Recognition and Desire for Life in Multiple Epidemics: COVID-19 and Violence Against the LGBTI+ Community in Favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

LGBTI+ people living in favelas in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) have been submitted to several challenges. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brutally has hit favelas with disproportional number of deaths. This health emergency adds to the long-term ongoing epidemic of violence, particularly police violence, in favelas. We acknowledge that this problem is at least partially a product of unconscious racism with historical roots in colonialism. The LGBTI+ community members from favelas are particularly affected by because they are both special targets of violence and ignored or even excluded from public services and policies. Civil society organizations, such as Grupo Conexão G, responded to COVID-19 with food banks and other welfare actions for LGBTI+ people in favelas—which were nevertheless impacted by police violence. Conexão G then created the Observatório de Violência LGBTI+ em Favelas (Monitoring Centre of LGBTI+ Violence in Favelas), in which both authors of this article worked in different capacities. We analyze a report produced by Observatório that shows the reality of violence against LGBTI+ people in favelas. Although we notice unconscious motifs of racism and hatred against the LGBTI+ community, we also identify resistance to violence as an expression of unconscious desires—now for life, rather than destruction. We highlight the ambivalent position of recognition, which frames the possibility for identification while also justifying protection against destruction. As we see it, though, shelter against precarity (such as exposure to harm from COVID-19 and police violence) is necessary to keep one alive, thus producing life lines or desire for life. We conclude that recognition and desire are keys to respond to the harmful effects of racism, colonialism, and hatred against LGBTI+ people; nevertheless, we also advocate for keeping alert to both established and new forms of destruction that threat the LGBTI+ community.