Sexuality, Religion and Politics in Latin America

JUAN MARCO VAGGIONE

Workshop; Sexuality and Politics; 2014

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 discoursesin 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 andstable boundary between religion and politics that pervades the imagination of these movements. Without disqualifying the centralpolitical strategies adopted by these movements in particular thedefense of laicidad, referring to the principle of laicité or theseparation between church and state this article underscores the needfor those engaged with sexual politics to consider that it ispolitically inevitable that religion is now enmeshed in publicdebates about sexuality, in both normative and empirical terms. Thechanges recently observed in conservative religious activism and thenormative transformations that are expanding democratic arenas inways that incorporate religious voices have created a new panoramafor sexual politics. If, as contended in this article,distincthistorical contexts present distinct challenges for sexualpolitics,our main challenge today is to develop more complexanalytical frameworks and political strategies to better understandand resist the political force of religion as a legitimate component,at least in some of its manifestations, of the democratic playingfield.