XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Sexual Memories and Choreographies of Cruising in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

• In Event: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Memory in Brazil

Abstract

Since the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, clandestine sex spaces––bathhouses, porn theaters, dark rooms, gloryholes––and public cruising grounds have been violently and systematically dismantled throughout the Americas. Despite concerted efforts by local governments in Brazil to keep these spaces closed, however, many continue to operate as bars, cabarets, and men’s health clubs. During my recent collaborations with Coletivo das Liliths, a multimodal performance collective based in Salvador da Bahia, part of the ethnographic and artistic process has included cruising together at various locations throughout the city. In this paper, I detail several excursions to spaces that hold critical sexual memories for members of the collective, locating them within the broader geohistorical narrative of the city. Part auto/ethno/pornographic storytelling (Tortorici 2015) and part ethnographic striptease (Silva 2015), I consider the overlapping racial-gender-sexual histories that complicate––and, at times, facilitate––one’s ability to experience pleasure in these spaces. The paper connects these experiences back to the collective’s performance trilogy on queer absences in the Portuguese Inquisition archive, offering their performances of pleasure as a corrective to colonial violence.

Author

• Joshua Reason, University of Pennsylvania