José Leonilson's Weekly Newspaper Illustrations as Micropolitical Interventions in 1990s Brazil

From 1991 to 1993, Brazilian artist José Leonilson produced a weekly illustration for Folha de São Paulo, the country's most widely read daily newspaper. These works introduced a minoritarian perspective into the public sphere, challenging its norms by focusing on intimate and micropolitical themes, frequently through allegorical means. Several illustrations directly engaged with the AIDS crisis; Leonilson died from AIDS-related complications just two weeks after his final drawing was published. The article positions his contributions within the intersecting discourses of sexuality, public health, and media in Brazil during that period. It proposes that Leonilson's practice envisioned mass media and publicness as fictional spaces that could, paradoxically, be utilized against the growing standardization of previously non-normative sexual identities. The content is published by ARTMargins Online and is available through MIT Press under a subscription model. The piece was written by Nicholas C. Morgan and released on March 25, 2020.