Abstract
Teresina, the capital city of one of Brazil’s poorest states, is growing rapidly. When the city’s population growth is met with economic prosperity, practices of distinction proliferate among its large and expanding middle class in an effort to establish a sense of place and belonging. It is within this context that a community of bohemians creates an emergent timespace of possibility to challenge convention, to experiment with new perceptions, self-presentations, and relationships, and to build community. Forged around an ethos of queerness, Teresina’s bohemia manifests only at night and in shifting ordinary locations around the city that are undetectable by the local mainstream. This chapter focuses on possibilities and challenges that arise when outsiders with a fascination for unconventional ways of life attempt to claim a place for themselves in a provincial city undergoing acute social and cultural transformation.
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Notes
- 1.
E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen point out that this paradigm shift in understanding identity is “a philosophical scaffolding through which queer theory, impelled not only by Foucault but by deconstructionist critiques of identity and feminist contestations of constricting definitions of sexual differences, emerged out of a critique of Western metaphysics and its stable ontology” (2011, 3).
- 2.
Launched in 2004, the same year as Facebook, Orkut was a Google-owned and Google-operated social networking site widely used in Brazil.
- 3.
GLS is an acronym that came out of an identity politics movement to institutionalize gay spaces in Brazil as not exclusively Gay or Lesbica, but also “S,” standing for “sympathizers” (simpatizantes).
- 4.
“Reais” is the plural form of Real, the Brazilian currency.
- 5.
It is not to say that no participants in nocturnal bohemia are concerned with sex and sexual identity. Many are, but nocturnal bohemia as a whole is much less so. I take up this discussion in chapter six of Queerly Cosmopolitan (Murphy 2019).
- 6.
Rogues brought together clothing styles as diverse as young women wearing tight pants, T-shirts, and short hair (a rarity in the city at the time), women with long curly hair wearing loose-fitting dresses and “hippy” jewelry, men with short hair wearing fitted T-shirts and pants emphasizing their muscles, and men with long/shaggy hair and beards wearing loose-fitting clothing.
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Murphy, T.E. (2021). Belonging through Bohemia: Queer Timespace and Possibility in Teresina, Brazil. In: Kuppinger, P. (eds) Emergent Spaces. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84379-3_10
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