A los Jóvenes de Ayer: reflections on sexuality and reproduction among young people in Latin America and their political driftsAbstract
Despite political ups and downs, since the restoration of political democracy, several Latin American states have advanced citizen inclusion and democratization in matters of gender and sexuality. Today, we are faced with nostalgic discursive and practical projects, authoritarian and sometimes violent, to return to a less democratic and plural order of gender and generation, which finds echo in adolescents and young people. How do the transformations in the modes of accumulation, access, and permanence in the labor market, social mobility, impact sociosexual experiences and relationships? What is sexuality and reproduction like today, and for the younger generations, as circulating commodities, producers of value, capital, “brands”? How are sexuality, reproduction, eroticism, and friendship lived, without the protection of intimate spaces, without unmediated conversations, without time to waste? Throughout the essay, we reflect on these questions in a context marked by the loss of vital references, in a world that makes radical uncertainty the universal experience of our time.
Key words:
Sexuality; Reproduction; Adolescent; Politics; Latin America
Resumen
A pesar de los vaivenes políticos, desde la recuperación de la democracia política, varios Estados de América Latina avanzaron en procesos de inclusión ciudadana y democratización en materia de género y sexualidad. Hoy nos enfrentamos a nostálgicas tentativas discursivas y prácticas, autoritarias y a veces violentas, de retornar a un orden menos democrático y plural de género y de generación, las cuales encuentran eco en adolescentes y jóvenes. ¿Cómo impactan las transformaciones de los modos de acumulación, de acceso y permanencia en el mercado de trabajo, de movilidad social, en las experiencias y vínculos socio-sexuales? ¿Cómo es hoy, y para las generaciones más jóvenes, el fenómeno de la sexualidad y la reproducción en tanto mercancías en circulación, productoras de valor, capitales, “marcas”? ¿Cómo se vive la sexualidad, la reproducción, el erotismo, la amistad, sin la protección de espacios íntimos, sin conversaciones no mediadas, sin tiempo para perder? A lo largo del ensayo reflexionamos en torno a estas preguntas en un contexto marcado por la pérdida de referencias vitales en el mundo que hace de la incertidumbre radical la experiencia universal de nuestro tiempo.
Palabras clave:
Sexualidad; Reproducción; Adolescente; Política; América Latina
Resumo
Apesar dos altos e baixos políticos, desde a recuperação da democracia política, vários Estados latino-americanos avançaram em processos de inclusão cidadã e democratização em questões de gênero e sexualidade. Hoje enfrentamos tentativas discursivas e práticas nostálgicas, autoritárias e por vezes violentas, de regresso a uma ordem de género e geração menos democrática e plural, que encontram eco nos adolescentes e jovens. Como impactam as transformações nos modos de acumulação, acesso e permanência no mercado de trabalho, mobilidade social e experiências e vínculos socio-sexuais? Como são a sexualidade e a reprodução hoje, e para as gerações mais jovens, como mercadorias em circulação, produtoras de valor, capital, “marcas”? Como vivenciar a sexualidade, a reprodução, o erotismo, a amizade, sem a proteção dos espaços íntimos, sem conversas imediatas, sem tempo a perder? Ao longo do ensaio refletimos sobre estas questões num contexto marcado pela perda de referências vitais no mundo, que faz da incerteza radical a experiência universal do nosso tempo.
Palavras-chave:
Sexualidade; Reprodução; Adolescente; Política; Latin America
As I watch the new waves
I am already part of the sea
(Charly García)
The theme that binds this volume together, namely, thinking about theories, methodologies, and political dimensions of “sexuality and reproduction among young people in 21st-century Latin America”, raises questions that those of us who were young in the 20th century can approach with warm nostalgia, but also with discomfort. This discomfort relates to the relationships between sexuality, reproduction, and youth, with the reactionary and authoritarian political tendencies that, surprisingly for us, garner some support from younger generations. These political tendencies invite us to reflect, given that, in matters of sexuality and reproduction, the region is characterized by achievements and advances that have improved and would allow for improving the lives of many people, especially the younger generations. However, there is deep unease.
Throughout the 21st century, despite political ups and downs, we have witnessed a continuous transformation in the meanings of sexuality, intimacy, affection, and family. This is even more so if we look at it from a historical perspective: considering the long history, we can affirm that there have been quite clear processes of citizen inclusion and democratization regarding gender and sexuality in the region. By citizen inclusion, we mean incorporating previously excluded sexual/gendered individuals, de jure or de facto, as rights-holders, and the adoption of measures that promote such inclusion (e.g., quotas). By democratization, we mean translating and applying the principles of freedom and equality to an ever-increasing number of areas of interaction, such as those related to interpersonal, intimate, emotional (or potentially emotional) relationships, parental, erotic, and sexual relationships. These firm and sustained processes were also accelerated.
Since the restoration of political democracy in the 1980s, several states in the region have been recognizing multiple rights, passing laws and implementing public policies that affect sexuality and reproduction in a democratizing sense: divorce, rights regarding contraception, regulations that ensure greater equity in marital and filiation matters, sexual education in schools, recognition of unions or marriage for gays and lesbians, recognition of gender identity for trans people, access to assisted fertilization techniques and, as in Uruguay and Argentina, the legalization of abortion1-8.
In the long run, these processes can be interpreted in terms of the technical, but also ethical, separation of sexuality and reproduction. Historically, two practices that separate sexuality and reproduction have been stigmatized and persecuted: abortion, that is, the flagrant practice that separates reproduction from sexuality; and sodomy or homosexuality, that is, the flagrant practice that separates sexuality from reproduction. These processes of destigmatization and legal and social recognition of homosexuality and abortion are neither complete nor universal in Latin America, but much progress has been made.
Technical separation effectively enables non-reproductive sexual practices and non-sexual reproductive practices. Effective and safe contraceptive and abortion techniques have made it so that heterosexual intercourse is no longer inexorably associated with reproductive outcomes or with the fear of reproductive outcomes. In turn, along with adoption, assisted fertilization techniques (and new gestation techniques) have allowed reproduction and motherhood/fatherhood without necessarily depending on heterosexual intercourse, on reproduction still called “natural”. Ethical separation requires recognizing that sexuality is valid as an activity separate from its eventual reproductive outcome and that reproduction is valid outside of heterosexual intercourse. Reproduction, as well as filiation, has even been separated from its heterosexual fictionalization (which maintains the legitimacy of access to “the techniques” only for married heterosexual couples who show an inability to achieve pregnancy through “natural” means, thus attempting to keep the fiction of heterosexual reproduction).
The gender-based and familial order never resulted in spaces of protection and harmony. Nevertheless, the idea of order functioned as a myth of subjective certainty. An unequal and violent order, yes, but one that functioned as an expectation of certainty in the face of life’s many uncertainties. Faced with the transformations of gender and generation hierarchies, we stand now before nostalgic discursive, practical, authoritarian, and sometimes violent attempts to return to a less democratic and plural order of gender and generation. In electoral terms, such projects garner surprisingly widespread youth support. While the gains achieved in the democratization of interpersonal, intimate, emotional, erotic, and sexual ties have encountered resistance from several political and religious groups, what is new now is the renewed echo they find among younger generations.
Youth, adolescents, and health
Where do young people and adolescents fit into this picture? By the mid-twentieth century, a homogeneous representation of adolescence had spread as a stage in which adult responsibilities were postponed thanks to the extension of schooling. The transition to adulthood was conceived linearly: the end of school gave way to entering the workforce, and leaving the family home of origin led to the formation of a new home. These events, expected from heteronormative and reproductive perspectives, were based on a horizon of economic prosperity and social mobility.
At the end of the twentieth century, we began to think about adolescence in the plural. The recognition that changes in the human organism do not manifest themselves in a single pattern of biopsychosocial development and that identification with a particular gender is a fraught process for individuals was cross-cutting elements in several health and education policies and programs, which highlighted the diverse experiences of adolescents and young people, historically rendered invisible by the presumption of heterosexuality. Alongside these advances, we have also witnessed a devalued social citizenship due to inequality gaps in the main sectors (housing, education, health, income, and security) and different life cycles.
The processes that unfold during adolescence and young adulthood occur in such heterogeneous social settings that they render the idea of social mobility for all absurd. Being born and raised in the region means developing in a land rich in possibilities only for a privileged group, and not even that. A group that lives in an unpolluted environment, resides in a neighborhood with safe water, and has adequate housing. A group that does not assume work obligations when it is time to get an education, nor grows up in a violent environment. Belonging to this group has little to do with chance or personal merit. Going to work at the age of 10, experiencing problematic drug use at 12, or giving birth at 13 are not random events or the result of individual attitudes. High and persistent inequalities significantly impact the lives of individuals and communities: overlapping social deprivation and environmental degradation create critical settings for the development and health of large segments of adolescents and young people.
In the current global and regional context, the authoritarian restoration drive and its yearning for gender and generation hierarchies are growing. This is especially true among privileged categories within these hierarchies (cis people, men, heterosexuals, and adults), but not only among them. Questioning the diverse representation of adolescents and the use of “gender ideology” as a category of accusation, whether to denigrate feminism or gender diversity, has affinities with the defunding of health and education policies.
Criticizing comprehensive sexuality education, mobilized under the slogan of ending indoctrination in schools, undermines the pursuit of gender equality and erodes the protective role that schools can play in empowering children and adolescents to identify situations of abuse and sexual violence. Sexual violence, in particular, victimizes girls and adolescents to a greater extent, and the perpetrators are almost entirely adult males, usually from close circles. Learning to differentiate between good secrets and bad ones that should be shared, and distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate physical contact, is part of self-knowledge of one’s own body and its care, which can help recognize situations of abuse and seek help. These are compelling reasons to prioritize efforts in comprehensive sexuality education in schools9. We are also witnessing the underfunding of sexual and reproductive health policies and programs. Paramount in Argentina is the dismantling of the National Plan for the Prevention of Unintended Pregnancy in Adolescence (ENIA), which successfully reduced teenage pregnancies by developing counseling, community outreach activities, and guidance in schools, as well as facilitating access to contraceptive methods10. Preventing early motherhood prevents the interruption of girls’ and adolescents’ educational trajectories, which is why this type of policy is strategic for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
Opposition to sex education (under the imaginative slogan “Don’t mess with my children”) and the defunding of health policies mark a new chapter of confrontation in a historical period marked by mistrust, fueled by conspiracy theories and the spread of false and implausible news that casts a shadow of suspicion over human rights-based policies.
Issues of inequality, vulnerability, violence, non-heterosexual and heterosexual sexuality, reproduction, and non-reproduction remain relevant as social problems and objects of research. What we understand has come to discomfit us is the inclusion of politics, in several ways, some unexpected, and which, combined, shape critical contexts. We will examine these situations of sexuality and reproduction among young people in the region vis-à-vis the market and economic relations, technological mediations and networks, the experiences of time, and global experiences of uncertainty. We propose these lines to reflect, uncomfortably, on how sexuality, reproduction, and youth are coordinated, with policies that distance themselves from democratic or transformative realities and utopias (in pursuit of egalitarian projects, social justice, or some other value based on solidarity and collective emancipation). This distancing, for some of us in our non-young generation, is a matter of concern for us and, we would say, saddens us.
The market, social networks, and subjectivities
One angle for thinking about these issues relates to the political economy of sexual-affective and reproductive ties, or, put another way, to the libidinization of commodified, economic, and monetary ties, and the commercialization of sexual-affective and reproductive practices and ties. What is this situation like today, and for these generations? How do transformations in modes of accumulation, access to, and permanence in the labor market, upward and downward social mobility, and development impact sociosexual experiences and ties? What are sexuality and reproduction like, for these generations, as commodities in circulation, producers of value, capital, and “brands”?
Thinking about political economy leads us to examine sexuality and reproduction in terms of structural vulnerability. A few years ago, we published a paper on vulnerability and health in LGBT youth. The objective was to consider the specificities of structural vulnerability - individual, social, and programmatic - in young people whose sexuality or gender identity deviates from cis-heteronormative norms, in contexts of inequality11,12. Thus, in the analyses, the variable “generation” was either left aside or considered secondary to other variables or markers of difference, such as class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity; that is, it was considered secondary and separate from these other structuring dimensions of inequality and vulnerability.
Youth vulnerability, like any other vulnerability structure in context, must be examined not in terms of whether members of the category are “more” or “less” vulnerable, but in terms of specificity: what makes young people, in their diversity, specifically vulnerable to illness, physical and mental illness, harm, violence, and death?
To account for the specificities in contexts defined by collective historical coordinates, social conflicts, and biographical trajectories, such an examination must examine the “hows” of vulnerability; that is, the processes, resources, and local contexts in their historicity that produce and reproduce vulnerability, and not just the “in what” or “why” they are vulnerable. In this sense, we should empirically examine the situations of access to infrastructure and material resources in terms of morbidity and mortality due to health reasons, external causes (homicides, femicides, transfemicides, accidents, and suicides), non-normative sexualities and gender, but also regarding cis-heterosexuality, whose hierarchies and violence are not always at the center of the agenda and also have specificities when examining health vulnerability.
In addition to changes related to class, gender, and generational restrictions on accessibility, permanence, and mobility in formal and informal labor markets, a radical shift in the formats of ties and the production and circulation of social meanings, with an explosive impact on new generations, derives from the technological mediation of all practices and all the relationships in which they participate, even those practices and relationships in person and intimate spaces. Practices and relationships can transition from virtuality to in-person presence, or vice versa, giving rise to new connections and sociabilities online and offline13. Every definition today is technologically mediated. Here, technologies impact the how of sexuality and reproduction, through social media, the production and circulation of images, old and new chemicals, the transnationalized and mediated experience of lifestyles, identities, and languages, and experiences of time.
A ghost is haunting the world: the ghost of consumerism
Generations born in the 21st century grew up with the omnipresent social media and new cultural codes disseminated by influencers, video games, and online betting sites. Adolescents and young adults from all social classes, constantly exposed to advertising in which personal happiness or success is reduced to the act of consumption, must confront the social demand for personal exposure on social media, with varying personal capital (economic, relational, but also erotic-sexual and specific capital derived from the number of followers, viewing frequency, and the like).
The deteriorated deprivation and reasonable hopelessness about possible improvements in structurally unequal societies further fragment the experiences of younger generations. Large groups of children and adolescents, living in territories stripped of almost everything, are forced to fend for themselves with unstable institutional support. The demand to become an adult at an early age reveals unique interconnections of social deprivation, gender subordination, and abuse in the adult world. These girls and adolescent women face feminized tasks and domestic labor obligations inside and outside the home. We have boys and young men working at whatever they can in informal and hazardous jobs. These young bodies are forced to work and exposed to the hostility of the streets, where the availability of alcohol and highly toxic psychoactive substances exacerbates the fragility of their condition. Divested of any social anchorage and faced with the abrupt demand to work, they are exposed to increased manipulation and violence.
These circumstances forge one of the few subjective certainties: they do not see a future; they know that they have almost no one on their side to help them preserve their lives14. As Sibilia15 (p.19) points out, “almost none of the institutions that formed the backbone of the modernizing project were left unscathed: from the school to the prison, the barracks, the museum, the library, the cinema, the factory and the hospital, passing through the nuclear family and reaching the press and science”.
In these times of exaltation of individual autonomy and technological mediatization, the paradox of the legitimacy of supports becomes more dramatic16. People who have grown up and lived in privileged conditions, thanks to their family environment, tend to possess supports that are invisible at first glance, which increases the belief in a subject who is fulfilled exclusively by the force of their will and sacrifice. On the contrary, socially vulnerable individuals who are ridded mainly of family, economic, and cultural resources are paradoxically stigmatized as dependent and losers, even though they find some support in a social institution or program. At the same time that institutions offer fewer bases of support capable of organizing social time in the form of predictability, the demands on individuals for self-responsibility increase17.
From Miami and Dubai, the meccas of success for a large part of Latin America’s youth, young men with gym-sculpted bodies adorned with fashion brands sell their financial formulas on social media to escape poverty and become millionaires. Disbelieving in a political era that was more productive in demanding rights than in transforming the material conditions of existence, many young people find in reactionary discourses something to believe in again and process feelings of frustration and helplessness. Cis heterosexual men grapple, with varying degrees of bewilderment, with the tensions between the loss of privilege and the construction of more just and supportive relationships. To what extent can they break the culture of abuse and sexist complicity as proof of belonging among peers? In what ways can they rethink their belief in masculine superiority and the pedagogy in which they have been trained?
The technology-mediated tie transformations do not distance but rather draw individuals nearer together (increasingly less isolated and isolatable, but increasingly alone, in the Arendtian sense). The ways of socializing, learning, communicating, but also courting, getting horny, “having sex,” are increasingly formatted through technologies and gadgets (especially virtual ones: phones, tablets, computers, and social media) that separate and join bodies, subjectivities, voices, nudity, offer aspirational models (more or less unattainable, more or less familiar or everyday), detach eroticism from some sense (for now, technological mediations cover sight, hearing, but do not yet include smell, taste, touch or umami), but it should not be long before we do. For now, liquids and fluids are not exchanged with other people on screens, although there are already markets for mail-ordering used underwear. Mediations result from and produce a revolutionary shift in time, rhythms, and duration: the immediacy of everything, the everything now.
They also introduce fantasy, enjoyment, danger, and the data of the record: the possibility of repetition and, above all, circulation (this must be analyzed not only as risk and danger, but also as a commodity, which is in fact valorized, and young people know this, also as pleasure, excitement, and thrill). What practices, subjectivities, drugs, clothes, weights, and the like, are compatible with these rhythms and mediations? What scenes? What purposes? What legitimations? What forms of violence (including self-violence) do they enable or stimulate? We must rethink almost everything.
A question to ask yourself and young people: Are sexual relationships possible today without cell phones? Are there encounters not preceded by cell phone communication? Is there sex without one or more cell phones in the middle of the action? Is there jealousy not mediated by cell phones? Is there adultery without a cell phone? The cell phone is the third party in the relationship. It opens up possibilities for creation, recreation, but also for voluntary or involuntary harm, blackmail, and commercialization. It also enables long-distance dating, meeting people when traveling to explore the city, and maintaining remote friendships and intimacies. There is a productivity in cellular sex that is already a given among the younger generation18.
When we think of technology these days, we think of the internet, networks, and telephones. However, the sexual sphere is permeated and challenged by other and very diverse technologies: contraceptives, condoms, lubricants, antiretrovirals, legal and illegal recreational drugs, sex toys, makeup, clothing, costumes, for example. However, they are also surrounded by technologies, sometimes addictive, such as the gym and supplements, implants, cosmetic procedures, hormone therapies, drugs to ensure erections, to stay awake, and to have a better time.
Having said all this, how can we, as adults and within institutions, support these new formats? How can we create safe spaces for dialogue and access to information for safe sex?
A room of one’s own, where Virginia Woolf could write, but also where adolescents and young people could have their relationships, no longer has walls. How does one experience sexuality, reproduction, eroticism, friendship, without the protection of intimate spaces, without unmediated conversations, without time to waste?
Sexuality, reproduction, and accelerated time
Patterns of social and political gratification, which relate to social mobility, democratic life, and interpersonal ties, have shifted, so to speak, from patterns of deferred gratification to patterns of intended, immediate, and instant gratification. Deferred gratification refers to the ability to delay immediate rewards or pleasures in order to achieve long-term goals or benefits. It is a psychological and social process that involves self-control, patience, and the ability to resist temptation. If for decades, to put it simply and schematically, effort and work were expected to yield rewards some time later, much later, that has now changed.
The idea that gratification comes later, after effort, waiting, and going through processes, characterized both individual, family, and national or societal economic life, as well as the processes, for example, of finding a suitable partner, starting a family, and finding and developing a vocation and a profession. Today, it does not seem to work that way: the economic, emotional, sexual, and even reproductive rewards must come now. If they do not come now, we have frustration, sometimes guilty parties, and some other times a desire for violent and hostile responses toward those guilty parties. This shift in time expectations and, consequently, in the degree and extent of individual and social frustrations, and the violence that accompanies these frustrations, appears to affect the sexuality and reproduction of 21st-century youth.
Deferred gratification no longer works because waiting and postponing are not the order of the day. However, even more radical is the fact, emphasized by several authors14, that gratification loses its deferred character but also sheds its connection to effort and work: “The emphasis lies on that ‘you’, who is the recipient and the cause of deserving it. Just by being ‘you’ (or other similar terms), you deserve it and should be able to enjoy it. Also, I agree, of course: even if I have done absolutely nothing. I deserve it for being me”14 (p.15).
We propose to consider the hypothesis that the pattern of deferred gratification, thought, experienced, and believed regarding individual, familial, or more generally economic progress, upward social mobility, access to and improvement of property, which is currently in crisis, is also in crisis vis-à-vis relationships, sexuality, friendships, and even reproduction. Suppose economic progress, the accumulation of goods, and enrichment cannot wait or depend on effort or work. In that case, we can say that the establishment of friendly, erotic, and even sexual bonds cannot wait either, and often do not seem to depend on work - the work of courtship, seduction, and awakening desire.
In both cases, economics and eroticism, unrequited gratification produces frustration, discomfort, a sense of injustice, a great deal of anger, and a search for those responsible. There is no need to reduce the issue of violence associated with frustration among involuntary celibates, the incels, those involuntary celebrities who became famous both for their armed attacks on colleges and public places in the United States and for being the typical trolls or dark, resentful figures so successful on social media.
Radical malaise
Finally, what characterizes all generations today, and particularly the younger ones, is malaise. A radical malaise. A play on words, radical malaise legitimizes radical evil. This radical malaise is not exclusive to the younger generations. Let us propose some ways to think about it. However, while not exclusive to younger generations, this radical malaise, which we believe refers both to an overload of subjective interpellations and a loss of primary references of certainty, takes on a specific nature in younger generations, given that one of the dimensions of lost certainty relates to the future becoming unimaginable, obliterating any idea of the future that is not radically uncertain. The lack of a horizon for the future obliterates any experience of time other than the present, especially considering that historical narrative and memory processes are also in crisis, and new generations seem not to subscribe to them, or not to want to. We live only in the present without learning or inscribing ourselves in past experiences and narratives, and without individual and collective projections into the future.
Some of the subjective demands young people face are impossible to satisfy per se, and others are impossible to satisfy altogether. Today, we must get rich, earn money, prestige, and property quickly and on a large scale; we must succeed in our own activities (even those we enjoy and find satisfactory: in school and university, at work, in artistic and literary production, and the like); we have to form a couple (not just heterosexuals, but now also gays, lesbians, and trans people), be happy in a couple and if not, separate, have children, have sex and be happy in sex: and on top of that, as if that were not enough, not only “we have to” succeed, work, have a partner, family, and sexuality, but “we have to want” to succeed, work, have a partner, family, and sexuality. The list we have just made is very short, it does not end there: we have to do sports, take care of ourself and others, take care of our health, protect ourself from HIV, adhere to antiretrovirals and contraceptives, want to be healthy, want to live a long time, age well, stay beautiful, stay young (how?), and from there we are one step away from wanting immortality.
Impossible. Suppose we combine all these impossible challenges, at a time of life like adolescence, which - let us return to the cliché for a minute - is characterized by insecurity and the search for oneself. In that case, the search for one’s place in the world, and in a context produced by the networks that are now the habitat of young people, the result is explosive. Subjective discomfort, depression, suicide attempts, and panic proliferate. Ailments proliferate, even pathologized, giving rise to medical and secular expertise, institutions, drugs, and markets.
The situation is even more complicated because the networks not only offer unattainable real-life role models (the talented singer, the skilled soccer player, the prettiest, the forever young, the most muscular, or the one who did well), but also, through artificial intelligence or software, unattainable nonexistent role models.
These statements have their specificities, or they do not apply to all geographical, class, community, or contexts. They do not apply to all, nor - hopefully - to most individuals. Of course not. However, let us take the electoral results by district, broken down by age group, as a proxy. We see that sometimes colorful but highly reactionary figures, far-right candidates and discourses, reach the most diverse corners of the countries and somehow claim to take charge of these impossibilities and frustrations: they offer new pipe dreams, explanatory conspiracies, perhaps real culprits, and often scapegoats. Among the latter, some classics: migrants, some ethnic minorities, those who benefit from gender ideology, gays and lesbians, trans people, workers and their organizations, the unemployed and their organizations, racialized minorities or majorities.
Adolescence and young adulthood are often periods of uncertainty, if only because life is supposed to be all ahead of us. We have seen that recent decades have also introduced radical new uncertainties: related to the breakdown of the imagined order of gender and generation, technology-mediated relationships, and the collapse of the bedroom walls that hinder the reality and imagination of intimacy. At the same time, we have seen that this generation suffers explicitly from difficulties related to the formal and informal labor market.
As a perplexing conclusion
To conclude, we propose placing these lines of reflection in the context of what we call the triple epochal crisis, which makes radical uncertainty a universal experience of our time. Lechner’s question19, “Does democracy respond to the search for certainty?”, is answered with a resigned shrug.
For the sole purpose of raising this concern, we propose considering this experience of uncertainty as linked to a triple process of loss of vital reference points in the world: first, the crisis of the mode of accumulation and social mobility through work; second, the crisis of gender and generational hierarchies; and third, the radical uncertainty of the planet, in terms of climate and (not so) natural disasters, and the collective experience of this planetary crisis (all together, all at the same time) ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic20.
First, the capitalist mode of accumulation and the modes that emerged as alternatives, as offering human faces, were revealed to be chimerical for individual progress, upward social mobility, and integration through work. Hardly anyone believes they will be better off through work anymore, and no one believes that income depends on effort. The capitalist mode of accumulation today cannot, and will not, on the contrary, manage to contain everyone. Entire categories of the population become explicitly superfluous, that is, expendable. Individuals and groups, but also non-human animal species, jungles, landscapes, rivers, seas, glaciers, and even the air itself. The certainty, or illusory certainty, that one’s place in the world depends on one’s place in the world of work no longer exists. This is particularly burdensome for the figure in crisis: the male breadwinner. Alternatively, for the adolescent and young male who has been socialized to become the male breadwinner. Hence, the importance of restorative discourses, which seek to establish or reinstate some order of certainty.
Second, we repeat, the order of patriarchal gender hierarchies and adult-centric generation has been shattered. This also breaks down parameters of certainty and partly explains why anti-rights discourses on gender and sexuality are so prevalent.
Third, the climate crisis, pandemics, extractivism, and the precariousness of the planet. We are not in a trustworthy world either. Instead, we should say a planet, since we are referring to the physical world, our surface, our water, our air, our buildings and airports, our forests, rivers, and ecosystems. Here, it seems the answer is to deny the problem outright. To interpret it in a conspiratorial way. It does not exist.
Faced with this loss of reference points, young people in particular are unsure of what to do because they are uncertain about their place in the world. How do these processes impact sexuality and reproduction, and vice versa?
While in this essay we delve uncomfortably into reactionary political drifts and emerging authoritarian modes of individual and collective processing of frustrations and discontent, we cannot fail to recognize the stubborn resilience of democratic gains, nor can we forget the regenerative capacity of communities, even in more extreme conditions than the current ones.
At this historical juncture, we can also document the defense of the progress made with the expanded rights of women, gender diversity, and childhood and adolescence in diverse territories. The democratic transformations of the meanings of affection, sexuality, and family can be questioned, but they cannot be erased from social memory.
Despite all the limitations and outstanding debts, the processes of citizen inclusion that have occurred in the region since the restoration of democracy have succeeded in introducing the possibility of plural gender arrangements under the principles of freedom and equality, and have been lived, celebrated, and sown. These democratic advances, which explain much of the conservative backlash, also allow us to believe in the emergence of new languages and alliances that challenge fanaticism and champion care, interactivity, and solidarity.
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The data sources adopted in the research are indicated in the article’s body.
