Abstract
This book attempts to examine the murky point at which public meets private, and local and national meets the global through the development and engagement of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) movements with the state in Mexico and Brazil. In so doing, it is a unique contribution to the literature surrounding the development of human rights in democratizing political regimes, in addition to presenting an analysis of the history and emergence of LGBT movements in South America – an important counterpoint to the dominance of voices from North America and Western Europe. It is therefore a significant account of the emergence of civil rights within societies which are undergoing the process of regime change and democratization.
De la Dehesa achieves this through a historical comparison of the LGBT movements in Brazil and Mexico. Taking a comparative approach allows the emergence of a theoretical framework which, while speaking to the question of the effect of liberalism and transnational discourses such as human rights, citizenship and modernity, allows engagement with the specificity of each national context, emphasizing the primacy of the local and individual. This analysis is further nuanced by the ongoing acknowledgement throughout of the importance of individual social position, including race, class and gender, in determining the extent to which individuals have access to public life and the ability to enter into negotiations with power holders.
This is achieved by a focus on the boundary between public and private life, an area hitherto neglected in the study of LGBT movements. De la Dehesa argues that most studies of these movements focus either on the cultural and social aspects of life, utilizing ethnographic methods, or on policy outcomes, which focus instead on policy analysis. This book examines the strategies employed by activists in their engagement with the state, and the social, political and intellectual conditions which shape or determine their success. In this sense, the analysis is influenced by a symbolic interactionist perspective on identity, wherein identities and subjectivities are contingent, making the political strategies themselves neither necessary nor ‘rational’. This is perhaps the book’s greatest strength as, in focusing on this particular, contingent and fluid context, de la Dehesa is able to draw out both the unique national and social contexts of the activists involved, but also establish links between local and global narratives.
These global narratives include those relating to liberalism, citizenship and democracy, apposite given the context of regime change and the associated intellectual and social upheavals in both Brazil and Mexico throughout the period of analysis. Unlike LGBT movements in democratic societies, those in the two case studies needed to develop a discourse of civil and human rights, democracy and the importance of the split between public and private in order to articulate their claims. This is in contrast to those activists elsewhere who instead were able to utilize a discourse already in use within their national contexts. This makes the Mexican and Brazilian cases particularly interesting, as they illustrate how transnational discourses of human rights used by social movements globally are developed and deployed within specific national contexts. This also allows for a close analysis of the discourses when developed in relation to strong national discourses, wherein sexuality and reproduction (private matters) were assumed to be matters of the state, and therefore public, and further, that campaigners for sexual rights were understood as weakening the nation through the promotion of deviant behaviour. This is further illustrated through the dominance of religious discourses in these contexts, which presented a strong opponent to the liberalization of the political regime in relation to sexual rights, but also in changing the cultural taboos associated with such topics and behaviour.
This approach outlines a critique of the underpinnings of liberal representative democracy and, in particular, underscores the significance of the local in making global statements regarding the desirability or applicability of liberal theory or democracy in every context. In particular, the elite nature of liberal democratic theory, which assumes that social inequality is experienced similarly across all disadvantaged groups, is shown to be highly problematic, when we consider the differences between nations, as in this case, or within them between different social and cultural groups.
However, although this represents an ambitious and important project, this point also highlights one of the problems with this book, namely a limited engagement with these theories. The book itself is a historical account of political engagement and change in Brazil and Mexico from the early 1960s until the present day. This approach allows a description of the discursive strategies employed by activist groups and, as such, is a valuable account. Yet the potential for a greater theoretical contribution cannot be ignored. Despite the opportunity to develop the themes identified in the book, and outlined above, the focus appears to be less a theoretical development than a historical account which illustrates some of the author’s positions.
This should not necessarily be understood as a weakness. Indeed, the recording and publication of the histories of marginalized groups and the analysis of the strategies employed by such groups in pursuit of political and social change is crucially important. But some important questions remain unanswered. In positioning himself on the border between public and private, by examining the entry of a marginalized group into the public sphere of the state, de la Dehesa sits in a somewhat uneasy scholarly position, unable to address either the public or the private spheres adequately. Indeed, the focus on the role of the discourse of universal citizenship, critically important in both contexts although deployed differently in each, has meant that other, more subtle strategies and discourses may have been neglected. For example, one of the primary obstacles to the development of sexual rights in emerging democracies has been the social and cultural stigma attached to individuals not conforming to hetero-normativity. Fear of significant electoral backlash makes politicians wary of campaigning for or introducing potentially unpopular legislation. Thus an important part of achieving significant and lasting social change involves altering the perceptions and attitudes of the electorate, a fact recognized in Chapter 1. Yet the engagement of activists with the broader society is largely neglected, limited only to discussions of alliances with other groups and political protests. Although this neglect is recognized by the author in his focus on activist engagement with the state, the presentation of the engagement as binary seems to limit the analysis unnecessarily, particularly if we consider the focus on citizenship and democracy. These two elements make the consideration of the social and cultural milieu and the engagement of activists with fellow citizens and social actors particularly important, a fact which raises the need for a stronger consideration of the private, in addition to the public. Positioning private citizens as actors in the public and political suggests that consideration of both public and private relationships between individuals would result in a more complex picture of the strategies, formal and informal, employed in the achievement of significant social change.
One further limitation of this focus on formalized movements and their engagement with the state is the neglect of those individuals not affiliated with these movements. In so doing, de la Dehesa has replicated one of his fundamental criticisms of liberal democratic thought – that of elitism and the assumption of the existence of universal citizenship, universal aims and universal experiences by members of particular groups. Although this is continually recognized as a limitation of his analysis, I do feel that an examination of the engagement with the state of individuals outside the movements analysed would have resulted in a more complete and convincing account. This lacuna is partially addressed in a chapter examining the experiences of individuals living outside major metropolitan centres, but discussions of the place of the working class or racial and ethnic minorities are missing, which is an important omission.
Overall, this book examines a neglected and important region and documents the history and strategies of LGBT movements in emerging democracies. This is a significant contribution to the history of such movements globally and within Latin America. It also touches on some significant theoretical areas which, if developed, could make a further contribution to the literature on the relationships between social movements locally and globally. This book is recommended for readers interested in the processes of social and political change within democratizing regimes, as well as to those interested in posing significant questions regarding the project of liberal democratization.