Pathways to Freedom: Afro-Brazilian Religion in Queer and Trans Activism

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.