The entire scene should have lasted about three seconds: Federal Deputy Erika Hilton (Psol-SP) makes a video celebrating Lula's election after the counting of the ballots on October 25th. He passes by her, takes her face, gives her a tender kiss on the cheek, and leaves the frame. A simple, spontaneous, affectionate gesture.
I don't know if Lula is aware of the magnitude of the statement he made to the world.The president of a country, who has just been re-elected in a historic and unprecedented process at so many levels – with popular participation and social engagement without equal, in an epic turn that happens despite all kinds of sabotage byBig Techsto the Trump administration, of attempts to boycottpublic transportationin order for people not to reach the polls, due to a large and biased press playing against –an 81-year-old man, who has the world at his fingertips, publicly shows affection to a transgender woman.
This scene moves me for different reasons. I have been infiltrating events on the extreme right around the world for the last few years and interviewing these figures. I can say that not even one of these congresses, nor any of these conversations, did not pass through ultra-violent speeches against transgender people.
I have written extensively about this, including about how, during the Trump administration, this violence led to resolutions and public policies from its first day in office. I will not repeat myself here about how these narratives are constructed based on moral panic and the idea of destroying families and sacred values. What I want to emphasize is thatthe demonization of transgender people is currently at the center of the political right. It is a consensus issue among them, used to mobilize fear, resentment, and hatred, and has real-world effects on the lives of thousands of people.
And the mobilization of these emotions is not exclusive to the extreme right. It is also important to say that I don't know how many times I myself have been harassed, threatened, and exposed by women who identify as radical, exclusionary transgender feminists, or how many times the Pauta Pública has been the target of hatred when we pointed our microphones at transgender people. Okay. As Judith Butler said, being harassed by these people is a badge of courage.
Another important point is thatBrazil is one of the countries with the most transgender people killed in the world.When Lula makes this gesture, what message does he send to the people? And what message does he send to transgender people?
The scene reminded me of Suzanne Hommel's account, a German born in 1938 who spoke in the documentary "Encounter with Lacan" about the time she was a patient of the French psychoanalyst. She carried deep traumas from her experience during World War II, but in one of her sessions with Lacan, she recounted a recurring dream that would wake her up with strong anguish every morning at 5 a.m. She added the historical context of her childhood: "It was at 5 a.m. that the Gestapo would come to search for Jews in their homes." When the psychoanalyst heard the word "Gestapo" (the official secret police of Nazi Germany), he quickly got up from the armchair and gently stroked her face. When she tells this in the documentary, she immediately raises her hand to her face, imitating the gesture.
Through this physical and verbal act, Lacan transformed the word "Gestapo" into "geste à peau," which in French means "gesture on the skin," and introduced tenderness where only horror and trauma had previously resided. In the documentary, she is moved when she says that this did not erase her suffering but that it had definitively changed it, and that even decades later, she still felt that touch that had changed the way she looked at her own history and her own pain.
The "geste à peau" of Lula at Erika Hilton in this moment of our history, seems very powerful and symbolic, a milestone in a position in the world, that can ressignify a lot of affections for many people. And at the same time it is so beautiful precisely because it was a spontaneous caress in a country that is ressignifying its relationship with politics, that still suffers from the trauma of the four years under the genocidal government of Bolsonaro – and that chose this Sunday to bet on tenderness instead of horror.
Incidentally, it should be noted that Erika Hilton was re-elected as the woman with the most votes in history for the Chamber of Deputies, and with 1.5 million votes won in São Paulo, she is the second parliamentarian in the country to break the 1 million vote barrier for the position.