Originally published here.
In the last 20 years, several countries in Latin America have sought uneven and disparate legal transformations affecting the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and collectives. These new legal measures have taken place simultaneously, with deepening structures of social, gender, and sexual injustice challenging their view as indicators of progressive change.
In this contradictory context, LGBT social policies have emerged as a specialized field of state action because of two parallel trends: the macro political politics affecting the region, and the accumulated experience of gender and sexual social mobilizations in their interactions with the state. There are many variations of this emerging field of social policies because it is shaped by the meaning provided by local actors such as interest groups, activists, and policy makers, and their translation into policy lobbying, policymaking, and policy negotiation.
As result of these innovations, gender identity and sexual orientation have nowadays entered into the language of policymaking and policy implementation. These legal measures have opened spaces for social and political participation that were not there before. Nevertheless, LGBT policies are new regimes of governmentality that control the inclusion of gender and sexual social mobilizations into citizenship and democracy.
The intent of this article is to show that innovations in LGBT lawmaking and policymaking in Latin America happen not only in diverse sociopolitical contexts, but also in contradictory directions for change. There is no doubt that the diversity of mechanisms for policymaking and policy implementation made in the name of LGBT policies in Latin America have allowed for the positioning of agendas for gender and sexual justice in the public sphere. Gender identity and sexual orientation have nowadays entered into the language of policymaking and policy implementation. These legal measures have opened spaces for social and political participation that were not there before. Nevertheless, there are several issues to be explored in these innovations
This article discussed the challenges of LGBT social policies as an isolated field of inquiry. The description of the rich landscape of legal measures targeting LGBT issues intended to illustrate their emergence as result of interactions among state institutions and social mobilizations acting in legislative, judicial, and executive levels. In this way, LGBT policies are an expression of the state in action and reflect the engagement of social mobilizations in the promotion of change.
LGBT social policies exist in the fluidity and porosity between sectors of the state and between state and civil society.The cases explained in detail, Brazil and Colombia, illustrated two ways in which the lobbying, enactment, and implementation of LGBT social policies have taken place. Colombia is a case of policymaking mostly concentrated in the legislative branch and implemented through legal frames, whereas Brazil is a case of policymaking in the executive branch expressed in governmental plans. Both cases have produced achievements and faced limitations.
On the one hand, a variety of strategies have existed for granting rights through policies, showing creativity in policy design. On the other hand, the case of Colombia showed a bureaucratized state structure with limited capacity for policy implementation, and Brazil made important temporal gains that did not become state policies and therefore faced the impact of governmental changes.The discussion of LGBT social policies highlights the complex relationships established between the state in action and the disparate demands of those included under the problematic LGBT umbrella.
The analysis of these social policies shows that their political subject is less a pre-existing homogeneous collective actor and more the result of state interventions. There were indeed previous processes of organization and collective action for change in gender and sexual orders with relatively autonomous existence.
However, state policies defined interactions between institutions and social organizations in particular ways that were used and resisted: as “risk populations” in public health and HIV policies, as pathologized individuals and collectives required of state correction and normalization, and as victims of particular forms of gender and sexual violence.
In this way, LGBT policies are not just legal gains or the results of well-used political opportunities but also a locus for the making of political subjects. If political subjectivities emerge in the connection of disparate areas of political action, policy activity, and identities (Manrique Ospina & Quintana Porras, 2016), these policies will also create new forms of identification, intervention, and collective action.
Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 29 January 2021It is a matter of further discussion how much change is provided by these policies and their impact in structures of social inequality. As mentioned before, the paths for change that conflated in LGBT policies came from a variety of political trajectories and struggles for transformations in gender and sexual politics, even more when these politics are often in processes of overlapping, negotiation, and imposition.
The parallelism between the emergence of LGBT policies and the limited advancement on issues such as abortion (Tabbush et al., 2016) and sex work (Aravena, Korol, & Berkins, 2007), as well as backlashes on other areas of gender and sexual politics (Fontelas Rosado-Nunes, 2015; Vaggione & Morán Faúndes, 2017), challenge the view of these policies as indicators of progressive change. Instead, LGBT policies appear as a new regime of visibility that shed light on some issues of state action but render unattended structural matters of inequality that are not reduced to gender identity or sexual orientation matters.
As a closing idea, there is the question if these innovations in policymaking are contradictory. These innovations occurred during the post-structural adjustment period, characterized by a deepening of neoliberal policies and increasing social tensions that at the same time reduced the scope of social policies and required state alternatives to social demands. State responses through public policies have been heterogeneous. The production of these policy innovations under a multicultural regime requires close attention. LGBT policies are a hybrid space for change resulting from the translation of social demands into regimes of governmentality that control the inclusion of gender and sexual social mobilizations into citizenship and democracy.
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