The Limits of Democratic Responses to Trans/Feminicides in the Americas and Trans/Feminist Communal Movidas - hosted by Julio César Díaz Calderón

This lecture questions from Latin America a widely accepted myth in the theory and practice of Political Science and International Relations about the relationship between violence and democracy: democratic political regimes generate the best protection of citizens' rights, in particular, the guarantee of a life free of violence for their political subjects. By empirically analyzing subgroups of populations that are usually homogenized in national-level statistics, this lecture will show how the previous myth presupposes a restricted (hetero-cis-sexist-colonial) vision of what violence is and what democracy is (understood as polyarchy). This skewed vision keeps different types of violence against population's subgroups invisible and reproduces a limited understanding of the relationship between violence and (lack of) democracy. This lecture will give some of the sociological factors explaining the reduction of democracy to polyarchy in the last decades in Political Science and International Relations and will propose a classification of the academic work on democracy in those disciplines based on three research orientations: total, relative, and paradoxical. This division is both at the level of epistemology (on the class of inferences from what is observed) and at the level of method (levels of stratification of the total population). Then, this talk will dwell on a specific subgroup that the author has investigated extensively: +LGBTTTIQA (political) subjects in Mexico. First, the three research coordinates are used to understand the existing research in various disciplines on the political participation of +LGBTTTIQA people. Then, it shows fragments of two alternatives of peace based on autoethnographic and poetic pieces on the relationship between the author and trans* activism on hate murders of +LGBTTTIQA people in Mexico.
Co-hosting Saints LGBT