SHOT AT CLOSE RANGE: demeaning, pleasure, and desire in cases of police violence against travestis

Roberto Efrem Filho robertoefremfilho@gmail.com

Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brasil

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional.

[July 20th, 2013, State Center for LGBT Rights, Downtown, João Pessoa — PB]. “I have already been the victim of policemen many times. Last time I was a victim, I was shot at close range, which has left me a scar on my leg until today. So, I have nothing good to say about the police” — Lua told me the story while showing the scars on her legs. Seated across from me in one of the rooms at the LGBT center in João Pessoa, the recorder between us, Lua remembered different instances of violence she had experienced or witnessed during the five years she worked as a prostitute on the streets of Paraíba’s capital, “pains and pleasures” — she tells me, “more pains than pleasures” — she explains. One of these episodes of violence, maybe the most physically damaging, started out with a flirtation. Lua had already started to leave the streets back then, keeping only a few regular clients that would seek her whenever they were interested, and she had become more and more engaged with the LGBT+ movement's initiatives that would end up giving her a professional occupation over time. That night, she had decided to go to a party promoted by the owner of a bar in her neighborhood. She was buying cigarettes when a uniformed police officer approached her, distancing himself from both women who were with him at the bar table: “he came up to me and said he’d leave those women at home, one of whom was his girlfriend, that he would drop her off at home, and when he came back, I was to give him a blow job, that he would cum in my mouth, and that he would do this and that.” Lua, however, did not like his approach, “the way he chose to flirt with me”. She felt offended, “it left me feeling really bad”, and she reacted: “shame on you, go be with your girlfriend, your woman over there, who by the way is really pretty, and you just left her there to come say such things to me”. She called him out and left. The police officer left the bar and came back right away. According to Lua, “he was blinded by rage”. He forcibly dragged her behind the bar, “started to rip off my clothes, I started to scream, he put his gun in one of my nostrils, he wanted to put it inside my mouth, passed it down on me, rubbing the weapon against my breasts. Then, when he arrived in my legs, he shot me at close range. Appalled by what Luahad just told me, I asked her whether the gun shot had been intentional. She confirmed it. And later explained that the policeman “had chosen the place to fire his gun and terrorized me.” The officer in uniform passed his gun on her face, “made me smell it, put it in my nose”, tried to put the gun into her mouth, “even cutting my mouth a little”, and then he took down the weapon, “and he was taking it down and down”, rubbing the gun against her body until reaching her thighs, “and when he reached my legs, he fired his gun twice here and there”. After the two shots, the policeman went back to his car, parked it on a street corner and turned back once again towards Lua, loading his gun, and shooting again. At the moment, a woman who had witnessed everything threw herself on top of Lua, “she was laying down on top of me, and I can only remember her whispering in my ear ‘don’t move, he’s still shooting’”. Once the gunshots were over, the women took Lua to the bar’s restroom, noticed the amount of blood, tied her bleeding leg with a shirt and left the place. The policeman, who had apparently loaded his gun once again, fired his gun three more times against the restroom’s door, but did not hit Lua. When she finally left the restroom after some time, Lua did not find anyone else at the bar.

Police violence is part of the daily experiences of sex workers, to the point that the issue is central to prostitutes’ movements (Olivar, 2012; Mello, 2016). Most typically, the police actions on street prostitution that can be called “violence” have to do with territorial management. They include, for instance, police raids, which were analyzed by Claudia Fonseca (1996), taking prostitutes off the streets of Porto Alegre to the police stations where they, even aware of not having committed any felony, ended up deciding to pay their bail in order to avoid a long bureaucracy that could interfere with their time and work. According to Lua’s memories of the streets at night, however, these actions had to do with the violation of rights. “At the time, I was a minor and, even then, I suffered many violations of my rights from police officers”.

Lua tells me that she and other sisters were placed in front of the police cars with the headlights on “so that our vision would be blurred”, then thrown inside the car only to be taken back to the station, “just to put us through the embarrassment, to be moving us here and there, look at your sister, this thing is your sister”. For Lua, these actions from the police at times represented the interests of local businesses downtown, who wanted to get rid of the prostitution in certain areas. “There were a lot of encounters that happened right there on the streets, so there were traces of condoms, or something else in the following morning, which left people very dissatisfied”. At other times, the police action was tied to intensified processes of criminalization, which linked prostitution to property crimes, illicit drug use and its market.

Therefore, in Lua’s memories, State agents acted against street prostitution through the urban territorial management, which allowed for the taming of maneuverable, coercible, and displaceable bodies, constituted by very precarious experiences in terms of class, and by unequal relations of gender, sexuality, and age — after all, as she says, “I was a minor”. In fact, following Lua’s account, this taming of bodies depended on the understanding that prostitution per se produced a scenario of “sexual degeneration”, as stated by McClintock (2010), which can be illustrated through the traces of condoms and their work left on the streets. However, these degenerate bodies became more available to police intervention as they were more closely tied to criminalization processes, of what Michel Misse (2010) called “criminal subjection”. In this sense, police violence against sex workers is similar to the violence routinely perpetrated in the outskirts of big Brazilian urban centers, a part of the constitution of the “urban violence” problem as an inexcusable justification for exercising control over deeply racialized subjects, bodies, and territories.

Lua’s narrative on the night out at the bar in her neighborhood in João Pessoa, and an important part of the judicial narratives about the victims of the travestis. serial killer from Carcarás converge, nevertheless, in an even more strict link between prostitution and police violence. Here, policemen are not external agents acting on a scenario of sexual degeneration and delinquencing: Renato Humberto de França and the police officer who shot Lua at the bar are meddled in this context. In an interview given to a local TV channel in Carcarás at the time of Renato Humberto’s arrest, in February 2012, the chief reported that he was only able to reach the suspects after conducting a “search with the travestis.^[9] aiming at “telling apart the people who were frequently in the area”. Renato Humberto was one of these regulars, a “very assiduous regular of that place”, a “well-known person amongst the gay people that worked on the streets”, as highlighted by the state’s prosecutor in the filing of the lawsuit for Suzanita’s murder. Thus, according to what the bar's owner reported to Lua in the following day, that cop already had a reputation, and was well known by her and her clientele, “he was known to become aggressive after drinking, he would shoot his gun to the air, as if bragging “I’m a cop, I am in charge of the streets”.

In the narratives on both of these cases of violence that I am hereby analyzing, therefore, policemen seem to exercise their sexuality, and act sexually upon the territories and bodies, so that sexuality does not emerge as an alterity to be contained — sex workers in the streets of João Pessoa and Carcarás —, but it consists of a primary or suspected link between victim and perpetrator. It is important to highlight that the phenomenon does not exclude the adjective “police” from the noun “violence”. The violence narrated by Lua is still police violence despite the perpetrator not being on duty at the time of the incident. Nevertheless, Lua only brought up the story after a specific question on the participation of policemen in the criminalization of prostitution. “Policemen are very cruel until today. I do not have a good reference to give you on the part of policemen, because everything I have experienced with them has been negative, (…) from solicitation to being approached on the streets, everything was inhumane”. The episode at the bar, thus, can be added to the other experiences Lua has had with the police. Even though it represents more explicitly an image of brutality, it is not isolated from her other experiences, it just reached a more extreme level.

My perception of the imbrications between sexual practices and police violence, however, comes from the reading of Breno Marques de Mello (2019; 2016). From an ethnographic research conducted with the Association of Sex Workers from Paraíba, Mello had access to narratives of sex workers whose relationships with police officers — somewhat close clients, boyfriends, and husbands — put them under violent situations, such as beatings and rape, but also to sexual practices at first consensual, which became violent over time, including the use of police uniforms, weapons, cuffs, boots, batons, etc. Mello (2019; 2016) understands such instruments presented in these scenes as signs of power alluding to an aesthetics of the State that prevents us from differentiating, for instance, the police officer from the client (also a police officer) who pulls out his gun against the prostitute’s head during sex.

From the legal and public documents available on the “travestis’ serial killer case”, it cannot be said whether the sex workers and the other “regulars of the area” identified Renato Humberto as a cop — something that would not have been unlikely, given his alleged assiduousness and the dynamics and size of a town like Carcarás^[10].

Nothing can be found in the documents regarding the possibility that a police officer may or may not have facilitated Renato Humberto’s access to his victims. However, the emergence of Renato Humberto’s gun narrative in the legal proceedings on the murder of Suzanita brings about difficult links to be ignored between police work and the violent act. While pressing the charges, the state’s prosecutor highlights as evidence of crime authorship, the Ballistic Report that had pointed out that “the investigated bullets had come out of a gun apprehend with the suspect”. But such links also come with the decision of sealing the lawsuits, as it was requested by the chief given that the suspect was a cop. He explained the situation during the seminar on May 23rd, 2017, suggesting that the police work could have hindered the investigations and provoked even more killings.

Thus, the scene of the uniformed officer dragging Lua behind the bar, tearing up her clothes, and pressing his gun against her face after being rejected by her is filled with the signs of power discussed by Breno Mello (2019). At first, there is the uniform. “Think about it, a uniformed officer, having a beer at a bar, with his wife, carrying a gun (…) he was already wrong the moment he decided to have a beer while wearing his uniform, with the police uniform and a gun that also belonged to the police department”. According to Lua,the uniform evokes effects of power, which might have even been part of his sense of entitlement to flirt with her, and the following understanding of her rejection as something so inadmissible. But there is even more to that. There is also what had been known about him, the man who became aggressive after drinking, “that would fire his gun to the air, as if bragging “I’m a cop, I’m charge of the streets”. There is, in other words, a territorial management implied in exaggerated performances of masculinity. There is, furthermore, a belief in the impunity, part of the State processes that protect some of its agents.

Those judicial narratives on the serial killer and Lua’s narrative on the police officer that approached her at a bar surface experiences of police violence whose recognition requires catching the perpetrator in the act. It is about taking the police work in its performativity, in a similar analysis conducted by Vianna and Lowenkron (2017) regarding the “double making of gender and the State”. The act of pulling out a gun and shooting Suzanita’s head, as well as the acts of dragging Lua, tearing up her clothes, and rubbing a gun against her face arise discursively as State actions — and that being said, not only because the weapons belonged to the police department. State processes take place profusely at their own margins, in the efforts to constitute borders, in the intersections of what is discursively constituted as lack or absence of the State. State processes even come out of that is produced against the State, in the engendering of delinquent bodies, territories, and subjects, liable to control (Efrem Filho, 2017b). Police violence and State violence take place at the same time sexual practices and policies are being made. These practices can be materialized in the headlights against a group of travestisdetained in João Pessoa at night; or in a flirtation whose rejection on the part of a travesti is unequivocally inadmissible.

If the violence narratives I discuss here can be densely categorized as “police violence”, it is possible to argue that part of what has been constituted as “violence” is intimately linked to an understanding of the police work in the production of hierarchies, demeaning, and humiliation. This is certainly evident in Lua’s account on her encounters with cops, in which she and her friends were thrown in the back of police cars towards the station “just to put us through the embarrassment, to be moving us here and there, look at your sister, this thing is your sister.” Except for the incident at the bar, Lua did not report any other case of physical violence perpetrated by policemen against her. The violence she primarily identifies with them, “policemen are still cruel”, stems discursively from experiences of embarrassment, disrespect, humiliation, which, according to Everton Rangel (2020, p. 184), may operate either interpersonally or through technologies of the State.

I do not intend to suggest that hierarchization, demeaning, and humiliation practices are synonymous with violence. As it has been widely discussed in a relevant bibliography on the subject, the constitution of violence requires moral investments that conceive them as such (Corrêa, 1983; Gregori, 1993; Simião, 2006; Cardoso de Oliveira, 2008). Humiliation, on its turn, is not always understood as violent by the perpetrators or those who are subjected by them (Díaz-Benites, 2019; 2015). By highlighting the relevance of hierarchization, demeaning, and humiliation practices in Lua’s account, I aim at, following Everton Rangel, identifying narrative contexts in which “both phenomena at stake exist in a relationship of dependence and demand forms of thinking about gender” (2020, p. 172). This is because the aforementioned understanding of the police work in the production of hierarchies, demeaning, and humiliation ends up being articulated through an anthropomorphized and masculinized state subject, materializable in the police officers described by Lua, something similar to what Vianna and Farias (2011) observed in the accounts by mothers and family members of State violence victims.

In other words, Lua’s accounts underscore the presence of something related to the “State" and conversely to gender in regards to hierarchies, demeaning, and humiliation, and, therefore, something she perceives as violence. “We (policemen) are ourselves and that’s it. And they always saw us as the minority, as human garbage, as…”. The headlights, the trunk of the police car, the mocking at the station — “look at your sister, this is your sister” — would be performances of masculinity enacted by and enacting processes of production of authority and competence that do not fall very far from the “I’m a cop, I’m in charge of the streets” attitude attributed by Lua to the police officer who shot her at the bar. Thus, the link between State practices, gender performances, and demeaning is decisive in the apprehension of what is violent according to the analyzed narratives. This violence narratives, however, are intensified in images of brutality as they become more intimately connected to sexuality, sexual practices, and policies.

This link between violence and sexuality is related to what Maria Filomena Gregori (2008) has called “limits of sexuality”, a borderland space in which norms and transgressions, consent and abuse, pleasure and pain, the tense relationship between pleasure and danger coexist. This limits are intensified, for instance, in conflicts in which subjects experience their sexuality through the ritualization of pain and suffering, as is the case for the BDSM community and sadomasochists^[11] discussed by Gregori (2016) and Regina Facchini (2008). These conflicts may embrace the ratification of moralities and the mobilization of sexual panics that identify certain “communities” as degenerate and violent, liable to being criminalized. Not surprisingly, according to Facchini and Machado (2013), the narratives given by the members of these communities emphasize notions of consent, consensuality, safety, freedom of choice, and disavowal of aggression in order to legitimize themselves and their pleasure, whose language is informed by the eroticization of hierarchies. Another example of the tense relationship between such limits of sexuality can be found in the practices of bizarre porn discussed by María Elvira Díaz-Benítez (2012). According to Díaz-Benítez, pornography involving animal sex is usually criticized for the lack of consensuality, which takes these practices to be categorized as illegal and so the members of these networks have to respond to their actions.

Therefore, as Laura Lowenkron (2015) has observed, consent occupies a central role in the definition of what is legal and legitimate when it comes to sexual practices. It is linked to a “moral economy of pleasure” aimed at controlling and condemning violence and violation of rights instead of immorality (Lowenkron, 2015, p. 226). It is formed, then, alongside the notion of vulnerability, with current judicial regimens, the regulation of sexuality, and what’s constituted as violence. Thus, the aforementioned examples of tensions in the limits of sexuality provide a ratification of the value of consent for the experiencing of the so-called good exercise of sexuality as opposed to violence. However, if sexual pleasure is affirmed through the denial of consent, or the presence of vulnerabilities that prevent one of the parties to give consent; if the violence is what constitutes the pleasure, the limits of sexuality are dismantled and violence is conceived, according to Gregori, as “abusive actions liable to being socially and morally condemned as well as criminalized” (2008, p. 576).

The suspicion of the presence of pleasure in violence is a relevant component in the images of brutality present in the accounts regarding the “travestis. serial killer case”, as well as the violence experienced by Lua that night at a bar. In these narratives, the suspicion of pleasure is a catalyst of brutalization. As I have argued before, the scene of violence against Lua takes place only after she rejected her perpetrator. It is an act of revenge, retaliation, and a punitive measure. The series of events, nevertheless, suggests pleasure through the performance of a demeaning practice that reaches its peak when both gunshots are fired. The uniformed police officer sexualized the violent act. According to Lua, the cop “chose exactly where to shoot”, but before doing so “terrorized me”. Such terrorizing corresponds to an erotic ritualization of the production of fear, hierarchy, and humiliation. In Lua’s words, after all, the cop did not simply take her behind the bar and shot her. He did more than that: “started to tear up my clothes, I started to scream, he put his gun in one of my nostrils, wanted to put it inside my mouth, went through me and rubbed it against my breasts”.

Here, the tearing of her clothes per se suggests sexual violence. While I listened to her account at the LGBT center in João Pessoa, I thought Lua was about to describe a rape scene. Afterwards, however, the arbitrary stripping down opens space for the exercise of a liturgy in which the gun’s trajectory — or the phallus — through her body, penetrating her, subjected, demeaned, and humiliated her. All of these actions precede an attempted murder that is initiated by the gunshots against her legs, which is only not finalized because another woman protected her, taking her to the restroom. In any case, what I believe needs to be highlighted is that the borders between sexual violence and lethal violence are extremely loose in Lua’s account, which somehow stems from the discursive markers of demeaning and humiliation — or, according to Díaz-Benítez (2015), “extreme humiliation practices” — suggesting pleasure in the violent act. The prominence of these humiliation practices in Lua's narratives leads me to seriously take into account the following insight by Díaz-Benítez in her studies on violence and eroticism:

Taking into consideration that the new forms of eroticism place consent as the legitimate basis to realize and legitimize practices, and that much of what is understood by sexual rights come from this assumption, would it be interesting to reflect upon the double pleasure/violence outside the limits of consent?^[12] (Díaz-Benítez, 2015, p. 66).

As stated before, I believe that the insinuation of pleasure is productive in violence narratives because they make up the unacceptable, the absurd, the monstrous, the images of brutality activated for the struggles for policies against violence, for justice in certain cases and criminalization and accountability of the perpetrators. This is what can be seen in the legal reports on Suzanita’s murder, the alleged third victim of the travestis. serial killer case. Just like in Lua’s account, these documental narratives suggest possible contact zones between violence and pleasure. Even though there are no records of any sexual relations between Renato Humberto de França and his victims, while pressing charges, the prosecutor implies that, since Renato Humberto was “an assiduous regular of the place” and “well known by the gay people that worked on the streets there”, the victims were “lured” by him “to the place where they were executed”. I believe that, given its ambiguities and multiple meanings, the word “lure” employed by the prosecutor can be placed in the constitution of these zones between pleasure and violence.

I have argued elsewhere that the emergence of a narrative of “seduction” may suggest eroticism, desire, and sexuality, as well as fraud and deceit (Efrem Filho, Souza Júnior, and Leite, 2020). Looking at the eroticism at stake here, one is to deal with the image of a murderer whose sexuality is directly linked to the crimes, a “maniac” who, according to Cilmara Veiga, sees himself in “a relational interface between violence and gender” (2018, p. 181). Thus, given the fraud at hand, a Machiavellian subject is characterized, one who is punishable and accountable for his actions, someone absolutely capable of intending to eliminate all the “remaining sluts, dykes, and faggots” from Carcarás. This ambiguity between eroticism and fraud regarding an “assiduous regular” in the streets where travestis and gay people work brings about questions regarding Renato Humberto de França’s desires.

This is because the mere suggestion of pleasure and luring ends up activating the idea of desire for the perpetrator. The legal records regarding Suzanita’s murder and the other public documents related to the “travestis. serial killer case” potentialize the questions around the police officer’s sexuality: after all, was Renato Humberto “well known amongst the gay people who worked there” because he was a client? Did he lure his victims because he sexually desired them?; What would be the sexual identity of Renato Humberto, married to Linalva de França, father of three children?

In the narratives around the case, these questions regarding Renato Humberto de França’s sexuality correspond to the questions around the identity of his victims. In some cases, the victims are generically identified as homosexuals. Other times, they are described as travestis, or homosexuals and travestis. Besides, even though all of the serial killer’s hypothetical victims were sex workers on the streets, there are narratives in which prostitute is added to travestis and homosexuals — which seems to have happened because of Suzanita, the only cisgender woman among the victims who is not identifies as travesti or homosexual. Except for Suzanita, all the other victims were identified as male at birth and are recurrently cited, in the legal proceedings and records, by the male names stated in their documents.

At that May 23rd, 2017, seminar in the police station auditorium, the chief that conducted the investigation projected an image on a white screen in front of the audience that he called “a timeline” of the deaths^[13]. This timeline had the names, and black and white photos (some of which were copies from their ID cards) of the five lethal victims. Next to the document name of four of the victims, one could find, in parenthesis, “nicknames” or “aliases”, to use the language of police investigations and legal proceedings. Next to Suzanita’s ID photo, for instance, there was “Suzana .Suzanita).” For other three victims with male names, there were other names in parenthesis. Two of them were female, Lela and Lígia, one of them alluded to the name of a very popular candy, Xaxá — ambiguous in terms of gender identity. Only the first lethal victim, Alisson Marques, is presented just with their document name.

As soon as I started to read the documental narratives, the first impression I had on such confusion regarding names and gender identities was that the chief, prosecutor, police officers, and journalists had very little to no knowledge of the LGBTI+ repertoire mobilized by the social movement, left wing sectors, the field of gender and sexuality studies, and the State bureaus working directly with human rights language and policies. Thus, in the narratives about the “serial killer case,” homosexual victims, travestis, and prostitutes end up constituting an indistinct mass, marked by the victimization and the gunshots at the base of the skull — the so-called killer’s signature^[14]. Even though my first impression remains very much present, given its verisimilitude, a closer contact with documental and judicial narratives on the killings of the LGBT community has offered me different perspectives as well.

As a rule, according to Mariana Melo (2020) in a recent research on LGBT homicides in Paraíba, the state management of these murders usually requires a certain framing of such violences, which authorizes police, judicial, and governmental agents to constitute identities and control bodies. Therefore, as previously stated by a vast literature on the theme, processes of claiming rights, struggles for justice, legitimization of victims, and punishment for perpetrators tend to require a victimizable subject of rights, with a well-defined identity, both morally and normatively (França, 2017; Efrem Filho, 2017a; Freire, 2016).

However, my understanding after dealing with lawsuits regarding LGBT killings is that these judicial narratives constitute identities and materialize bodies while framing a scenario of sexual degeneration and delinquency that blurs the status of victims and perpetrators (Efrem Filho e Gomes, 2020; Efrem Filho, 2016). The phenomenon can be observed in the documents related to the “travestis. serial killer case”, which seem to reproduce what had been reported by Lua. In these documents, questions around names, gender identities, and the sexual practices of victims and perpetrators are catalysts of degeneration.

Here, what Fabíola said to me precisely after the seminar in May 2017 takes a central role: “Professor, a case like this must be very interesting to study, no? The man kills because he cannot accept himself. It is awful. It is internalized homophobia.” This statement is indicative of a very common trend amongst debates on LGBTphobia: the theory of self-hatred and the repression of one’s own sexual desires that would lead to discriminatory practices, prejudice, and violence against those who would in fact embody the desires of the repressed^[15]. What Fabíola seemed to be declaring is that Renato Humberto de França was just as gay as his victims, but that the feelings of repulse he felt about himself led him to violence and, ultimately, the serial murders. Fabíola attributed to the cop a “disgust about himself”, an emotion that would imply the acknowledgment that something in the body of the perpetrator contains the very characteristic of being scornful, but whose causes could be moral or physical, as explained by Díaz-Benítez (2019) in her study with former porn actresses and their perception of themselves.

The attribution of emotional feelings such as aversion and self-aversion, repulse and self-repulse, disgust and self-disgust, to the serial killers constitutes the perpetrator’s narrative as I have discussed at the beginning of this article. It also works, therefore, as a component of an exceptional character, whose monstrous acts include violent acts that are also read as exceptional, contrary to the human condition. Even though this perpetrator operates multiple meanings in the judicial records and in the “case”, widely speaking, providing a guilty party and motive for the killings, its villain story telling hides State processes and extremely unequal social relations that enabled the murders in Carcarás in the first place, just as much as the account of violence and humiliation described by Lua during our interview at the LGBT center in July 2013.

The travestis and homosexuals allegedly victimized by the serial killer shared more than the gunshots fired against their heads, and the disposal of their bodies at the Campo da Bagaceira. They also shared experiences of class, racialization, territorialization, generation, gender, and sexuality that were very similar, even similar to those described and lived by Lua and her sisters years ago. Such similarities can be expressed, for instance, in their activities as sexual workers in the streets of Carcarás and João Pessoa, as well as in their potential exposure to violence, criminalization, and humiliation. In the intersections of these experiences, transphobia and homophobiacannot be simply explained by the figure of the serial killer. Nor would they be clarified by his conviction, since, in fact, he was not.

Renato Humberto de França was only convicted for the attempted murder against Edmundo^[16] and for illegal possession of a gun with restricted use^[17]. In the judicial records regarding the murders of Alisson Marques, Lela, Lígia, and Xaxá, the court issued a mistrial, probably due to claims of lack of “sufficient evidence of authorship,” which means Renato Humberto did not even stand in front of a grand jury. While I finish writing this paper, in January 2021, the lawsuit regarding Suzanita’s murder is still in motion. Suzanita was killed almost ten years ago on July 21st 2011. As it can be noted, then, the judicial outcomes have opposed the characterization of the serial killer. After all, the conviction of one attempted murder does not a serial killer make.

However, the exceptionality of the serial killer narrative, as well as the hypothesis raised by Fabíola, that the motive behind the violent acts could be explained by a frustrated sexuality, are extremely controversial at least for one more reason. Besides masking social inequalities and State processes that promote conditions for vulnerability, let alone the apparent lack of evidence to convince a judge, they place homosexuality as the origin of the problem, lost in the limits of sexuality, ratifying the inadmissibility of the links between violence, pleasure, and desire. What I would like to argue, first and foremost, is that identifying the root of violence in a frustrated sexuality or “self-aversion” ends up holding homosexuality — its aversion and horror, etc. — accountable for the violence itself.

In the end, it reproduces the understanding of the homosexual subject as someone who can be explained through their sexuality, unimaginable outside or beyond its limits. The phenomenon was discussed by Foucault (2010) in his work on the relationship between the creation of medical sciences and the homosexual identity.

Even if, hypothetically, the suspicions and doubts raised by the judicial records about his sexuality were proved, even if Renato Humberto de França “came out” in public, admitting a hidden homosexuality experienced on the down low at the Campo da Bagaceira, attributing a frustrated homosexuality as the motive for his violent acts — as an internalized form of homophobia or any other reasons — foreshadows the moral (and political) incapability of recognizing that people may desire violence, humiliation, and demeaning others. Besides, it presupposes the political (and moral) incapability of recognizing that certain practices by State agents constantly operate violent acts and humiliation practices through a language of gender and sexuality. The desire and pleasure for violence and demeaning are, after all, dimensions of State processes and relations of inequalities, as well as the ways in which subjects are constituted while experiencing and producing these acts. They are not natural human expressions, but they are formed by social hierarchies that, when involving violence and oppression, must be fought against. This is what LGBTI+ activists do when they use the term LGBTphobia and make reports listing the names of the victims. Dealing with contradictions, they bring about images of brutality in order to tackle the issue of violence, so that it will not be repeated in the future.