Political Subjects or Powerless Victims? Medicalization, Judicialization and Victimization of Political Claims: the Case of Women’s and LGBTI Politics in Contemporary Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico

PECHENY MARIO

Santiago de Chile

Congreso; 21st World Congress of Political Science; 2009

International Political Science Association

Based on an extensive empirical comparative study of four Latin American cases, I discuss two contradictory forms of social logic: policies and sexuality. Policies pre-suppose definite limits, a field of intervention, measurable goals and processes, evaluations of cost-effectiveness and rational subjects capable of acting. Besides, in democracy, policies need to be legitimate, i.e., publicly justified in terms of justice. On the other hand, sexuality, as a subjective practice, follows a different logic: its limits are blurred, it is pervasive, its goals and processes are not easily measurable and are sometimes ambivalent and opaque, and rational sexuality is an oxymoron, if not a contradiction. Legitimacy in the field of sexuality relies less on fairness or majority rule, for example, than on a (still undefined) “erotic justice.” However, social movements have instituted a progressive sexual agenda, and sexual policies have existed for decades, not exclusively to repress or control people’s experiences. I argue that the construction of a sexual policy agenda rested on the assumption of sexual victims rather than sexual subjects. In reproductive health, as well as in the first waves of feminist and LGBTI sexual rights, subjects were framed as victims: of a virus, of unwanted pregnancies, of violence, of social and gender inequalities. Little room was left to agency, collective projects, and historical-structural thinking. Now, a process from sexual health to sexual rights has opened the door to re-politicizing sexuality, but the original framing has instilled the idea that political subjects are suspect. A paradoxical phenomenon illustrates contemporary social reluctance to deal with conflict and antagonism. The more sexual an issue or a subject appears to be, the more political it is in a negative sense: it is seen as particular, interest-based and conflictive. Inversely, the more de-sexualized an issue or a subject appears to be, the more apolitical it is: considered as universal, as value- or interest-free and consistent with social order. The challenge is how to sexualize and politicize issues and subjects in a democratic direction, and in the direction of “erotic justice.”