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Epistemic doubt and affective certainty: counting homotransphobia in Brazil

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Abstract

Statistics circulate with ambivalence in governance settings and mass publics—both extolled as authoritative knowledge and the object of distrustful scrutiny. In the field of human rights activism, where the means to create authoritative knowledge operates asymmetrically between activists, organizations, and state actors, this makes statistical production and circulation subject to an intense politics of knowledge. LGBTI human rights actors in Brazil, for instance, constantly produce numbers that endeavor to make homophobia and transphobia epistemically and affectively real to various audiences. From community surveys of personal experiences of violence or discrimination, to civil society reports of homicides, to federal government reports from human rights hotline complaints, LGBTI activists are awash in figures where they find themselves the producers, consumers, and subject material of such data. This article documents how activists and civil servants count violence, constructing homophobia and transphobia as knowable objects. These counting practices emerge from activists’ counterpublic circulations of knowledge about objects as well as epistemic infrastructures (police, journalistic coverage, hotlines) through which LGBTI peoples’ experience becomes refracted. Aware of these complications, activists deploy epistemic doubt and affective certainty to the field of statistics—utilizing the knowledge they offer while questioning whether violence can be measured at all.

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Notes

  1. This article uses the contemporary nomenclature of Brazil’s LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, intersex) social movement. The terms for sexually dissident and gender expansive people used by the movement has changed over the decade in which data for this study was collected. Brazilian trans* people often identify with the categories travesti and transsexual, which are also used in this article.

  2. See GGB 2011, GGB 2016, GGB 2017, GGB 2018 respectively.

  3. See ANTRA 2017, ANTRA 2018, ANTRA 2019 respectively. Over the course of 2020, however, ANTRA released a series of bulletins warning of increased violence against trans people in quarter-by-quarter comparisons between 2019 and 2020.

  4. See Pillay (2010), Amnesty (2010), TV Cultura (2018), Cowie (2018) respectively.

  5. For clarity, I use the overarching term homotransfobia [homotransphobia in English] as a general term to mean structural oppression against LGBTI people. When interlocutors use terms homofobia [homophobia], transfobia [transphobia], LGBTfobia [LGBT-phobia], I opt for that reported term in context.

  6. Categories of racial identification in Brazil are notoriously slippery due to the ideology of racial democracy (the belief that racial categories and therefore racism do not exist). In my reporting, I have relied on self-reported racial categories (e.g. white, mixed-race [moreno], black) when people have offered them in the course of fieldwork. When people did not offer a self-described racial identity, I included my own impressions of light-skinned and dark-skinned people. This method is imperfect, and my readings also reflects my own position as a white U.S. Latino. Nevertheless, it is preferable over not reporting on race.

  7. “Boletins de Ocorrência Especiais para LGBT.” Jornal da Gazeta. November 5, 2015. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHdqCkFs7XM&t=63s Accessed May 6, 2021.

  8. For an example of a study using DECRADI data obtained through a freedom of information request, see G1 2017.

  9. For more on hypervisibility see Amar 2013.

  10. Lauren Berlant (2008), for instance, suggests that the case is best understood as a genre of evidence that combines the singular and the general into a single narrative.

  11. The SDH published three Dossiers in total, including editions in 2013 and 2016. All three describe a similar methodology.

  12. Information about the Rio de Janeiro DisqueDenuncia is publically available on their website: https://disquedenuncia.org.br. Last accessed November 1, 2019.

  13. Personal conversation. Gustavo Bernardes. June 11, 2018.

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Funding

Research for this study was funded by

IIE-Mellon Graduate Fellowship for International Study (Awarded July 2011).

Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (Awarded January 2012).

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  1. Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Bowdoin College, 7100 College Station, Brunswick, ME, 04101, USA

    Joseph Jay Sosa

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Sosa, J.J. Epistemic doubt and affective certainty: counting homotransphobia in Brazil. Theor Soc 52, 95–117 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09462-0

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