Sexuality, Religion and Politics in Latin America

JUAN MARCO VAGGIONE

Simposio; Sexuality and Politics: Regional Dialogue from the Global South; 2012

Revisiting previous work (Vaggione, 2005, 2006a, 2006b) this article presents the concepts of reactive politicization and strategic secularism to illuminate patterns of conservative religious activism that not only transcend the classical religious?secular dichotomy but also define and determine contemporary sexual politics. The second part of the article presents some normative considerations with regard to the intersections between religion and sexuality. After decades in which normative arrangements tended to confine religious practice to the private sphere, as external to politics, now major contemporary debates have given more legitimacy to religious actors and discourses in the democratic public sphere. This realignment in the relationship between democracy and religion presents new challenges to feminist and sexual diversity movements, calling into question the rigid and stable boundary between religion and politics that pervades the imagination of these movements. Without disqualifying the central political strategies adopted by these movements ? in particular the defense of laicidad, referring to the principle of laicité or the separation between church and state ? this article underscores the need for those engaged with sexual politics to consider that it is politically inevitable that religion is now enmeshed in public debates about sexuality, in both normative and empirical terms. The changes recently observed in conservative religious activism and the normative transformations that are expanding democratic arenas in ways that incorporate religious voices have created a new panorama for sexual politics. If, as contended in this article, distinct historical contexts present distinct challenges for sexual politics, our main challenge today is to develop more complex analytical frameworks and political strategies to better understand and resist the political force of religion as a legitimate component, at least in some of its manifestations, of the democratic playing field.