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1. Fall 2016
by Violeta Arvin Casoni, Carolina Brandão Piva, and Luciene de Oliveira Dias
Versão em português aqui
Figure 1. Vasco Szinetar, Las Libertadoras, 1990. Source: Instituto Moreira Salles Collection.
Carol Piva / @carol.piva is performing a Post-Doctoral Internship in Cultural Performances at the Universidade Federal de Goiás. She holds a PhD in Art and Visual Culture, a Master's in History and a degree in Literature. Professor linked to the Graduate Program in Cultural Performances at UFG. Member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Servant of the TRT of Goiás. Visual poet, literary translator, and editor.
Luciene Dias / @luciene.o.dias has a
PhD in Social Anthropology, a Master’s in Environmental Sciences and graduated in Communication and Journalism. She is a professor of the Graduate Program in Cultural Performances and the Graduate Program in Communication at the Universidade Federal de Goiás and a coordinator and researcher at Pindoba - Research Group on Narratives of Difference. Areas of interest: ethnic-racial, gender and sexual relations.
Violeta Arvin Casoni / @dejenjibre
is a Master's student in Cultural Performances at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, with a scholarship from FAPEG. She has a degree in Sociology from the Universidad de Playa Ancha and is a specialist in Gender, Body, and Qualitative Methodologies.
Introduction
This article attempts to delve into clothing and the body as performative sites for gender expression. To this end, we have used photographic records of transgender people in Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela, from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The images are by artists Madalena Schwartz, Paz Errázuriz, and Vasco Szinetar, created in the context of military dictatorships. With the purpose of problematizing hegemonic mandates around gender, body, and sexualities, we investigate the mobilization of dissident sexual memory from “everyday times” and its possibilities for the performances of clothed bodies. [1]
The two works by each artist chosen for the present analysis were taken from: (1) the Manzana de Adán project by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz, which consists of a series of photographs taken between 1982 and 1987 in brothels in the Santiago and Talca regions of Chile; (2) the Las libertadoras series, produced by Venezuelan photographer Vasco Szinetar; and (3) an unidentified series by Hungarian-Brazilian photographer Madalena Schwartz.
Performances of Body, Gender, and Clothing
Clothing plays an important role as cultural expression, as a reflection of our social, political, and historical environment. Moreover, clothing can be one of the elements that contribute to denaturalizing gender categories and allowing them to be understood as a social construction. Following Judith Butler's formulations, it would be appropriate to ask: what are the everyday performances in which clothing plays an important role in justifying the social punishment of certain bodies by the dominant order? [2]
As the first place to house clothing, the body is a means of expression that exists permanently. There is no possibility of being absent from it, and this is an ontological quality of its existence. [3] It is not possible to separate the experience of the body from the cultural patterns in which it is encountered and recognized. In this sense it is a symbolic body, a cultural body. Clothing is accompanied by the quality of fluid fabric at all times, reinforcing its performance in the different spaces it occupies.
The adornment of the body becomes relevant for thinking of clothing as an extension of the self. From the simple look at a body on stage, a first understanding opens up which certainly will not be the last. Clothes and the body are a part of the performance of contemporary existence. [4]
In performance studies, objects acquire a special value, in addition to their temporal specificities and spatial settings. [5] The practices of dressing give rise to a performance that enables the construction of an identity and the reflection of a situated cultural time.
Traditionally and historically, the categories of gender have been produced from a binary position, from a labeling of the body in terms of sex (male-female) and gender (masculine-feminine). This binary emphasizes a fixed, immutable, racist, classist, heterosexist, normalizing, and oppressive hegemonic narrative, assumed as natural and social. [6] Consequently, at the same time, dominant gender performance can appear in two ways: cis and trans. Both make the social constructions and performativities visible, but the trans performance is evidently not within the norm. [7]
Although gender categories have a structuring quality, they are a potentially creative site filled with meanings, an alternative to compulsory normativity. From this aspect, clothing acquires possibilities – in its functions of covering the body – to subvert the hegemonic mandates that compose it, structured by the fashion industry in the West. [8] It becomes necessary to feel-think the composition of a visual narrative through clothes, accessories, and hair beyond the fashion industry: style can be inside and/or outside of it. [9]
This visual narrative that can be inside and/or outside the regiments of the fashion industry enables the binary performance of the gender dimension to be susceptible to alteration through garments on bodies that potentiate what could be felt/thought of as new everyday ontologies, multiple and diverse. Such potencies destabilize the dominant statutes of what is understood as “feminine” and “masculine,” opening ways to multiple horizons, diverse and in constant movement in the performance of the body.
Each daily performance is a sequence of spontaneous embodied acts and can be read as a practice of resistance. [10] Thus, invitations to think about sex and gender demand the certainty that there are no transparencies or neutralities here. Bodies experience intensely, which implies a simultaneity of dimensions to be worked on, such as episteme, practice, act, process, transmission, event, and intervention in the world. [11] The act of dressing is part of a social, cultural, and historical relationship between the body and clothing. [12] Clothing as a performative construct becomes another mechanism that makes the heterosexual matrix visible. [13]
In these contexts, and, depending on time, more visible or less visible, transcorporealities appear that irritate and bother the public eye, institutions, and customs: the transgression of the codes become sanctioned. Sanctions that go through different layers, from contempt, faces, sayings, sieges, and insults in the public space to total exclusion from social mechanisms of protection and improvement of the quality of life, up to death.
Figure 2. Paz Errázuriz, La Manzana de Adán, 1980. Source: pazerrazuriz.com.
In such violent societies, those markers of difference that visually break the dominant codes are permanently at risk. Even though a memory of violence always remains, reproducing clothing performances that seek protection in profoundly violent socio-cultural contexts, escape always has a space to be/exist, as a possibility, a disobedience that pulsates as strongly as feeling/thinking. Escape is the dangerous route that requires crossing borders outside the conventions of nation states. [14] These divergences, of yesterday and today, account for acts that resignify categories, creation, resistance, and insistence on experiences that “demand” spaces that make a dignified life possible.
In a subversion of the codes of conscious political practices – defined, premeditated, or inserted with some militancy – it seems that a desire/feeling/thinking/doing seeks its own possibilities of being. The trans body makes visible an existence that problematizes, from its own experience, the possibilities of a body marked by race, gender, and class difference and questions the dominant status of cis-normality by imagining the body in relation to the world. [15]
The performance of bodies covered by clothes – of trans lives – opens the possibility of a resignification of the neoliberal/racist, sexed, heteronormative code, which transforms the body into an object of desire, marketable in a certain way, under certain conditions and with certain appearances. In this imposed construction, the white, cisheteronormative, middle-class imaginary prevails. The use of clothes, their parts, colors, shapes, and possible combinations are also read under this matrix of rigid and immovable characteristics, in which each body, marked by a difference that defines a biological fact, corresponds to certain garments and not to others.
We will look at performances of clothing outside the confines of the fashion industry, one of many industries which generally reinforces the dominant paradigms of exclusion and inequality in the West; performances in which certain garments, associated with certain corporealities, will be displaced from the environments where one expects to find them, opening up the way for confusion, divergence and imagination. [16] In this regard, Mayra Cotta and Thais Farage point out that “available clothing is not only an objective reflection of society, but a medium capable of transforming structures and being deeply connected to the creative tradition of image-making.” [17]
Fashion appears as a space of neutralization of symbolic potential. [18] Ordinary people account for this way in which aesthetic clothing choices move in diffuse directions. They show how fashion and the everyday practices of dressing walk on different paths, with some points of convergence.
Some aspects of the act of dressing, of performing gender through clothing, escape the confines of the fashion industry. These aspects are linked to aesthetic trends that are generally outside the social and cultural contexts that accompany them. [19]
Figure 3. Vasco Szinetar, Las Libertadoras, 1980. Source: Instituto Moreira Salles Collection.
Body Memory and Performances
Memory involves a reflection that allows us to understand life, where the act of remembering acts as a method of constructing accounts that have been silenced by hegemonic narratives of history. [20] Thus, tracing divergent gender trajectories and how they destabilize practices through a performative construction of clothing implies recognizing the traces of the past present in our contemporaneity.
Diana Taylor reflects on performance as a place between archive and repertoire, as a space that tells stories, where transmission happens in mixed ways. [21] The repertory of a body thought moves between archives and the body, as a product of experiences, personal/intimate memories, historical traumas, sociopolitical crises, and formative spaces. [22]
The memory of bodies combines ephemeral and permanent practices, which are not immune to the passage of time (as many things disappear) but, through the action of memory, they are reconstituted. [23] It is in this reconstitution that a cultural transmission is achieved that at the same time creates community. These transmissions take place in a time that is spiraling, that is curved, that lies beyond history, and that makes visible organic, sensory, and gestural elements. [24]
In the chosen photographic works by Madalena Schwartz, Paz Errázuriz, and Vasco Szinetar, it is possible to see portraits of trans people's lives in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, amidst military dictatorships and the emergence of AIDS. Works that take place within contexts of commotion, shock, and state terrorism, political, sexual, and physical execution, exiles, disappearances, and persecutions. [25]
Faced with the terror of totalitarian administrations in Latin America at that time, the glamor of parties and shows, parks, brothels, neighborhoods, and homes emerges in a context of sexual dissidence, unthinkable until then, and which creates everyday memories.
Portraying that sociopolitically particular moment opens up a gesture that implies risk, openness, and sensitivities for marginalized lives, even though some of them reflect a cosmopolitan scenario, as is the case for Brazil. We are presented with scenarios that exist outside of our “normalized” lives, of people claiming the right to exist.
The testimonies created in military dictatorships are important, especially those relating to people who were dissidents as well as those who resisted. The photographs made by Madalena, Paz, and Vasco are part of the Latin American archive of trans memories. They are photographs that dialogue spiritually with the temporality of counter hegemonic corporealities and that are part of a reconstruction of the memories of difference.
These are photographs of people who allow themselves to be portrayed outside of posed gestures and, on the contrary, open up the space of their lives to discover other aspects and depths of who they are in front of the camera. Everyday life happens as an improvised study, infiltrating heterosexual life with an activism that is not aware of itself, of the resistance that involves the wearing of their rags, skirts, heels, and lace.
The photographs show an interest in a dissidence that has no partisan political substratum but is reflected in everyday life with an aesthetic and artistic performance that presents itself as reaffirming difference, revealing worlds that did not matter for Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela, and that, perhaps, in different dimensions, still do not matter.
In this work, the act of reminiscence seeks to create tension in a past that is constricted in time, to make visible a history that has a busy course. This exercise of remembering brings a practice of memory that is alive, of bodies that make transits. Trans bodies and their ways of covering the body, in other times and now, are bodies that suspend the normative and destabilize the hegemonic, underlining that people are not simply recipients of social systems but that there is also an agency oriented towards their transformation.
We wonder, in the complexities in which the archive and repertoire move, how to think of clothing as an object of memory that highlights situations of the past that remains as materiality, but which transports memories of other performances, which make visible other forms of transmission and permanence, of bodies that walk with these clothes. Of clothes on bodies that question ways of being in the world. Of the composition of a style that transgresses the hegemonic look. Of clothes that evoke memories of these bodies that move across borders, which blur gender borders and explore other ways of existing.
Bodies of trans people, like gender divergent bodies of past decades, open multiple meanings through the performative inversion of clothing. This has added meanings and a potential increase in gender visibility via lives that transform everyday imaginaries using the potential narratives embedded in the code, of which it is possible to find record in different moments of history.
Although photography is essentially a symbol of the past, in spiraling time it allows for articulations and transformations that are stubbornly reconstructed as timeless and in- becoming. Literary time wanders through styles that constantly re-signify themselves, creating collective memories that are alive and in motion and trigger affections.
Other Times: Visual Moments of Counter-Hegemonic Bodies
From the series Las Libertadoras, by Venezuelan photographer Vasco Szinetar, we perceive visualities that trace different bodily practices. In Image 1, a figure occupies the center, like a sphinx looking at the horizon with a perfect body posture, in a relaxed social situation. She is adorned with clothes that seem glamorous for the occasion, clothes that allow a glimpse of the silhouette, and with a gesture traditionally understood as feminine to hold her handbag.
There is no glitter, sequins, eloquent hair and makeup; a pedestrian life is exposed, everyday, common, simple. Performances of bodies that wear costumes that do not follow fashion, where there is no constant renewal, raise boundaries with respect to the dominant ethos that permeates gender expressions and identities, by assuming dangerous sexual orientations. [28] The expression of danger used in this text refers to the need for provocation about the affront established whenever the body action subverts the cisheteronormative expression of gender.
As in Image 2, the truth of gender cannot be perceived through fabric, through its fit to the body. Although the line drawn by the garment outlining the flesh does not reveal a body traditionally read as female — with a predominant bust, small waist, and prominent buttocks — there is a body posture that evokes feminine gestures. Such an evocation can be perceived, through the full smile, as the pleasure of being observed by the presence of the camera/eye that portrays a dialectic relationship, on the one hand, and of a lady who seems to be waiting for some important news, like any woman in the daily life of her neighborhood.
There are no rules about how to wear a piece of clothing. There is no value, no specific meaning from an industry that defines the ethics of good clothing. On the contrary, there is creativity, resistance, insistence, and enunciation in public space, in places that make up culture, and in routine activities that manage other visualities, like when one goes shopping in the corner shop, enjoys a park or social life from the threshold of the home one inhabits, on the border of the personal and the public.
There is a silhouette that is placed in tension, one which affirms Western cultural stereotypes of how a 'female' and 'male' body should look/read, projecting not just a gender, but a narrative of composure, a duty to be and a way of showing oneself in public. The traditional male figure that renounces adornment is buried underground in a gesture of rebellion, in bodies that “barely” interpret gender and fashion. [29]
Traditionally, the clothing system responds to a binary gender logic, which makes bodies become instruments that must follow anatomical labeling, where each garment corresponds to a body part. The arbitrariness of the cisheteronormative canon in clothing is being broken, subverted and transgressed to make space for diverse performances of clothed bodies from gendered visual/textile narratives. In this sense, Del Campo affirms that “to dress the body is to establish in it the mark of culture, to establish on it a system of signs on which the notion of person, citizen, social subject is based.” [30]
Figure 4. Paz Errázuriz, La Manzana de Adán, 1980. Source: pazerrazuriz.com.
Thus, various aesthetic or counter-aesthetic events emerge — visual narratives, small noises that disturb the status quo of those who, following cisheteronormative standards, inhabit the city. This instability is caused by various bodies, with garments that enhance a kind of protest against the mandates of gender, race, work, class, sexuality, and fashion, as in the streets of the capital of Venezuela in Vasco Szinetar's portraits (Image 3). One of the posed figures defies the convention that requires a body to be clothed, that nudity is inappropriate in practically all social situations, even those that reinforce it (underwear, bikinis, short skirts and shorts, plunging necklines). [31] The bodies in this image challenge a series of performances that reproduce and identify women and femininities as objects of desire. These bodies break with the average height of what is expected in a female body, of skin color in a female body, of hair understood as beautiful, exposing hair that is read as “rebellious,” evoking a lack of “seriousness” or implying “dirtiness” based on the normative cis/hetero/white/thin imaginary. [32] These bodies break with what is potentially desirable in the status quo, occupying the public space traditionally and historically denied them.
A line of flight that forcefully accompanies the flows of a life, disorganizing a situation, shows that other landscapes exist, other vital compositions, in an act of unmarking the established order, making room for other possibilities of being in the world. [33] The clothes and the gestures that accompany each outfit function as a strategy of weakening the consolidated forms of body coverage that insist on reducing it to binary schemes.
The scenography in Image 4, in various shades of vibrant blue, evidences the mismatch of one color to the cause of masculinity. Part of Paz Errázuriz's collection, the photo interweaves activities officially assigned to female roles. A table in the middle of a dilapidated kitchen is the site of several actions. One of the first introductions to becoming a woman can be the relationship with putting on make-up and, at the same time, the space is redefined by assembled food, in what appears to be a piece of chicken and some bread, on one side, and eyeshadows, lipsticks, eyeliner, and mascara on the other side of the same table. The figure of the person cutting the bread symbolizes the border by wearing a sports T-shirt with a round collar and three-quarter sleeve, usually associated with a male figure, but they provoke the eye of the beholder because of the intense make-up on their face. These “mixtures” of actions, bodies, clothes, and scenarios lead us to feel/think how, in any life, the crossing of normative borders happens.
Figure 5. Madalena Schwartz, unidentified portraits, 1970s. Source: Instituto Moreira Salles Collection.
Clothes allow, like a passport, circulation through other worlds. [34] More than telling who we are, clothes speak of behaviors in everyday life. Let’s think of clothes as protocols of experimentation, in which the subject enters, driven to create responses to the forces of instituted orders and to perform social, political, emotional, material, and subjective experiments.
Image 5, by Madalena Schwartz, could condense the idea of this daily laboratory of what it might be to experiment with gender as a cultural performance, in a body that expresses itself from an alterity that the social order denies. Here is the enjoyment of profound adornment, from the form of the hair and the flowers that highlight a female figure. Dresses that reveal shoulders, plunging necklines, and a glamour interrupted by the hairiness of the arms that
“should be” devoid of hair. As Gloria Anzaldúa mentions, border territories transcend geographical boundaries to be situated in affections, psychologies, sexualities, corporealities, and spiritualities. [35]
To inhabit the border territory would be to inhabit the fuzzy and vague lines that lie between what is clearly defined as the bastion of normality, of sanity, of what is right, of what simply “is,” and that which is not thought/felt in this world.
In this paper, we wanted to reflect on visual border narratives that appear in the composition of style through clothing in a part of the territory known as Latin America and how these decisions question a dominant patriarchal, racist, and classist gender order. We have also reflected on other peripheral zones that cross through us as subjects marked by difference, exposing other ways of existing in other times — times traditionally located in what would be the past but which, in the practice of remembering, show us how they are present in our contemporaneity. Here the fact of remembering becomes a living practice, situated, in constant movement, in a gesture that seeks to create feminist memories of the corporealities that have been silenced by dominant accounts.
We feel/think that the images presented show wardrobes that do not compete with the fashion market, in which the possibility of choice in the capitalist sense is limited, but that structure other possibilities; peripheral performances that have generated possibilities for the visibility of the existence of historically silenced and persecuted bodies; socially constructed identities formed in encounters with others, in the topography of the city streets and in the trivialities of daily life.
Clothing thought of as culture is thus transversed by daily performances destabilizing the gender imposed on bodies that insistently deviate from the norm. The performativity expressed in the images exposed here breaks with a single identity and proposes plural existences when we talk about bodies and the constitution of space.
The gesture of making normative borders visible seeks to problematize and show how the extraordinary appears in our everyday lives, in our different bodies, recognizing their complexities, agencies, and resistances in spiraling temporalities.
At the same time, however, we invite you to read these approaches as open reflections, far from interpretations that seek “authenticity” or “truths,” for the act of remembering and creating memory is always a situated and contextual social practice. [36]
Notes: Visual Narrative Memories from the Gender Border
[1] The present article integrates the discussions proposed in the master's thesis of Violeta Arvin Casoni, in development in the Graduate Program in Cultural Performances at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Luciene de Oliveira Dias and co-supervision of Prof. Dr. Carolina Brandão Piva. The research is financially supported by FAPEG - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Goiás.
[2] Judith Butler, Bodies that matter. On the material and discursive limits of “sex” (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2008).
[3] Renata Pitombo, “Body, fashion and performance” (conference presented at VII Seminar Body, Fashion and Performance, online modality, November 3-11, 2021).
[4] ibid.
[5] Antonio Herculano Lopes, “Performance and history (or how the jaguar, in one leap, went to Rio at the beginning of the century and still came back to tell the story)” Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1994.
[6] Lelya Troncoso Pérez, “Revolutionary women and everyday resistances. Reflections on feminist practices in Chile” Clepsidra: Interdisciplinary Journal of Memory Studies, v. 7, n. 14, 2020.
[7] Dodi Tavares Borges Leal, “Transgender performativity: poetic equations of reciprocal recognition in theatrical reception” (doctoral thesis, University of São Paulo, 2018).
[8] Joanne Entwistle. “The body and fashion. A sociological vision” (Barcelona: Paidós, 2002).
[9] Ben Barry & Daniel Drak, “Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking” Fashion Theory, v. 23, n. 6, 2019.
[10] Diana Taylor and Marcela Fuentes, “Advanced Performance Studies.” Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011.
[11] ibid.
[12] Laura Zambrini, Bodies, clothing and gender expressions: the case of transvestites in the City of Buenos Aires. All sex is political. Studies on sexualities in Argentina, edited by Mario Pecheny, Carlos Figari and Daniel Jones. (Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal, 2008, p. 123-146).
[13] ibid.
[14] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / The Borderlands: The new half-breed. (Madrid: Artes Gráficas Cofás, 2016).
[15] The term “cisgender” is used to refer to people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Jaqueline Gomes de Jesús, Guidelines on gender identity: concepts and terms. (Brasilia, 2012).
[16] Teresa de Lauretis, Alicia no longer. Feminisms, semiotics and cinema. (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1992).
[17] Mayra Cotta and Thais Farage, Women, clothes, work: how gender inequality is dressed. (São Paulo: Paralela, 2021).
[18] ibid.
[19] ibid.
[20] Lelya Troncoso and Isabel Piper, “Gender and Memory: critical and feminist articulations.” Athenea Digital, v. 15, n. 1, 2015.
[21] Diana Taylor, O arquivo e o repertório: performance e memória cultural nas Américas. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2013).
[22] Diana Taylor. Staging Social Memory: Yuyachkani. In Performance, exile, borders: territorial and textual wanderings. ed. Graciela Ravetti and Márcia Arbex (Poslit, 2002), 13-45.
[23] ibid.
[24] Leda Maria Martins, “Spiral Time Performance.” In Performance, exile, borders: territorial and textual wanderings. ed. Graciela Ravetti and Márcia Arbex (Poslit, 2002), 69-91.
[25] See note 9.
[26] Luciene de Oliveira Dias, Pindoba, resilience and the academic place. Nós Magazine: Culture, Aesthetics and Languages. n° 2 (2019): 36.
[27] See note 24.
[28] Pía Montalva, “Misrepresenting disobedience,” in Fashion and Power, edited by Javiera Núñez and Colectivo Malvestidas. (Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial, 2021, p. 186-194).
[29] ibid.
[30] Alicia del Campo, “Street clothes: social theatricalities and political subject in the student movement.” in Fashion and Power, edited by Javiera Núñez and Colectivo Malvestidas. (Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial, 2021, p. 100-125).
[31] See note 8.
[32] Letícia Carolina Pereira Nascimento, “I'm not going to die: Loneliness, self-care and resilience of a black, fat transvestite beyond the pandemic.” Inter-Legere, v. 3, n. 28, 2020.
[33] Rosane Preciosa, Discreet rumblings of subjectivity. (Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 2010).
[34] ibid.
[35] See note 12.
[36] See note 9.
Additional References
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2016. Borderlands/La Frontera: La nueva mestiza. Madrid: Artes Gráficas Cofás.
Barry, Ben and Drak, Daniel. 2019. “Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking. Fashion Theory 23 (6): 679-709.
Butler, Judith. 2008. Cuerpos que importan. Sobre los límites materiales y discursivos del “sexo.” Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Campo, Alicia del. 2021. “Ropa de calle: teatralidades sociales y sujeto político en el movimiento estudiantil.” Em J. Núñez e Colectivo Malvestidas (Eds). Moda y Poder. 100-125. Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial.
Cotta, Mayra e Farage, Thais. 2021. Mulher, roupa, trabalho: como se veste a desigualdade de gênero. São Paulo: Paralela.
Dias, Luciene de Oliveira. 2019. “Pindoba, resiliência e o lugar acadêmico” Revista Nós: Cultura, Estética e Linguagens 4 (2): 19-39.
Entwistle, Joanne. 2002. El cuerpo y la moda. Una visión sociológica. Barcelona: Paidós.
Lauretis, Teresa de. 1992. Alicia ya no. Feminismos, semiótica y cine. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra.
Leal, Dodi Tavares Borges. 2018. “Performatividade transgênera: Equações poéticas de reconhecimento recíproco na recepção teatral.” Tese doutoral, Universidade de São Paulo.
Lopes, Antonio Herculano. 1994. “Performance e história (ou como a onça, de um salto, foi ao Rio do princípio do século e ainda voltou para contar a história). Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa: 1-16.
Martins, Leda Maria. 2002. “Performance do tempo espiralar”. Em G. Ravetti e M. Arbex (Orgs). Performances, exílio, fronteiras. Errâncias territoriais e textuais. 69-91. Belo Horizonte: Poslit.
Montalva, Pía. 2021. “Malvestir la desobediencia”. Em J. Núñez e Colectivo Malvestidas (Eds). Moda y Poder. 186-194. Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial.
Nascimento, Letícia Carolina Pereira. 2020. “Eu não vou morrer: Solidão, autocuidado e resistência de uma travesti negra e gorda para além da pandemia”. Inter-Legere 3 (28): 1-22.
Pitombo, Renata. 2021. “Corpo, moda e performance”. Conferência apresentada no VII Seminário Corpo, Moda e Performance, modalidade on-line, 3-11 de novembro de 2021.
Preciosa, Rosane. 2010. Rumores discretos da subjetividade. Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS.
Taylor, Diana. 2002. “Encenando a memória social: Yuyachkani”. Em G. Ravetti e M. Arbex (Orgs). Performances, exílio, fronteiras. Errâncias territoriais e textuais. 13-45. Belo Horizonte: Poslit.
Taylor, Diana e Fuentes, Marcela. 2011. Estudios Avanzados de Performance. México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Taylor, Diana. 2013. Entre o arquivo e o repertório: performance e memória cultural nas Américas. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.
Troncoso, Lelya e Piper, Isabel. 2015. “Género y Memoria: articulaciones críticas y feministas”. Athenea Digital 15 (1): 65-90.
Troncoso, Lelya. 2020. “Mujeres revolucionarias y resistencias cotidianas. Reflexiones sobre prácticas feministas en Chile”. Clepsidra. Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios sobre Memoria 7 (14): 120-137.
Zambrini, Laura. 2008. “Cuerpos, indumentarias y expresiones de género: el caso de las travestis de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”. Em M. Pecheny, C. Figari e D. Jones (Orgs). Todo sexo es político. Estudios sobre sexualidades en Argentina. 123-146. Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal.
Image 5, by Madalena Schwartz, could condense the idea of this daily laboratory of what it might be to experiment with gender as a cultural performance, in a body that expresses itself from an alterity that the social order denies. Here is the enjoyment of profound adornment, from the form of the hair and the flowers that highlight a female figure. Dresses that reveal shoulders, plunging necklines, and a glamour interrupted by the hairiness of the arms that
“should be” devoid of hair. As Gloria Anzaldúa mentions, border territories transcend geographical boundaries to be situated in affections, psychologies, sexualities, corporealities, and spiritualities. [35]
To inhabit the border territory would be to inhabit the fuzzy and vague lines that lie between what is clearly defined as the bastion of normality, of sanity, of what is right, of what simply “is,” and that which is not thought/felt in this world.
Words of Open Endings
In this paper, we wanted to reflect on visual border narratives that appear in the composition of style through clothing in a part of the territory known as Latin America and how these decisions question a dominant patriarchal, racist, and classist gender order. We have also reflected on other peripheral zones that cross through us as subjects marked by difference, exposing other ways of existing in other times — times traditionally located in what would be the past but which, in the practice of remembering, show us how they are present in our contemporaneity. Here the fact of remembering becomes a living practice, situated, in constant movement, in a gesture that seeks to create feminist memories of the corporealities that have been silenced by dominant accounts.
We feel/think that the images presented show wardrobes that do not compete with the fashion market, in which the possibility of choice in the capitalist sense is limited, but that structure other possibilities; peripheral performances that have generated possibilities for the visibility of the existence of historically silenced and persecuted bodies; socially constructed identities formed in encounters with others, in the topography of the city streets and in the trivialities of daily life.
Clothing thought of as culture is thus transversed by daily performances destabilizing the gender imposed on bodies that insistently deviate from the norm. The performativity expressed in the images exposed here breaks with a single identity and proposes plural existences when we talk about bodies and the constitution of space.
The gesture of making normative borders visible seeks to problematize and show how the extraordinary appears in our everyday lives, in our different bodies, recognizing their complexities, agencies, and resistances in spiraling temporalities.
At the same time, however, we invite you to read these approaches as open reflections, far from interpretations that seek “authenticity” or “truths,” for the act of remembering and creating memory is always a situated and contextual social practice. [36]
Notes: Visual Narrative Memories from the Gender Border
[1] The present article integrates the discussions proposed in the master's thesis of Violeta Arvin Casoni, in development in the Graduate Program in Cultural Performances at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Luciene de Oliveira Dias and co-supervision of Prof. Dr. Carolina Brandão Piva. The research is financially supported by FAPEG - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Goiás.
[2] Judith Butler, Bodies that matter. On the material and discursive limits of “sex” (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2008).
[3] Renata Pitombo, “Body, fashion and performance” (conference presented at VII Seminar Body, Fashion and Performance, online modality, November 3-11, 2021).
[4] ibid.
[5] Antonio Herculano Lopes, “Performance and history (or how the jaguar, in one leap, went to Rio at the beginning of the century and still came back to tell the story)” Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1994.
[6] Lelya Troncoso Pérez, “Revolutionary women and everyday resistances. Reflections on feminist practices in Chile” Clepsidra: Interdisciplinary Journal of Memory Studies, v. 7, n. 14, 2020.
[7] Dodi Tavares Borges Leal, “Transgender performativity: poetic equations of reciprocal recognition in theatrical reception” (doctoral thesis, University of São Paulo, 2018).
[8] Joanne Entwistle. “The body and fashion. A sociological vision” (Barcelona: Paidós, 2002).
[9] Ben Barry & Daniel Drak, “Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking” Fashion Theory, v. 23, n. 6, 2019.
[10] Diana Taylor and Marcela Fuentes, “Advanced Performance Studies.” Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011.
[11] ibid.
[12] Laura Zambrini, Bodies, clothing and gender expressions: the case of transvestites in the City of Buenos Aires. All sex is political. Studies on sexualities in Argentina, edited by Mario Pecheny, Carlos Figari and Daniel Jones. (Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal, 2008, p. 123-146).
[13] ibid.
[14] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / The Borderlands: The new half-breed. (Madrid: Artes Gráficas Cofás, 2016).
[15] The term “cisgender” is used to refer to people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Jaqueline Gomes de Jesús, Guidelines on gender identity: concepts and terms. (Brasilia, 2012).
[16] Teresa de Lauretis, Alicia no longer. Feminisms, semiotics and cinema. (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1992).
[17] Mayra Cotta and Thais Farage, Women, clothes, work: how gender inequality is dressed. (São Paulo: Paralela, 2021).
[18] ibid.
[19] ibid.
[20] Lelya Troncoso and Isabel Piper, “Gender and Memory: critical and feminist articulations.” Athenea Digital, v. 15, n. 1, 2015.
[21] Diana Taylor, O arquivo e o repertório: performance e memória cultural nas Américas. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2013).
[22] Diana Taylor. Staging Social Memory: Yuyachkani. In Performance, exile, borders: territorial and textual wanderings. ed. Graciela Ravetti and Márcia Arbex (Poslit, 2002), 13-45.
[23] ibid.
[24] Leda Maria Martins, “Spiral Time Performance.” In Performance, exile, borders: territorial and textual wanderings. ed. Graciela Ravetti and Márcia Arbex (Poslit, 2002), 69-91.
[25] See note 9.
[26] Luciene de Oliveira Dias, Pindoba, resilience and the academic place. Nós Magazine: Culture, Aesthetics and Languages. n° 2 (2019): 36.
[27] See note 24.
[28] Pía Montalva, “Misrepresenting disobedience,” in Fashion and Power, edited by Javiera Núñez and Colectivo Malvestidas. (Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial, 2021, p. 186-194).
[29] ibid.
[30] Alicia del Campo, “Street clothes: social theatricalities and political subject in the student movement.” in Fashion and Power, edited by Javiera Núñez and Colectivo Malvestidas. (Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial, 2021, p. 100-125).
[31] See note 8.
[32] Letícia Carolina Pereira Nascimento, “I'm not going to die: Loneliness, self-care and resilience of a black, fat transvestite beyond the pandemic.” Inter-Legere, v. 3, n. 28, 2020.
[33] Rosane Preciosa, Discreet rumblings of subjectivity. (Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 2010).
[34] ibid.
[35] See note 12.
[36] See note 9.
Additional References
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Barry, Ben and Drak, Daniel. 2019. “Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking. Fashion Theory 23 (6): 679-709.
Butler, Judith. 2008. Cuerpos que importan. Sobre los límites materiales y discursivos del “sexo.” Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Campo, Alicia del. 2021. “Ropa de calle: teatralidades sociales y sujeto político en el movimiento estudiantil.” Em J. Núñez e Colectivo Malvestidas (Eds). Moda y Poder. 100-125. Santiago de Chile: Enhorabuena Editorial.
Cotta, Mayra e Farage, Thais. 2021. Mulher, roupa, trabalho: como se veste a desigualdade de gênero. São Paulo: Paralela.
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Leal, Dodi Tavares Borges. 2018. “Performatividade transgênera: Equações poéticas de reconhecimento recíproco na recepção teatral.” Tese doutoral, Universidade de São Paulo.
Lopes, Antonio Herculano. 1994. “Performance e história (ou como a onça, de um salto, foi ao Rio do princípio do século e ainda voltou para contar a história). Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa: 1-16.
Martins, Leda Maria. 2002. “Performance do tempo espiralar”. Em G. Ravetti e M. Arbex (Orgs). Performances, exílio, fronteiras. Errâncias territoriais e textuais. 69-91. Belo Horizonte: Poslit.
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Nascimento, Letícia Carolina Pereira. 2020. “Eu não vou morrer: Solidão, autocuidado e resistência de uma travesti negra e gorda para além da pandemia”. Inter-Legere 3 (28): 1-22.
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Preciosa, Rosane. 2010. Rumores discretos da subjetividade. Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS.
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