Transvestite Diplomacy

Analyzing how Brazil interacts with the demands of the LGBTQI+ community in the national and international scenario

Abstract

The aim of this work is to understand how Brazil's political agenda for the protection of LGBTQI+ people has been organized domestically and internationally in the face of alarming rates of violence against the LGBTQI+ population, on the one hand, and Brazil's international prominence in defending the human rights of the LGBTQI+ population, on the other. We applied the Actor Network method to four cases that frame Brazil in different moments of debate: the Brazilian Parliament's responsiveness to LGBTQI+ demands between 2003 and 2010; the 60th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 2004; the hearing of the 162nd Extraordinary Session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2017; and Brazil's performance in the report Avances y Desafíos Hacia el Reconocimiento de los Derechos de las Personas LGBTI en las Américas, published by the IACHR in 2019. The findings point to: i) Brazil's regional protagonism in advancing the protection of sexual diversity and gender; ii) the existence of a powerful advocacy network for the safety of sexual and gender minorities; iii) the conditioning of the advancement of the international discussion on LGBTQI+ rights on the political agendas of states; and iv) the sensitivity of the agenda to the interplay of partisan interests in Brazil. This research contributes to the argument that the rights of LGBTQI+ people are vulnerable to the instabilities of the International System, and identifies the intensification of disputes in Brazil that contribute to this diagnosis.