Human rights and the works of the imagination: an ethnography of the ordination of the first trans reverend in Latin America

Abstract

This article is constructed around the ethnography of the clerical ordination of Alexya Salvador, the first transgender Latin American pastor. The analysis is interested in describing and reflecting on possible contemporary ways of correlating the categories of religion and human rights. It focuses on the production of iconic scenes, communication artifacts that inscribe living pictures into networks oriented to redefine the meanings of these categories based on concrete and communicable experiences. Under this framework, human rights can be understood as a language in action that allows agents who designates and recognized themselves as religious to give form and expression to their imagination, which are unmarked by stabilized borders between the political, the religious and, in this case, the erotic.