"Tem xiririca na bixanxa": movimentações de lésbicas, gays, bissexuais e travestis no Espírito Santo entre 1960 e 1989

Abstract

This research analyses the movements of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transvestites in the state of Espírito Santo between the 1960s to the year of 1989. The empirical data consist of articles from the official press, an alternative left press, and a type of homosexual media. In addition, the interviews of Tina Moreira, Edson Ferreira and Claudino de Jesus will also be discussed. Then, the documents produced by the competent bodies for the censorship, controllability and repression of the Brazilian State during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) to the Redemocratization are part of the main sources found. Through those documents, we present a study of how homosexuals and transvestites appropriated the urban area, such as the Grande Vitória, and the countryside cities, as Colatina, producing a “possible place” to live in. Moreover, the research inquires which were the representations and discursive discontinuities made by and about the groups analyzed. Besides that, we seek to investigate how homosexuals and transvestites act in the process of subjectivation, conformity, and the effort to build a “group unit” in this period. Furthermore, we inspect the context where the Triângulo Rosa pela Dignidade Humana (TRpDH) has arisen as the first local group defending the dignity of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transvestites. The TRpDH was created right after the beginning of the National Campaign against Aids in the state of Espírito Santo, in 1987. Have we questioned: Which were the factors that act in the arise of the TRpDH? Did the agency emerge as an answer to the SIDA/Aids epidemic? Why, at the beginning of the 1980s, the state of Espírito Santo still did not have a group like the TRpDH, considering that there were already activist groups in the adjacent states? We believe that the possible way to reflect upon these questions is to perceive the local context and singularities of homosexuals and transvestites in the capixaba context. To show that, we investigate the corpus documental - as well as review the literature about the theme - through the lens of the theoretical Cultural History texts. We sustain the research by taking part in the concepts of representation, sexuality dispositive and subject, sex-gender system, performance, sexual politics, the desire of a nation, and Aids dispositive, respectively elaborated by Roger Chartier, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Renan Quinalha, Richard Miskolci, and Nestor Perlongher. The methodological framework of the sources is placed in Foucault’s discourse analyses, which prime the investigation of both the discourses in the moments they are made, as the discontinuities, without holding on to the “origin of the discourse”.