Acordos e colisões: família, sexualidade e lesbianidade

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the experiences and situations experienced by women who call themselves lesbians in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. It aims to understand how the female (homo)sexuality goes through a game between hiding and revealing their lesbian identities according to the dynamics that are involved. In this way, their biographies are constructed and organized in confluence with the spaces of (homo)sociabilities, by which these women transit daily. For this research, the life histories of the five collaborators were analyzed through the technique of snowball research during 2017 and 2018. I demonstrate how the negotiations undertaken by these women in the work area are woven and managed , family, studies, social movements through the maintenance of their agencies and intentionalities. In the ethnographic field, what is observed is the way in which women who identify with a dissident sexuality maintain their family relations. The concept of acceptance has been extensively explored to try to analyze and understand a lifestyle different from that adopted by other members of the family nucleus. It was also important to understand the processes of coming out, as everyday situations and not events scheduled to happen. The sociological literature on secrecy has helped us understand the silences and tensions that permeate the lesbian lives of women in this research. Different from what can be imagined this secret did not always appear as a moral panic, but rather susceptible of agency and new interpretations.