Classifications and their limits: categories of fluidity and ambiguity of sexuality in Brazil

• Grant number: 24/07383-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Regina Facchini
• Grantee: Inácio dos Santos Saldanha
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Since Brazil's re-democratization, sexuality has been consolidated as a theme that articulates a language of rights and disputes over them. Events such as the HIV/Aids epidemic, the constitution of an "LGBT population" as subjects of rights, the flourishing of the field of gender and sexuality studies, the rise of conservatism and the Covid-19 pandemic are associated with the formation of concepts, subjects, strategies and classifications. The literature on these historical changes highlights the relationship with the state as a stimulus for the presentation of defined groups for the construction of public policies, but there is still a need for more in-depth knowledge of the limits and contradictions of these classifications. During the same period, categories such as "bisexual", "razor", "g0y", "pansexual", "polysexual" and others have circulated and provoked discussion, culminating in the recent multiplication of categories that refer to identities (mainly on the internet) relating to attraction to men and women, or attraction beyond the male-female opposition. The aim of this research, therefore, is to understand the classificatory tensions caused by the production of categories relating to desire for more than one sex or gender in the context of LGBTI+ activism in Brazil, considering that classifications and their categories are produced historically by certain actors and contexts, which can be identified and analyzed. I define the empirical section based on the notion of "discursive fields of action", a concept borrowed from Sonia Alvarez, in the form of networks and political-communicative webs between various actors and the interface between their forms of action, taking sexuality as the articulating axis. More specifically, I focus on spaces for discussion and articulation of HIV/AIDS activism, bisexuality and new categories since the country's re-democratization. To do this, I propose the production of an ethnography that combines participant observation, document analysis and semi-structured interviews.