A memória, a informação e o silêncio da lesbianidade no Serviço Nacional de Informação, nas décadas de 1970 a 1980

Abstract

It presents the memory and information framework of the LGBTQIA+ community in the Military Dictatorship, created between 1965 and 1985. The research problem is: How does the device of sexuality operate at the time of the Military Dictatorship and how does it affect the constitution of memories and erasures for the LGBTQIA+ community, specifically for lesbians considering the information used by the perpetrators and their agents? Finally, how is the information used for such an endeavor? It starts with the inference that there are erasures and silences that institutional and social discourses impose on such a community and that such erasures and silences help to constitute a phobic matrix specific to the Military Dictatorship, which is based on information. The hypothesis is that the Military Dictatorship was constituted by its own information mechanisms, promoting the erasure and silence of lesbian women, in their experiences and memories, with a fundamental role of information as interfering in the construction of the device of sexuality. The general objective is to analyze the informational dynamics and LGBTQIA+ memories from documents retrieved in the Revealed Memories platform, specifically in the Fundo do Sistema Nacional de Informação (SNI). This objective was operationalized by documental research, in the Revealed Memories platform and using Foucault's Discourse Analysis. The results corroborate the presented hypothesis, showing that there is, in the process of informational and memorial exchanges of the Military Dictatorship, deletions, silencing of lesbians and their association with terms that negatively value these women. The survey shows that there is a difference in the nature of the documents and their content. The 1970s are characterized by documentation aimed at demarcating lesbianism as an aggravating factor in the citizen behavior of the women involved, while the 1980s reveal the rise of the lesbian movement, producing information aimed at their empowerment, which was collected and observed by the SNI. In common, both decades are concerned with observing and censoring lesbian expressions, which reveals an ongoing process of silencing, erasure, and censorship. It is concluded that information amalgamates the device of sexuality, from its offer or erasure, from the enunciation of certain discourses, and impediment (silencing) of others. That such information is reflected in hegemonic memories, sometimes institutionalized, in the form of censorship and in underground memories, as an input that builds resistance and, finally, that informational violence, which is incidentally and intentionally characterized, conjugates the limits of this information and, consequently, of discourses of resistance and of subterranean memories themselves.