This article discusses how Brazilian AIDS activism has emerged and been reconfigured over the last 25 years. I analyze how societal forms were created and particular problems emerged in a specific context affected by the AIDS epidemic. Based on ethnographic research in concrete contexts in Brazil, I follow the ways by which people have united around various ideas and practices related to life, health and illness, morality and politics. People affected by the epidemic were engaged in sociality, identity formation and the definition of a wide range of health, political and judicial demands, which take a particular biosocial activism as their main form of collective mobilization. My main aim is to reflect, therefore, on the formation of particular biosocial worlds, socialities, collectivities and identities related to specific modes of subjectification surrounding life and death, biomedicine and biotechnologies, politics and citizenship.
[PT] O retorno da maioria dos países latino-americanos numa ordem constitucional após o esgotamento dos regimes ditatoriais no início dos anos 1980 – a chamada terceira onda de redemocratização descrita por Samuel Huntington - favoreceu a emergência de um novo ator coletivo na cena político-partidária da América Latina. A partir da pluralização do campo religioso latino-americano e tendo como marca distintiva a confessionalidade, o político evangélico conseguiu transpor o conflito cultural entre uma identidade construída em ruptura com o catolicismo romano da esfera privada – à esfera pública. A participação recorrente e duradoura dos protestantismos populares na política partidária, inclusive com representação nos Parlamentos latino-americanos, possibilitou a constituição de uma nova elite política evangélica existindo ao lado da velha oligarquia latifundiária ou do mais moderno segmento patronal. Neste ano de 2017 em que se comemora os 500 anos do movimento da Reforma Protestante do século XVI, o presente estudo investiga se o protestantismo latino-americano tem conseguido transformar as relações de poder entre Igreja e Estado e particularmente a cultura política patrimonialista baseada em relações de dominação pessoal – apadrinhamento, conchavo, nepotismo, clientelismo, populismos, etc, ou, ao contrário, destituído de um ethos cultural enraizado no liberalismo político tem procurado doutrinar a função pública impondo ao conjunto da população sua moral religiosa privada de maneira a constituir um Estado multiconfessional procurando obter as mesmas vantagens outorgadas pelo Estado à Igreja. ; [EN] The return of most Latin American countries to a constitutional order after the exhaustion of dictatorial regimes in the early 1980s - the so-called third wave of redemocratization described by Samuel Huntington - favored the emergence of a new collective actor in the Latin America's political-party scene. From the pluralization of the Latin American religious field and having as its distinguish mark the confessionality, the evangelicals politicians was able to transpose the cultural conflict between an identity built in rupture with Roman Catholicism from the private to the public sphere. The recurrent and enduring participation of Popular Protestantism in partisan politics, including representation in Latin American parliaments, has made possible the emergency of a new evangelical political elite existing alongside the old rural oligarchy or the most modern entrepreneurial segment. In this year of 2017, in which the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation movement of the sixteenth century is celebrated, the present study investigates whether Latin American Protestantism has succeeded in transforming power relations between Church and State in the Continent - particularly the patrimonialist political culture based on relationships of personal domination – patronage, collusion, nepotism, clientelism, populism, etc., or, on the contrary, devoid of a cultural ethos rooted in political liberalism has sought to indoctrinate the public function by imposing on the whole of the Latin American population its private religious morality in order to constitute a multiconfessional State seeking the same advantages granted by the State to the Church.
