Banca de DEFESA: FERNANDA DE CARVALHO AZEVEDO MELLO

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : FERNANDA DE CARVALHO AZEVEDO MELLO
DATE: 18/12/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: a definir
TITLE:

“Put Your Tongue In, Kiss Anyway, And Fuck It”: Sapatão Freedom Processions in
the Carnaval of Olinda and Recife (PE - Brazil)

 

KEY WORDS:

Women’s hooking up; Carnival of Recife and Olinda; Female homoeroticism; Lesbian identity; Feminist ethnography; Coloniality and sexuality.

PAGES: 238
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Antropologia
SUMMARY:

 

This thesis investigates homoerotic practices among women and LBTIPN+ dissident
subjects during the Carnaval of Olinda and Recife, examining how desire is produced,
circulates, and is regulated within one of Brazil’s largest popular festivals. Drawing on a
feminist, implicated ethnography conducted between 2023 and 2025 – based on intensive

participant observation, interviews, daily circulation through street blocos, and the affective-
corporeal involvement of the researcher—the study analyzes queer “hooking up” among

women not as an episodic festive occurrence, but as a situated practice shaped by race, class,
cisnormativity, gender expression, bodily legibility, and territoriality. The research
demonstrates that Carnaval does not suspend norms; it bends heterocisnormativity through
tactical freedoms: partial, unequal, and provisional modes of experimenting with desire
under surveillance. Approaches, situated consent, aesthetic performativities, and tacit
agreements structure possibilities for flirting and erotic interaction, revealing that erotic
freedom is unevenly distributed. Black, masculine-presenting, and peripheral women face
heightened moral sanction, while whiteness and femininity offer greater margins for
experimentation. The study also examines the role of rebuceteio (interwoven affective
networks) and tactical non-monogamy, which temporarily reorganize exclusivity regimes
and enable experiments in other forms of intimacy without dissolving norms. Politically, the
thesis shows that feminist and LGBTQIAPN+ blocos are not “safe spaces” but contested
territories marked by erasures, tensions, and hierarchies of visibility. Theoretically,
mobilizing Indigenous and decolonial epistemologies, the work articulates the concept of
the sapatão body-territory: an entanglement of body, desire, aesthetics, and space that
explains how butches and gender-dissident subjects not only inhabit Carnaval but actively
produce it, inscribing ephemeral territories of belonging and resistance. The final analytical
chapter demonstrates that sapatão operates as a political-aesthetic category that exceeds
sexual orientation, functioning as a gender identity, territorial marker, and recognition
technology—modulated by racial and class hierarchies. Methodologically, the thesis affirms
implicated ethnography as an epistemological stance: understanding this phenomenon would
not have been possible from a distanced position. Reflexivity is treated as an analytical tool,
and the researcher’s body as an operator of access, vulnerability, and situated knowledge.
The study concludes that homoerotic practices among women and dissident subjects during
Carnaval constitute modes of existence and world-making that challenge hegemonic
categories of gender, sexuality, and politics. Far from being festive exceptions, they reveal
how desire can operate as tactical freedom, territorial production, and embodied critique of
the coloniality of gender.

 

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Interna - 2313763 - ANGELA MERCEDES FACUNDO NAVIA
Interna - 1149569 - ELISETE SCHWADE
Interno - 1152605 - FRANCISCO CLEITON VIEIRA SILVA DO RÊGO
Interna - 1691014 - ROZELI MARIA PORTO
Externa à Instituição - ISABELE MACHADO DOS SANTOS WIDBERGER
Externa à Instituição - MARION TEODOSIO QUADROS - UFPE