On October 8th, LaShandra Sullivan presented her work on Black Queer Feminism and the Politics of Revelry as a part of a speaker series on Global Racism, State Violence, and Activism. Her talk emphasized practices of state sanctioned violence and racism in Brazil and the resulting activist movements, as she provided historical context, vignettes, and analysis to discuss the contemporary social and political situation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, specifically related to Black and LBGTQ+ people. The event began with the introduction of Audre Lorde’s idea of the erotic: satisfaction, power, and fulfillment brought about by moments of joy. For Sullivan, studying joy through Lorde’s context helped explain how people survive amidst inherently violent conditions. She discussed the assassination of Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman known for her work in poor areas and shantytowns. Her murder resulted in extreme public outcry from certain quarters and drew attention to social movements and political activism in Rio de Janeiro. However, the focus of Sullivan’s talk was not the suffering nor structural inequality that exists within Brazilian society, but rather the communities that formed from these events and bonded through revelry.
A central theme of Sullivan’s presentation was the phrase segurar a onda, or “hold the wave” in Portuguese. Not only does it refer to hanging on, or going with the flow, but she described it as “evitar (avoid) a breakdown”. Erotic joy and revelry were forged by activists amidst the struggles of daily life as a means for survival. It worked as a type of social and political activism that forms and reforms Rio through mundane instances of joy. It strengthens the ability to endure and persist within communities using embodied practices. In examples that Sullivan gave of Black and queer parties, gay flagging, and dance, she explored methods of embodying segurar that create communities and show that revelry provides relief amidst dangerous circumstances.
The theme of segurar serves as a centralizing force in thinking about processes of self-making and remaking that revelry entails, emphasizing radical community building. By participating in moments of joy, amidst the oppression of the conservative environment, occupants of those moments create spaces of relief and help one another cope through practices of physical and social movement. The idea of gay flagging, for example, that Sullivan discussed, is a means of community-making through shared language. In the example that Sullivan shared, a performer cloaked herself in symbols that lesbians had used throughout the years to flag themselves. Her self-marking was not a flirtation with a person, but a flirtation with the past, an invitation to remember a shared history that continues to connect the community.
The community making here is based in a history of structural oppression and slavery in Brazil that have resulted in the genocidal anti-Blackness that Sullivan brought up in the event. These communities and events of revelry are not only activist movements that uplift marginalized communities, but a means of survival. Indigenous histories and the histories of Blackness in the Americas are intrinsically tied, as Patrick Wolfe discussed in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”. Both native people and Black people experienced extreme violence at the hands and whims of settler colonial forces. This treatment cannot be categorized wholly as racism, however, since Black people and indigenous people were raced differently in relation to their positions within settler colonial states. Indigenous people presented a threat to land acquisitions. Federally, native people had to prove their exact degree of indigeneity through blood quantum, a measure of the amount of native blood a person possesses. The lower their blood quantum, the less of a claim to the land, and therefore less of a threat they posed to settler colonialism. Black people were objectified through the settler colonial system of capitalism, and within this racist system slavery constituted their Blackness (Wolfe 2006, 387-388). Wolfe’s paper makes clear that settler colonialism seeks to eliminate the native. History is reworked to provide a narrative that places the settler in the best possible light, a fictionalized accounting that makes no attempt to fill in gaps. This targeting of Blackness and queerness in Brazil stems from the same dehistoricization. The retelling privileges false narratives that the society was built without the abuse of Black people and Black labor.
Revelry as Sullivan describes helps to provide spaces of rest amidst the unsafe contemporary conditions for Black people in Brazil. This manifestation of erotic joy allows people to reshape themselves and their society. They create spaces to celebrate each other at parties, for example, and ways to recognize one another as allies and support systems in public. The governmental and societal restrictions can be put aside when the full force of the community comes together. Erotic joy creates and structures people into unified communities based on shared identities, shared histories, and shared joy.
References:
Sullivan, LaShandra. 2020. “Holding the Wave: Black LGBTI+ Feminist Resilience Amidst the Reactionary Turn in Rio de Janeiro” Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil after the Pink Tide. Edited by Benjamin Junge, Alvaro Jarrin, Lucia Cantero, and Sean T. Mitchell Newark: Rutgers University Press. 1-26
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December): 387-409.