Corpos à margem: performance e performatividade queer nos espaços de representação em Chapecó/SC

Abstract

This research stems from the concerns and needs of looking at the queer corporealities in Chapecó and how their existence is denied by heterocisnormativity and hegemonic power in a medium-sized city with rural characteristics. Thus, this dissertation aims to understand the struggle of queer bodies for emancipation and spatial belonging in the city of Chapecó, Santa Catarina. It proposes a dialogue established through the relationship between body and space, achieved through interdisciplinary approaches between Geography and other fields such as Architecture and Urbanism, Philosophy, Sociology, and History. The research is unfolded through the specific objectives of: (i) analyzing the performance and performativity of queer bodies in the social space of Chapecó; (ii) understanding the representation spaces of queerness in their dynamic contexts, considering the construction of their territorialities; (iii) identifying spatial marks as hosts and generators of ephemeral and mnemonic experiences; and (iv) characterizing the Chapecó queer body and its spatial experiences in the city. To achieve this, the research begins with bodily and spatial readings experienced by dissident tribes in the city to construct the research and approach the empirical object, structuring the dissertation into three chapters: Encounter, Access, and Contact. In the first chapter, Encounter, a more theoretical and conceptual aspect, authors such as Butler, Preciado, and Maffesoli are articulated. It highlights how bodily dissidence is based on breaking heterocisnormativity, subverting identity and performativity as producers and reproducers of affective spaces, traversing gender and sexuality geographies and the organicity of tribal experiences. In this chapter, an initial approach to the queer corporealities in Chapecó is made through the Relief Maps tool, applied to five participants, providing a more precise direction for the fieldwork in the remaining chapters. In the second chapter, Access, the concept of representation spaces is used as the basis for spatiality. Building on the works of Lefebvre, Soja, and other authors, a structure of the queer representation space is elaborated, composed of central categories (identity, performance and performativity, and queer social practice), expressed through spatial analysis categories (symbols, myths/rituals, and altars), which manifest in the ritualistic and orgiastic experiences of the tribes observed during field observations. The third chapter, Contact, is fundamentally empirical, exploring the socio-spatial and identity experiences of five interviewed participants representing dissident corporealities in Chapecó, with whom we engaged throughout the research and who complement our objectives of understanding queer spatiality in the city. As a result, we perceive that these queer corporealities are interested in using the street as a locus for the construction of their representation space, where identities celebrate their symbolic and ritualistic manifestations. However, amidst their rites, dissidente Corpos à margem | 11 identities are persecuted and marginalized by symbolic markers of gender, race, and sexuality. The transgressive experiences of the corporealities in question are spatialized through their production of counter-spaces, emerging through tensioning against hegemonic norms and characterized as spaces of struggle and social belonging.