Why Intersectional Activism Matters? Notes on the Afro-LGBTI Brazilian Experience

In his lecture, Dr. Vinícius Correia Zanoli (Freie Universität Berlin) will recover the trajectory of the LGBTI movement in Brazil, concentrating on the impact of the relationships between social movements in the consolidation of intersectional activism. Focussing on the trajectory and strategies of a Black LGBTI group from the peripheries in Brazil, he will stress how the group’s action and identity were influenced by the participation of its activists in different social movements, such as Afro-Brazilian religious communities, black social clubs and activism, LGBTI organizations, trade unions, and popular movements. Dr. Vinícius Correia Zanoli will show how the circulation of activists fosters the exchange of strategies, identities, and knowledge and, finally addressing how these exchanges are not a particularity of his fieldwork but a trend in contemporary Brazil.

Moderation: Dr. Clara Ruvituso (IAI/Mecila)

This lecture is part of the lecture series "Diversity/Medialities" organized by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut and Mecila – Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America:

Inclusion and diversity have marked the demands of social movements in the 21st century. With the concept intersectionality, inspired by feminist movements in the US, the academic field aims to understand how various interdependent conditions of oppression and inequality–class, gender, religion, ethnicity, skin colour, citizenship, migration, geography, and language–are reflected in exclusion, but also in the articulation of differentiated demands and struggles. Much less visible have been the voices of academics and activists from Latin America, who have both made perceivable and conceptualized social and political exclusion from the peripheries. The series of public lectures focuses on these voices from the margins, their long-term conceptual and epistemological frameworks, and their forms and media of circulation and entanglements.

With the first focus on feminist and LGTBIQ movements and ideas we invite experts and activists analyzing South-North interconnections in the struggles for the rights of women and LGTBIQ groups in Latin America.