Social conventions and its modulations

The articles in this issue of Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad present diverse local contexts, from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, México and Panama, and offer significant contributions to analysis connecting gender and sexuality with violence, health and citizenship themes.

The researches of Álvarez & Arroyo and Barreto Ávila both study the relations between violence and gender through feminist epistemologies in two distinct national contexts. The former addresses the naturalization of violences in marital relationships and sociability spaces, from the perspective of girls and women in the city of Medellín, under the effects of the national Colombian armed conflict. Particularly, it focuses on the exacerbating notion of female bodies as “territories of discipline and control”, analyzing the inequalities identified by these women and girls in their everyday life. Despite the reproduction of gender stereotypes, exemplified by domestic work, interdiction of leisure activities, symbolic and structural limitations to access education, and specially partner’s violent practices, the authors observed resistance and agency on the part of these women, challenging the stereotypes and attributing new meanings to marital and family relations. The research questions narratives containing an emotional grammar of fear and dependency, to achieve “more pacific, equitable and democratic relationships”, beyond the ongoing armed conflict resolution process.

The article of Barreto Ávila analyzes gender violence in a university context, specifically a rape report which took place in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma do México and became an emblematic case, and arguments that the “testimony” is a form of individual and collective reparation when judicial and/or institutional responses insist solely on victim blaming and stigmatizing elements. The article highlights the disputes on the (re)signification of traditional juridical categories pertaining to rape and, discussing with Boltanski (1993), Jimeno (2010), and Ross (2000), among others, reveals the case repercussion dynamics in diverse spaces and institutions provoked by the testimony becoming public and collective. Through an emotional-political language, the empathy and legitimacy earned produced several effects and displacements.

Within the background of a broader context where conservative forces in Latin America are strengthening, both in local and national levels, two other articles present contributions to examine the process of LGBT citizenship recognition in the region. Building on many data sources-academic works, governmental documentation, and digital media report news-Aragusuku & Lopes analyze initiatives directed at the LGBT population in the context of public policies in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, from 2007 to 2017, as related to the state’s political context and the activities of the local LGBT movements.

Galindo and collaborators present the experiences of Tunja residents, a conservative Colombian city where the Catholic Church has traditionally exercised a distinctive control. Seen as a “taboo territory for the expression of sexual diversity”, tradition and rupture both take the scene in the middle-sized city. Through the voices given to the interviewed people, homophobic scenes in public and family contexts are revealed; but have a counterpoint in narratives of social and political participation of the LGBT community in the few civic and sociability spaces already achieved.

The many forms of “inhabiting the norm” (Butler 1999, 2003) or the social convention related to masculinity are emphasized in five articles of this issue. Through the ethnography of “orgy parties for men” in Rio de Janeiro, Barreto joins a series of researches presenting, in the last several years, an anthropological perspective on sexuality and its abject expressions in Brazil (see, among others, Díaz-Benítez, 2015; Pelúcio, 2009). The author reveals a context in which homosexuality is a possible modulation of masculinity, where issues related to desire, eroticism and a virile performance, as characterized by the “macho” subject, determine those men whose presence is allowed or denied ingress in these spaces.

Examining the documentation of military trials between the 1960s and 1980s, Fernández simultaneously explores the initiatives to restrict homosexuality through its characterization as a “crime against military honor”, on the one hand; and on the other, the conceptual and regulatory gaps through which sexual and affective relationships between men persisted and, in some contexts, were justified.

Navone analyzes the representations of masculinity by men with physical disabilities in discourses produced by and about writer Nick Vujicic; and Josito, a porn actor with a physical disability, and other cultural and medical sources. The discussion is situated in the intersection of gender studies, queer theory, disability studies and crip theory. The author is critical of a “pedagogy of normalcy” produced in relation both to meanings surrounding the disabled body and the male heterosexual normativity.

Passamani & Saggese focus on the 2009 documentary “Bailão”, a traditional space of male sociability in the city of São Paulo. Analyzing the intersection between male homosexuality and generation, the authors describe the intense transformations in the experience of long-time users of the space throughout the last decades, framed by the broader changes through which emerged a “gay citizenship”, as proposed by argentine sociologist Ernesto Meccia (Meccia, 2011).

The issue of conventions related to masculinity is also present in the instigating article of Madi Dias about an extensive fieldwork conducted among the Guna People in Panama. The author focus on the experience and perspective of the omeggids, pejoratively treated in the anthropological literature as “berdaches”. The two spirit people such as the guna omeggids have elicited the examination (or, more frequently, the curiosity) of travelers and ethnographers since the “discovery” of the New World. Instead of insisting, as did some of the classic authors (Clastres, 1978), how the assumed “homosexuality” of these persons is particularly integrated socially among these peoples, Madi Dias presents a renewed perspective deeply implicated in this experience and, through elaborations on friendship inspired by Foucault and on care by feminist theories, resituates contemporary processes of citizenship in relation to sexual and gender identity.

As introduced in the beginning of this text, an important part of this issue is dedicated to the connections between gender, sexuality and health. These themes are present in the article of Coitinho Filho, presenting ethnography of sociability networks of young people living with HIV/AIDS in Rio de Janeiro. The analysis focus on the events called “encounters” by these networks, spaces of sociability and care. Using an approach from the anthropology of emotions, the author examines an emotional grammar and its political dimensions in narratives of suffering.

This issue also contains the first number of a two-part 2018 dossier on HIV/AIDS in Brazil. These dossiers emerge from the particular interests of researchers from diverse social sciences and humanities disciplines - Public Health, Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Psychology - in the reinvigoration of debates and contributions on the epidemic from a sociocultural perspective. AIDS-related practices and policies in the last decade have been characterized by changes in the epidemiological profile, affecting particularly young people and “men who have sex with men”, and by the Brazilian government focus on the so-called “combination prevention” (Brasil, 2017). It presupposes the use of resources of biomedical origin, such as the pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis, combined to the articulation of biomedical, structural and behavioral interventions. Despite advances in biomedical prevention alternatives, we face a conjuncture where social responses to the epidemics have been weakening, and its spaces to voice important gender and sexuality issues are being progressively reduced.

The dossier in the current issue results from debates which took place in the Work Group “Articulating gender, sexuality and other differences in everyday HIV/AIDS prevention: perspectives on social change processes”, organized in the 11^th edition of the congress Fazendo Gênero, in the city of Florianopolis, from July 30 to August 4, 2017. Its organizers, Regina Facchini (Pagu/Unicamp), Thiago F. Pinheiro (Nepaids/USP) and Gabriela J. Calazans (Nepaids/USP) present a group of researches focusing on the relation between the epidemics and the production of social differences, both in terms of the epidemiological distribution and the discursive construction of the disease.

In the next issue of Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad, the second dossier is organized by Monica Franch (UFPB), Ivia Maksud (Fiocruz), Felipe Rios (UFPE) and Claudia Mora (IMS/UERJ), with researches debated in the Work Group “STD/HIV/AIDS, Policies and Subjectivities”, organized in the 2013 and 2016 editions of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Health Brazilian Congress (Abrasco). In this dossier works examining the social and sexual interactions of people living with HIV/AIDS, and the perceptions of social actors regarding new technologies of testing and prevention, will be presented.

Through its editorial focus on this two-part thematic dossier, our journal hopes to contribute with a framing tool for the fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemics, emphasizing desires, identities and activisms in Brazil

Referencias bibliográficas

• BOLTANSKI, Luc. 1993. La Souffrance à Distance. Morale Humanitaire, Médias et Politique Paris: Éditions Métaillé. 288 pp.
• BUTLER, Judith. 2003. Problemas de gênero: feminismo e subversão da identidade Rio de janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
• BUTLER, Judith. 1999. “Corpos que pesam: sobre os limites discursivos do ‘sexo’”. In: LOURO, Guacira Lopes (Org.). O corpo educado: pedagogias da sexualidade Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, p. 151-172.
• CLASTRES, Pierre, 1978. O arco e o cesto. Pierre Clastres, a Sociedade contra o Estado São Paulo, Brasiliense, 119-143.
• DIAZ-BENITEZ, María Elvira. 2015. “O espetáculo da humilhação, fissuras e limites da sexualidade”. Mana [on-line]. Vol. 21. Nº 1, p. 65-90. Disponível em: Disponível em: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0104-93132015v21n1p065 [Acesso em 28/08/2018].
  » http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0104-93132015v21n1p065
• JIMENO M. 2010. “Emoções e política: a vítima e a construção de comunidades emocionais”. Mana . Vol. 16. Nº 1, p. 99-121. Disponível em: Disponível em: https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-93132010000100005 [Acesso em 28/08/2018].
  » https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-93132010000100005
• MECCIA, Ernesto. 2011. Los últimos homosexuales: Sociología de la homosexualidad y gaycidad Buenos Aires: Gran Aldea.
• Ministério da Saúde. 2017. Diretrizes Nacionais de Prevenção Combinada em HIV/Aids. Disponível em: Disponível em: http://www.aids.gov.br/pt-br/gestores/organizacao-dos-servicos/diretrizes-nacionais-de-prevencao-combinada-em-hivaids [Acesso em 27.01.2018].
  » http://www.aids.gov.br/pt-br/gestores/organizacao-dos-servicos/diretrizes-nacionais-de-prevencao-combinada-em-hivaids
• PELUCIO, Larissa. 2009. Abjeção e Desejo - uma etnografia travesti sobre o modelo preventivo de Aids 1. ed. São Paulo, SP: Editora Annablume.
• ROSS, F. C., 2000. Bearing Witness: Women and the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission Thesis of doctor Philosophy. University of Cape Town. Disponible en: https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/361 [consultado el 10.06.18]
  » https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/361

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2018
• Date of issue
  Aug 2018