"Building up onself in America": sexuality, gender, and difference in the (im)mobilities of LGBT Brazilians living in New York City

• Grant number: 21/14686-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): June 01, 2023
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Isadora Lins França
• Grantee: Bruno Nzinga Ribeiro
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/16034-3 - Difference, abandonment and precarity in the (im)mobilities of Brazilian LGBT migrants living in New York City, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

Over the last few years, disputes, crises, and alliances in global geopolitics have brought about a progressive tightening of anti-immigration policies. Along the routes chosen for the displacement of Brazilians to the United States, such policies were implemented by means of restricting the granting of visas and the status of asylum seeker and refugee, increasing border detentions, and toughening the deportation policy through bilateral cooperation. In this scenario, the matrimonial market, tourism, educational and work programs, humanitarian policies, or even circumventing legal barriers consist of a wide set of strategies adopted by individuals in their migratory projects. Such is the general background against which this research project was conceived, in which I intend to explore how sexuality and gender are articulated with race, class, and nation in the process of constituting (im)mobilities that are experienced by Brazilians living in the City of New York, thus seeking to understand how these multiple differences run through these experiences. The empirical outline of the project will limit itself to "LGBT" migrants. I will follow up on networks of interlocutors who were previously identified throughout my master's degree research. Thus, my research strategy is the production of a multi-sited ethnography, in which I will follow and interview subjects from different networks, focusing on the gestation and development of migratory projects, on the circulation through different mobility regimes, and on how such experiences situate themselves in a transnational landscape.