Description
This paper examines how brutality against LGBT people during the Colombian Civil War functioned as a mechanism of social transformation through processes of dehumanization. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork in conflict-affected regions and extensive archival research, I argue that Colombian paramilitaries weaponized anti-LGBT violence as a semiotic tool that both communicated social reforms as well as disciplined the local population into compliance. By transforming bodies into symbols, these actors used violence to socialize civilians into new moral orders that redefined belonging. In my two field sites of Montes de María and Magdalena Media, I trace how the language and violence of dehumanization enabled moral justification for brutality, allowing civilians to interpret anti-LGBT violence as necessary, even righteous. This violence thus reified difference and also reconfigured social identity itself: remaking victims’ personhood, reshaping their communities’ social position, and redrawing the boundaries of the polity.
