Sexuality from the view of the oppressed

Articles by researchers address the experiences and demands of oppressed groups like women and homosexuals

By Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP – To address questions of gender, sexuality, race, nationality and other social markers of difference based on the experiences and demands of people who have been oppressed throughout history is the objective of the collection Discursos fora da ordem: sexualidades, saberes e direitos [Discourses of a new order: sexualities, knowledge and rights], recently released by Annablume Editora.

The work, funded by FAPESP under its Publications Research Support program, was organized by Richard Miskolci, professor at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), and by Larissa Pelúcio of the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). These researchers are responsible for the study group Corpo, Identidades e Subjetivações [Body, Identities and Subjectification].

The 12 articles that make up the collection were produced following debates at the Sexualities, Knowledge and Rights seminar held at UFSCar in 2010, funded by FAPESP.

“What differentiates this book, like the seminar, is the fact that it is not based on disciplinary thinking but rather on the knowledge of people like women, transvestites and transsexuals,” said Miskolci. The social movements that emerged during the 1960s, the organizer noted, challenged authorized scientific thinking, giving rise to new research topics and subjects.

“Feminists, homosexuals and blacks began to demand that their political needs be recognized. Little by little, this changed the dynamic of the production of knowledge, characterizing the historical event that Michel Foucault described as the insurgence of subjugated knowledge,” he said.

According to Miskolci, the texts in the collection valorize the contemporary demands inherited from this historic moment. It includes previously unseen articles from the queer movement—a branch of feminism that explores questions of sexuality—such as those bythe North Americans Judith Jack Halberstam and Marcia Ochoa.

The book also includes an essay by Márcia Arán, a psychoanalyst and professor at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) who passed away in 2011, in which she discusses how transsexual experiences point to the limits of traditional psychoanalysis.

“We begin from the empirical, from the experience of people whose humanity many times isn’t even recognized, to rethink the models of hegemonic social theory,” said Miskolci.

Among the subjects broached in the book is the creation of the first clinic for transvestites in Brazil, at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia’s Medical School.

The experiences of intersexual people, previously called hermaphrodites, are also related, including their confrontations with medical professionals who wanted to alter them surgically when they were infants. In addition, the book presents the experiences of Brazilian men and women who migrated to Portugal and Spain in search of personal realization and who were forced to renegotiate their identities and desires in accordance with the predominant ideas about Brazil and its inhabitants in those locations.

The last four essays are dedicated to these groups’ demands for citizenship. They clearly show the limits of the existing legal system, which was molded by hegemonic conceptions of those hoping to vindicate their rights.

The book was released in the United States in May during the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association. It will be officially released in Brazil at the beginning of July, during the Brazilian Anthropology Meeting at PUC-São Paulo.