Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies (review)

Scholars doing qualitative comparative research often enter dangerous waters. If the countries, conditions, and questions under consideration are not sufficiently similar, the usefulness of examining distinct situations is significantly diminished. Fortunately, the author has made a wise choice in deciding to study the political engagement of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) activists over the last three decades in Brazil and Mexico. Using a broad array of sources, theoretical frameworks, and analytical tools, this work is a model of how to execute a comparative study. It is also a stellar examination of how the gay, lesbian, and transgendered movements in Latin America's two largest countries have managed to occupy a political space and achieve concrete democratic gains despite significant countervailing forces.

Although the political, social, and cultural situations in the two countries reflect their unique histories, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have identified similar gender and sexual systems, especially regarding homoerotic desire and gender performance. Both countries retain a complex relationship with their largest neighbor to the north, which includes both appropriating and rejecting U.S. cultural influences. The sui generis nature of the Brazilian military-civilian dictatorship, which maintained elections, political parties, and some traditional institutions, is not dissimilar to the one-party rule of the Mexican PRI. In both cases, social movements challenged the ubiquitous and nearly absolute hegemony of authoritarian governments, causing a splintering of political power. As LGBT movements emerged in the 1970s alongside other efforts to democratize the two nations, activists appropriated transnational discourses that made universal human rights claims, called on the governments to implement enlightened notions of modernity, and employed broadened concepts of citizenship for men and women who have been socially marginalized by their sexual desires and their gender identity and performance.

In both countries, a sector of the radical left played a crucial role in the first phase of the politicization. Resistance to leftist ideas and the call for the political autonomy of the movement similarly polarized groups. However, in the long run, the strategy of building alliances with the institutionalized left—the Workers Party in Brazil and the parties that evolved into the Party of the Democratic Revolution in Mexico—proved to be a relatively successful approach for securing allies in approving legislation and implementing administrative measures designed to expand democratic rights to gay, lesbian, and transgendered people.

The economic crisis in both countries in the 1980s, the proliferation of AIDS among gay men, and the relative weakness of independent lesbian organizations all retarded the expansion of the movement for a time. Yet, as the Brazilian military regime loosened its grip and gave way to a democratic regime, and as similar processes in Mexico expanded electoral possibilities, many activists turned to the ballot as a means of gaining influence in order to change government policies. This proved a greater challenge than most initially imagined, but slowly, openly lesbian politicians in Mexico and their political allies in Brazil began to introduce anti-discrimination laws and other measures to guarantee legal protections for sexual minorities.

Mobilizations in Brazil demanding that the government address the AIDS crisis led to the participation of activists in developing policy and implementing prevention programs. They took advantage of resources extracted from the Ministry of Health to build new gay and lesbian organizations that in part focused on AIDS education, and in the 1990s the number of groups nationwide exploded. In the process, they shaped their advocacy vis-à-vis the government in terms of offering expert knowledge and advice as "technicians" on LGBT issues that legitimized their lobbying efforts. The parallel strategy of organizing LGBT pride parades created considerable visibility, with over 250 events staged annually throughout the country—the estimated 3,000,000 people who participate in the São Paulo parade made it the largest in the world. Although Mexican activists have been less successful in obtaining...