Interpersonal violence against queer and trans Brazilians is high. Over the course of a three-year study, there were 24,564 reported incidents, averaging about one incident every hour (Revista Brasileira de Epidemologioa 23, 2020). Despite the 2019 supreme court decision ruling that homophobia and transphobia are crimes similar to racism and punishable by up to five years in prison, data shows that rates of violence remain staggeringly high. 2024 marked the sixteenth year in a row Brazil topped the charts for number of trans murders in a given country and Black trans women have suffered the most. (Revista de ANTRA, 2025).
Scholarship has duly recognized the role of religious politics in the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in Brazil. Despite the defeat of the conservative Christian- backed far-right president Jair Bolsonaro to Worker’s Party candidate and current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022, “bolsonarismo” and its sexual conservatism – including anti- “gender ideology”, anti-feminism, anti-gay marriage, restriction of women’s autonomy, and maintenance of the “traditional” family – continues to circulate through the Brazilian public.
Opposing these issues constitutes a “holy war” for many conservative evangelicals (Da Silva, 2019). In addition to a longer history of persecution by the Catholic Church, other victims of this “holy war” include practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religion, their deities labeled by some as manifestations of the devil. A number of recent acts of violence against practitioners, hate- speech, and desecration of terreiros (Candomblé temples or houses) have led to public debates about the legitimacy of Afro-Brazilian religions (Hartikainen, 2019).
Thought by many to be a safe haven for queer and trans people, many scholars have found Afro-Diasporic religions to offer critiques of hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality due to various aspects of their cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies (See, for example: Matory 2005; Pérez 2016; Strongman 2019; Tinsley 2020; Vidal-Ortiz 2006). It is no surprise then, that a number of activist organizations that intersect LGBTQ+ and Afro-Brazilian religious identity – like Conexão Nacional de Mulheres Transexuais e Travestis de Axé (National Collective of Transsexual and Travesti Women of Axé) and Coletivo Navalha (Razorblade Collective) – have started popping up in recent years.
This paper details some of the ways that Afro-Brazilian religion has been employed by activists to cultivate just and joyous lives for racially and sexually marginalized individuals in an unjust and oftentimes unlivable environment. Following the theme of this year’s conference, I argue that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires meaningful ways for queer and trans activists to engage with their social justice work such that it generates new pathways to freedom not obstructed by white supremacist heteropatriarchal epistemologies. My argument is supported by a year’s worth of ethnographic fieldwork with Brazilian LGBTQ+ activists in São Paulo – the historical center of queer and trans social movements in Brazil.
My work is greatly influenced by the work of M. Jacqui Alexander. Alexander warns against ignoring sacred and spiritual knowledge in analyses of the conditions of modernity. I see constructions of new pathways to freedom by Afro-Brazilian religion-inspired queer and trans activists as important critiques of the sociocultural milieu that creates precarious lives for queer and trans Brazilians. Black trans theorists such as C. Riley Snorton and Marquis Bey’s inspire my reading of how Blackness in Afro-Brazilian religions disrupts gender normativity. Blackness calls into question the ways we understand binary gender and gender identity as a stable organizing feature. Black trans theory draws attention to the racialized dimensions of the anti-“gender ideology” movement in Brazil and many other parts of the world. This makes it all the more necessary to think with queer and trans activists whose social justice participation is situated in non-European hegemonic epistemologies.
I also engage with queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s concept of queer worldmaking – a fugitive project, ultimately unrealizable, that creates spaces that articulate themselves in ways different from the normative constraints of what should exist in public space. I see Afro-Brazilian religion-inspired queer and trans activism as a type of queer social practice that challenges heteronormativity and the public/private dichotomy that punishes nonnormative genders and sexualities for simply existing in public space. It also disrupts the political secularism that disguises the role of Christian hegemony in transnational Euro-American ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality that constitute the material conditions of marginalized people in Brazil.
Take, for example, the participation of Conexão Nacional de Mulheres Transexuais e Travestis de Axé (National Connection of Transsexual Women and Travestis of Axé) in the first annual Marsha Nacional pela Visibilidade Trans (National March for Trans Visibility) at the Capitol’s Praça dos Três Poderes (Three Powers Plaza: the Federal Supreme Court, National Congress, and Presidential Palace buildings). Dressed in the recognizable white attire of the Afro-Brazilian religions and carrying food offerings, the group’s presence in the Capitol disrupts the secularity of both this political center and the trans movement.
My paper demonstrates how thinking with queer and Black trans theory in religious studies offers ways of understanding the ways that religion offers meaningful inspiration for social justice work that cultivates new pathways to freedom apart from the neoliberal secular frame of much of the LGBTQ+ activism in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. It also demonstrates how the study of religion can offer salient critiques of the violent institutions of modernity. Centering the knowledge and practices of my interlocutors, those marginalized on multiple levels – Black and queer practitioners of the still frequently villainized Afro-Brazilian religions – this paper reflects on the importance of the intersection of queer and trans studies and the study of religion.
This paper details some of the ways that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires queer and trans activism. The last few decades has seen staggering rates of violence against queer and trans Brazilians and there persists a continuous flow of hate crimes against Afro-Brazilian religions. This climate has created particularly precarious lives for those who belong to both communities. Afro-Brazilian religions are known for being more hospitable to LGBTQ+ people, in part due to the ways the religions’ deities, the orixás, defy European notions of gender boundaries. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires meaningful ways that queer and trans activists engage with in their social justice work such that it generates new pathways to freedom not obstructed by white supremacist heteropatriarchal epistemologies. I offer a reflection on the importance of non-European epistemologies in analyses of the sociopolitical milieu that creates such precarious lives for queer and trans Brazilians.