Narrativas de vidas LGBTQIA+ em queerentena: discursos e estéticas da diferença em atos de reelaboração de si, (re)existência e resistência na pandemia de covid-19

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic, in addition to being characterized as a health problem, can be understood as a social-political phenomenon that highlights social inequalities and hierarchies. For LGBTQIA+ people, this pandemic stiffens vulnerabilities, precarious conditions and difficulties in their lives. In this thesis, we aim to understand how experiences of the covid-19 pandemic are elaborated by LGBTQIA+ people when narrating their own lives and what meanings they attribute to gender and sexuality issues in the contemporary world. To develop these actions, we mobilized the book Histórias da Queerentena, organized by philosopher Pablo Pérez Navarro and published in 2020, which contains 72 stories written in the first-person singular (I) by LGBTQIA+ individuals who address different pandemic experiences. Our interest is not in analyzing the stories or categorizing them, as more canonical methodologies suggest for investigating heterogeneous materials like this. Thus, the methodological design of the thesis articulates two communicational perspectives: affective and indicative. We believe that affect is what touches and moves the researcher, the researcher and the research, constituting a sensitive and unexpected experience, but capable of bringing movement and fluidity throughout the process. We have combined this perspective with the indicative paradigm as a way of highlighting essential clues that emerge from contact with life narratives, articulating them with the theoretical-conceptual basis and the empirical object. The first chapter situates research on gender and sexuality in Communication, with special attention to those that have focused on the covid-19 pandemic as a mobilizing event for research. The second chapter provides an overview to contextualize the Brazilian scenario of the emergence of the health crisis and presents, in a brief historicizing journey, what it is like to be LGBTQIA+ in Brazil, the country that kills us the most. We also turn to an initial contact with the narratives of LGBTQIA+ lives, observing the insurgent character that constitutes them. In the third chapter, we delve into the foundations of queer studies, delving into important concepts for the thesis, such as power, resistance, gender, sexuality, closet and difference, which form theoretical and political lenses for understanding the phenomenon, and then try to bring queer premises closer to the field of Communication. Based on this, the thesis is divided into a double look at the queer scene: discursive and aesthetic. In the fourth chapter, life narratives are explored with reflections on memory, writing, confidences, testimonies and discursivity, with the aim of grasping the disputes and tensions of meaning that emerge in the queer scene through discourse. However, experience escapes language and interpretative gestures. In this sense, the fifth chapter works on the dimension of experience crossed by the establishment of an event with latencies and presences. The sixth and final chapter sews together the threads pulled throughout the research to bring queer studies to light once again and articulate the discursive and aesthetic perspectives with which we work. Our thesis argues that queerentenadas are narratives of disorder, written to confront a world ordered by norms, in which our lives are daily targets of violence. During the covid-19 pandemic, an event that intensified inequalities in LGBTQIA+ lives, writing has become an action of recording that has highlighted perspectives on one's own experience in the world. The call to gather personal stories in a book became a safe space to share about oneself, allowed me to choose what I wanted to expose, highlighted which identities would appear when narrating and connected with other people who, although they didn't know each other and were each facing particularities, formed an assembly.