“If it wasn’t for an orixá, I wouldn’t be standing!” - Political Gender Violence, Religious Racism, and Care at Brazil’s democratic crossroads: prefigurative re-Orí-entations from LGBTQIA+ Candomblé movements.
Political violence; religious racism; Afro-diasporic epistemology; LGBTQIA+.
This thesis investigates the intersection of religious racism, political gender violence, and the denial of LGBTQIA+ representativity in spaces of power, focusing on the politicization of terreiros as a locus of resistance against Brazilian christofascism. Adopting an Afrocentric and prefigurative approach, it proposes the Oxunist epistemology, grounded in care as a political principle and in the reconfiguration of legal and institutional structures through axé categories. The study begins with an analysis of the constitutive violence of the modern state and its contemporary manifestations in christofascism, highlighting how the instrumentalization of Neo-Pentecostal religion reinforces exclusionary hierarchies. In contrast, it presents political care as a strategy of infiltration and 2 rearticulation of Western political structures, centered on categories rooted in the practices of Candomblé terreiros. Theoretical reflections are enriched by interviews with Black trans leaders from social movements, whose trajectories illustrate concrete forms of resistance against systemic exclusion. By shifting the focus of critique toward the construction of epistemic alternatives, this research advocates for a political logic rooted in ancestry and interdependence. It thus argues for the necessity of a juridical and institutional paradigm that transcends the coloniality of Western modernity, ensuring the participatory citizenship of dissident bodies