In the face of the rise of neo-fascist currents (Grimson, 2025), refeudalization (Kaltmeier, 2022), and the de-democratization (Brown, 2021) of contemporary Latin American states, sexual activism and citizenship have acquired a political and epistemological relevance that transcends disputes over recognition (Arévalo, 2025a). LGBTIQA+ struggles emerge as practices of radical democratization, embodying the questions: Who can be recognized as subjects of rights? and Which bodies are considered legitimate in the social sphere? Thus, LGBTIQA+ experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean reveal a complex web of resistances, articulations, and affects that challenge the limits of the political, contesting the meaning of citizenship, human dignity, and democracy.

Thinking about sexual activism and citizenship from the Global South requires starting from a central observation: the region is both a territory of expanding rights and the stage for an intense reactionary counteroffensive. Since 2010, there has been a cycle of normative and programmatic advances regarding sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and diverse bodies, expressed in judicial decisions, legislative reforms, and public policies, such as the 2018 promulgation of Advisory Opinion OC-24/17 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This opened a legally binding horizon for States and provided LGBTIQA+ activists with a strategic tool to contest sexual citizenship within the Inter-American framework.

Several countries in the region have made progress in recognizing gender identity and marriage equality through laws that enshrine gender identity and the right to marriage equality. However, these "model" frameworks have significant limitations: the Bolivian case produces fragmented legal identities without full rights; in El Salvador and Honduras, legislative gridlock and non-compliance with Inter-American Court rulings reveal a lack of political will to recognize the rights of transgender people. This demonstrates that legal change does not lead to substantive sexual citizenship, but rather coexists with states, judicial systems, and political cultures marked by cisheteropatriarchy, racism, and classism.

In response to these legal advances, conservative power groups and religious fundamentalists have emerged. Gabriela Arguedas (2024) calls this the "reproductive reconquest." It is a political project aimed at reclaiming privileges for those who feel threatened by progressive feminist and LGBTQIA+ agendas. These groups deploy anti-gender campaigns rooted in religion and conservative sexual populism to reverse political gains and reinstate colonial hierarchies of body, race, gender, family, sexuality, and nation.

The anti-gender counteroffensive was consolidated through the strategic use of gender ideology. Junqueira (2018) and Bracke and Paternotte (2020) indicate that the phrase "gender ideology" emerged as a discursive device articulated by Catholic and evangelical sectors to delegitimize feminist struggles, gender studies, and LGBTIQA+ agendas, presenting them as an "ideological" agenda that threatens the family, the nation, and childhood. This rhetoric simplifies and distorts academic concepts and political demands, transforming them into scapegoats for economic, political, or moral crises. This generates a form of sexual populism that articulates negative emotions and channels them toward historically vulnerable and precarious bodies and identities.

“Gender ideology” is an effective political tool at various levels. It operates as a polarizing narrative that blocks any informed public debate on sexual and reproductive rights. Furthermore, it functions as an electoral platform: political-religious leaders mobilize moral panic to occupy government positions, from which they promote the repeal or defunding of institutions, programs, and policies aimed at women, Afro-descendants, and LGBTQIA+ people. In Brazil under Bolsonaro, in El Salvador with Bukele, in Costa Rica with Rodrigo Chaves, and in Argentina under Milei, institutions responsible for gender and diversity policies have been dismantled or weakened, combining a “soft” phase of restructuring and budget cuts with “hard” phases of discursive and normative attacks on sexual and gender differences. This offensive seeks to erode the Enlightenment principles of equality, secularism, and public rationality, proposing normative frameworks where religious morality is the foundation of law and the state (Passos, 2020).

This counteroffensive can be interpreted as a neonormalizing reaction against the advances of sexual citizenship (Arguedas, 2024). While LGBTIQA+ activism in the Global South focuses on translating demands for bodily autonomy, affective connection, and redistributive justice into equality and human rights, anti-gender forces construct a narrative in which these advances are portrayed as “privileges” that threaten the cisheterosexual majority, the nation, or even Western civilization. In doing so, they revive unfounded stereotypes that associate LGBTIQA+ people with pedophilia, moral degeneration, or even responsibility for natural disasters or health crises, for example.

However, reducing the field to a confrontation between progressive states and reactionary forces would be an oversimplification. As argued in the collective work *Livable Sexual Citizenships in Latin America and the Caribbean* (Arévalo, 2025b), the region combines global influences, such as the circulation of European regulations, pressure from the Inter-American system, and the conditionality imposed by financial institutions, with local histories of community organizing, feminist networks, alliances between movements, and litigation strategies that have allowed them to inscribe their demands on post-neoliberal agendas of rights and democracy (Corrales, 2021). Latin American activism has articulated a situated critique of the “homonationalist” models of the Global North, which use the LGBTI agenda to whitewash geopolitical interventions or reinforce racialized borders between the “tolerant West” and “backward others” (Puar, 2017). Thus, sexual citizenships in the Global South not only appropriate the language of rights, but also resist forms of instrumentalization of LGBTIQA+ people that leave intact the internal structures of violence, poverty and racism.

In this context of legal advances and persistent lethal violence; of constitutional recognition and anti-gender sexual populism, Latin American and Caribbean sexual activism and citizenship are not conceived as a given, but rather as a conflictive, situated, and unfinished process. LGBTIQA+ struggles intersect with demands against structural racism, the militarization of territories, extractivism, and patriarchal violence, and unfold in multiple arenas: the courts, the streets, parliaments, platforms, international forums, community spaces, and universities.

Thus, what is at stake is not only the formal recognition of LGBTIQA+ people as subjects of rights, but also the possibility of redefining the very idea of ​​citizenship and democracy. In a region marked by persistent colonial inequalities and extreme levels of femicide and hate crimes, the construction of livable sexual citizenships requires challenging the meaning of the State and sustaining practices of care, memory, and resistance that transcend the strictly legal sphere. Sexual activism and citizenships in the region today are inscribed within this dual movement: of conquest and defense, of institutionalization and critique.

The relevance of sexual activism and citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean rests not only on the prolific, interdisciplinary, and critical scientific production of recent decades, but has also demonstrated its theoretical, social, and intellectual importance by: 1) recognizing the role of LGBTIQA+ populations in the construction of regional democracy (Arévalo, 2025), 2) analyzing, from a comparative perspective, the legal and political advances regarding their rights (Díez, 2018), 3) asserting the historical relevance of these populations in the development of Latin American and Caribbean societies (Insausti, 2024), 4) articulating local struggles in/from the Global South with international trends (Martel, 2013), and 5) stimulating situated theoretical production on violence to encourage just socio-political projects and feasible affirmative public policies in the region (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, 2016; Ahamed, 2019). Muñoz, 2020; Córdova Quero, Díaz, Santos Meza y Mor, 2024).

These factors become relevant in the current global context marked by multiple crises—democratic, theoretical, and epistemic—in the face of which LGBTIQA+ struggles have consolidated themselves as a theoretical and practical source for political and social reconfiguration, capable of challenging both the production of knowledge and the horizons of social justice widely demanded in the region.

Thus, the social relevance, theoretical novelty and political renewal that the Latin American and Caribbean LGBTQA+ movements offer to the social sciences from situated practices, promote diverse fields of reflection, theorizing and political-social impact through intersections with feminism (Butler, 2007), decoloniality (Falconí Travéz, 2018) and intersectionality (Arévalo, 2025) from a common place: the Global South (Drucker, 2004).

Thus, sexual activism and citizenship posit that sexuality and gender cannot be confined to the private sphere nor reduced to the dimension of identity (Insuasti, 2024). On the contrary, these elements are a political mechanism that organizes citizenship, conditions access to rights, and defines social hierarchies that operate within the structures that determine the public order and social reproduction (Martel, 2013). Therefore, the interdisciplinary analysis of sexual activism and citizenship redefines the categories with which we understand society, politics, and everyday life in Latin America and the Caribbean (IACHR, 2018; López Castañeda, 2018; UN Women, 2024).

Below we develop in depth the axes that the study of LGBTIQA+ activism and citizenship in the region stimulates and promises.

1. Theoretical relevance

The shift towards sexual and gender dissidence has allowed for questioning the traditional limits of the social sciences. In Latin America and the Caribbean, this process takes on a critical character because bodies, practices, and discourses are not only subject to regulation or exclusion, but also operate as spaces where coloniality, racism, class struggle, and cisheteronormativity intersect and are expressed (Butler, 2004; Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, 2016; Bernini, 2017).

Thus, from an interdisciplinary perspective, her study proposes reflections that articulate power, desire, language, law, and affect as inseparable dimensions that help to name realities, identify hierarchies, and denounce systemic inequalities that have been historically naturalized.

In this sense, the study of sexual activism and citizenship is not a decorative element in contemporary critique, but rather a fundamental component for the epistemic reconfiguration of this theoretical perspective, as important as decoloniality, feminism, and intersectionality. It is this ontological and epistemic catalyst that encourages and compels us to articulate these communities in order to construct and understand the particularities of their historical and social development within the Latin American context. One of the first interdisciplinary advances can be found in the collective work *Livable Sexual Citizenships in Latin America and the Caribbean* (Arévalo, 2025), where it is possible to observe not only local concerns, but also the disciplinary articulations that converge on a single object of study.

Thus, the interdisciplinarity of sexual activism and citizenship is the result of a political commitment to overflowing the boundaries of academic knowledge and to building objects of study whose very complexity keeps the critical, collective and collaborative production of knowledge about their various aspects alive.

2. Social relevance

Latin America and the Caribbean presents itself as a contradictory space for sexual and gender dissidences, because while LGBTIQA+ agendas advance in the region, hate crimes not only persist, but there is also the formation and legitimization of political projects that threaten their full development in society, producing spaces in conflict and marked by structural inequality, violence and discrimination (ILGA LAC, 2023; Without Violence LGBTIQ+, 2024).

In response, LGBTIQA+ struggles have strained institutional structures, promoting the expansion of human rights and challenging the punitive policies that were deployed - and in some countries persist - against LGBTIQA+ people by the State and now by conservative groups.

The LGBTIQA+ movement has promoted two key processes: the first is institutional change through the progressive adoption of a human rights perspective within its legal frameworks; the second is both the increase in organizations working with these populations, and the formation of academic and civil networks for the generation of data and research that serve for the design of public policies and promote sociocultural changes within each country.

These processes have changed social perceptions of gender, justice, and everyday life, denouncing authoritarian and conservative pasts and defending their right to be/exist in the world. Therefore, in the face of hate speech and emerging neoconservative policies, sexual activism and citizenship movements in the region advocate for alternative forms of society.

3. Intellectual Relevance

The intellectual relevance of this topic lies in the efforts to produce critical knowledge from the Global South, to articulate what in the Global North seems to be overcome or nonexistent due to its socio-historical conditions. This not only responds to the current context but also to two important phenomena: on the one hand, the conquest of spaces historically excluded from LGBTIQA+ people, such as academia, through the presence of researchers who address these issues; and on the other hand, the strategic articulation between academia and activism, given that those who investigate these phenomena very often do so from a political praxis where theory is not conceived in isolation from transformative action.

Therefore, we can speak today of an emerging Latin American and Caribbean LGBTIQA+ intellectual community that, nevertheless, encounters discrimination and administrative and political obstacles in building common spaces that foster ongoing, intergenerational, and regional dialogue. Hence the possibility, viability, and necessity of a Working Group that enables the building of networks and the strengthening of academic-activist communities, not only to promote scientific and social progress but also to increase the visibility of these local efforts within a long-standing and highly regarded regional project such as CLACSO.

For all the above reasons, sexual activism and citizenship invite us to think and act from a politicized ethic where without sexual justice there is no social justice, and without diverse bodies there is no possible democracy.