Advanced Diploma in Sexualities and Citizenship

• Class 1: Viable Latin American and Caribbean sexual citizenships
  Teacher: Amaral Arévalo
  
  Issues related to sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, and sexual and affective characteristics have gained international visibility over the past 40 years. The visibility and achievement of rights by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer, asexual, and other gender, sexual, and affective identity (LGBTIQA+) population are hallmarks of this historical moment, especially in contemporary Western societies. This process has not been spontaneous, as simplistic analyses might suggest. On the contrary, it is a genealogical process involving social organization, collective action, and political advocacy.
  This introductory class aims to (re)constitute an overview of the sexual citizenships of LGBTIQA+ people in Latin America and the Caribbean. To this end, a historical and conceptual overview will be presented. Historically, it will show the social, cultural, institutional, and political changes concerning LGBTIQA+ people, who went from being criminalized to acquiring citizenship. This transformation occurred through collective actions carried out by various organized LGBTIQA+ movements starting in the second half of the 20th century, which intensified in the 1990s and 2000s with a clear impact on public administrations in the States. However, progress began to decline in the second half of the 2010s with the rise of conservative and far-right political trends in these countries.
  
  
• Class 2: Urban Morphology of Desire. The urbanism of the modern Latin American city as a product of sexuality
  Teacher: Jenny Vanesa Muñoz
  

  This class aims to analyze the city and its relationship to expressions of human sexuality. From the perspective of urban morphology, we can approach an understanding of urban dynamics, identifying distinctive forms in architecture, the urban fabric, and the diverse land uses of specific areas of the city that, for complex reasons, have become consolidated over time as the so-called "red-light districts" or "tolerance zones."
  The class begins with basic concepts aimed at understanding the complexity of living, moving through, working, and consuming in spaces that, far from being neutral and homogeneous compared to other areas of the city, are historically marked by the forbidden, the special, the marginal, and ultimately, the desired, as an experience of desire located on the margins of legitimacy and legality. These concepts include the right to the city and the distinctive urban and social morphology of zoned or segregated areas.
  The class seeks to establish how desire is spatially configured in the city, in the cases of social groups that constantly use, inhabit, appropriate, and redefine such spaces; in turn, to understand how such spaces relate to their urban environment, which translates into the specialization of such processes, which implies the development of urban plans and cartography.

• Class 3: Asexual and aromantic citizenships
  Teacher: Willka Ñusta Taylor
  
  This class examines the struggle for recognition of asexual and aromantic people as a cultural and social battle against allonormativity and amatonormativity, which underpin everyday forms of violence such as pathologization, harassment, and media misrepresentation. Faced with a lack of safe spaces and constant social erasure, asexual and aromantic communities and organizations have emerged, creating refuge, support, and mutual aid networks, as well as promoting awareness and cultural change. Only in recent years have these organizations begun to engage in dialogue with the State and institutions, demanding that social recognition be accompanied by greater public transparency and respect in all spheres. Until these changes are consolidated, asexual and aromantic people will continue to be treated as second-class citizens within a society that still denies them instead of recognizing them as full subjects of rights, dignity, and existence.

• Class 4: Caribbean Sexual Citizenships: Crossed Perspectives
  Teacher: Yamirka Robert Brady
  
  This class analyzes the exclusion of the homosexual population from a two-dimensional perspective, understanding exclusion not only as a condition of “being outside,” but also as a social and historical process that produces inequality through institutional and cultural mechanisms that define who can belong, participate, and be recognized as a legitimate subject. The two-dimensional nature of this exclusion is expressed, first, in a material-institutional dimension, encompassing barriers to effective access to rights, services, and protections, as well as state practices of surveillance, control, or “normalization.” Second, it manifests in a symbolic-cultural dimension, composed of pathologizing or moralizing discourses, stereotypes, and forms of delegitimization that degrade social status, generate self-censorship, and restrict public presence. These two dimensions do not operate separately: they reinforce each other and produce a stratified sexual citizenship. The class illustrates this two-dimensionality through situated examples, including Cuba and other Caribbean countries, to show variations in the repertoires of exclusion according to political contexts, legal frameworks, and moral grammars.
  
  
• Class 5: New rights agenda in the Southern Cone
  Teacher: Diego Puntigliano Casulo
  

  This class aims to encourage reflection on the relationship between Latin American states and social movements at the beginning of the 21st century. The class will focus on the latter, sharing transformative experiences and the liberation of citizens' rights, with the goal of providing complementary elements related to the discussions in the other classes of the module.
  The theoretical starting point is Bull's (2013) concept of the pink tide and the frameworks proposed by Friedman et al. (2020) specifically on gender and sexual issues, providing a general socio-political diagnosis that allows the geopolitical situation to be framed within the paradigm of sexual and reproductive rights. Thus, the aim is to introduce debates that allow us to understand why we speak of new social movements.
  The theoretical framework on the new rights agenda (Bidegain et al., 2024) is continued to explore the notions of intersectionality in the political actions of social movements, particularly those related to sexual diversity. This framework allows for the observation of specific cross-border cases with differentiated models for promoting sexual rights and citizenship in the Southern Cone. The Uruguayan case will be taken as a prime example to explain the diversity paradigm in contrast to traditional pride (Sempol, 2016), broadening the perspective on the causes, discourses, and repertoires of action championed by these groups (Puntigliano Casulo, 2025).
  In summary, the class seeks to approach the new interpretive and political frameworks coming from social movements, recognizing the contributions to the construction of knowledge oriented towards social transformation and that should continue to be part of university training practices.

   

• Class 6: The political representation of LGBTIQA+ people in Latin America
  Teacher: Gustavo Gomes da Costa
  
  Since the beginning of the 21st century, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer, and asexual (LGBTIQA+) people in Latin America have undergone a paradigm shift. Several countries in the region (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Uruguay) have gained prominence on the international stage thanks to the passage of laws that have expanded various rights for people who deviate from cis-heteronormative standards. At the same time, high rates of LGBT-phobic violence persist in the region, and there is a rise in political leaders with explicitly sexist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric. It is in this context that we see the growing participation of openly LGBTIQA+ people in political parties and elections in several countries of the region, attaining positions in the executive and legislative branches at various levels of government.
  Through a dialogue with academic literature on gender and politics, with a particular focus on discussions of gender quotas, descriptive representation, and political violence, this course seeks to examine the obstacles faced by openly LGBTQIA+ politicians, from the initial stages of their candidacy to their performance in parliamentary bodies. The discussions will be based on empirical studies of LGBTQIA+ participation in Latin American countries. The analyses aim to understand how gender-based political violence affects the actions of these parliamentarians and its potential impact on the participation of LGBTQIA+ people in institutional politics and in LGBTI+ politics in general in Latin America.

  
  
  

• Class 7: Feminisms-Transfeminisms and Transphobic Terfeminisms
  Teacher: José Ernesto Ramírez
  
  This class addresses the dynamics of segmentation in the practices of constructing political subjects proposed as situated versions of feminisms and transfeminisms, as well as the social discourses in which conceptions of identity and constitution as communities of action converge and diverge. It analyzes different positions and the supporting scientific and/or ideological arguments surrounding definitions of the objectification of human sexuality phenomena in their subjectivation and sociogenesis from medical, psychological, legal, and political perspectives. Emphasis is placed on the configuration of the main tensions and struggles to monopolize the dominant definition for specific conditions and realities in any given society—confrontations that ultimately constitute the frameworks for social orderings at their normative and symbolic levels. A methodological approach is proposed to allow for a social cartographic mapping of the space of agents, resources, and objectives mobilized in the strategies of reproduction or transformation of gender relations and rights in specific cases, in the manner of national systems of sex and gender relations.
  
  
• Class 8: Fundamentalisms and authoritarianisms in Central America
  Teacher: Amaral Arévalo
  
  Central American countries are experiencing democratic regression and increased authoritarianism, expressed in the weakening of institutional checks and balances, the concentration of power in the Executive branch, the instrumental use of the justice and security apparatuses to persecute opponents and silence the critical press, as well as in the restriction of civic spaces and the systematic deterioration of the rule of law.
  This class will analyze how the circulation of the political-discursive stratagem of “gender ideology”, promoted by fundamentalist sectors, impacted autocratic dynamics and the laceration of human rights in Central America, by legitimizing projects of “moral restoration” that restrict comprehensive sex education, criminalize sexual and gender dissidence, erode the frameworks of protection of reproductive rights and weaken the civic space through disinformation campaigns, hate speech and the instrumentalization of state institutions to persecute feminist and LGBTIQA+ activists.
  In Central American states that are increasingly committed to moral restoration as a political project of power, the presence of political dissidents and gender, racial, and sexual alterities has no social space, political place, or territory to exist, being pushed into clandestinity, exile, or symbolic disappearance through mechanisms of criminalization, pathologization, censorship, and lethal violence, which seek to reinstate a heteropatriarchal, racist, and authoritarian order as the only legitimate form of life and citizenship. 

• Class 9: Rhetorics of the “trans* danger”: Moral panics of gender and (dis)recognition in contemporary sexual citizenship
  Teacher: Débora Fernández Cárcamo
  
  This class addresses gender-based moral panics as a psychic, affective, and political phenomenon that transforms trans* and gender-diverse identities into a new “social danger,” articulating misinformation, fantasies of contagion, and protective rhetoric. Moral panic is analyzed as a libidinal economy and regime of enjoyment that organizes fears, hatreds, and desires around the category of gender. Drawing on authors such as Konstantinos Argyriou, Judith Butler, and Víctor Mora, the class presents how the old grammar of “sexual dangers” has been reactivated today around the figure of the trans*, conceiving it as an imagined threat to the family, the nation, and sexual difference. The class problematizes the contemporary place of gender dysphoria, the role of conversion therapies and the strategic use of “scientific evidence”, among other transphobic articulation devices, as a surface of dispute where the legitimacy of suffering, the material possibilities of gender transition and social intelligibility itself are negotiated.
  The class explores a trans-affirmative reading of gender-based moral panics, examining how they, in practice, reshape the criteria for protection, reparation, and mourning. Rather than accepting the scenario in which these lives appear only as a threat to be contained, corrected, or sacrificed, it questions the kind of common world that is affirmed when their precarity becomes an acceptable cost for preserving a certain sexual and social order. Against this backdrop, the strategies of gender-affirmative actors who challenge the interpretive monopoly of moral panic and produce alternative criteria for legitimacy, care, and justice are addressed. Thus, it examines how these panics organize disinformation, capture emotions, and sustain infrastructures of violence, while simultaneously creating fissures that filter out counter-emotions, counter-narratives, and critical practices that resist the logic of the scapegoat.

• Class 10: University sex and gender dissidences in Latin America and the Caribbean
  Teacher: Iyamira Hernández Pita
  
  To critically analyze the historical function of the University as a reproductive apparatus of Western hegemony and to evaluate, from the perspective of the Global South, the resistance strategies (digital activism) and the normative frameworks that redefine it as an agent of transformation and promoter of livable sexual citizenships for LGBTIQ+ populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
  
  
• Class 11: HIV-positive Archives in Latin America and the Caribbean
  Teacher: Luis Rojas Herra
  
  This course offers a critical approach to the construction of queer and HIV-positive memory in Costa Rica during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, within a context marked by state persecution, social stigmatization, and structural violence against queer and HIV-positive individuals. Through the analysis of historical sources and the recovery of oral histories from activism, the course aims to understand how mechanisms of control, morality, and exclusion operated, and how affected communities generated political and organizational responses to resist. Overall, the course seeks to recognize the political power of HIV-positive memories as a tool to challenge oblivion, rewrite queer genealogies, and strengthen critical perspectives on health, rights, and sexual citizenship in Latin America.

• Class 12: Queer Spiritualities: Theology, Body and Resistance in Latin America
  Teacher: Yacurmana de la Puente
  
  This class proposes a critical introduction to queer spiritualities in Latin America, understood as theological, political and bodily practices of resistance against the coloniality of power, religious patriarchy and sexual normativity.
  Drawing on the contributions of feminist theology and queer theology—particularly the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid and contemporary developments surrounding indecent theologies—the articulation between religion, body, desire, and territory will be addressed.
  The proposal stems from a situated reading: Latin American queer spiritualities do not emerge as an abstract exercise in doctrinal reinterpretation, but as an embodied response to exclusion, symbolic violence, and the silencing of sexual dissidence within religious traditions.
  We will reflect on how these spiritualities reinvent the languages ​​of the sacred, shift the boundaries of the theological, and shape communal forms of care, memory, and pleasure, in dialogue with transfeminism and decolonial epistemologies.
  From this perspective, the class invites us to think about spirituality as a practice of freedom that eroticizes theology and politicizes the body, opening paths to imagine the divine from the lived experiences of LGBTIQ+ communities in the Global South.
  
  
  

• Class 13: Technocommunication and sexual citizenships: From appropriation to the new ideological struggle
  Teacher: Raul Antonhy Olmedo Nery
  
  The class is designed to bring students closer to the socio-technical ways in which the struggle for the recognition of LGBTIQA+ rights manifests itself in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
  In this regard, attention is paid to the forms of communication that have been developing in the region, particularly in two trends: one related to the social appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by activists, collectives, and members of the LGBTIQA+ community to make their presence visible in the world and to actively participate in the emerging digital public sphere. This process is manifested in the formation of virtual communities, the development of independent LGBTIQA+ communication projects, and the construction of their own repertoires of connective action.
  The second trend focuses on the new ideological struggles that arise within the framework of transnational digital information circuits; that is, the media production of content originating in the Global North, whether positive or punitive for LGBTIQA+ people, which is produced, distributed, and consumed globally through digital systems such as Video on Demand (VoD) and social media platforms.
  This second category offers us elements for ideological critique that is now advancing at a second level: no longer the dilemma of whether or not to present LGBTIQA+ people in mass and digital media, but how these representations form hegemonic patterns that, on the one hand, serve to legitimize the vision of the Global North beyond its borders and, on the other hand, deploy new mechanisms of exclusion by not naming peripheral realities.
  These elements are crucial because communication and the media ecosystem are presented as key ideological institutions for the legitimacy or repression of LGBTIQA+ populations in the region.
  
  
• Class 14: Families, kinship and non-normative affective arrangements
  Teacher: Maximiliano Marentes
  
  What is family and family life for LGBTQ+ people? Does it represent a shift away from cis-heteronormative criteria? How do they construct kinship? Do they produce other types of intimate arrangements? The objective of this class is to reflect on new trends in thinking about kinship, family life, and affective arrangements in the case of the LGBTQ+ population of Latin America. To do so, we propose an exploration that leads us to consider the place that “family” has occupied within the framework of LGBTQ+ movements. While since the 70s, within the context of revolutionary demands surrounding sexualities, the family was denounced as a normative, repressive unit that reproduced bourgeois mandates, a change began to occur in the 2000s. For lesbians and, to a lesser extent, gay men, forming families with their partners began to be a more readily available possibility. For trans and gender-diverse individuals, the family of origin continued, and continues, to operate as an institution that expels them at a young age. Simultaneously, at different times and for the various gender identities that make up the LGBTIQ+ population, other forms of intimate, affective arrangements began to emerge as “families by choice.” These represent a critical re-examination of the concept of kinship ties. In recent years, in addition to the legal provisions that allowed for the legal recognition of same-sex couples, possibilities for establishing parentage through assisted reproductive technologies and adoption have also arisen. In short, in this class we propose to explore the multiple ways in which family, kinship, and intimate arrangements are articulated, in specific ways, with different gender identities.

• Class 15: Subjects of Rights in the Digital Age
  Teacher: Eder van Pelt
  
  This course aims to examine the possibilities for individual freedom in digital environments through the lens of modern Western law. To this end, it addresses three key questions: What are we as digital subjects? How has the law recognized and constituted us through normative instruments for the protection of our digital freedoms, thus shaping the first vestiges of the digital legal subject? And what would be the most appropriate normative paths for realizing the senses of freedom based on the self-managed dynamics of these digital subjects? The argument will be developed from an interdisciplinary perspective, particularly through analyses of the economy, power, and society in the digital age, to consider law and its intersections with digital technologies, with special attention to internet technologies.

You must be registered in the CLACSO Single Registration System (SUIC) and enter your username and password. If you are not registered, click here. hereTo access the registration form, you must click the "Register" button on the webpage of the Diploma you are interested in.

Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive a confirmation in your email.

Classes will begin in August and will conclude in December 2026.

All registered participants will receive, on the first day of activities, the necessary instructions to access the classes, bibliography, and discussion forums through the CLACSO Virtual Training Space.

Accessing and navigating the Virtual Learning Environment is very simple and user-friendly. In any case, a technical and academic support team will always be available. For inquiries, you can write to [email protected] 

 You must write an email with the request to [email protected] We will send you the requested certificate as soon as possible.

Exceptional criteria: In exceptional cases and within the first 20 days of starting the Higher Diploma, the student may write to [email protected] Requesting withdrawal and stating the reasons. After the case is evaluated, a response will be sent to the request. If approved, the student may resume the Higher Diploma program if a new cohort is offered the following year. After that period of time has elapsed since the start of the course, no requests will be accepted.

Money paid will only be refunded in cases where the organizing institutions decide to cancel the activity. 

Yes, the advanced diploma is certified by CLACSO. The diploma will be sent digitally and is completely free of charge.

Payment can be made in one installment, by credit card or bank transfer. We also offer the option of paying in 3 installments.

Yes. There will be discounts for students belonging to CLACSO Member Centers and CLACSO Associated Centers, for CLACSO Associate Researchers, and for all those who pay within the discount period.

You can check if you belong to a member center here: 

https://www.clacso.org/institucional/centros-asociados/

The Advanced Diploma program integrates a dynamic of asynchronous and synchronous classes. Classes are primarily asynchronous. The schedule for synchronous sessions will be communicated by the Diploma coordinator at the beginning of the program, and participation in these sessions is not a prerequisite for passing the program.