History of gay marriage köln
Die Wahlen in Brasilien liegen erst einige wenige Wochen zurück. Die Berichterstattung darüber ist freilich bereits in den Hintergrund gerückt. Mariana Prandini Assis ist Anwältin für Menschenrechte in Brasilien und Doktorandin an The New School for Social Research in New York.
Ana Carolina Ogando ist Politikwissenschaftlerin und arbeitet als unabhängige Forscherin und Beraterin in Brasilien. Jair Bolsonaro, the recently elected Brazilian president, is now well known, both nationally and internationally, for his misogynistic and homophobic declarations.
And in a televised debate not long ago, Bolsonaro suggested that spanking a son who showed signs of being gay was the best way for parents to change his behavior and assure he would grow up as a proper man. These are only a few of the many outrageous assertions made by Jair Bolsonaro not only during his presidential campaign, but throughout his twenty-seven year political career as a federal deputy.
As efforts to make gender equality a central focus of UN documents and policies progressed, a strategy that came to be known as gender mainstreaming , so did the attacks articulated by the Vatican — during the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, and the Preparatory and Committee Meetings for the IV World Conference on Women Beijing Anti-gender campaigns have found fertile ground in Latin America in the past five years as the pink tide of female presidencies in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina showed signs of weakening, along with the rise of Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal groups.
Anti-gender crusaders gain momentum as they install moral panics, while creating different enemies that fit their mold and the immediate context — feminists, gays, artists, academics, trans bodies. These representatives have acted in an organized fashion to undermine the expansion of sexual rights, including same sex marriage and reproductive rights, particularly the right to abortion.
Such attacks come in the form of legislative propositions that recognize the unborn as a full subject of rights, defines the family as a unit formed by a man, a woman and their children, criminalizes abortion even in case of rape and constitutionalizes the beginning of life at conception, to mention but a few.
While none of these proposals has gone far enough in the legislative process to be voted into law or constitutional amendment, they have indeed worked as a platform for the evangelical bloc to market itself as the defender of the traditional family and Christian values.
The materials were to be distributed in the school system as a pedagogical tool to challenge discrimination and violence against the LGBTQI community. Brazil has been dealing with alarming rates of violent death related to homophobia. While many other factors and interests were at play in the impeachment procedure against President Dilma Rousseff, reactionary discourses on gender and sexuality played an important role in galvanizing popular support.
Die geschichte der gay ehe: ein rückblick für köln.
Such discourse catalyzed a hatred against Dilma Rousseff that paved the way for the return to the center stage of a long-known type of politician: male, white, sexist and authoritarian, one that appeals to stereotypical masculine politics. The context of misogyny, ridicule, and moralist appeals to traditional heteronormative family values and femininity that marked the impeachment procedure, in legislative arenas and the media, represented the comeback of strong political and patriarchal elite forces that had been until then overshadowed.
The message from these forces was clear: women and LGBTQI people were and are not welcome in politics, and more powerfully: gender and sexual justice ideals and agendas are even less so. Emblematic cases involved the distortion of her image and speeches to claim she is an atheist who has offended religious symbols.
More than 50 incidents of politically motivated gender and racial violence were reported during the campaign, with numbers still rising. Many of these incidents are directed against bodies that have always been historic targets of violence in Brazil — women, blacks, and the LGBTQI community.
As if the act itself were not enough, the candidates were quick to publish a threatening message on Facebook stating that this was just the beginning of their attack on leftist activists. Shockingly, outrage for such violence did little to damage these candidacies. In other words, gender-based and racialized political violence did not only increase, but were also normalized during the campaign — with justifications that Bolsonaro could not be expected to control his electorate.
The speech Bolsonaro made the evening after winning the election fed into this popular imaginary: he started by saying his campaign had resorted to the Bible, the toolbox to fix men and women. And while at points Bolsonaro stressed out the right to freedom, a prayer led by Magno Malta, elected Senator and tipped to be the next Minister of Social Development, opened the official speech clearly stating this is a majoritarian Christian country.
The backlash we are witnessing has shown potential not only to cut back on rights but also to silence historically marginalized voices in the most extreme manner, even through lethal means. Either we confront these different forms of gender-based and racialized violence through a concerted alliance of democratic forces or we will succumb to a deeper dehumanizing narrative, further entrenching the enmity logic that designates which bodies are entitled to live.
Mariana Prandini Assis is a Human Rights Lawyer in Brazil and a Ph. D candidate in Politics at The New School for Social Research. Ana Carolina Ogando holds a Ph. D in Political Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais.