Purity & War: how prejudicial wartime violence against LGBT people denies agency and transforms social environments

During the Colombian civil war, civilians associated with marginal identities became collectively targeted by armed groups throughout the country. Through these ‘social cleansing’ campaigns, armed actors would publicly threaten LGBT people, among other groups, with the goal of removing them from a given territory in the name of security and social purity. Many LGBT people were killed in these campaigns and their deaths were often covered by local newspapers in graphic detail with full spread pages devoted to mutilated queer and trans bodies. In this paper, I question the impact of this extra-lethal violence and its associated local media coverage. I build on literatures of dynamics of violence, spectacles of violence, and necropolitics to argue that this newspaper coverage became a mechanism for social transformation that cleaved sexual and gender minorities from the body politic by reinforcing their difference. In analyzing archival newspaper footage, I demonstrate that this graphic coverage securitized the broader LGBT population and legitimized violence against them by denying their agency to self-expression and associating them with violence. With a new body politic that rejects difference established, a new social order can be imposed to rewrite the rules of war. I conclude the piece with a consideration of how some LGBT groups resisted this silencing and attempted to reclaim their agency in violent contexts. The contribution of this piece is deeper insight into the productive potential of prejudicial violence to transform social environments and the key role that agency, or its absence, plays in this transformation.