Between vedetes and “men in travesti”: A study about dissident bodies and performances in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the 20th century (1900-1950)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss how homosexuals of the first half of the 20th century (“sodomites”, “frescos”, “bagaxas” and “inverts” as they were called) appropriated the public territories of the city of Rio de Janeiro and developed technologies and resistance practices capable of circumventing the bourgeois and heteronormative conventions, even having a relationship with the Magazine Theater (the “Teatro de Revista”) and the “vedetes”. By the premise of a long time organization of homosexuals in Brazil, it is clear that those men learned to establish networks of sociability among themselves and thus faced the bourgeois morality and the medical and legal discourses that persecuted and excluded them. More than individuals shaping experiences, effemination, for example, was often adopted as a mechanism of resistance to institutional control and gender normativity, and the Magazine Theater became a possibility of agency in which it was possible to remodel projects of life of which gender and sexuality diversities have become a constitutive part. The historical documents used here were medical theses and books, criminal anthropology archives and magazine and newspaper headlines, and the temporality of the analysis was marked by the years 1900 and 1950.