Gênero, sexualidade e trabalho: tecnologias de regulação e sobrevivência LGBTQIAPN+ nos relatos de Lampião da Esquina

Abstract

This thesis results from an investigation into the construction of the meanings of work from a socio-historical perspective, taking as its empirical field the magazine Lampião da Esquina (1978–1981), a pioneering periodical in addressing genders and sexualities dissident to the cisheterosexual matrix in Brazil. The magazine circulated during a historical period marked by erasures and silencing, namely the Brazilian military-civil dictatorship, representing a space for the production of meanings regarding the experience of work in intersection with gender and sexuality in the country. The study is justified by its potential for historical-memorial recovery of experiences (Scott, 1998) related to work, as well as by highlighting how print media, such as Lampião da Esquina, function as gender technologies (Lauretis, 1994) and sites of memory (Nora, 1993). The theoretical framework is situated within gender studies, conceiving gender as a social, performative, and historical construction (Butler, 1990; 2018; Scott, 1995; 1998; Louro, 2004; Crenshaw, 1989; Lauretis, 1994), and engages with the perspective of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2005). It also dialogues with Brazilian Marxist feminists (Sueli Carneiro, 2011; Helena Hirata, 2007; 2009; 2011; 2016), emphasizing the intersection of gender, race, and class in structuring work and LGBTphobic inequalities in Brazil. The methodology is qualitative, interpretative, and interdisciplinary, centered on the analysis of 20 accounts published in Lampião da Esquina. It incorporates a situated epistemological stance (Foucault, 2015; Lauretis, 1994; Haraway, 1995), recognizing that every process of analysis is permeated by positional markers and power relations, with the researcher’s perspective being socially and historically situated and inseparable from the research process. The thesis argues that the meanings of work, as recorded in Lampião da Esquina, emerge from a phenomenon I propose to call regulationsurvival. Survival constitutes a meaning fundamentally linked to a strategy of becoming livable (Butler, 2018) through work, in the face of family conflicts and violence experienced by LGBTQIAPN+ populations since adolescence. The aspiration to escape repressive contexts often serves as the entry point into the labor world, which is in turn permeated by the ideal of life in other cities—directly related to the phenomenon of the exodus of LGBTQIAP+ people to urban centers. Within this framework, techniques for maintaining employment are observed, such as concealing sexual orientations, engaging in informal labor as a means of access and continuity, and sexual work; alongside mechanisms of exclusion, including heightened exposure to street violence, criminalization, and psychological abuse. These dynamics shape the precarization of LGBTQIAPN+ work through the lens of the regulation-survival concept, as represented in the historical context documented in Lampião da Esquina.