Between Citizenship and Prisons: Criminalizing LGBTphobia in Brazil

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 30th 2021