Julia Bueno - Nas esquinas do cuidado

2025, Brazil, Julia Bueno, Portuguese,

Original title: "Nas esquinas do cuidado: Brenda Lee e a redução de danos" (At the crossroads of care: Brenda Lee and harm reduction) by Julia Bueno.

Julia Bueno’s “Nas esquinas do cuidado: Brenda Lee e a redução de danos” is a book that refuses to remain neatly within the boundaries of academic analysis, biography or political manifesto. It is all of these at once and something more. It is a work that listens deeply to the voices of trans women and travestis who have lived and shaped the practices of harm reduction in Brazil long before the term became a formal public policy. It is an exploration of how care emerges not as an abstract ideal but as a daily struggle, an inventive survival strategy and a place where memory, rage, tenderness and political consciousness collide. The book widens the contemporary debate on health and human rights by focusing on the lives of those who are most often neglected in both fields and by insisting that any meaningful discussion about care must take into account the structural conditions that make certain bodies more vulnerable, more visible and more exposed to violence.

 

Bueno approaches the subject from a constructionist and feminist perspective, which allows her to dismantle the simplistic idea that harm reduction is nothing more than a healthcare technique. Instead, she shows how it is built through relationships, street knowledge and collective practices that challenge the social norms imposed on gender and sexuality. Harm reduction is portrayed as a tool created in the margins, where institutions failed and communities stepped in to save one another. In this narrative, the figure of the redutora de danos is not merely a professional but a mediator between worlds, a person who learns to translate suffering into action and who understands that care is inseparable from the experience of marginalization. For trans women and travestis who confront violence daily, the book argues that harm reduction becomes a mode of life, a way of negotiating survival at every corner and a refusal to let the world erase them. 

 

At the center of this exploration stands the legacy of Brenda Lee, a legendary figure in the history of the Brazilian LGBT movement and one of the pioneers of community-based responses to HIV and AIDS. Born in Bodocó in the interior of Pernambuco in 1948, Brenda was feminine from an early age and quickly became the target of prejudice. After moving to São Paulo as a teenager, she rebuilt her life in the bustling neighborhood of Bixiga, where she became a well-known and celebrated presence. It was in this setting that she opened her home to the first person living with HIV whom she encountered in 1984. It was a time when fear and misinformation about AIDS overshadowed any sense of compassion and when families often abandoned their relatives who had fallen ill. Brenda refused to look away and instead transformed her home into a refuge and later formalized it as the Casa de Apoio Brenda Lee, also known as the Palácio das Princesas. It became a sanctuary for homosexual men, trans women and anyone rejected for being HIV positive, offering medical care, shelter and a sense of dignity.

 

The life of Brenda Lee is interwoven with the story of the Brazilian public health system known as the SUS, the emergence of AIDS activism and the networks of solidarity that arose during one of the darkest periods of the epidemic. She was called the guardian angel of the travestis because she did not distinguish between who deserved care and who did not. She cared because she understood what it meant to be discarded. Her work attracted attention far beyond her community and became so significant that the Brenda Lee Prize was later created to honor people and institutions that contributed to the fight against AIDS in São Paulo. Her life was also captured in the 1988 documentary “Dores de Amor,” which exposed the harsh realities faced by trans women while celebrating their resilience. All of this is part of the history that Bueno draws upon to illuminate the contemporary landscape of harm reduction.

 

Yet Brenda’s life ended with devastating violence. In 1996, she was murdered after discovering financial fraud within her organization. Her death shook the movement she helped build, but her legacy survived in the memories of those she sheltered and in the practices of care that continued to spread through the streets of São Paulo and beyond. Her story is revisited in Bueno’s book with both affection and critical insight. It stands as a reminder that care often emerges from places where institutions collapse and that the people who craft these practices remain at risk because their humanity is constantly questioned.

 

“Nas esquinas do cuidado” is also a book about how transfobia infiltrates institutions that claim to promote rights and health. Bueno illustrates how discrimination persists even within environments meant to protect, often reproducing the same hierarchies and exclusions that society imposes on trans bodies. By gathering narratives from trans women and travestis who work in or rely on harm reduction programs, she shows that it is impossible to discuss health without confronting the social, economic and political factors that shape who is allowed to live safely. The book offers a powerful argument for an intersectional approach to health, one that recognizes the specificities of gender identity, class and race in shaping vulnerability and access to care.

 

The writing is grounded in research but also propelled by a pulse that comes from lived experience. Bueno herself is a redutora de danos, a clinical psychologist and a poet. She brings to the text the gaze of someone who walks through the same streets, who listens to stories not as an outsider but as part of a community that has had to invent its own forms of survival. She has a background in Political Psychology at the University of São Paulo, holds a master’s degree from UFPE and is a doctoral candidate in the same field. Her work with the GEMA research group on gender and masculinities informs the analytical lens of the book, while her experience with poetry and activism gives the narrative emotional depth. Her previous book of poems, “Amor&Revolta,” already hinted at the combination of love and resistance that shapes her writing. In this new work, that combination becomes even more central.

 

The book is an encounter between memory, politics and care. It walks through the corners where trans women have stood in the rain and in the sun, where they have been harassed, ignored and yet have found ways to support each other. It crosses paths with the ghosts of those lost to AIDS and the lives of those who refused to disappear. It revisits Brenda Lee’s Palácio das Princesas and sees it not only as a historical moment but as a blueprint for forms of community care that remain necessary. It listens to the voices of women who have been told their stories do not matter and turns those stories into a map of resistance. It shows that harm reduction is not simply about preventing damage to the body but about creating conditions for life in environments that constantly deny the value of that life.

 

By illuminating these experiences, Bueno contributes to expanding the field of harm reduction and situating its origins where they have always been, among the trans women and travestis who created systems of solidarity long before the state recognized them. The book also celebrates the transformative power of the travesti ethic, a way of caring that refuses shame and embraces dignity. It reminds readers that the most radical acts of care often come from those who were never trained in institutions and who learned everything by living through violence and refusing to surrender. In doing so, “Nas esquinas do cuidado” becomes more than a book. It becomes a tribute to a lineage of women who transformed the streets into places of healing and who taught Brazil a new meaning of care.

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Photos via tab.uol.com.br and uol.com.br