Sexual activism and ‘actually existing eroticism’: The politics of victimization and ‘lynching’ in Argentina

Introduction

Argentine political activism brings together sex and gender identities, as well as analytical perspectives and political strategies, that are created and transformed according to historical processes in the sexual sphere and broader political contexts. In this article, we discuss a growing trend for configuring these identities, perspectives, and strategies that ends up regulating sexuality in such a way that it comes into conflict with what we refer to as ‘actually existing eroticism.’ This conflict creates a problem for considering sexual politics aiming at erotic justice. Based on the case of Argentina, we propose a discussion of some strategies for action in sexual activism that have appeared in recent years, specifically public shaming and ‘lynching,’ in local Spanish ‘escraches,’ as peculiar and extreme methods of a broader political strategy of victimization in a context of neoliberal governance.

In Argentina, progress has been made in sexual politics, even during the recent neoliberal period: since 1988 with the recognition of divorce (which was simplified and improved in 2015 by the Reform of the Civil Code), a progressive sexual rights agenda has come to include comprehensive sex education (2006), emergency and surgical contraception (2006), punishment for gender-based violence against women (2009), marriage equality (2010), transgender identity rights (2012), and equal and universal access to assisted reproduction techniques. The main issue pending is abortion, which remains illegal. In 2018, a proposal of liberal reform approved by the Chamber of Deputies was rejected in the Senate.

This piece looks at the empirical research about these cases (Blanco et al., 2018; Corrales and Pecheny, 2010; Diez, 2015; Moreno, 2008), but the thrust of this discussion is analytical rather than descriptive or systematic. We have proceeded by modeling certain arguments and frameworks of sexual politics present in the public and academic spheres in order to better consider the following questions: How and to what degree are the modes of constructing sexual politics at odds with erotic practices? What relationships can be established between neoliberal governance, sexual politics, victimization, and escraches/‘lynching’?

We provide a critical account of an intellectual and political perspective with regard to sexual politics: a perspective that addresses inequalities and injustice related to sexuality through practices that obliterate the subjective appropriation of rights (Amuchástegui Herrera and Rivas Zivy, 2004), ‘actually existing eroticism,’ and democratic and transformative politicization. We will refer to a political and intellectual approach to sexual politics from a deep, normalizing, and pre- or post-political individualism that reduces issues of inequality (violence, injustice, hierarchies) to individual, rather than structural or historical, characteristics. Given that it assigns special legitimacy to the voice of victims, this approach ironically strips subjects of their capacity to speak, act, and intervene. Discontent is expressed through isolated complaints or unarticulated denunciations, while paradoxically the victim is seen as suspicious if she or he claims or demonstrates power.

In addition, this growing approach to politically processing sexuality, which transforms grievances and discontent into new norms and regulations, does not account for ‘actually existing eroticism.’ Specifically, this form of politicization of sexuality does not consider the often unjust, hierarchical, incorrect, and unequal nature of desire, pleasure, and eroticism. As a result, the sexual liberation movements and claims to free desire of the past are replaced by demands for changes in public policy and legal norms and for exemplary punishments.

Despite its critical and radical aspects, this victimizing perspective – both intellectual (because it refers to the way we think about phenomena, in which categories, based on which normative and empirical suppositions) and political (since it considers the assessment of situations, aspirations, and strategies) – is compatible with neoliberal governance. We use the term ‘compatible’ to highlight that we do not imply an identification or equivalence between ‘victim’ and ‘neoliberal individual’ and to make clear that there is no causal relationship between neoliberal subjectification and victimization. We do want to highlight, however, that more and more situations, individuals, and social categories are constructed in terms of victimization in a neoliberal context, in which the political regulation of conflicts is less about processing contradictory interests than it is about competition in the public sphere between different victims struggling to make their suffering heard and taken into account. This dynamic of zero-sum competition for resources and public attention makes alliances between actors (for example, alliances among all victims of patriarchy or neoliberalism) fragile and unstable.

Sexual politics and victimization

In this text, we discuss a way of conceptualizing and performing sexual politics which has constructed sexual-political subjects as victims. To say that subjects are constructed as victims is a paradox: if the victim has the capacity to speak and act, that is, if he or she is a subject, that status of victimhood becomes doubtful and less legitimate. For example, a rape victim who shows herself to be a woman who experiences desire, who is desirable, and who speaks out and acts politically, falls under suspicion. The ideal victim performs none of these actions.

The stances we refer to as victimizing aim to define situations of misfortune in terms of individual injustice. There is injustice when blame can be placed on someone (the state, society) for their responsibility, and that someone must answer for it. This blame is voiced from an individual perspective that considers the misfortune that becomes injustice to be a personal matter, not rooted in a structure of social and historical conditions that determines the situation and renders it intelligible.

The construction of sex-gender claims in the name of victims has yielded positive results with regard to the inclusion of those claims in the public and political agenda, as well as the identification of those who lodge such claims as legitimate: victims of gender violence, hate crimes, epidemics, police or institutional violence, bullying, and discrimination. In a context of neoliberal governance, the construction of a subject who lodges a claim as a victim has been and continues to be one of the most effective ways of achieving attention and influencing public policy and the distribution of resources. Insofar as any resource is a priori considered to be scarce, costly, positioning oneself as a victim or even as more of a victim than other victims is a strategy utilized by more and more individuals and social groups.

Claims by gays and travestis (transgender women) have garnered attention and affected public policy partly due to the disproportionate damage inflicted upon them by the HIV epidemic; abortion rights, due to the number of women and girls who have died from unsafe abortions (Brown, 2016); and gender inequality, due to the rates of femicide and violence against women. Disproportionate suffering has been one means to access attention and resources in a context in which the democratic citizen is obliterated by global and domestic policies that make it impossible, both in practice and often legally, for each person to exercise their right to have rights.

The analysis of different subjects and different sexual claims shows that there is a contingent leap, that is, one that may or may not occur, between the individual plane of the claim and its possible resolution, and the collective and political plane. That leap, which we refer to as politicization, implies inserting the individual experience into a collective narrative, as well as recognizing the structural and historical circumstances that produce and reproduce the conditions that make a given experience possible. Politicization changes the nature of the claim: it redefines a discourse of complaint (which is self-referential) or of irony (recognition of one’s situation as unjust, but where one does nothing to change it, and so critically but powerlessly self-referential) as a discourse of protest and questioning. That said, there has been growth in a particular form of politicizing individual experience such that it takes on both political and individualist characteristics: complaints or accusations as a form of public shaming or media ‘lynching.’ This discourse is based on a speaker (often a woman) who lodges a complaint against an individual (generally a man), who becomes the object of collective scorn. This complaint has effects on the accused person (who is set aside, punished, exiled) but few effects on the structures that make it possible for the action about which the complaint was lodged to occur.

From victimization to ‘lynching’

This analysis of victimization as a framework for sexual politics in Argentina and Latin America is not novel (Pecheny and de la Dehesa, 2014). Here, we would like to highlight two aspects that have received less scrutiny. One refers to the growing forms of presenting complaints, hardship, and discontent with regard to sexuality and gender, which appeal to public shaming and ‘lynching,’ generally through devices of virtual communication, and around complaints and scandals. This aspect is related to the global Me Too phenomenon (Murat, 2018). The other aspect has a longer and deeper history, and we present it in the following terms: complaints related to sexuality and gender are becoming increasingly distant from ‘actually existing eroticism.’ That is, the terms in which sex and gender complaints are lodged, generally originating in liberal social justice (freedom, equality, consent, the absence of hierarchies and violence), are often incompatible with the terms of what we could refer to as erotic justice (criteria upon which we can judge erotic-affective and sexual exchanges, that refer to desire, enjoyment, and pleasure that are fantasized about, experienced, given, and received, and that are not always compatible with the terms of justice of liberal and neoliberal contractualism). In summary, the forms of sexual politics of a victimizing complaint aimed at ‘lynching’ are current phenomena, but are also rooted in a historical-structural matrix.

How, then, can we sustain the victories that we have fought for and value without losing sight of the tensions and paradoxes that exist between those victories and erotic practices? Many demands for reproductive, gender, and sexual rights have been translated into effective achievements in Argentina and other Latin American societies in recent decades (Diez, 2015; Pecheny and de la Dehesa, 2014). In state institutions, the struggle for recognition has led to concrete advances in jurisprudence and legislation. The achievement of same-sex marriage, quotas for gender equality in parliament, the recognition of self-perceived gender identity, comprehensive sexual education, the establishment of gender violence as an issue, and access to hormonal and surgical treatment for transgender people are some of the examples that illustrate, with different scopes and particular characteristics in each country, the progress in the institutionalization of different causes supported by feminist and sexual diversity collectives.

Transforming demands into rights, whether for sexual, gender, and reproductive or any other type of issues, implies the need for politicizing those demands. Politicization includes two dimensions: one that addresses the conflictive nature of social relationships, which are structural and historical determinants, and another that registers a personal experience in a broader narrative, identifying an individual situation with other similar ones, thereby breaking isolation and beginning the construction of or search for a collective subject (Pecheny, 2010: 365).

Progress in sexual politics is fraught with the consequences of the contradiction between public norms and policies that result from demands for sexual and reproductive rights and erotic-affective practices. While policies are rigid, follow an instrumental logic, and bring about processes of regulation, sexuality and actually existing eroticism have a fluid, dynamic nature and follow logics that are framed within the sphere of passions rather than in rational instrumentalism or an ethically founded and legislated way one ‘ought’ to behave.

The very language of human rights generates this tension: while speaking in terms of rights allows for these struggles to be heard and incorporated in, for example, the legislative agenda, doing so also implies boxing them inside the institutional frameworks of (neo)liberal democracies, as well as placing now-recognized subjects of rights, including sexually diverse people who were excluded in the past, under new mechanisms that regulate their relationships and practices.

We are observing a dialectic between politicization and depoliticization. If depoliticization means abstracting conflictive issues both in the social structure and the historical process that produce them, demands related to gender and sexuality fluctuate between accentuating the conflict by recognizing situations of structural inequality suffered by groups in civil society, and attenuating the conflict by incorporating those demands into the state sphere of deliberation and public or judicial decision-making. And if we also understand depoliticization to be a process that implies presenting demands in an individual, isolated manner such that ‘it only matters to me,’ we can see that the realization of sexual demands in politics is permeated by this same dialectic. The institutionalization of claims occurs as a process that fluctuates between politicization and depoliticization, the particular and the general, the individual and the collective; and this fluctuation is possible thanks to the way in which claims are presented: in the language of human rights and their institutional inclusion in contemporary democratic regimes hegemonized by neoliberalism.

Criticisms of Keynesian economics and the welfare state allowed neoliberals and second-wave feminists to find some common ground. Several feminist theorists have observed the narrowing distance between feminism and neoliberalism in recent decades through the formulation of demands related to feminist ideas in liberal-individualistic terms. Nancy Fraser (2013) listed three unintentional contributions feminism has made to the neoliberal wave through its criticisms of the welfare state: (1) the criticism of the sexual division of work and the family wage, which ended up legitimizing flexible capitalism and the inclusion of women in a precarious labor market; (2) the criticism of a political vision that only recognized class contradictions and was blind to other ‘non-economic’ inequalities; and (3) the criticism of the paternalistic nature of the welfare state that paved the way for flexibilization and cutbacks to the state apparatus. This ‘dangerous liaison’ between the two movements allowed for growing depoliticization of issues related to sex, gender, and sexuality.

However, neoliberalism invests less and less effort pretending to be blind to differences; instead it is increasingly adopting features of elitism and class, gender, and racial supremacy. In recent years, the process of a conservative backlash has included: (1) the advancement of domestic and global capitalists, many of whom have been the beneficiaries of often corrupt business dealings with the state itself, who see an insurmountable obstacle to (their own) capitalist accumulation in regulation by the state and any protection of wages and social rights for workers; (2) the advancement of hierarchical-authoritarian actors, among them religious figures, who struggle often violently to re-establish historical systems of inequality; (3) the uncertainty of the middle and working classes in the wake of disruptions to the certain order of ‘welfare’ capitalism, to upward social mobility, and to connections to identities through work and employment, which lead to ontological uncertainties especially for male breadwinners; and (4) the uncertainty created by questioning the sex-gender order of reproductive heterosexuality and the gender binary institutionalized by hierarchical laws and privileges. In this context of a growing number of ‘real’ victims of exclusion and crossfire of all kinds, certain forms of manifesting anger and discontent, such as ‘lynching,’ are common to authoritarian actors and conservatives, as well as to those who struggle to change the hierarchical and violent sex-gender order.

Victimization and depoliticization

Depoliticization, in its dual nature (i.e., non-recognition of socio-structural and historical conditions or the lack of integration of individual experiences within collective narratives), materializes in different forms. Medicalization, for example, proposes that social problems can be solved through interference by the medical system, that is, those with objective know-how. This approach has certainly allowed for progress in the recognition of rights (Pecheny, 2002) but may raise problems related to the subjective appropriation of rights and their consolidation in the long term (Correa and Pecheny, 2016) in a context of ‘hygienization’ of sex encouraged both by responses to the HIV epidemic and the accompanying processes of digitalization of cruising, of searching for sexual partners (Miskolci, 2017). Judicialization alludes to the need for demands to be treated individually before a judge, who must assume the responsibility of solving them through individual reparations. While it renders invisible the social structures in which these situations come to be, it functions to reinforce the idea that the acts of aggressors are exceptional and even explicable through pathologies. As the feminist lawyer Ileana Arduino argues, ‘As a situation is recognized as a crime and reduced to its juridical connotation, it becomes impossible to recognize as a collective social conflict expressed in frameworks of asymmetrical power relationships’ (Arduino, 2018: 55, translated from the original Spanish). Victimization implies hearing individuals and their complaints only as victims of injustices rather than truly as subjects of law. While strategies of victimization have been useful for certain individuals and even groups (Polletta, 2006) since they have made it possible to achieve concrete benefits, they are also responsible for weakening the mechanisms of collective organization.

Marta Lamas (2018) also contributes to theorization on victimist discourses and their limitations. While she recognizes that one triumph of feminism is giving a voice to demands that have been made invisible, thereby allowing the violence suffered by women and sexually diverse people to be named and reported, she cautions of the danger of falling into essentialism and reductionism with regard to some categorizations. Assuming a victimist strategy includes the error of reducing women as a group to the condition of potential victims, while all cis males assume the role of perpetrators and aggressors. Victimhood becomes an intrinsic characteristic of the subject who suffers violence, creating a victim–aggressor dichotomy that simplifies a multiplicity of historical relations. The victim receives attention as the object of persecution, violence, or discrimination. At the same time, Lamas maintains that this is a privileged space of enunciation: ‘Victimhood bestows prestige, allows the demand to be heard, promises and foments recognition, and activates a powerful generator of identity, rights, and self-esteem. It inoculates one against any criticism and guarantees innocence beyond all reasonable doubt’ (Lamas, 2018: 46, translated from the original Spanish).

Rather than serving as a reference to a collective subject, with regard to the struggles of the women’s movement, individual identification with the category of ‘victim’ coincides with the transition from the term oppression, which refers to systems and structures (Rubin, 1996), to gender violence (Pitch, 2014). The category of gender violence has allowed emphasis to be placed on individuals, responding to the need to ‘remember the responsibility of concrete individual actors and, simultaneously, define women themselves as political subjects with a voice, precisely as “victims”’ (Pitch, 2014: 21, translated from the original Spanish). Victimism as a mode of subjectivization has eroded the possibility of collective organization, leading to the individualization of claims and a growing compatibility between feminist groups and the political and economic strategy of neoliberalism (Pecheny, 2010).

In the context of neoliberal governance, recognizing oneself as a victim is a possible strategy for inclusion but also allows for distancing oneself from any structural determination or social, political, or economic context. The strategies of victimization also undermine the possibilities of consciousness with regard to other struggles or solidarity among different social actors. When one presents one’s own complaint as privileged in the search for reparation, each individual or group is incapable of identifying that complaint with those of others. Likewise, ‘narratives of trauma’ subjectivize any sexually diverse person as a potential victim, promoting feelings of insecurity and imminent danger independently of real experiences. The result is an activism that moves away from supporting a joint struggle with movements against racism and poverty and toward configuring itself as a mainstream anti-violence movement that seeks to be recognized by the state (Halberstam, 2014).

As Argentine trans activist Marlene Wayar warns, the criticism of victimization does not ignore the horrors and mistreatment suffered by subjects (she refers particularly to transgender women). But to avoid staying in the role of victim, Wayar (2018: 109) proposes using the term survivor, that is, a victim who demands reparations. This occurs on two levels: at the individual level, the survivor demands material and concrete reparation through laws and policies; and at the collective level, she or he articulates collective practices aimed at preventing others from undergoing similar sufferings. Claims include material reparation and structural changes in the conditions that made those victimizing actions possible. Recognizing oneself as a ‘survivor’ would allow not only for one to recognize the suffering experienced, but also to politicize it in such a way that it builds a politics of compensation.

Abolitionist feminism as a paradigm of victimism

The debate between abolishing prostitution versus recognizing sex workers’ rights is perhaps the most controversial exchange of views taking place in feminist movements in Latin America today. The difficulties of politically discussing prostitution and sex work show once again that heterosexuality continues to be problematic, as does understanding the sexual dimensions of economic exchanges and the mercantile dimensions of erotic exchanges. While abolitionist positions tend to be interpreted as those that understand gender domination as oppression in structural terms, and legalizationalism is generally understood as prioritizing the individual and independent decisions of each sex worker regarding her own body, both parties in the debate are superimposed in a more complex relationship fraught – yet again – with the dialectic between the politicization and depoliticization of sexual demands and rights.

Through judicializing and victimist arguments, abolitionism achieved inclusion in the public agenda thanks to a punitive language in which the only political answer is punishment for those who use others for sexual exploitation, act as intermediaries, or are consumers. Abolitionism and campaigns against human trafficking therefore join a criminalizing perspective that supports the idea of a prison state in which referencing the figure of an innocent victim legitimizes that demand.

According to anthropologist Deborah Daich (2012), abolitionism in Argentina understands trafficking and prostitution as one and the same. Prostitution is held to be a form of gender violence that subjectifies women, a patriarchal institution based on the inequality between men and women that cannot be considered work and is contained within the paradigm of masculine dominance and feminine subservience and the objectification of bodies. It can therefore never be considered a free choice, and there is no place for the desire of women who are prostitutes. This abolitionist position in Argentina is defended by a large swathe of feminism and by the main leaders of the trans movements, such as Lohana Berkins, Diana Sacayán, and Marlene Wayar. Both Lohana Berkins and Diana Sacayan died prematurely.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Argentine Association of Women Sex Workers (Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina or AMMAR in Spanish) was created in response to police violence and works to achieve recognition of sex workers as citizens with rights. Sex workers adopt a discourse of autonomy and independence and assert that their work is consensual, despite being complicated by varying degrees both of coercion and exploitation and of resistance and agency. Their claims escape the victimism inhabited by the abolitionist debate, positioning them as subjects capable of action and bringing them closer to other workers, such as domestic workers, thereby creating the possibility of an articulation between demands of gender and class.

One peculiar case demonstrates that victimization might be a doorway to legitimation of rights. With regard to sex work, one of the arguments used to maintain its legitimacy is the access to sexual services for people with a disability; that is, the legitimacy of sex work is built on the existence of an inarguable victim (the ‘disabled’ subject) and not on the eroticism that may be involved in the exchange. In this sense the conflict between abolitionist normativity, which supposes inescapable violence, domination, and patriarchal exploitation of the bodies of women, trans people, and other sexual subjects, and actually existing practices ignores the question of the desire, pleasure, and satisfaction that may be involved – incidentally – in the charging or payment of money for sex. Any other types of non-monetary compensation or ‘non-sexual’ affective exchange are also difficult to capture in the language dictated by law or public policy.

In short, we cannot consider sexual conflicts as only connected to masculine domination and feminine submissiveness or sexuality singly or mainly as a danger (Vance, 1984). We must think about sexuality within a social and cultural framework in which it occurs, while this framework is also interwoven with diverse forms of experiencing eroticism. It is necessary to understand sex work politically and sexually, thereby avoiding victimizing discourses that reinforce punitive positions and support neoliberalism.

‘Lynching’ and sexual politics in Argentina

Lynching was originally a practice through which a mob takes the law into its own hands (Zangrando, 1991: 684). The practice began in connection with the period of slavery and post-slavery in the United States. This practice was still in use throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, becoming resignified during the 1950s as a countering strategy to the civil rights movement (Franklin, 1967). In recent years in Argentina, the feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements have used a similar practice of symbolic or media ‘lynchings,’ without physical violence, as a means to report various kinds of gender violence of different degrees and types, that is, physical and sexual violence but also economic and psychological violence. Public shaming (escrache in Argentine Spanish) is a particular form of ‘lynching,’ a type of protest initiated by the organization HIJOS (created in 1995 by children of people who were detained or disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship from 1976 to 1983) to publicly expose individuals responsible for crimes against humanity who had gone unpunished by the legal system. This practice of public shaming is based on a gathering at the person’s home, where a document is usually read while protesters shout slogans and paint walls or hang posters on them, generally bearing the face of the accused (Benegas, 2008). Nowadays, this mechanism is used differently. Those who engage in public shaming are generally women who recognize themselves as victims of gender violence, and the targets are the men who have carried out these violent acts, which can range from prohibitive rules placed on women by their partners in heterosexual relationships to physical violence, sexual abuse, and rape. New technologies allow women and other categories of individuals to use the web and social media to share testimonies describing their suffering and naming the aggressors and their practices, thereby arousing a generalized condemnation that surpasses the boundaries of the virtual world with concrete repercussions in the lives of the accused (harassment, physical and verbal violence, loss of employment, stigmatization, etc.). When we consider the fact that the Argentine feminist movement has gained unprecedented mass relevance following enormous public gatherings of women in protest of femicides, it is understandable that the main complaint – against sexist violence – is made in this way: by narrating individual stories, blaming a man (or multiple men), and adopting the identity of a victim who deserves reparation through the social condemnation of the aggressor(s).

In the age of apps and social networks, not only is interaction and self-presentation in sexual cruising contexts transformed, but the format of LGBTIQ+ sociopolitical demands is changed as well (Falcão, 2017; Miskolci, 2017). This follows an ideology of democracy as horizontality, which creates conflicts, radical polarizations, and anti-intellectual and anti-institutional aggressive responses in a dynamic more prone to shitstorms (Han, 2017) than to institutional deliberative politics. In this context, some collectives have adopted practices that tend to stretch a ‘politics of identity,’ individualizing their claims and framing them as more important than all others. By introducing themselves as those who having suffered the most, these isolating discourses block a joint political praxis. Simultaneously, criminalizing claims grow, for example the modification of the Anti-discrimination Law from 1988, aimed at criminalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, or the criminalization of commercial sex. Virginia Cano warns us that

… the proliferation within our [LGBT] movements of discursive strategies centered on the I-can, punishing affectivity (and therefore self-centered, alienating and immunizing in relation to our diffuse and intersecting collective responsibilities), the neutralizing development of assimilationist esthetics and the normalizing cooptation by mass-media of our experiences are sufficiently alarming to review those affective economies and technologies of the self that we promote, activate and imagine. (Cano, 2018: 35)

Cano recognizes the urgency to unpack rhetorical forms like escrache/‘lynching’ that end up legitimizing those they oppose insofar as they assume punishing features and reproduce individualizing, decollectivizing and depoliticizing discourses. Public shaming allows for situations of sexist violence to be put into words and made visible. It generates support for victims and can even put a stop to situations of violence still taking place, while at the same time isolating complaints and setting them inside a framework dictated by a punitive logic (Bernstein, 2017). This kind of logic constructs the identities at play in binary and essentialist terms of victim/aggressor, or even in terms of friend/enemy. Rita Segato (2017) warns of the risks for the feminist movement of adopting these practices, which can in the end reinforce the cut-throat punitive policies of neoliberal democracies. According to Segato, any friend/enemy politics is fascist, and if feminism constructs itself around this dichotomy, it will lose its politicizing and emancipatory potential.

In Argentina, a public space for women, lesbians, and transgender women has been materialized in massive national meetings. These public spaces of deliberation have provided a unique opportunity for these individuals to accumulate material and symbolic forces for different feminist and LGBTIQ+ struggles. In spite of tensions, or perhaps encouraged by them, decision-making in those meetings is a participatory and collective process, which according to Elster (2001) defines the deliberative nature of democracy. Within those protected spaces (protected from the cis-masculine gaze), exchanges appear to occur among free and equal citizens, oriented toward the collective good, which a priori would favor the quality of democracy and the active intervention of the citizenry (Dryzek, 2000: 29). But deliberative dynamics work only if the (even fictional) nature of freedom and equality is maintained, which is difficult in a context of fragility produced not only by the hetero-patriarchal environment, but also by the centrifugal internal dynamics that neoliberal governance promotes.

The practices of ‘lynching’ respond to the perception by various groups and actors regarding the impermeability of institutional channels to process demands, which have now become condemnations. There is a similar percept of the ‘disfiguration’ of democracies that have shown themselves to be incapable, and/or their political classes insensitive to the distress and uncertainty caused both by the expulsive forms of concentrated globalized capitalism and by transformations in traditional gender and generational hierarchies. Extra-institutional, individual, and often authoritarian means constitute part of the repertoire of action for both progressive and reactionary actors regarding sex-gender issues.

De-eroticization of sexual politics

Claims relating to gender and sexualities are not only complicated by a dialectic between politicization and depoliticization but are also embedded within another correlated dialectic: that of sexualization/desexualization. Just as feminist and LGBTIQ+ demands are depoliticized as they are translated, for example, into laws, they are also desexualized. After undergoing a process of institutionalization, erotic experiences are normatized and homogenized, such that they become compatible with the practices permitted by the state apparatus and liberal and neoliberal democracies. We therefore cannot ignore the distance between political complaints that may be processed by the institutional design of the state and the erotic experiences of people.

These contradictions make it increasingly difficult to raise the flag of sexual liberation, which, according to Gayle Rubin (1984: 302), must continue to be a feminist goal, or to raise the flag of erotic justice, whose ‘principles are pleasure, satisfaction, and sexual enjoyment; consent between those who carry out sexual practices’ (Correa and Jolly, 2006: 19, translation from the original Spanish). Translating principles related to social justice into laws that can be reinforced by the state is less complex than doing something similar with principles gleaned from the ideal of erotic justice. Erotic and sexual relationships contextually imply particular negotiations of asymmetry, submission, types of fidelity, masochism, polygamy, etc. (Dowsett, 2003; Meccia, 2016) that are difficult to transfer to state legislation that aims to take up liberal-democratic complaints made by collectives of sexual diversity.

A dual movement is taking place: on the one hand, achievements that have been made in the institutional framework of (neo)liberal democracies are constructed by distancing them from actually existing erotic practices, and, on the other hand and simultaneously, this brings about processes of normalization aimed at homogenizing and limiting those practices within the institutionally delineated boundaries. What happens in the case of practices also occurs with the identification of subjects. Marlene Wayar (2018) maintains that identities are often externally imposed, especially to travestis and transgender people, such that she prefers to discuss a trans ‘state of being’ rather than simply stating that one ‘is’ trans. The use of the gerund gives an account of the fact that sex-gender identities are always moments in a process rather than a fixed state (Wayar, 2018: 25).

We have already said that despite the tensions explained, the language of human rights and the still inevitable desexualization of claims from the LGBTIQ+ community have paradoxically brought about achievements worth struggling for, and which must be maintained and defended against current reactionary attacks. However, a kind of discontent or dissatisfaction remains, created by the gap between our right to pleasure, that is, erotic justice, and the policies that constrain it. It is the privation derived from a progressive conformism toward which groups and collectives of LBGTIQ+ and feminist activists have moved in recent years. We must consider how to combat this conformism if we still believe that it is possible and worthwhile not to abnegate our deepest, most fluid, and most genuine desire.

This distress is contained by dominant neoliberal rationality itself, that which demands economic self-sufficiency while simultaneously destroying the conditions required to make that demand possible. The same structural conditions undermine any possibility of autonomy. The individualizing morals of neoliberalism, which we have already discussed in this text, eliminate social or common responsibility, creating precarious or potentially precarious beings, each of whom is individually responsible for their own death (Butler, 2017: 21). This type of subjectification created the conditions in which this hardship is formed since the imposed imperative is impossible to satisfy. This same logic causes the gap between the regulation of sexual rights and actually existing sexuality since both cannot be satisfied simultaneously.

Conclusions

Advances in gender and sexual rights and sociopolitical organization by feminists and the LGBTIQ+ groups in Argentina and Latin America are welcome. They are the product of struggles in which we have participated and that we value. However, the achievements made with regard to legislation and public policy paradoxically create discontent that cannot be reduced to the gaps that exist between that legislation and the realities of the population; these hardships are not explained only by what is lacking, by what is done incorrectly, by those still excluded, that is, by issues of deficit. Our analysis has proposed two issues that exceed the scope of that plane.

First, we proposed that laws and policies – in a context of neoliberal governance – constituted expectations and institutionalized regulations that are at odds with erotic practices. We have used the phrase ‘actually existing eroticism’ to highlight the empirical nature of this concept. As in the case of socialism, it is not about the literature or an ought-to that can show us what we would like; rather, it is about the extremely heterogeneous experiences of subjects. We have not gone into detail here to develop what ‘actually existing eroticism’ is, but only pointed out that the principles that could give direction to this notion of erotic justice, which has yet to be fully defined, a justice based on criteria of desire, pleasure, enjoyment, and sensuality, may or may not be compatible with other criteria of justice such as liberty, equality, autonomy, or others that we ordinarily understand as constructing the idea of social justice in the political sphere and in social, mercantile, or other types of interactions. In other words, laws and politics are at odds with erotic-affective practices not only when they are repressive (for example, when they persecute gays or lesbians), exclusionary (for example, when they deny trans people access to treatment), or discriminatory (for example, when they exclude people living with HIV from employment). They are also at odds when they recognize marriage, identity, or access to health, when reproductive heteronormativity is accompanied by homonormativities (more or less legitimate and expected ways of being gay or lesbian), transnormativities (more or less legitimate and expected ways of being trans), abortion-normativities/normativities associated with parenthood (when or in what context to continue with a gestation or interrupt it), etc.

Second, we have raised concerns about a type of political action, public shaming or ‘lynching,’ which socio-sexual feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements have increasingly adopted to channel protests and discontent. These actions are part of a longer process of construction of sexual politics that made victimization, in a neoliberal context, an almost necessary condition for access to the political stage, the public policy agenda, and the public sphere of democratic deliberation. Victimization (which has adopted diverse forms: medicalization, judicialization, mediatization) has allowed individuals and feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements to make achievements but at the same time has limited the scope of politics by not addressing the structural and historical aspects that make possible the litanies of exclusion, oppression, exploitation, and violence. In these recent years during which the conservative backlash is imposing itself even electorally, we understand that individualized and extra-institutional means such as ‘lynching’ can be successful in terms of political agitation, but at the same time they are coherent with an authoritarian neoliberal governance that excludes politically contentious subjects and issues in democracy. Likewise, the isolation of those who lodge complaints about some issues (those most apt for these forms of action are the most evidently cruel or appalling) fragments the constitution of socio-sexual subjects that are more articulated and horizontal, as well as the separation (even the false perception of contradiction or opposition) from other demands for social justice that are not at first glance connected with sex-gender issues, including those pertaining to work, salary, or economic sustainability.

Considering sexual politics in grim times therefore means thinking about ourselves politically, theoretically, and erotically. That has been our intention in writing this text.