Conexões entre violências e participação política nos mandatos de vereadoras lésbicas eleitas em 2020 no Brasil

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the connections between violence and political participation of openly lesbian councilors elected in 2020. The research reflected on how power relations imply the dehumanization of lesbians, who are crossed by issues of gender and sexuality, reducing the political representation of this population. At the heart of this discussion, lesbophobia is configured as a tool to punish lesbians, since they are not intelligible as women under the compulsory order of sex, gender, and desire. The objective is to find out who these lesbian councilors elected in 2020 are, presenting data involving the State/Region; where she was elected; the Party for which she was elected; Age; Color/Race, and Education. Characterizing the profile of these subjects allowed us to observe that it is necessary to intersect the debate, considering that social markers of differences act and reflect on which lesbians occupy the political sphere. Next, we searched Instagram profiles for posts reporting complaints made by these parliamentarians of violence suffered while serving as councilors. We discovered that their political participation is permeated by lesbophobia which we subcategorized into: 1 – Reporting stigmatizing lesbophobic comments. Lesbians are stigmatized by the sex that marks them as women and by the sexuality that marks them as lesbians. Our searches showed that councilors suffer constant attacks regarding their clothing, hair, and the spaces they occupy and are often called freaks. 2 – Reporting sexual violence. Violence is used to regulate, through fear of harassment and rape, the times and places where women can or cannot access. It not only acts with this function but also determines how women should relate to men, considering that women who are not classified as marriageable or deviant should or can be raped. In this study, a councilor was kissed without her consent by another parliamentarian, in the Chamber. We found other cases of rape threats as a way to cure female homosexuality. 3 – Report of a death threat. Councilors receive incessant death threats and in them, there is reference to sexual orientation and also the murder of Marielle Franco. 4 – Reporting speech interruptions. Women are socially, historically, and culturally discredited about what they say, generating consequences when they are violated, since what they say has no value. About this, we verified complaints from councilors about being interrupted or ignored while speaking. Finally, we mapped the prepositions presented by these councilors for the LGBTQIA+ community in their mandates. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis, the research revealed that language is an articulated set of signs serving to mean something and therefore, constructed in society with specific objectives, such that the act of injury is used to produce and maintain lesbophobic stigmas. The participation of lesbians in the political sphere is not just a matter of representation, but necessary for the construction of a fairer sociability. It is necessary to explore ways to create political environments free of violence, where people, with their differences, can contribute significantly to the advancement of democracy.