Call for papers: Queer/kuir/cuir cinemas and audiovisuals in Brazil and Latin America

2020-06-07

 

ISSN 2316-9230

In New Queer Cinema: a critical reader (2004), Michele Aaron argues that the term queer/kuir/cuir can describe cultural products, critical interventions, and political strategies. She also claims that the new queer cinema, an American movement motivated by the boom of HIV/AIDS, the neglect of the State with the epidemy, and the fragmentation of the tendency of queer/kuir/cuir and assimilationist activisms, was an overlap of these three items. This means that queer/kuir/cuir movies would be cultural and artistic products that advocate for critical intervention through political and aesthetic strategies that move towards sex, gender, race, and class normativities.

            Aaron’s argument is not very distant from what had already been proposed by Ruby Rich, in her previous essay entitled “New Queer Cinema”, which was first published in Village Voice magazine, on March 24th, 1992. Additionally, Aaron’s comments are connected to numerous other reflections that have made the notions of image, audiovisuals, and queer/kuir/cuir cinema even more complex. Examples can be found in the works of Alexander Doty (1993), Richard Dyer (2002), Helen Hok-Sze Leung (2004), Sara Ahmed (2006), Harry Benshoff (2006), Sean Griffin (2006), Elena Del Rio (2008), Daniel Williford (2009), and Jack Halberstam (2020), among others.

            In the scope of Brazilian researches, it is possible to name some predecessor publications such as the ones by Antônio Nascimento Moreno (1995), Denilson Lopes (2002), Karla Bessa (2007), Wilton Garcia (2011), Lucas Murari and Mateus Nagime (2015). Such publications demonstrate that the Brazilian and Latin American cinematography dealt with queer/kuir/cuir cinema before and after the American movement, even if it is possible to identify a recent boom, especially lead by trans, dykes, bichas, sapatonas, travas, monas, fanchonas, ocós, jaciras, viadas, maricas, machudas and lesbianas.

Considering that in the last 10 years Latin America, especially Brazil, witnessed its kuir/queer/cuir cinematography be led by a queer multitude (PRECIADO, 2011), it is possible to infer that there was also a construction of a research community that proposed themselves to understand these phenomena. At this point, it should be considered that both the academic and cuir/kuir/queer audiovisual productions are inserted in a broader spectrum of the gender studies consolidation in the country and the continent, of the profusion of new activist waves, of the complex media visibility of LGBT individuals, and also of some advances and setbacks in the field of cultural and institutional politics (TOMAZETTI, 2019).

It was then, especially since the year 2010, that the coexistence of a research community was intensified. A community that not only dedicated themselves to think of the images of queer/cuir/kuir cinema in its transnational complexity, but also what could be specifically understood as Brazilian/Latin American queer/cuir/kuir cinema, or cinema made in Brazil and Latin America. It is also important to mention that, in these last 10 years, such studies were built specially by queer/kuir/cuir researchers who were in the process of formation. Which means that they were students of Undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctoral degree programs (MARCONI, 2020).

More specifically, in the last five years, since 2015, some landmarks help us visualize the profusion of these works. In 2015, the philosopher Judith Butler comes to Brazil for the first time and the bank Caixa Econômica Federal sponsors the debut of the Mostra New Queer Cinema: cinema, sexualidade e política (New Queer Cinema Festival: Cinema, Sexuality, and politics). Alongside the showing, researchers Mateus Nagime and Lucas Murari organize the publication of New Queer Cinema, with texts by Erly Vieira Junior, André Antônio Barbosa, Ramayana Lira, Louise Wallenberg, among others.

In 2016 the Associação Nacional de Programas de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação-COMPÓS (National Association of Post-Graduate Programs in Communication) grants, for the first time, the award for the Best Master’s Dissertation to a research about queer/kuir/cuir Brazilian cinema. The award was granted to Dieison Marconi for the dissertation “Documentário queer no Sul do Brasil (2000 - 2014): narrativas contrassexuais e contradisciplinares nas representações das personagens LGTB” (Queer Documentary in Southern Brazil (2000-2014): Countersexual and Counterdisciplinary Narrativesin the representations of LGBT Characters) . In the same year an honorable mention was extended to the research of Érica Sarmet, entitled “Sin porno no hay posporno: Corpo, Excesso e Ambivalência na América Latina”.

In the years 2016-2017, the Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual-SOCINE (Brazilian Society for Audiovisual and Cinema Studies) approved and accomplished the Queer and Feminist Cinema Seminar, coordinated by Ramayana Lira, Maurício Gonçalves e José Gatti. In a similar path, COMPÓS and the Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares em Comunicação-INTERCOM (Brazilian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in Communication) also built and strengthened their study and research groups for discussions of the queer/cuir/kuir audiovisuals.

In their theoretical and methodological spectrum, many of these researches have been distancing themselves, little by little, both from the paradigm of representational politics, and have also been inflexing some hegemonic theories of the cinema and audiovisual fields, sedimented during the twentieth century. This course has been necessary not only for the field of study dedicated to the cuir/queer/kuir landscapes to be conceived, but also for the complexity of the concept of the kuir/cuir/queer audiovisuals to be recognized through the point of view of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, production and circulation, consumption and reception, authorship and spectatorship, history, historiography, and decolonial perspectives.

Considering such a context, this special session seeks to gather texts that contemplate the multiple forms of reflecting on queer/cuir/kuir Brazilian and Latin American cinema. Besides the traditional format of scientific articles, these texts can be sent in author/experimental formats that explore an undisciplined sub methodology (MOMBAÇA, 2016), or epistemic disobedience (MIGNOLO, 2010), that above all also promote tears in their formal and aesthetic weavings.

Hence, we call for the submission of texts that reflect on the following themes, or related topics:

  1. Transexualities, cinemas, and queer/cuir/kuir audiovisuals in Brazil and Latin America.
  2. Queer/kuir/cuir pornography and post-pornography in Brazil and Latin America.
  3. Black queer/kuir/cuir cinema in Brazil and Latin America.
  4. Lesbian queer/kuir/cuir cinema in Brazil and Latin America.
  5. Queer/kuir/cuir consumption and spectatorship in Brazilian and Latin American cinema.
  6. Queer/kuir/cuir authorships in Brazilian and Latin American cinema.
  7. Aesthetics and politics in queer/kuir/cuir Brazilian and Latin American cinema.
  8. Production and circulation of queer/kuir/cuir movies in Brazil and Latin America.
  9. History and historiography of queer/kuir/cuir cinema in Brazil and Latin America.
  10. Decolonial perspectives in queer/kuir/cuir cinema in Brazil and Latin America.
  11. Relationships between queer/kuir/cuir Brazilian cinema and queer Latin American cinema.

 The deadline for article submissions is September 15th, 2020 and this special session will be published in the edition of December 2020. Norms and submissions: https://rebeca.socine.org.br/1/about/submissions.

 

Dieison Marconi, Alessandra Brandão


BIBLIOGRAFY

AARON, Michele. New Queer Cinema: a critical reader. Paperback, 2004.

AHMED, S. Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

BESSA, Karla. Os festivais GLBT de cinema e as mudanças estético-políticas na constituição da subjetividade. Cadernos Pagu (UNICAMP), v. 28, p. 257/-283, 2007

GARCIA, Wilton. A diversidade cultural/sexual no filme Elvis e Madona. XII Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual Socine. 129ed.São Paulo: Socine, 2011, v. 2, p. -113 

LOPES, Denilson. O homem que amava outros rapazes e outros ensaios. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002. 

MOMBAÇA, J. Rastros de uma Submetodologia Indisciplinada. Concinnitas, S.l, v. 01, n. 28, p. 341-354, set. 2016.

MORENO, Antônio do Nascimento. A personagem homossexual no cinema brasileiro. 1995. Dissertação (Mestrado em Artes) – Instituto de Artes, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, 1995 

MARCONI, Dieison. Ensaios sobre autorias queer no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo. Tese de Doutorado, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brasil, 2020. 

MARCONI, Dieison. Documentário queer no Sul do Brasil: narrativas contrassexuais e contradisciplinares nas representações das personagens LGBT. 2015. 231 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Comunicação) – Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria, 2015.

MIGNOLO, W. Desobediencia epistémica: retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad. Buenos Aires: Del Signo, 2010.

PRECIADO, Paul Beatriz. Multidões queer: notas para uma política dos anormais. Estudos Feministas, Florianópolis, v. 19, n. 1, p. 11-20, jan./abr. 2011.    

SARMET, Érica. "Sin porno no hay posporno: Corpo, Excesso e Ambivalência na América Latina. Dissertação de Mestrado, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação na Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brasil, 2015.

TOMAZETTI, Tainan Pauli. Genealogias dissidentes: os estudos de gênero nas teses e dissertações em Comunicação do Brasil (1972-2015). Tese de Doutorado, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brasil, 2019.