Non-static aesthetics: fashion and resistance in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

In this work, the contemporary productions of two Brazilian transvestite artists and activists are put into dialogue: the singer, composer and actress Linn da Quebrada, and Vicente Perrota, clothing designer, stylist and performer. The article explores the performances and fashion shows by Perrota, a member of the Atelier Transmoras, as well as the film Bixa Travesty, the funk songs and the video clips by Linn da Quebrada. The objective is to analyze the ways in which fashion is configured in their productions as a strategy of resistance whose costumes, beauty technologies and body cosmetics hold dissident subjectivities and mobilize irreverent affects. While they recover archives and build insurrectionary communities, fashion stands as lodging, but, at the same time, as an occupation of degenerated bodies that attack sexual difference and devices such as the suit, that normalize and ensure the heterocentered regime.