Abstract
In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a group of skinheads observed him at a party and suspected that he might be gay (McLoughlin 2011). This scale of horrific homophobia is not uncommon in Brazil, where rates of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are reported to be amongst the highest in the world. A study conducted with the support of Grupo Gay da Bahia offers the conservative estimate of 260 gays killed in the country in 2010, indicating that rates doubled in only 5 years. The statistic sits uncomfortably with the image of Brazil as a sexually tolerant society, where the legalization of homosexuality was established shortly after the nation’s independence from Portugal. It was therefore with a great sense of achievement for proponents of gay rights that, in May 2011, the Brazil Supreme Court agreed to award same-sex couples the same legal rights as married heterosexuals (BBC 2011). Though the decision stops short of approving marriage for same-sex couples, it has been heralded as an important step against discrimination and toward acknowledging the rights of gays, lesbians, and transgenders to love and live without the condemnation of the state.
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Notes
- 1.
A recent study conducted by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation suggests that Brazilian middle class and young people consider themselves to be of ‘no religion’ at higher rates than ever in history, with Catholicism loosing the most ground.
- 2.
Religion-In-Latin-America database: http://www.prolades.com/amertbl06.htm
- 3.
The ‘Geographies of Religion: a new dialogue’ conference was on 8 and 9 March 2010 in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Keynote presentations were given by Jason Dittmer, Julian Holloway, Kim Knott, Lily Kong, Elizabeth Olson, Jane Pollard, and Andrew Yip. A ‘Geographies of Religion Working Papers Series’ which is based at Newcastle University presents some of the papers emerging from this conference. Many will recall this event because of the lengthy discussion that it created on the critical geography mailing list when a member of the list posted a statement in opposition to the conference and questioned how it contributed to critical and radical geography.
- 4.
A 2010 special issue of Religion (volume 40, issue 4) provided a forum for debating Tevas’ assertion of religion and provides an interesting introduction to the sophistication of contemporary theorizations of religion.
- 5.
Research by Claire Dwyer, David Ley, and Justin Tse on suburban religious landscapes in Canada provides a compelling glimpse into the various ways that religious technologies and the logics of regional planning converge and come into conversation.
- 6.
The Max Planck-funded ‘Urban Aspirations in Seoul: Religion and Megacities in Comparative Studies’, and the larger project of which it is part, will likely reveal a range of new empirical data about religion in a new configurations of the global city. See http://www.mmg.mpg.de/research/all-projects/comparative-study-of-urban-aspirations-in-mega-cities/
- 7.
This includes a special issue on religion and politics for the journal Area (T. Sturm, ed.).
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Olson, E., Hopkins, P., Kong, L. (2013). Introduction – Religion and Place: Landscape, Politics, and Piety. In: Hopkins, P., Kong, L., Olson, E. (eds) Religion and Place. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4685-5_1
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