Abstract
This article aims at understanding, from the case of the criminalization of LGBTphobia in Brazil, how criminalizing demands were articulated by social movements with the defense of democracy and human rights. Considering that Brazilian LGBT activism has grown in struggles against the repression of the criminal justice system towards sexual and gender dissidents, we intend, at first, to understand how demands for criminalization policies arose among activists. Departing from queer criminological studies that have analyzed how gender and sexuality structure prisons and the criminal justice system, we reflect on how prisons and prison struggles have become structuring features of contemporary sexual politics. From this case, at last, we seek to illuminate aspects of the historical process underway in Brazil in the last decades in which democratization has gone hand in hand with the expansion of the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. The object of this study is the speeches of the hegemonic groups in the Brazilian LGBT movement, in order to investigate in them how demands for criminalization and incarceration were built. Thus, we are based on an empirical analysis of the documents produced by Brazilian LGBT activism since the 1980s, as manifestos, records of national meetings and law projects. In following the rising and rooting of this agenda, we argue that not only has LGBT phobia become a problem of crime and prison, but LGBT struggles have become criminalizing and carceral. Keywords: crime; LGBT movement; democracy; criminalizing rationality DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-11-10 Publication date: June 30 th 2021
Highlights
From queer criminological inquiries about queer investments in punishment (Lamble, 2013) and its intertwined relations with the spreading of neoliberal rationality in all social spheres (Dardot Laval, 2016), we frame the criminalization of LGBTphobia in Brazil as a case study of these social phenomena
The hegemonic activisms of sexual and gender dissidents started to guide criminalizing demands as the result of a specific and contingent historical process: that of Brazilian redemocratization in neoliberal and punitive turn. Instead of normalizing this historical present as the only possibility of struggles for citizenship, the brief reconstruction articulated in this article, based on the analysis of documents of LGBT activism, intends to outline how it became possible for these struggles to become criminalizing
As we show in the article, the criminalization of LGBTphobia has taken a prominent place in the social movement agenda linked to struggles for democratization
Summary
From queer criminological inquiries about queer investments in punishment (Lamble, 2013) and its intertwined relations with the spreading of neoliberal rationality in all social spheres (Dardot Laval, 2016), we frame the criminalization of LGBTphobia in Brazil as a case study of these social phenomena. The hegemonic activisms of sexual and gender dissidents started to guide criminalizing demands as the result of a specific and contingent historical process: that of Brazilian redemocratization in neoliberal and punitive turn Instead of normalizing this historical present as the only possibility of struggles for citizenship, the brief reconstruction articulated in this article, based on the analysis of documents of LGBT activism, intends to outline how it became possible for these struggles to become criminalizing. Since the 1st Encounter of Homosexual Militants in 1979, the idea of including in the 1967 Constitution the prohibition of discrimination for “sexual option” had been presented, an agenda that would be taken as inclusion of non-discrimination for “sexual orientation” in the National Assembly Constituent in 1987 as part of the strategy to guarantee civil rights to homosexuals (Camara da Silva, 1993) It was in the 1980s that the first attempts to criminalize sexual discrimination among some leaders of homosexual activism were invented, who tried between 1984 and 1985 to present a criminalizing bill in Federal Chamber of Deputies (Martins, 2020). The first time, that, a bill was presented that proposed to make discrimination based on sexual orientation a crime, it was in 1999 with 1904/1999 bill by Deputy Nilmário Miranda (PT), which aimed at adding “sexual orientation” to the Racism Act of 1989, which aims at
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