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Abstract:
Scholars have recast debates on globalization by emphasizing both national actors' selective appropriation of transnational practices and their hybrid reinvention in national settings. Drawing on Nestor García Canclini's concepts of "global communities " and "hybrid cultures," I explore these debates by comparing gay and lesbian activists' first experiments in electoral activism in Mexico and Brazil, both occurring in 1982. The different electoral strategies that prevailed in each country drew on the transnational arena in different ways. To explain these differences, I consider the relative strength of competing sectors within heterogeneous social movement fields and their variable participation in competing global communities. The relative influence of these sectors and thus the relative salience of specific transnational practices, in turn, reflected each movement's embeddedness in broader opposition movements to authoritarian regimes. Finally, I argue that these practices should be read contextually, with attention given to their transformation and limitations in national settings.
In 1982, gay and lesbian activists approached the electoral arena for the first time in Latin America's two most populous countries, Brazil and Mexico. Both elections took place under authoritarian regimes during protracted transitions to formal democracy. While parallel disputes over partisan alliances had bitterly split both movements, two quite different electoral strategies ultimately coalesced. In Mexico's presidential and congressional race, activists mobilized around gay and lesbian candidates, forging a tight electoral alliance with the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), a small Trotskyist party that, while electorally insignificant, played an important role in both homosexual liberation and feminist movements at the time. In Brazil's gubernatorial and legislative elections, on the other hand, most activists ultimately eschewed such a close alignment with any single party, approaching candidates and parties across the ideological spectrum with a set of demands they pursued in legislatures after the race. Both movements' entry into the electoral arena reflected their embeddedness in broader movements for democratic change. Both also reflected certain activists' participation in the international arena, although in very different ways. This article does not seek to provide a full account of the conditions-both national and global-that permitted each electoral path to coalesce. Rather, it focuses on prevailing electoral strategies in 1982 as a window to explore how activists variably engaged in the global system, responding to national-level imperatives and...