In this chapter, Johnson’s interlocutors share stories about sexual awakenings, sexual encounters, sexual desire, and sexual violence. Since their narratives move between and beyond pleasure and pain, the chapter is divided into three sections—the first focuses on sexual awakenings and the narrators’ various emotional attachments to sex with other women; the second centers women’s sexual behaviors and practices; and the third focuses squarely on these women’s painful experiences of sexual violence, often in adolescence and at the hands of male relatives. Importantly, these narrators stress that their sexual desires have not developed in response to these violent experiences, illustrating that their articulation of same-sex attraction is conscious and affirmative.
Local impacts of religious discourses on rights to express same-sex sexual desires in Peri-Urban Rio de Janeiro
