Paper details

Paper authors	Caobe Sousa
In panel on	Borders and Subjectivities: Imagination, bodies, and political experiences
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

In the analysis of the discrimination and violence that migrants face when they cross national borders, categories such as race, class and gender are structuring to understand which bodies are considered “desirable” or not in the receiving societies. The purpose of this paper is to add sexuality as a relevant category as well by analyzing the narratives of Venezuelan gay men in Boa Vista, a brazilian city that lies 220 km from Brazil's border with Venezuela. This region is particularly facing multiple transformations related to the arrival of Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers and the installation of a complex humanitarian structure in recent years. The results showed that the experience of homosexuality and the experience of immigration tends to launch the subject to a place of imagined otherness and exposure to violations of different types. It was also possible to verify that in this frontier region the violence seems to operate as an identification game in which, in order to try not to be attacked, one has to manage when and where it is safe to perform his national and sexual identity.

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