The Read: Moisés Lino e Silva, Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’ve been excited by this book ever since I heard about it through social media about a year ago. Lino e Silva speaks beautifully to a concept that I’ve been struggling to think about for some years in a long-stalled manuscript about individual agency in modern Zimbabwe. It’s also useful for a second manuscript that I’ve been writing over the last six months.
Is it what I thought it was?
It is what I hoped in multiple ways, absolutely. I was thrilled from the beginning: Lino e Silva is serious about the conceptual frame—that liberalism is a useful conceptual frame for thinking about the desires and actions of people who aren’t normally named by liberalism as examples of its ideals, but that doing so also opens up a much broader and more multiplicitous sense of what “liberty” can and does mean.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’m already rewriting both manuscripts to reference this book.
I can imagine working it into some future class, though I’d have to think about how exactly to do that in a way that respects the Brazilian content in the book.
Quotes
“I use the concept of minoritarian liberalisms as an umbrella term to refer to all the virtual and actual alternative conditions of liberalism beyond the normative type: favela liberalism, queer liberalism, peasant liberalism, maroon liberalism, to cite a few.”
“I propose that there are at least three characteristics that are present in minoritarian modes of liberalism: the deterritorialization of established freedoms and liberties; the understanding of liberalism as part of a collective mode (instead of an individual ethos) of politics more independent of the nation-state; and a transformation of the conditions of possibility for liberation.”
“Within Rocinha, drug-trafficking governmentality reigns. A distinct form from the nation-state governmentality, which operates in the ‘formal’ city of Rio de Janeiro. They both act by establishing control over territories and populations, but they do so through different modes of oppression and by allowing different kinds of freedom. Traffickers are not usually free in territories controlled by the Brazilian state, and the nation-state is not free in territories controlled by traffickers.”
“These favela frontiers were not difficult to locate. Rio’s policemen precisely knew the territorial limits of their activities, and they helped to regulate the boundaries of the slum from the outside, just as traffickers did on the inside.”
“Slum dwellers challenge liberal values connected to land ownership…Why has the colonial hijacking of land not been established as a form of theft, but favela dwellers are consistently charged with such accusations?”
“In normative liberalism, humans are universally free, but the freedom of some colonizes the freedom of others. Not everyone agreed to the colonial social contract…Favelas are violent territories: there is no denying that. Violence is not one-sided. Many brutalities happen in the name of a social order that was never desired by favela residents. Favela dwellers may violate current understandings of ‘property rights’ and refuse to follow the terms of an unfair social contract, but this is not to say that laws only exist in the Asphalt [e.g., the formal city of Rio], that freedoms only exist in the Asphalt.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The major focus of Lino e Silva’s reading of favela liberalism is through the life of a travesti (transvestite) friend of his that he met during his ethnographic research, and the extent to which favela liberalism is articulated through and within sexuality, and the extent to which it provisions, when it is most fully realized within the favela, some affordances or liberties that would not be available in the “formal city” of Rio de Janeiro.
I really appreciated the way that Lino e Silva narrated his own presence and identity within his research, and how savvy he is about “reverse anthropologies”, meaning the ways in which the people he came to know tried to interpret his identity and the nature of his activities. (As he points out, in a community controlled by traffickers who are constantly concerned about informers who might betray them, figuring out how to explain the difference between informers and anthropologists is an urgent priority.) The book is reflexive in an attentive, thoughtful, truthful way—it doesn’t require a huge theoretical apparatus or a highly particular genre to do the important, ordinary work of asking what kind of relationships an anthropologist has with the people they come to know.
To some extent, Lino e Silva’s analysis reminded me of Richard White’s description of “the middle ground” of the Great Lakes region when it formed a frontier between indigenous communities and expanding European settlement in the eastern part of North America. What White tries to explain is that the “middle ground” was less an arbitrary mish-mash of two competing zones of sovereignty or control and more a third space in its own right, with its own norms, rules, institutions and freedoms. It was violent, but its inhabitants had a sense of the purposes and limits of the violence that took place in the middle ground. There are freedoms possible in the favela that are not possible in the Asphalt, there are rules in each space that derive from a highly located “liberalism”, but the liberalisms in these places also reference each other and in a sense rely on each other. Favela liberalism allows the sale, circulation and use of drugs—and thus is a conduit by which drugs enter into the Asphalt, where they are not allowed; Asphalt liberalism in this sense wants favela liberalism to exist but it also wants favela liberalism to be subordinate and temporary.
I did find myself right away constantly noting how much the one favela that Lino e Silva is different than other favelas that are referenced as more dangerous, less free, especially to the travesti freedoms that are so important to this book, and that the difference often is about the particular group or criminal organization controlling a particular favela, or even just the personality and cultural outlook of the head of such an organization. There was a kneejerk response that kept kicking off in me: well, favela liberalism is a pretty tenuous thing if it depends on the contingent character of a particular set of autocratic rulers, travesti freedom isn’t much if it can be taken away tomorrow on a whim. But Lino e Silva does a great job of consistently pointing out that the freedoms you can secure with money in the favela’s liberalism mirror the ways in which money buys freedoms in normative liberalism, whether it’s the freedom to not have your data tracked if you buy the right brand of cellphone or the freedom to not be prosecuted for crimes that would be a quick trip to jail for less wealthy and powerful people. Quite similarly, if you step back for a moment, the idea that minoritarian liberalism is only as secure as the whim of a ruling power within a favela or a maroon community pretty much mirrors the way that power changes hands in normative liberalism. Rights and freedoms under Bolsonaro are very different than they were under Lula da Silva; freedoms that Americans had only two years ago have now been taken away by the judicial vote of only six people, none of them selected directly by the electorate. I appreciate that Lino e Silva persistently wants to identify what is particular about favela liberalism rather than just make the book a series of ironic statements about how the favela and the Asphalt are mirrors of one another, but he also sticks to the point that both liberalisms are related and that’s why the use of the same term for both is appropriate.
Chapter Three has Lino e Silva travelling to Ceará, in the north-east, where his main travesti friend in the favela is from, so I also really appreciated how he uses this trip to understand what makes the favela a site with its own liberalism and why it might be a destination for the kind of queer migration that a lot of scholarship has considered over the last two decades. It personally reminded me a lot of conversations I had with some young women in rural Zimbabwe about how they could wear makeup and more sexualized clothing only if and when they travelled to Harare, how there were places that were more free and were that way even before the question of sovereignty over those places arose—free in part simply because of their material and social scale, more free because anonymity and mobility were more possible. (And also of course dangerous and potentially violent too, a contrast that has been part of global urbanization from its modern beginnings almost everywhere.)
I was enormously pleased that in the middle of Chapter Three, Lino e Silva turns to a discussion of what he calls “peasant liberalism”, because this is very close to what I’ve struggled for years to conceptualize when I want to talk about why some rural Zimbabweans and their appointed chiefs might have invested in or embraced colonial divisions of the world into the modern and the traditional, the urban and the rural, the state and the chiefship, not because they favored colonial authority but because this was a continuation of what I had been thinking of as “vernacular liberalism”, as a way to keep a larger unitary sovereignty at bay and preserve room for rural households to follow some of their own prerogatives. It does a lot to open up the possible applications of “minoritarian liberalism” in a broader sense, work that continues throughout the book.
The book insistently argues that a consideration of minoritarian liberalism—the ways in which people “take liberties” in multiple senses in spaces and communities that normative liberalism considers broken, defective, or absent of freedom, is the first step to “decolonizing” normative liberalism itself, to calling to the ways in which it comprehensively fails to live up to its own stated aspirations and obligations. So in this sense minoritarian liberalism is not a permanent alternative vision, or an already-achieved decolonial ideal. Lino e Silva is not saying that minoritarian liberalism is more free or preferable, but that some subjects who articulate a favela liberalism, a queer liberalism, a peasant liberalism, are able both to claim freedoms for themselves within their situation and to call attention to how normative liberalism is the main obstacle to the fulfillment of their aspirations.
I do think this raises a sharp question that I didn’t see Lino e Silva raising, though I may have missed it—I need to work through Chapter Five and Six in more detail still—of whether there is any such thing as principled illiberalism, and whether any communities, socialities or institutions are characterized by their interest in or adherence to some form of illiberalism, of a rejection of all liberalisms. I think there is such a thing and I think there are many adherents—I wondered, for example, if the community Rio das Pedras, described as being under the control of a brutal and secretive paramilitary elite, was not in some sense a favela illiberalism, mirroring what might almost be called normative illiberalism (the illiberalism of military regimes, of aspirant theocrats, etc.)
Anyway, I thought this was pretty much the perfect ethnography: a rich set of narratives, properly self-aware, strong descriptions of place and situation, and some really useful theoretical and conceptual frames that go beyond the context of the inquiry itself.