The limits of “experience” and “liberation” in the National University Meeting of Sexual Diversity (Encontro Nacional Universitário da Diversidade Sexual – ENUDS)

Abstract

The National University Meeting of Sexual Diversity (Encontro Nacional Universitário da Diversidade Sexual – ENUDS) arose in Brazil in 2003, gathering annually since then. Its participants include groups and collectives articulating issues of sexual diversity, and it has become a space of academic and political discussion. This article analyzes the socioanthropological trajectory of ENUDS, exploring the performance of ideals related to “sexual liberation”, to the dissolution of hierarchy and gender conventions, and to “fechação” as a political praxis. These ideals are here understood as aesthetical dimensions of performances based on the notion of “experience”. The analysis focus on the arguments legitimizing this “experience” and on the tensions posed by these ideals in a political space framed as “collective”, “horizontal”, and “non-institutionalized”.