Ursula Muñoz S.
Ursula Muñoz S. is a critic, journalist and MFA candidate at Boston University’s College of Communication. Harboring a special interest in hispanic and lusophone media, she is currently completing her graduate thesis on political dissent in 21-st century Venezuelan genre films. Previously, her reporting on Puerto Rico’s uptick in transfemicides was recognized by Florida’s Society of Professional Journalists as some of the state’s best coverage of LGBTQ+ issues in 2021 and 2022.
Review of Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015 by João Nemi Neto
With the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ communities across the globe, queer and trans media is arguably more prescient than ever before. Brazil is no exception: from the gritty realism of Hector Babénco’s Pixote (1980) to the genre-bending fun of Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutras’ Good Manners (2017), on-screen depictions of queer and trans stories are rich and varied. As in the United States however, the mainstream success and critical appraisal of relatively inexplicit crowdpleasers considered “safe” for heterosexual audiences such as Daniel Ribeiro’s charming but chaste coming-of-age rom-com The Way He Looks (2014), raises the question of whether visibility alone is enough to be warranted as groundbreaking anymore. While it’s easy to claim respectability politics to be a thing of the past, Brazilian LGBTQ+ films from previous decades may suggest otherwise. As such, queer film canons—like any other canon—are worth questioning when we consider the uplifting of normative works at the expense of subversive media by and about sexual minorities and deviants.
With Cannibalizing Queer, João Nemi Neto proposes a new lineage to the study of contemporary Brazilian cinema by tracing its origins to Brazilian Modernism and the 20th-century Antropofagia movement, calling for a new framework for understanding the country’s cinematic portrayals of sexual dissidents. Beginning in 1928 with the publishing of poet Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago, Antropofagia consisted of the conceptual and self-conscious “cannibalizing” of foreign and domestic ideas and influences, and mixing them with Brazilian culture to produce unique cultural works. A senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures whose work focuses on queer theory and pedagogy, Brazilian culture and visual media, Nemi Neto is able to bring into “interdisciplinary conversation” the fields of cinema studies, Brazilian modernism and queer theory, making the case for Antropofagia as inherently queer…in the broadest of senses. Using a definition of queer that challenges “normativity” (both heterosexual and homosexual), but also social class and racial divisions,” Nemi Neto then identifies anthropophagi and queerness as equal factors in the development of Brazil’s LGBTQ+ filmic output.[1]
Nemi Neto constructs Cannibalizing Queer in five chapters and two “trailers” which act as introductions to chapters two and four. Chapter 1 establishes a theoretical background for what follows, revealing the complicated history of antropófagos bringing to light indigenous social practices as an important part of the culture—often through aberrant stereotyping. As a marginal and therefore “transgressive” figure, the indigenous body is culturally queer and “thus embedded in the very idea of Antropofagia”.[2] Chapter 2 discusses the film Orgy or: the Man Who Gave Birth (1970) from João Silvério Trevisan, an acknowledged scholar, writer and LGBTQ+ activist and the author of Perverts in Paradise (1986), seminal text on homosexuality in Brazil.[3] Nemi Neto analyzes this film in conversation with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Silviano Santiago’s notion of temporality. Chapter 3 focuses on the representation of HIV/AIDS in Brazilian cinema, using Fauzi Mansour’s AIDS, the Furor of Sex (1985), David Cardoso’s I Have AIDS (1985) and Sérgio Bianchi’s Romance (1988) as case studies. What’s most notable here is the author’s situating of these films in popular culture. All three belong to the three most profitable genres of Brazilian cinema during the 1980s—pornography, porno-chanchada (a classic Brazilian genre which imbued elements of the traditional musical with eroticism) and marginal “auteur” melodrama, respectively. Likewise, this chapter draws on Kristeva’s theory of abjection to decode stigmas of shame and revulsion attached to AIDS for effeminate gay males during the 1980s. Chapter 4 continues the theme of effeminacy, analyzing Tatiana Issa and Raphael Alvarez’s award-winning 2009 documentary Dzi Croquettes, which chronicles the stage performances of a group of cross-dressing artists during the 1970s. Finally, Chapter 5 focuses on Karim Aïnouz’s Madame Satã (2002) and Hilton Lacerda’s Tatuagem (2013)—both queer period films which focus on performance. Tatuagem is notable in that it situates itself in the Tropicalía movement of the 1970s, directly referencing Antropofagia’s appropriation of the carnivalesque by focusing on a fictional avant-garde theater group subversive protests during the country’s military dictatorship. Madame Satã deals with the real-life João Francisco dos Santos, a drag queen and local legend who “defied the norms of his time.”[4]
With his new book, Nemi Neto breaks new ground in Brazilian cinema studies, offering a fresh and thorough interdisciplinary study to shed light on a key cultural movement in Brazilian history whose influence on queer Brazilian cinema has historically been under-discussed. Most importantly, the author’s study of this movement does not serve as a hagiography of its proponents—rather, it admires Antropofagia’s transgressions of hegemonic social norms while also problematizing the white colonial elite which appropriated indigenous cultures and languages during the movement’s inception. It can be argued that white intellectuals’ contrasting of modernity (which Andrade believed “makes civilization sad”) to their own utopian notions of pre-colonized Brazil patronized native Brazilian populations by simplifying their realities.[5] In line with Antropofagia’s referential tendency, some works produced during this movement took the metaphor so far as to actually feature cannibalism in both theme and style—as did many of the films they inspired, such as Joaquim Pedro Andrade’s Macunaíma (1960) and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971)—both benchmarks of Cinema Novo’s cannibal-tropicalist phase.[6] In doing so, these works arguably associated indigeneity with primitivism, which is in itself a problematic notion. At the same time, the initiative to shine light on indigenous customs as important to the culture was a noble one, and Antropofagia deserves credit for challenging heteronormative, patriarchal, capitalist and colonial social structures through its many transgressions. As such, the author argues Antropofagia’s notions of emancipation and its inclusion of indigenous people and people of color as inherently queer, and the movement’s embrace of “women’s and abject bodies that have been denied visibility” to be inherently queer.
As for the book’s physical content, Nemi Neto makes sure to include visual materials with image credit. These consist mainly of movie posters and stills which do a good job of conveying the textures and aesthetic sensibilities of this movement for anyone unfamiliar with the book’s subject matter. The book also includes a scan of Silvério Trevisan’s Manifesto entendido from the filmmaker’s personal archives, and provides an English translation of the text. The book also includes a helpful table of contents, as well as a thorough bibliography and index, preceded by a list of detailed notes that are labeled by chapter.
[1] João Nemi Neto, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015 (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2022), 4-5.
[2] Nemi Neto, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015, 9.
[3] Nemi Neto, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015, 43.
[4] Nemi Neto, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015, 10.
[5] Nemi Neto, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015, 17.
[6] Nemi Neto, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015, 12.