XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Queer Trans Ecologies from the Amazon: Indigenous Futurism and Performative Activism

• In Event: Underrepresented voices in Brazilian Cinema: Presence, Tensions and Representations

Abstract

After creating short- and medium-length performance-videos and stunning photo series, one of the highlights of the queer Indigenous artist Uýra Sodoma’s career is the film Uýra: A retomada da floresta (Uýra: The Rising Forest, Juliana Curi, 2022, 63 mins), an independent film made to give visibility to a broad spectrum of underrepresented voices including queer, trans, Indigenous, and Black, and dedicated explicitly “to all the forests that brought us to this point, and the many that are yet to come.” With a broad distribution at festivals and arthouse theaters worldwide, this pseudo-documentary blends reality and fantasy and invites the viewer to witness an intimate portrait of the artist Emerson Pontes and their performative persona Uýra Sodoma as it submerges the viewer into their world.

In this paper, I discuss Uýra’s hybridity and fluidity as the most striking impressions of The Rising Forest as the camera alternates between Emerson as a trans non-binary, educator, creator, activist, and community member to Uýra who takes on different forms as a human-plant-spirit. I draw from José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of the “brown commons,” Elizabeth Freeman’s study Queer Belongings, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, and Cleo Wölfle Hazard’s provocative Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, among other theorists of queer and trans ecologies, to discuss Uýra Sodoma’s performance as depicted in this futuristic film. I am particularly interested in presenting Uýra Sodoma’s filmed performance against a backdrop of eco-criticism and artistic activism that aims to bring visibility to the pollution of waterways, the urgency of forest preservation, the violations of human and LGBTQ+ rights, and the persistence of systemic colonial inequalities.

Author

• Kathryn Sanchez, University of Wisconsin Madison