Description
The paper draws from authors’ ongoing engagement with queer/feminist activists in Brazil to rethink conventional understandings of ‘violence’ and/in 'the international'. One of the main challenges in studying violence is the normativity which tends to attach to the concept: when it is seen as ‘legitimate’ (eg. used by state actors), violence is usually defined merely as the ‘use of force’. Meanwhile, other forms of violence are persistently pathologized, seen as requiring intervention/correction/moralization. Queer/feminist perspectives shed light on the gender/sexual politics of violence and how its domestic/public architectures share origins and legitimation in patriarchal regimes. At the same time, such perspectives tend to marginalize contributions from the global South, especially activist forms of knowledge production. Against this, we draw from the perspectives of queer/feminist activists resisting political violence in Brazil (including police violence, gentrification, and gender-based/queerphobic violence) as key to theorizing the international dimensions of violence as a system sustained and normalized via enduring realities of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. We do not merely seek to add or absorb Brazilian queer/feminist activist perspectives as 'local case studies' of violence/resistance but as key contributors to our political imagination in the making of alternative (queer/feminist) utopias.
