Limited Steps toward Decolonization; Or, Where Is Trans and Travesti Thought?

Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela, by Moisés Lino e Silva, is an ethnography that focuses on the life of Natasha Kellen Bündchen, a travesti who lived in Rocinha, one of Brazil's biggest favelas, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Interested in liberalism, freedom, and liberty in such a setting, the author lived there for almost two years for the fieldwork that supports the research. During that time, he became friends with many Rocinha dwellers, especially queer folks. He also did fieldwork in the northeastern state of Ceará, where he visited Natasha's family and where many other people who live in the favelas in Rio are from, and in Italy, a common immigration destination for Brazilian travestis, where he tries to make sense of a possible sex trafficking scheme.As already indicated in the title, Silva centers the argument of the book on the opposition between "normative" and "minoritarian" liberalism, briefly referring to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to ground his understanding of minoritarian liberalism as "groups that do not aim at imposing their own standards as a universal rule" (12). Based on that dichotomy, he aims to reconceptualize and decolonize liberalism, claiming for an understanding of it "much more aligned with a politics of liberation than has been the case otherwise" (xii). While he does trace a compact genealogy of liberalism in the introduction and articulate a critique of it under the rubric of "normative" throughout the book, the use of the term to describe minoritarian liberation struggles is not very deeply discussed on a theoretical level. Even though Silva engages (also very briefly) with José E. Muñoz's understanding of "disidentification," an important concept with which to think about the complex relation of queer culture and performativity with the norm, there is still some contradiction and confusion left in the fact that the author refers to only a few among many existent critiques of liberalism but still affirms that in the book the term will be understood "as any set of ideas, desires, or practices in favor of freedom and liberty, regardless of their conformity with more established Western philosophical traditions" (11).The ethnography itself is well documented and narrated. Silva's time living in Rocinha and the relationships he established with the locals give him access to a broad understanding of the power relations that organize this specific territory. He includes detailed accounts of how drug-trafficking factions govern life in the favela on many levels, especially social norms and infrastructure. One relevant example is how the author is surprised and comes to understand why Natasha and other queer residents feel much safer in Rocinha than in other higher-class neighborhoods, contradicting the expectation of the "normative" liberal view. The "law of the Hillside" protects queer folks in a much more direct way than the nation-state or the ruling social norm of the Asphalt (what favela dwellers call the middle- and high-class neighborhoods), exemplifying how the nondemocratic power of the faction safeguards the freedom to express sexual and gender diversity in this context. Additionally, Silva's account of the presence of the neo-Pentecostal church in the favela is very comprehensive, contributing to a better understanding of the rise of the Far Right, which in Brazil is very aligned with neoliberalism economically and politically, but is deeply involved with neo-Pentecostalism. That is, it does not separate state and religion and is especially influenced by the antiqueer and antifeminist tendencies of the church.Another point worth noticing is the almost complete absence of references from the field of trans studies or the work of travesti scholars, of which there are a few in Brazil. When we consider that no space is given to trans thought in the work, it starts to feel like the obsession with liberalism, freedom, and liberty that guides the whole conceptual scheme of the research, in a way, keeps the author from articulating different concepts that already exist, both in Brazil and abroad, and that would be essential to better understand Natasha's life and death beyond the binary "minoritarian" against "normative." That absence makes the broad use of liberalism even more questionable: the point of view of the author, even if constructed through what seems to be a vulnerable intimacy with the subjects of study and expressed in a very well-narrated form, is only slightly transformed by the radical experience of travesti life in the favela, as the book doesn't articulate with concepts that challenge liberalism as part of modernity, a system of thought and worldmaking that is based on structural inequalities and inseparable from coloniality.The book ends with the author engaging with a question regarding "the end of anthropology." In a similar reformist approach present in his use of liberalism, Silva argues for decolonization as a possibility that allows a differentiation "between a (normative) liberal anthropology and a (minoritarian) anthropology for liberation" (188). Other essential questions regarding the history of anthropology and the very possibility of it being indissociable from colonialism are left unasked, also revealing a bibliographic gap of existent works in anthropology and other disciplines that discuss coloniality in an onto-epistemological level. As the methodological and epistemological grounds of the field and of the research itself are not discussed in depth, the ambitious goal of decolonizing liberalism and anthropology ends up being more an idealist desire than an achievement.