Article presented in "Toronto Queer Film Festival", by the OCAD University, in November of 2019
Abstract
2018 was such a year in Brazil. The elections showed the ugliest face of a country that doesn't tolerate diversity. Black people, poor and LGBTQIA+ experienced a different kind of fear - to be slaughtered by institutional apparatus. In the same year, Linn da Quebrada was in a movie not about her but with her - Bixa Travesty is a documentary that cares about authenticity and situated knowledge. The movie shows her experience as a black transvestite living at a violent slum - the difficulties as the delight to be a nonconformist body and an artist. Far from the stonewall symbolic presence, Linn shows us a delicate narrative full of violence, embodiment, musicality and dirty words. The present article refers to the kind of resistance that is increasing in Brazil since the presidential election: a resistance that runs away from the institutional emerges from the minorities and carries every single mark of colonization. Using mostly Brazilian and Latin American authors, we intended to argue with the facts that are going on recently in Brazil and our heritage - our blackness, our genders and bodies, our spirituality and our music. In addition to the bibliographic review, the movie was analyzed with a focus on the main character - the Travesty as an authentical body, gendered by the colonization process and culture. Therefore, it was possible to seek some of the significance and the way that nonconformist bodies in Latin America are reacting politically and artistically against the massive attack that comes from our conservative government.
Keywords: Cinema; Linn da Quebrada; Performance; Queer; Travesti.