Richard Miskolci


Richard Miskolci is a Brazilian sociologist. His work articulates Social Science's tradition with Queer Theory and Post-Colonial Studies. He is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UNIFESP , Brazil, and also a researcher of CNPq. Miskolci is the leader of the Research Center and also coordinates the area of Human and Social Sciences at the Department of Social Medicine.
He initiated his career dealing with Critical Theory, but the contact with the works of Michel Foucault and Cultural Studies attracted his attention to the field of differences. Miskolci has researched in Germany and was a Student-at-large in the humanities at the University of Chicago before receiving his PhD in Sociology from University of São Paulo. He got tenured as a professor of sociology at UFSCar Federal University of São Carlos where he worked between 2004 and 2018.
Miskolci has contributed to disseminate Queer Theory in the Brazilian academic field in a dialogue with its own tradition of sexuality studies, especially those created under the influence of Néstor Perlongher's work. Miskolci has edited the first Brazilian compilation of Queer Studies. "Dissent Sexualities" received the Award Citizenship in Respect to Diversity.
Brazilian sexuality studies and activism is marked by identitarian tendences while Miskolci's work supports a non-identitary perspective based on queer and gender theories. Gender defies identity as a concept that underlines the importance of social structures defining our desires and self-comprehension. Queer theory challenges normality and its a priori expectations. Miskolci's work stands in opposition to crude identity politics as well to studies based on the illusion of a stable subject/identity.
Later, Miskolci has worked in a senior research with David M. Halperin to develop the methodology for his historical research on nation and sexuality in the Brazilian fin de siècle. The research was conducted during over 10 years with different grants until it became a book: "O Desejo da Nação: masculinidade e branquitude no Brasil de fins do XIX". In this work, he analyses the Brazilian elite project of creating a nation with European immigrants and also disciplining the local population. The ideals of whiteness and masculinity of the ruling elite directed this authoritarina project during the first decades of the Brazilian Republic.
In 2011, Miskolci was one of the creators of Contemporânea - Revista de Sociologia da UFSCar. Between 2015 and 2018 he worked in the coordination of Sociology at CAPES, the Brazilian agency that manages the graduate system. He is also a member of the Research Committee Futures Research of the International Sociological Association and of the International Relations Committee of the Brazilian Sociological Society. With fellow members Soraya Cortês and Celi Scalon, Miskolci was one of the founders of Sociologies in Dialogue, the society's international journal.
Miskolci has researched the contemporary use of digital media in Brazilian society since 2007. This research, sponsored by CNPq, became his main area of interest. In 2016 he has organized the first Brazilian compilation on Digital Sociology and in 2017 published "Desejos Digitais: uma análise sociológica da busca por parceiros on-line", a book that summarizes his researchers about how homosexual men use digital media to search for sexual partners. According to the book, ICTs have shaped homosexual subjectivities since the adoption of commercial Internet in the mid 1990s creating a new homosexual ethos based on neoliberal values like competition and entrepreneurship. The old cruising was replaced by the online market in which new homosexual subjects compete for partners while keeping a presumed heterosexuality in family and/or work environments.
His most recent research is on the conservative alliance against gender studies which it calls "gender ideology". Miskolci has contributed to this field of research showing how the once religious notion of "gender ideology" became an agnostic label and also a moral platform that unites right-wing interests and conservative actors, especially during electoral periods. According to him, this is not a simple reaction to the advance of sexual and reproductive rights, but a new political grammar also shaped by the rise of online social networks.
In his perspective, contemporary notions like "cisgender" and "place of speech" lack empirical and epistemological base. "Cis" is a label/accusation used by new political actors against older ones. Cis is often used to present trans people as the new historical actor inside LGBTI imaginary community. In a gender/queer perspective there is no cisnormativity since, in everyday life, gay and lesbians are also accused of being genderbenders and, in epistemological terms, trans demands can also be understood as normative instead of a break of gender norms. Accusing/labeling gays and lesbians as cisgender, scholars/activists project on their competitors the shadow of the normality that haunts their identitarian politics.
"Place of speech", on the other side, is also part of the contemporary war inside difference politics in which authoritarian actors try to monopolize speech while claiming they should be the only ones to be heard. This reception of Spivak's ideas is shaped by contemporary interests, especially - but not only - inside Brazilian intellectual field. "Place of speech" has been used to validate activist/empirical perspectives against academic/intellectual work creating an anti-intellectual war on online social networks.
In other words, Miskolci's recent ideas challenge contemporary political grammar showing how political interests have denied scientific work opening space not simply for the rise of extreme-right, but also for a supposedly leftist apology of anti-intellectualism. In his vision, both extreme right and the "leftist"/neoliberal trends are part of the same authoritarian wave that has taken political life menacing freedom of speech and academic autonomy.
Miskolci is one of the founders of the Thematic Group LGBTI's Health of the Brazilian Association on Colletive Health, and has researched on health issues in a queer perspective since he has joined the Department of Social Medicine of the Federal University of São Paulo, in 2018.

Publication list