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16 - Queering Intermediality in Brazilian Cinema

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2023

Lúcia Nagib
Affiliation:
University of Reading
Luciana Corrêa de Araújo
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil
Tiago de Luca
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

Queerness in Brazilian cinema has been explored in recent research from different perspectives, including film history and cultural studies. Luiz Francisco Buarque de Lacerda Júnior (2015) argues that most of the studies on homoeroticism in Brazilian cinema up until the 2010s focused on the politics of representation and cinema's potential to resist/reinforce hegemonic heteronormative discourses. One good example of such approach can be found in Antônio Moreno's A personagem homossexual no cinema brasileiro (The Homosexual Character in Brazilian Cinema, 2001). In his book, Moreno catalogues a number of Brazilian films according to a (rather moralistic) scale of pejorative portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters and stereotyped gestures, in an attempt to compile the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ representations of homosexual characters. The shortcomings of Moreno's book seemed to have encouraged academics such as Lacerda Júnior (2015) and Mateus Nagime (2016) to design different approaches. Whilst Lacerda Júnior's study reviews the history of Brazilian cinema and its treatment of male homoeroticism, Nagime's thesis focuses on films made in the first five decades of the twentieth century, trying to point out the origins of a Brazilian queer cinema.

And yet, although these approaches are certainly welcome, the relationship between queerness and intermediality remains underexplored. For Carlos Rojas (2020: 175), intermediality is a ‘weird concept’, useful not only for ‘thinking about processes of cultural production, but also for proposing a queer exploration’. This intersection is important because intermediality, as a critique of the notion of a ‘pure medium’, challenges the very concept of ‘identity’ and ‘specificity’, which is a similar theoretical position to queer studies. José Esteban Muñoz (2009: 116) has argued that:

the intermedial process leads to a perpetual unfinished system that is by its very nature asystemological […]. Intermedia is a radical understanding of interdisciplinarity. The usage of intermedia that I am suggesting is interdisciplinary in relation to both art-making protocols and taxonomies of race, gender, and sex.

Following Muñoz, our aim here is thus to highlight the protocols of intermedial citations and the taxonomies of race, gender and sex, in order to understand the two-way process through which queerness ‘queers’ intermediality and intermediality ‘mediates’ queerness.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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