Description:

Black LGBT+ Feminism and the Politics of Revelry in Rio de Janeiro

In Rio de Janeiro Black Brazilians are currently navigating a violently right-wing authoritarian shift in Brazilian politics. This has included economic austerity measures, anti-Black “shoot to kill” policing policies, federal military occupation, as well as persecution of Afro-religious spiritual communities. Amidst this, cross-sections of Black LGBT+ feminist activists, artists, and academics create spaces of relief and resistance by weaving memory and matter in forms of communal sociality and solidarity. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork, this talk trace the routes and networks of movement-building and counter-world making across Rio to analyze how sensations such as laughter, erotic pleasure, and music help create protests spaces—from intimate gatherings to public forums —as sites of joy. I explore how such spaces are forged in entwinements of pleasure and politics in explicit invocations of Black feminism. Here, spatial imaginaries of belonging and coping through mutual affection, sensuous embodiment, and spiritual communal enmeshments re-make the city within the city via multiple forms of Black feminist and LGBT+ counter-publics. I argue that such sites offer insights into culturally specific forms of the coalescence of matter and historical memory through spatial practices.