Brazilian urban youth activisms: racial and gender issues

Abstract

In this article we state the main analysis perspectives and key categories that guide the research project Urban Youth Activisms: aesthetic, migratory, racial and gender issues. It was conducted by the Brazil team together with the Red Iberoamericana de Posgrados en Infancias y Juventudes (RedINJU): an international research network constituted by the WG CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales) Infancias y Juventudes. In this first presentation, which corresponds to the initial nine months of our study, partial results are also shared regarding the reflective, contextual and conjunctural comparison of empirical data concerning some of the intersectional aspects that guide the approach with our research subjects. They’re critical, qualitative and situated readings of statistics (official and independent) on Brazilian urban youth, which concern racial and gender issues.

Keywords
Activism; Urban youth; Intersectionality; Aesthetics; Politics

Resumo

Enunciamos neste artigo as principais perspectivas de análise e as categorias chave que norteiam o projeto de pesquisa “Ativismos juvenis urbanos: questões estéticas, migratórias, raciais e de gênero”, conduzido pela equipe Brasil junto à Red Iberoamericana de Posgrados en Infancias y Juventudes (RedINJU) – rede internacional de investigação constituída pelo Grupo de Trabajo Infancias y Juventudes do Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). Nesta primeira apresentação, que corresponde aos nove meses iniciais de nosso estudo, também são compartilhados resultados parciais referentes ao cotejamento reflexivo, contextual e conjuntural de dados empíricos atinentes a alguns dos recortes interseccionais que norteiam a aproximação com nossas/os/es sujeitas/os/es de investigação, a saber, a leitura crítica, qualitativa e situada de estatísticas (oficiais e independentes) sobre as juventudes urbanas brasileiras, no tocante a questões raciais e de gênero.

Palavras-chave
Ativismos; Juventudes urbanas; Interseccionalidade; Estética; Política

Resumen

Exponemos en este artículo las principales perspectivas de análisis y las categorías clave que guían el proyecto de investigación “Activismos Juveniles Urbanos: Cuestiones Estéticas, Migratorias, Raciales y de Género”, realizado por el equipo de Brasil con la Red Iberoamericana de Posgrados en Infancias y Juventudes (RedINJU), red internacional de investigación constituida por el Grupo de Trabajo Infancias y Juventudes del Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). En esta primera presentación, que corresponde a los nueve meses iniciales de nuestro estudio, también se comparten resultados parciales relacionados con la comparación reflexiva, contextual y coyuntural de los datos empíricos relacionados con algunos de los recortes interseccionales que guían la aproximación con nuestros participantes en la investigación, a saber, la lectura crítica, cualitativa y situada de las estadísticas (oficiales e independientes) sobre la juventud urbana brasileña, en lo que respecta a las cuestiones raciales y de género.

Palabras clave
Activismos; Juventud urbana; Interseccionalidad; Estética; Política

Introduction: assumptions and research scope

The research project Urban youth activism: aesthetic, migratory, racial and gender issues is part of Brazil’s contribution to the international research network (Red Iberoamericana de Posgrados en Infancias y Juventudes - RedINJU) constituted by the WG CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales) Infancias y Juventudes, whose founders are Silvia Borelli and Rose de Melo Rocha. The remaining authors in this article are associate researchers.

Our work results from a partnership between two National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) research groups, namely Images, metropolis and youth cultures (PUC-SP) and Juvenália: aesthetic, generational, racial and gender issues in communication and consumption (ESPM-SP). In structural terms, we are located in the WG CLACSO, specifically in the axis Infancias y juventudes: hegemonías, violencias y prácticas culturales y políticas de resistencia y re-existencia. We consider activist youth to be coherently integrated to the analytical scope in the axis, if organized around national and local collectives. That is, we acknowledge the manifestations of hegemonic powers in their institutional and illicit coercions, we perceive the action of multiple kinds of violence towards young people, and we pay attention to the cultural and political practices through which youth express ways of resisting and existing. As indicated by Valenzuela (2009), we understand that biopolitical resistances are the result of confronting the necropolitical management of the capital.

The scope of our investigation concerns communicational, audiovisual, narrative and political processes produced and mobilized by collectives and young activists living in São Paulo. It aims to observe their languages and aesthetic experiences prioritizing cultural and resistance practices in relation to racial and gender issues. They hold strong intersectionality. The presence of internal and external migratory flows in the configuration of aesthetic-political practices and expressions of our study subjects will also be considered in this investigation. The internal aspect concerns neighborhoods, cities, states and regions of Brazil; while the external refers to countries and nationalities¹.

The theoretical basis and epistemic framework of the project are aligned with decolonial perspectives and are affiliated to the tradition of Latin American research on youth. It seeks to listen to authorial narratives and self-organizing processes of political and cultural action. We focus, in this sense, on the forms of presentation, representation, and presence performed by juvenile actors. We do not aim that much attention at the representations produced about them. We also presuppose the bibliographies that articulate aesthetics, politics, and urbanity as a reflective framework, as well as those produced by Latin American, African, and Afro-Caribbean ethnic and gender dissidences. Bringing together repertoires from the areas of Anthropology and Communication, the research adopts a multimethodological protocol composed of synergistic articulation between bibliographical research, documentary research and field research. It maintains regular spaces for dialogue and production between the team and the researched collectives².

It is important to emphasize in this introductory framework that we consider the collectives and their subjects to be privileged sources of information on the way Brazilian urban youth builds their activism in a context of profound instability, precariousness and political tension. Being faithful to our team’s common values, we give priority to listening to young people’s narratives about themselves and the world in which they are situated. The political and aesthetic dimension that emerges from these autobiographical narratives - both individual and collective - brings three central territories into contact: corporalities, cities, and audiovisualities.

We assume, with Cubides, Toscano and Valderrama (1998), that the concept of territory is not only thought in its geographic, geolocated and geopolitical materialities, but also understanding that these territories are cultural, symbolic and increasingly permeated by interfaces and languages arising from digital networks and technicities. Thus, we understand that it is from this expanded and multi situated territoriality that the youth and their collectives trigger and produce sensibilities, sociability, and configure what Aguilera Ruiz (2014) names their own epistemes. This means to say that these young activists narrate themselves while also taking for themselves the construction of their political and existential grammar.

In this way, the enunciated analysis perspectives (qualitative treatment of quantitative data; intersectional and transversal cross referencing, individual accounts; and youth author narratives, relevant research data) have led us in these initial months to elaborate a shared conceptual map. It merges our reflective inputs and concerns with emic contributions. The key categories - necropolitics, dissidence, collective action, politicity, subjectivities and political bodies, political appropriation of networking communicational tools - are not only diagnostic categories. They also approach the embodied expressions of the activist subjects as enunciation resources about their daily silencing, subjection and violence. All of it appears in their incorporated authorial narratives.

In methodological terms, our intellectual production envisions the team’s interlocution and collective production, research horizontality, systematic meetings and integrative exchanges. We have as a central objective the mapping of perceptions and conceptions by these young people about the subordination and vulnerabilities they experience. In addition, we are interested in understanding how they confront and resist such sociocultural conditioning. As well as Néstor Perlongher, Fernández (2013, p. 15) presents an assumption with which our research is aligned. Following the author’s proposal, we will take “a step further in relation to qualitative methodologies that incorporate ‘the voices’ of the social actors they investigate. We also incorporate their knowledge, which is richer and more potent than what the classical academy, even the most democratic, can assume”³.

Brazilian youth: violence, inequalities, racial and gender issues

Following the contextualization of our proposal, we present reflections on Brazilian youth associated with the interpretation of some relevant macro data. They show processes of vulnerability and exclusion faced by youth sectors especially in terms of racial, migratory, and gender issues in the last decades. That is, they start from the point of view of the violence they suffered and from the political-economic scenario. We understand that this problematization contextualizes the panorama of the debate on urban youth activism we followed in our research.

The generation and consolidation of multiple inequalities in global contexts (APPADURAI, 2004; SANTOS, 2000) are mostly anchored in the conditions of subalternization experienced by inter and intra-generational segments (children, adolescents, youth, the elderly); by women submitted to patriarchal and sexist regimes; by black and indigenous people, by those subjected to stigmatization and exclusion by heterogeneous forms of racism; by segregated and threatened LGBTQIA+ people; by diverse immigrants and refugees; by the inhabitants of big cities, who subsist in conflict with the complex urbanities; and by the residents and occupants who live in the confrontation between the planned, hygienized, and commercialized metropolis and occupied places/territories in daily life.

One of the aspects that stands out in the set of indicators on youth in Brazil is the violence resulting from multiple forms of racism, transphobia, homophobia, feminicide, juvenicide, ethnocide and the murder of leaders of social movements that face, in reverse, a model of society that proposes the dissolution of policies and achievements from previous projects. A reference instrument such as the Atlas of Violence (BRASIL, 2019; 2020) reiterates in the previously cited editions the deepening of intentional violence lethality rates in the country. This lethality is directed towards Brazilian youth, even if with different nuances originated in distinct racial, social class and gender issues.

A perspective on diverse types of activism

By enunciating and publicly announcing themselves, the analyzed activists and collectives activate very specific modes of articulation between aesthetics and politics. This happens as they confront the suffered violence moving towards their desired life perspectives. We have worked with the concept of “embodied political subjectivity” (DIAZ GOMES; ALVARADO SALGADO, 2012) to reflect on these political expressivities. In a complementary direction, activists and collectives claim that their bodies are political, articulating from this scope the struggle against structural racial and gender violence in Brazilian society.

It is important to pay attention, in the Brazilian case, to what Chaia (2007) identifies as two of the main historical landmarks of the approximation between aesthetics and political engagement in the country: the late 1960s and the mid-1990s. In both cases, according to the author, there is an intention of social reflexivity, an effort - individual or collective - of direct action and a concern with otherness, configuring an “attitude towards art and the surrounding reality” (CHAIA, 2007, p. 10) of characteristic not only counter-hegemonic, but fundamentally heterotopic.

Considering the aesthetic a public issue is an important guideline for what we understand here as activism. Thus, activism is circumscribed to practices, postures and languages in which engagement is necessarily a theme of resistance, dissidence or dissensus. According to Rocha (2021, p. 17),

youth activism [...] gained strength in the 2000s, especially after the World Social Forums, the occupations, the secondary school mobilizations in Chile and Brazil, the actions of local, regional, national, and global collectives, and in more specific circles of non-partisan and cross-party youth political practices. Later, in the 2010s, notably with the growth and consolidation of the youth marches, and in the wake of activist mobilizations that began to make heavy use of social networks, the debate on gender imprints politicality and a strong aesthetic marker to the expression.

Colling (2018, p. 157) specifically addresses the activisms of sexual and gender dissent:

Obviously, the relations between art, politics, sexual and gender diversity, especially when we think about the history of feminism, are not new. Feminists, as well as other social movements, such as the black movement and its theater, have always realized that arts and cultural products in general are powerful strategies to produce other subjectivities capable of attacking misogyny, sexism, and racism.

The embodied political narratives of urban activists constitute a memoriographical collection of pasts, presents and utopias. Memory, here, also appears as the fruit of a full-bodied experience, which takes place in the context of the metropolis, of the urban tracks and palimpsests, as proposed by Walter Benjamin in many of his writings, and, more recently, according to updated by Martín-Barbero (2004), when he enunciates the great transformations of perception in contemporary societies, permeated by urbanity and by technicities. The metropolis, founder of the modern sensorium, demands from those who transit in it a new and expanded sensory regime whose aesthetic perception is affected by particular regimes of images and imaginaries.

If in Benjamin we see the power inherent to the audiovisualities that interpellate us through the senses, it is in Rancière (2009) that we identify an ultimate imbrication between aesthetics and politics. According to the author, we understand the sensible as something that is shared and common. In addition, in this sharing, the legitimacy and visibility of the parts are distributed in an unequal way. Therefore, by proposing new divisions, aesthetics reveals its essentially political dimension.

This is how we also understand the relationship of these young activists with their living spaces and the production of memories. Amid the routes through the urban landscapes of the city, they are able to perceive, in their bodies, the particularities of their surroundings. This also relates to what Canevacci (2008) associates with the grammar of symbolic fragments in urban space to be deciphered - they are a sort of bricolage.

We also think of the city itself as a body that triggers specific memories about itself and its inhabitants, whether in relation to the situations or flows it contains, which alternate and vary widely in time/space. In this way, the relations of this city-body with traumatic issues such as slavery, or with the dynamic and varied migration cycles, can produce localized inscriptions.

Here, therefore, the category of the body reveals itself essential. The bodies we speak of, which circulate in this body-city, already bring at birth a cultural inscription, as Butler (2019) proposes and, consequently, echo involuntary memories. The urban experience, its memoriographical inscriptions, actively forged or involuntarily attributed, allows us to trigger in an intense way the debates of gender and the debates of racialized bodies, seeing the body as a repository of stories, of memories, of imaginaries that constitute bodies. In this sense, the performative dimension of prejudice becomes evident. Given these perspectives, we understand, in the observation of activist bodies, that the fight is something that implies the bodies and that is done with the body.

A perspective on intersectionality

After locating the Brazilian youth in relation to suffered violence and the socio-political contexts of the last decades, which directly influence activism, it is worth presenting the intersections and specificities that lead us to an intersectional reading of such realities. Davis (2016) names intersectionality ideas and practices that highlight the way in which gender, race, and class act as intersecting systems of power, configuring themselves to maintain forms of subalternization, but also allowing a way to elucidate the possibilities of emancipation and resistance strategies.

In the author’s view, it is necessary not to hierarchize oppressions, but to understand that they combine and intersect (DAVIS, 2016), victimizing the world’s populations. Intersectionality, therefore, not only marks differences but also proposes comparative and complex criteria that denounce the observed structures of oppression and claim social justice for subalternized subjects. Thus, a first and important step in any analytical project that aims at an intersectional project is to point out the contexts and markers of inequality of the observed social group, because difference, by making structural oppression visible, becomes the materiality that lays bare an unequal system (CARRERA, 2021).

In this research, as we set out to analyze the data on violence against Brazilian youth and its intersectional crossovers, we start from the premise that capitalist logics, structural racism (ALMEIDA, 2017) and cis-hetero-patriarchy are inseparable and that the interpretation of the statistics brought here permeates this understanding. Intersectionality is, therefore, a theoretical and methodological apparatus that guides our point of view; a fundamental analytical operator for the perspectives and planning of a future.

The intersectional debate aims to rescue the voices of historically silenced subjects and to make visible how some social groups (black women, LGBTQIA+ population, peripheral youth and indigenous populations) are more exposed to structures of violence. Regarding the relationship between youth and racial inequality in Brazil, it is found that 75.5% of homicide victims in 2017 were black individuals, according to data from the Atlas of Violence (BRASIL, 2019). The survey further notes that when comparing a ten-year period (2007-2017) there was an increase in racial lethality in the country. While the murder rate of blacks grew 33.1%, the rate of murder of non-blacks showed a small growth of 3.3%.

Despite the fact that most of the murder victims are men, when we make the gender cut from the survey, we note that racial inequality persists. We see that the homicide rate of non-black women grew 4.5% between 2007 and 2017, while the homicide rate of black women grew 29.9%. The disparities can also be seen when we check the proportion of black women among the victims of lethal violence: 66% of all women murdered in the country in 2017. A much higher growth compared to non-black women. However, it should be noted that specific data on feminicide report the predominance of death of white women, which may be associated with the absence of records (underreporting, lack of notification due to conditions of vulnerability) of data about black women.

The data presented by the Atlas of Violence about racial inequality reinforces the survey of the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA) about the murders committed against transsexuals. According to the dossier, the average profile of transgender people murdered in Brazil in 2019 is black and young. The observation provides evidence that 67% of the victims survive on prostitution, reiterating the index that black transsexuals have less access to schooling, to the formal labor market and are the majority in street prostitution. About 0.02% of transsexual women are in college, 72% do not have a high school education, and only 4% are in formal jobs.

Mbembe (2018) highlights how this logic, which dehumanizes certain bodies, entails a management of life and death, dictating those who can live and those who must die. The effects of what the author names as necropolitical practices deepen the conditions of vulnerability of marginalized youth in urban contexts. Mbembe (2017) states that the current devastating conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism accentuates inequalities, producing more and more disposable individuals, unemployed, refugees, and exposed to death. Meanwhile, social conflicts have increasingly taken the form of what he calls mortal passions, based on issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.

The racialization of social relations and practices pointed out by Mbembe (2018) causes a series of disparities, which in Brazil stand out, for example, in the asymmetries between white and black people in all instances: access to health, employment, education, income, etc. Black women have less access to education and are inserted in less qualified positions in the labor market, highlighted by the high concentration in domestic work. They have lower life expectancy in relation to white women. There is a high rate of illiteracy and school dropout among black youth in comparison to white children and adolescents. There is a scarcity of black representation in spaces of power, occupying leadership positions in the political field and in spaces of visibility such as TV news, soap operas, and series. These, among other indicators already mentioned in our reflection, reinforce the place of subordination imposed on black bodies.

For Almeida (2017), the mechanisms associated with structural racism are linked to discriminatory processes that derive from the colonial period. This era has always privileged the existence and power attributed to certain bodies and groups to the detriment of others, as in slavery. Such logic, according to him, is perpetuated by institutional, cultural, historical, and interpersonal practices and it aims to naturalize the association of the place of black people with subalternity.

These inequality indicators and oppression dynamics can be associated with what Kilomba (2019) has characterized as projects of silencing. The thinker argues that alterity must be kept muted to ensure that exclusionary discourse is consolidated, without the interference of dissident narratives. It thus legitimizes violent structures against subalternized groups.

When applying these reflections to communication studies, Carrera (2021) recognizes the concept of intersectionality as a methodological tool of great value, because the author sees in interactional environments, in relationships of sociability and in communication practices, symbolic places for debates about the matrices of oppression and dynamics of discrimination and (in)visibility. For the author, the focus of observation needs to be not on the intersections that make up the subjects, but on the ability to identify how they mobilize these intersections, while the subjects and interlocutors construct their enunciations.

Carrera (2021) recognizes that social environments, mediated or not by technicalities, are spaces prone to reproduce intersectional oppression dynamics. Mainly because they culturally construct marginalizing meanings about subalternized subjects. In this context, the narratives, discourses and audiovisualities resulting from communication practices can be considered as materialized expressions of sociocultural tensions (ROCHA; SILVA; PEREIRA, 2015). They are also relevant discursive and symbolic productions that enable analysis on intersectional dynamics.

In short, the contexts of inequality raised here coupled with the listed theoretical and methodological aspects are foundations of paramount importance to guide the analytical process inherent to our research about the understanding of Communication as a means for social equality (CARRERA, 2021). Intersectionality is a methodological tool capable of directing the construction of our questions, as it rejects binary observations and it aims to understand the contexts and subjects “in their heterogeneity and completeness” (CARRERA, 2021, p.11).

An intersectional reading of violence against LGBTQIA+ youth

With the intersectional assumptions presented above as a reference, this section proposes a qualitative reading of some relevant statistical surveys of violence committed against the LGBTQIA+ population in Brazil. The specific data in relation to these populations are not presented to us by official government agencies in any of their spheres. Therefore, it was necessary to look for alternatives so that this information could be found. In this sense, we counted on the important work done by the third sector, notably by organizations such as ANTRA and Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB), which concentrate their efforts on collecting data from multiple sources, such as journalistic notes, documents, denunciations and reports, of the cases of violence and death against this population.

The 2019 report “Violent Deaths of LGBT+ People in Brazil”, conducted by GGB, identifies, since 2000, 4,809 deaths due to violence against these populations, with an ever-increasing curve of the annual number of deaths, with the exception of more significant reduction in the years 2006, 2013 and 2019. Regarding the decrease in the latter year, the role of the Federal Supreme Court in equating the crime of homophobia to that of racism in the context of the Direct Action of Unconstitutionality by Omission (ADO) 26 must be emphasized.

As for the profile based on specificity of sexual orientation, 52.89% of the compiled cases is related to the gay population, followed by the gender-fluid population (27.05%), lesbians (9.73%), transsexuals (8.81%), and bisexuals (1.52%). Most of the victims are between 15 and 34 years old (44.68% of the total number of deaths), which points to an accentuated vulnerability specifically among young people. As for the racial dimension, 37.08% of the deaths are concentrated in black and brown-skinned individuals, against 36.78% of white individuals. This highlights the importance of an intersectional reading of these data, informed jointly by questions of gender and race.

The report also draws a relation between violence and sexism, based on results obtained by the IBGE in a research about sexist speeches, which verified the highest frequency of prejudice speeches in the Midwest and North regions (GGB, 2020). Moreover, it stresses the connection established in Araújo’s report (2020) between sexism and criminal factions, which would have been responsible for crimes with cruelty against young, poor, and marginalized populations in large metropolitan regions. Sexism and heteronormativity also appear in the justifications given by criminals about the motivations for the murder (GGB, 2020).

The Todxs application, which enables users to make geolocated reports of violence suffered by LGBTQIA+ populations, records in its mapping and report analysis that “54% is related to the victim’s sexual orientation, 30.4% to non-specific LGBTIphobia, 11.8% relates to gender identity, 2.5% to gender expression, and 0.6% comes from a combination of gender identity and gender expression” (METRO, 2019). As for the content of the reports,

Spoken violence and humiliation (when the violence is intended to publicly diminish the person or deny their identity, affecting them more deeply) account for more than half of the reports received, 33.3% and 18.4%, respectively. The occurrences of physical violence and prohibition, in which LGBTI+ people have their rights curtailed, such as the right to physical integrity, freedom of mobility and freedom of expression (since they cannot freely express their genders and sexualities), together represent 17.9%. The category “discrimination” presents 12.4%, while the others (written, harassment, symbolic, sexual, etc.) add up to 18%.

(METRO, 2019).

Based on these data, and as also established in the GGB report, we understand that violence against the LGBTQIA+ population “is diffuse and hides different nuances of structural homotransphobia” (GGB, 2020, p. 38), sometimes having elements clearly related to open and declared hatred, but at other times strongly grounded in structural situations of vulnerability to which these populations are condemned. There are repeated denials of fundamental rights and possibilities of defense and protection of their lives in both cases. In the same direction, the Dossier of Murders and Violence Against Brazilian Trans People conducted by ANTRA in 2019 points out that 99% of participating LGBTQIA+ people said they do not feel safe in the country (BENEVIDES; SAYONARA, 2019,). It is a reflex of what they call structural LGBTIphobia.

With specific regard to the transgender and transfeminine population, the dossier points out that in 2019, Brazil remained the country where there are more deaths of the trans population in the world (with 124 registered murders). Of these, 59.2% of the victims were between 15 and 29 years old, further clarifying that “the higher murder rates of the trans population is directly related to age issues, where the younger, the more susceptible to violence and mortality. Unlike those people who exceed the estimated life span, they see the possibility of being murdered decrease throughout their lives” (BENEVIDES; SAYONARA, 2019, p. 31). A total of 97.7% of the murders were against female trans people (121 cases), and, as for the racial cut, 82% of the victims were black and brown people; the perspective of gender and race are, therefore, fundamental in the intersectional analysis of trans and gender fluid youth.

Another point of convergence in the data collected is physical and symbolic persecution. Added to the sexism of heteronormativity, in the case of transgender and transfeminine people, there is also family exclusion, which leads to their expulsion from their homes at the average age of 13 (BENEVIDES; SAYONARA, 2019, p. 32). In addition, they are mostly “murdered in contexts of urban centers, prostitution zones, and in the almost always dark streets, reaffirming the effects of the Cross-dressers Exodus inside and outside the country as an emergency survival measure” (BENEVIDES; SAYONARA, 2019, p. 23).

Loka de Efavirenz Collective: some observations

With the intention of adding some initial notes on the empirical data observed so far to this discussion, we exhibit a first presentation and analysis of one of the activist groups studied, the Loka de Efavirenz Collective (Loka).

Since July 2016, the focus of the collective’s action is the debate around themes that involve the need to think about public health policies directed to people living with HIV/AIDS. Moreover, the necessity that these public policies are adequate and compatible with the needs and reality of Brazil.

Loka not only counts on participants from different social segments, such as artists, theoreticians, militants, etc., but also on actions in different regions and on activists in three Brazilian states. The inspiration for the collective’s name alludes to the drug “Efavirenz”, commonly used as part of the antiretroviral therapy for individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

They still do not have a physical headquarter, but they show interest in having a place in the future to expand their forms of action. Their organization and articulation takes place predominantly in virtual spaces, using social network platforms such as Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. These sites work as a place for discussion and as a way to denounce violations suffered by people living with HIV/AIDS. In its presentation text on the Facebook profile⁴, Loka makes intersections by understanding HIV and AIDS as devices to control bodies that intensify structural violence against groups already historically oppressed and victims of issues such as sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, among others.

Loka de Efavirenz makes manifestations in social network websites. For instance, they denounce that the - sometimes arbitrary - conduct of public health policies for populations living with HIV/AIDS, corroborates the maintenance of stigmas around the HIV-positive population, often already marginalized for fitting into socially oppressed and/or socially vulnerable groups. As examples of the difficulties faced cited by Loka de Efavirenz, it is possible to mention the prevention campaigns, sometimes built to reinforce prejudices, in addition to the precarious conditions of access to medical treatment that do not meet the different scenarios and Brazilian social contexts.

We can make some observations starting from the combination between the presented data on Loka de Efavirenz Collective and the reflection developed throughout the article. First, we notice that the realities of the populations living with HIV/AIDS in Brazil and the communicational materialities that derive from their discourses and narratives need to be analyzed based on intersectional methodologies, which include gender, race, class, sexuality, region, among other social markers, present in the mapping of these groups.

It is also noteworthy that the audiovisual narratives perceived in Loka de Efavirenz emerge as ways to break the invisibility and silencing of historically oppressed groups. These, in turn, can be understood as strategies of confrontation, of those who aim to fight against systems and structures that cross oppressions. To do so, the collective uses the technicalities that allow it to make itself visible, echoing dissensual existences.

Final considerations

We made intentional choices when analyzing the emergence conditions of urban youth activism as a relevant analytical and sociological category for thinking about cultural and political resistance. When mapping statistical data we prioritized a qualitative way to approach the violence that directly victimizes sectors of Brazilian youth, selectively affecting racial, sexual, and gender minorities and indiscriminately affecting women and LGBTQIA+ populations.

These choices are situated in terms of unequivocal contextual aspects and they are in synergy with the political agenda and engagement of the activists and collectives we have been following. Their demands for the right to the body is directly linked to the public agenda that claims right to the city. It is precisely here that the articulation they propose, namely the one between racial and gender issues, becomes evident. In other words, treating and producing statistical data does not reverberate, per se, in intersectional and transversal readings. The analytical effort we make as a research team is an implicit choice. Without it, we understand that it is difficult to assess how situations of precarization, vulnerability, and stigmatization are concretely and subjectively rejected by activist practices of racial, ethnic, aesthetic, and gender resistance.

When we analyze gender issues across available official sources, we clearly see that many institutional researchers tend to reproduce gender binarisms. There is no neutrality in the approach; one notes the reproduction of cis and heteronormative patriarchal perspectives in federal, state, and municipal government sources. Not coincidentally, dissidents of gender and sexuality are often invisibilized. Police and judicial practices are characterized by lack of rigor in the investigation, identification and arrest of suspects of crimes against the trans community. The characterization and accounting of gender-based violence committed against women depends on legal instruments of denunciation and updated records, which often does not occur. Sources referring to the LGBTQIA+ population are produced by NGOs and associations of the community itself. The official sources do not give priority to intersectional comparison (class, race, ethnicity, gender, generation, regionality, territoriality). Moreover, the absence of records may be due to social, legal, and symbolic conditions of vulnerability and related to the precariousness of the implementation of protective measures.

We have focused on structural necropolitics by identifying the main lines of resistance and confrontation to racial and gender violence by activists. Since underreporting, delegitimization, and silencing are constant facts in the Brazilian reality, community actions of support, denunciation and protection have been as important as the struggle for public policies. Those resources share the aim of providing characterization, accountability, and punishment of classist, racist, misogynist, and LGBTphobic violence.

• 1
  The debate on mobility and migration will be explored in a specific article. We are interested in problematizing the particularities and the intersections between global migration flows (APPADURAI, 2004; SANTOS, 2000), and national, regional and local ones (FERREIRA et al., 2010).
• 2
  At this moment, our empirical base is constituted by the public presence of two youth collectives in São Paulo, one linked to the racial and gender debate, with national reach and led by positive youth, and the other linked to migrant and aesthetic issues.
• 3
  The translations in this paper’s quotations are made by us.
• 4
  Loka de Efavirenz’s Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/LokadeEfavirenz. Access on: 28 mar. 2022.

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Edited by

Editor: Maria Ataide Malcher

Editorial assistant: Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  04 July 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  02 Apr 2021
• Accepted
  07 Mar 2022