Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is challenged by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls such marginalized visions of freedom “minoritarian liberalism,” a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom—be they queer, favela, or peasant.

Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). While many of those the author meets consider themselves “queer,” others are treated as “abnormal” simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.

In her endorsement of the publication, Wendy Brown (political theorist) states: “Lino e Silva’s remarkable book fulfills its ambition to decolonize the freedom at liberalism’s heart. Equal parts erudite political theory and delicate anthropology, it roams a favela in Rio for stories and imaginaries across Blackness, queerness, gender and class, where it discovers everywhere the bubbling of minoritarian desires and practices of freedom. This beautifully written work does nothing less than bring liberalism–as theory and practices– into the 21st century.”

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Moises Lino e Silva is tenured faculty at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), which is located in Brazil. His field of focus is that of political anthropology, with a specialty in the ethnographic study of liberty and authority. This is examined in relation to issues such as poverty, sexuality, race, and religion. His initial in-field research considered the aspects and issues of freedom as experienced and perceived by slum dwellers in Rio de Janeiro. More recent work has studied the cultivation of Afro-Brazilian power and the nature of freedom and partial freedom after formal slavery, using ethnographic research to understand the current power dynamics between Latin America and West Africa. He is also the editor, with Huon Wardle, of Freedom in Practice: Governance Autonomy and Liberty in the Everyday (Routledge 2017). Lino e Silva was appointed a World Social Science Fellow by the International Social Science Council.

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, out in 2020, from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.