Wily Homosexuals: Notes on the Circulation of Queerness and Homophobia in the Luso-Brazilian Nineteenth Century (original) (raw)
Related papers
Was Camões Gay? Queering the Portuguese Literary Canon
2007
The title of this paper echoes, tongue in cheek, the titles or opening lines of a couple of recent interventions pertaining to the matter at hand-queering of the Portuguese literary-historical canon-which, regardless of their sui generis referential framing, are in my view symptomatically illustrative of the structures of power and meaning that have shaped this ongoing process. In June 2002, a new Portuguese book-review magazine called Os Meus Livros published in its inaugural issue a review by Vasco Graça Moura of a just-released debut novel Pode um desejo imenso by Frederico Lourenço, a classical scholar and professor at the University of
Portugal's First Queer Novel: Rediscovering Visconde de Vila- Moura's Nova Safo (1912
Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2019
This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal's first queer novel. Given the extremely limited number and scope of existing critical approaches to the text, my reading is oriented by a reparative strategy that aims, first and foremost, to remedy its precarious status as an archival object. I describe the novel's inchoate and cluttered collection of references, images, and storylines as a countercultural scrapbook of queer feeling, ruled by an antiquarian sensibility, whose structures of cohesion belong less to the realm of formal aesthetics than to the sphere of homophilic affective epistemology. Further, I chart Nova Safo's intersecting gestures of transitive embodiment-transnational, transgender, and transracial-by discussing the novel's mournful evocation of three recently departed icons of fin-de-siècle literary culture:
2007
The thesis novels of Eça de Queirós have long been acknowledged as a high-water mark in nineteenth-century Portuguese prose fiction. Equally, however, they are a crucial source of evidence for the dissemination in Portugal of new ideas about the human constitution, and about the social roles and interactions of men and women in an increasingly industrialized, urban and literate society. This essay's subject is Eça's ambivalent engagement with contemporary arguments for women's emancipation, a project that had a complex and uneasy relationship with the Portuguese liberal program for national 'regeneration' that the novelist espoused. As Ana Paula Ferreira has emphasized, Eça's depiction of middle-class women's sexual transgressions reflects both a contemporary conception of the nation as a male-focused and male-ordered organism, and widespread anxiety regarding the future of this organism. His first two novels depict female adultery as intrinsic to a vicious cycle of social ills that, by imperilling individual women, also endangers the nation, by compromising women's fulfilment of a patriotic duty of conceiving and rearing the new 1
Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, 2021
The censorship of literary texts ebbed and flowed over the course of the Brazilian civil/military dictatorship, but not always in the ways we might predict. Variable patterns of censorship led to a small explosion of publication of homosexual male literature in 1975 and 1976, which we might call a queer “mini-boom.” One of the more notable texts that appeared during this window is Gasparino Damata’s Os solteirões, a short story collection that centers on queer male experience in the years just before the 1964 golpe militar. The stories include a good amount of wild sex, but they are more interested in the failure and bad endings of these queer relationships than they are in the sex itself. And, in a sly way, the stories align the bad endings of queer wild times with the bad beginnings of the dictatorship itself. Informed by the work of queer theorists Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, this essay examines Damata’s stories through the lens of two different temporalities: on the one hand, the timing of the publication of the volume within the larger historical trajectory of the censorship of queer literature (that is, during the queer “mini-boom”), and, on the other hand, when exactly the action in the various stories takes place. In lining up moments of private queer crisis with moments of political change and increasing repression in Brazilian public life, the volume manages to skirt both “political” and “moral” censorship and mount a creatively oblique queer challenge to the repressive forces of the military regime.
International Journal of Iberian Studies, 2016
This co-authored article analyses the work of a number of sexual scientists and legal experts in Portugal at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in respect of their attempts to classify and investigate female homosexuality in Portugal. Building on work already à à à à à à à à àE àM à à à à à à à considers the sexological discourse on lesbians and their presence in Portuguese society in the first half of the twentieth century through a close textual analysis of the work of Moniz and that of other àT à à à à àP à à à à à E à counterparts forms a key aspect of this work. In this way, a contribution is made to the history of sexuality in Portugal and the framing of Portuguese discourses on lesbianism within broader European expert fields.
“All the Same”: Lampião da Esquina and Violence as a Narrative Instrument of a "Homosexual Identity"
LGBTQ POLICY JOURNAL at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, 2017
This article aims to explore one of the most sensitive issues present in the platforms of the Brazilian Homosexual Movement (MHB). It surveys the reports published in the Brazilian newspaper O Lampião da Esquina (The Lantern on the Corner) which ran from 1978-1981, part of an extensive network of publications called the “nânicos,” the aim of which was to discuss the construction of a homosexual identity. Lampião compiled a combination of reports of violence against gueis (gay), travestis (transgender), lésbicas (lesbians), and other minorities, in conjunction with accusations of silence, community relations, and even the wide persecution of sexual minorities by state authorities. The analysis of this article focuses on how the construction of public mourning formed the basis for a political and social agenda that has guided the MHB in the past and reverberates to this day
Queer Interventions in Amália Rodrigues and António Variações
Neste artigo, oferecerei uma análise de duas canções: O Rapaz da Camisola Verde escrita por Pedro Homem de Mello em 1954 e cantada por Amália Rodrigues em 1965 e a Canção do Engate da autoria de António Variações em 1984. O Rapaz da Camisola Verde composta durante a ditadura de Salazar, apresenta subliminarmente uma história de um rapaz jovem, que se encontra numa esquina escura, escondido do regime ditatorial, à procura de prazer com outros homens. Dez anos depois do fim da ditadura de Salazar, a Canção do Engate apresenta-nos uma relação física entre dois homens, representativa de uma formação de uma identidade queer em Portugal. Oferecendo uma análise comparativa sobre o contexto histórico, o político e o pessoal destas duas músicas, chamarei a atenção para as formas em que se abriram possibilidades, para o surgimento de identidades queer na sociedade portuguesa. Estas eram baseadas igualmente em uma ruptura com um passado opressivo e na recuperação destas próprias identidades. Abstract:
Uncovering Brazilian History and the Social Construction of Sexuality
Latin American Perspectives, 2002
Beyond Carnival is a fascinating book that fills a void in Brazilian history and studies of sexuality. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, James Green vividly traces the social and cultural history of male homosexuality in Brazil's two major cities-Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo-from the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s. He ably relates this history to the political, economic, and social transformations in the country and ties it to the history of gender and masculinity. Participating in local events since the 1970s, Green captures well the complexities of Brazilian culture by going beyond carnival, that is, beyond the exotic vision of a stereotyped Brazilian sexual permissiveness. He demonstrates that male homosexuality, though decriminalized by the Imperial Penal Code of 1830, was subject to medico-legal control, police violence, and social stigmatization, even during carnival. This control was directed especially at the poor, blacks, and Northeastern migrants. At the same time, Green examines the resistance and the construction of a male homosexual subculture by the subjects themselves, arguing that its principal characteristic was the appropriation of urban public space. Excluded from the patriarchal family, they appropriated the parks because of their access, as men, to public space. However, being subject to scorn, they also created an alternative private spacesupport networks that Green calls "counter-casa" (counter-home). From this gender perspective, Green reelaborates the class-based dichotomy of casa (home, space of rights) versus rua (street, space of exclusion) originally formulated by the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta. Since political regimes did not have a decisive impact on the development of this subculture, Green organizes the six chapters chronologically following the social transformations that redefined gender relations and the use of public space in Rio and São Paulo. The narrative begins with the belle époque in Rio, between 1898 and 1914. As the then-capital of the republic grew, a male homosexual subculture emerged, one that was not yet self-affirmative but already manifested itself in the public plazas. Although sodomy remained decriminalized, "effeminate" men were routinely 153 Cecília MacDowell Santos teaches at the University of San Francisco and is a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives.
Sexuality, Culture and Politics: the Journey of Male Homosexuality in Brazilian Anthropology
Translated byThaddeus Gregory …
The present article inquires into the ways in which a presumed Brazilian "managing" of sexual categories or identities (mainly related to male homosexuality) has been conceived of in anthropology since the end of the 1970, sometimes becoming an axis for building and maintaining a national identity characterized as exotic, backward and non-Western. We also trace parallels between two historical moments of reflection regarding the links between sexuality, culture and politics, briefly reviewing some of the early theoretical and empirical contributions that prefigure the central concerns and conceptualizations of today's sexuality studies: the instability and fluidity of sexual identities and the entanglement of sexuality with dynamic and contextual power relationships and social hierarchies.