Political mourning and the melancholy of power in the history of sex-gender diverse activism

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is a relevant tool for research on social phenomena. Although they are commonly employed under an intrapsychic focus, psychoanalytic constructs can also be used in the analysis of collective dynamics. By extending Freudian definitions of mourning and melancholy to a social and political perspective, the present work had the scope of describing the history of the Brazilian diverse sex-gender movement through the concepts of power melancholy and political mourning. For this purpose, the theoretical-bibliographic and documentary historical methods were used. At the end, it was observed how the scenarios of disenfranchisement of sexual and gender dissidents, throughout the history of the social movement, generated processes of melancholization, which demanded the internal restructuring of the groups, in order to get out of panoramas of oppressions through collective reactions.