates that there have been achievements, albeit difficult, in other fields. Could you talk a little about what positive things the community has achieved and how much you hope Rights in dispute contribute to the debate?
Isadora Lins França: It is difficult to talk about this topic when much of what has been achieved turns out to be too fragile in the face of the destructive policies that affect LGBTI+ and other populations in Brazil, as we have today. Although we followed in the early 2000s a very important process that we call the “citizenization” of an LGBTI+ collective subject, marked by the recognition of this subject as worthy of rights in Brazil, the general diagnosis is that this recognition is today in dispute and under open attack, including from our political representatives at their different levels of action. It is also important to remember that this is not a process that only affects our country: there is a rise of the extreme right on the international scene, which is accompanied by anti-gender policies, the threat to sexual and reproductive rights and neoliberal policies that dismantle the social protection system existing in these places. All of this is in dispute today, as there is also a lot of work on the part of different social actors to contain the so-called “death policies”. Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how inequalities have an important impact on the way different populations are affected, further justifying the need for universal public policies. In Brazil, in the last 20 years, there have been a series of achievements that still last, such as the rectification of names for trans people, the recognition of marriage between people of the same sex, the transsexualization process in the SUS, anti-discrimination laws in various areas, the veto of homosexuality reversal therapies — the famous “gay cure” —, among others. Even though the scenario is quite difficult, the texts reveal that the achievements obtained during this period were the result of intense social mobilization, which bore fruit beyond a more immediate moment: new demands, new vocabularies, new forms of action face the difficulties encountered today. Furthermore, the process of “citizenization” of LGBTI+ created a type of recognition that cannot be turned back so easily, since people saw themselves as subjects of rights and in a position, therefore, to claim these rights. Rights in dispute presents an important contribution to understanding the intense transformations that we have experienced in the last two decades, which are also notable for the speed with which political scenarios change. Gender and sexuality have assumed a central place in our political debate, and the articles in the book face the challenge of analyzing these disputes based on the scientific knowledge consolidated on the topic in recent years in Brazil.
Regina Facchini: In addition to having a central place in contemporary politics, it is important to remember that, despite their supposed particularity, gender and sexuality are the place from which a very diverse set of intellectuals focuses on crucial questions of national and transnational political processes that involve the dispute over who should live or who should die in our country and in others that are affected by the growth of reactionism aimed at human rights and social protection. LGBTI+ are the starting point of these contributions, we hope that they can be added to analyzes of contemporary political processes produced through other empirical starting points.
Service:
Rights in dispute: LGBTI+, power and difference in contemporary Brazil
Organizers: Regina Facchini and Isadora Lins França
ISBN: 978-65-86253-58-0
1st Edition, 2020.
536 pages, 23,00 x 16,00 cm
