THE COLONIAL NECROPOLITICS OF “GENDER IDEOLOGY” IN BRAZIL

THE QUEER AS A QUESTION OF NATIONAL SECURITY

Résumé

Given that the so-called “ideology of gender” has recently become prominent in contemporary discourses and public debates in Brazil, this paper considers the biopolitical presuppositions that those discourses animate in the context of queerness. We aim to examine how queerness, in the Brazilian context, has historically been articulated as a question of national security. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of security, critical queer, biopolitical, and feminist decolonial thought, we unpack how mechanisms of embodied power are articulated and how those articulations support and reinforce the traditional concept of the family, enabling the (con)figuration of certain subjects as proper citizens while constituting gender non-conforming subjects as “threats.” As two sides of the same coin, biopolitics (the governance of life) and necropolitics (the politics of death) are fundamental for this analysis.