Em nome da mopral e dos bons costumes: repressão às experiências lésbicas durante a “ABERTURA POLÍTICA.” (1978- 1985).

Abstract

This paper analyzes the repression committed by agents of the dictatorship against lesbian women during the period of "political opening" during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship, under the pretext of defending morality and good customs. To this end, we analyzed, on the one hand, the collective experience of articulating political movements organized by lesbians and, on the other, the individual case of writer Cassandra Rios, who was censored for being a lesbian and for writing lesbian narratives. We seek to understand how repression by the dictatorial state acted to associate homosexuality with subversion and how the structural prejudices of Brazilian society legitimized the military's discourses, in addition to addressing how the issue of lesbianism was marginalized and rendered invisible in history and historiography. To this end, we engage with Green and Quinalha (2021), who provide a historiographical overview of the relationship between the dictatorship period and homosexuality, working with the authors' concept of homosexuality and repression, as well as Fernandes (2018), who specifically refers to the organizations and resistance of lesbian women during the military dictatorship. We use journalistic sources from the periodicals Em Tempo (1981) and Lampião da Esquina (1979) and documents from the National Information System (SNI) found in the digital collection of the National Archives. Keywords: Repression