Love Without Veil or Garland

Affective Colonization and ‘Homoaffective’ Civil Unions

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2026/96801 This article offers a critical reading of the 2011 decision of the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court that recognized stable unions between people of the same gender as family entities. Although celebrated as a milestone for the rights of sexual minorities, the decision operates through an affective grammar that disciplines as much as it includes. Drawing on critical perspectives on law and sexuality, I argue that the judgment mobilizes a heteronormative framing of conjugality, in which the very term ‘homoaffective subject’ functions to produce a domesticated and respectable figure, while simultaneously silencing more radical forms of kinship, desire, and care. The article develops the notion of ‘affective coloniality’ as a key to understanding the normative costs of recognition.

Keywords: Sexual rights; Homoaffectivity; Affective colonization.