This is My Body: The Queer Messianic Dysphoria of The Pink Supper

Abstract

In this article, I offer a personal and critical analysis of The Pink Supper, a protest-performance created in collaboration with Biño Sauitzvy in 2019. It is written using three modes of expression: (a) critical writing, which appears in roman type, (b) internal conversations, in italics and (c) excerpts from the performance itself, in bold. In engaging three distinct voices, I take a queer approach to writing. The polyphony tears up traditional rules of top-to-bottom knowledge transmission. It abandons formal narrative structures. In their stead, I actively embrace a somewhat ‘disorganised’ rhetoric by tightening horizontal bonds with queer writers who have adopted a similar approach.

Keywords:

• Live art
• queer performance
• trans murders
• The Pink Supper
• Brazil

Notes on Contributor

Nando Messias is a Lecturer of Contemporary Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama University of London. Their work straddles performance art, dance and theatre, combining beautiful images with a fierce critique of gender, visibility and violence. As well as a practitioner, Nando is a researcher of queer theory and performance. They were the recipient of 2019 Library of Performing Rights-LADA (Live Art Development Agency) Commission for which they developed The Pink Supper.

Notes

1. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2008), 11.

2. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 98. See also, Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993).

3. Paul B. Preciado, ‘Trans Catalonia’, and ‘Identity in Transit’ in An Apartment in Uranus (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019), 110-12, 183-5.

4. Tom Phillips and Anna Jean Kaiser, ‘Brazil must not become a “gay tourism paradise,” says Bolsonaro’, Guardian, April 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/26/bolsonaro-accused-of-inciting-hatred-with-gay-paradise-comment (accessed August 30, 2022) and Kaspar Loftin, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Victory Sparks Fears in Brazil’s LGBTQ Community’, HuffPost, February 11, 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jair-bolsonaro-lgbtq-brazil_n_5bdcb9ade4b04367a87c8fa6?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADee5mWejKB01hwcRXH1i6liVT6J9U6ZVQC-QJIMnbGhNzKcEXEKPu0XyY1SGnDp5aiyFF3FWAoenHqsWgLleyIDBTnCWmNpsfU3h_YcUVA0nCyuNKR1rEFI5ylL0-BtY5MLp1Xuy36yxUG0uWo-sf_pLtziLviZPUBOTglDhGXz (accessed August 30, 2022).

5. Preciado, ‘Our Bison’ in An Apartment on Uranus, 236.

6. ‘Gender dysphoria’ has been used since 2013 (DSM-5), which replaced ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ to avoid the term ‘disorder’ and associated stigma. GID itself replaced ‘Homosexuality’ in 1973 according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys’, in Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), 154-64. See also Preciado, ‘First Names: Paul Beatriz, Request 34/2016’ in An Apartment in Uranus, 192-3.

7. mens sana in corpore sano, a Latin proverb: ‘a sane mind in a healthy body’.

8. See Lucas Ramón Mendos, ILGA World: State-Sponsored Homophobia 2019: Global Legislation Overview Update (Geneva: ILGA, December 2019).

9. For arguments against the gender pathologisation of children, see José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Preciado, ‘Who Defends the Queer Child?’ in An Apartment in Uranus, 54-58; Sedgwick, ‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay’.

10. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 159.

11. The rise of populism is not confined to Brazil. Right-wing populists in office at the time of writing include Orbán (Hungary), Salvini (Italy), Janša (Slovenia), Duda (Poland), Erdoğan (Turkey), Trump (USA), to cite a few.

12. Eduardo Michels, Mortes Violentas de LGBT+ no Brasil–2018: Relatório do Grupo Gay da Bahia (Salvador: Editora Grupo Gay da Bahia, 2019), 3.

13. Brazil Events of 2019, Human Rights Watch World Report 2020, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/brazil (accessed on August 30, 2022).

14. Ibid.

15. Zing Tsjeng, ‘Brazil’s New President Once Told a Politician She Was Too Ugly to Rape’, Vice, October 29, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/j53wx8/jair-bolsonaro-elected-president-brazil (accessed August 30, 2022).

16. Brazil Events of 2019, Human Rights Watch World Report 2020.

17. Butler, Excitable Speech, 4.

18. ‘The environmental policies of President Bolsonaro’s administration have effectively given a green light to criminal networks that engage in illegal logging in the Amazon and use intimidation and violence against Indigenous people, local residents, and environmental enforcement agents who try to defend the rainforest (…) Preliminary data show that from January to October, deforestation in the Amazon increased by more than eighty per cent, compared to the same period in 2018’ in Brazil Events of 2019, Human Rights Watch World Report 2020.

19. José Marcelo Domingos de Oliveira, Mortes Violentas de LGBT+ no Brasil–2019: Relatório do Grupo Gay da Bahia (Salvador: Editora Grupo Gay da Bahia, 2020), 13.

20. Danilo Thomaz, ‘Reduzida por homicídios, a expectativa de vida de um transexual no Brasil é apenas 35 anos’, Época, Jan 30, 2018, https://epoca.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2018/01/reduzida-por-homicidios-expectativa-de-vida-de-um-transexual-no-brasil-e-de-apenas-35-anos.html (accessed August 30, 2022).

21. Grupo Gay da Bahia have been compiling reports for 40 years. In the performance, I quoted the number of homicides of trans people in 2018. The total number of deaths of LGBTQI+ people that year is 420. The report concludes that ‘one LGBTQI+ person was killed in a violent way every 20 hours in Brazil that year’. Michels, Mortes Violentas, 1.

22. Again, I am stating the number of deaths of trans people. The total recorded deaths of LGBTQI+ people is 46–more than one a day in February 2018.

23. Mendos, ILGA World: State-Sponsored Homophobia 2019: Global Legislation Overview Update.

24. Preciado, ‘The Son’ in An Apartment in Uranus, 268. The fear of not being allowed to return to Brazil becomes more concrete with the closing of borders during the coronavirus pandemic. In a press address in November 2020, Bolsonaro declared that he was sorry about the COVID-19 deaths but ‘we have to stop being a country of faggots’ (‘tem que deixar de ser um pais de maricas’).

25. Preciado, ‘I Would Like to Live’ in An Apartment in Uranus, 233.

26. Preciado, ‘My People are the People of the Ill-Born’ in An Apartment in Uranus, 253.

27. Even those who would otherwise have chosen to stay have had to leave under pressure from Bolsonaro’s administration. Jean Wyllys, one of the president’s main political opponents and advocate of LGBTQI+ rights, ‘resigned his seat in Congress in January 2019 after receiving death threats and fearing for his life’ in Brazil Events of 2019, Human Rights Watch World Report 2020. Wyllys currently lives in exile. He was replaced by ‘David Miranda, who, like Wyllys, is openly gay and has also reported receiving death threats’. Ibid.

28. Literally ‘for the English to see’ but used to mean ‘making things look a certain way’. For instance, when Brazil hosted the Olympics in 2016, homeless people were moved out of city centres to temporary accommodation to ‘sanitise’ the urban landscape. This move didn’t address social inequalities; it merely removed them from view.

29. Preciado, ‘Identity in Transit’ in An Apartment in Uranus, 184.

30. Ibid.

31. See James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin Books, 1963). For a queer reading of Du Bois, see Muñoz, The Sense of Brown.

32. For more information on transphobic discrimination in the UK, see ‘Joint Statement on the Rights of Trans People in the UK’, Human Rights Watch, May 17, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/17/joint-statement-rights-trans-people-uk (accessed on September 28, 2022). For statistics on transphobic violence and discrimination in other countries, see ‘World Report 2020’, Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020 (accessed on September 28, 2022).