Meanings and Practices of Discrimination Against Sexual Diversities Through a Methodology of Recursive Problematization

Abstract

This paper presents some readings of the material produced within the UBACyT Research Project of Chair I of Group Theory and Technique at the University of Buenos Aires: “Contemporary Modes of Subjectivation: Amorous, Erotic, Conjugal, and Parental Diversities in Urban Middle Sectors” in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.

This study was carried out using the Recursive Problematization Methodology, both for the construction of inquiry instruments capable of capturing the production of heterogenesis at the moment in which it takes place, and for the reading of the material gathered, in a way that makes it possible to accommodate diversity and understand the modes in which the logics of diversity operate.

The fieldwork was conducted using the productions of meaning that emerged from: a) individual interviews; b) the Group Production Sessions carried out by students of the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, Chair I of Group Theory and Techniques; c) workshops proposed within the framework of the UBANEX extension project of that chair; and d) the LGBTTIQ Pride marches held in Buenos Aires. The analysis of this material made it possible to render visible meanings and practices related to discrimination against sexual diversities.

Among the findings, we present a particular insistence: the ways in which discrimination appears in relation to amorous, erotic, and conjugal diversities. Specifically, we examine how, in accounts of situations of violence, these situations are not always signified as such, and even less as situations of discrimination, although all of them speak of the non-acceptance of “difference.” Likewise, we observe that when discrimination is exercised by a family member, it does not seem to be signified as such. Finally, we note that these findings coexist with a broad acceptance of the laws on same-sex marriage and gender identity.

On the basis of these findings, we have been able to make visible some strategies of inequalization of differences within sexual diversities, by accounting for various lines of signification related to discrimination, while taking care not to homogenize what is heterogeneous.