BOYS WEAR BLUE, GIRLS WEAR PINK: MOLOTOV-FASHION & CULTURAL RESISTANCE IN BRAZILIAN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY BY HENRIQUE GRIMALDI FIGUEREDO
POLITCS AND GENDER AUTHORITARIANISM [THROUGH FASHION] “Boys wear blue, girls wear pink.” It is with this phrase that in January 2019, the newly appointed Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, summarizes what she calls the “new phase” of Brazilian politics. [1] At that moment, the only woman in the first echelon of a government that has been characterized by the mitigation of difference and the incessant reaffirmation of a heteronormative family and moral ideal, the minister’s declaration establishes two major propositions. First, it reifies gender to two unique possible coordinates, reducing the subject’s experience to the roles directly associated with biological sex, and; second, it reaffirms the gender component to a direct association with fashion, or rather, to the socially consolidated paradigms of gender roles in fashion that condition their community presentation to very well-established coordinates, in which it is acceptable for only girls to wear pink, and boys to wear blue. Fashion, in this sense, manifests, in fact, a power [2] in the regulation of bodies and subjectivities, providing very specific and conditioned routes of existence that is understood ideologically or socially as possible or acceptable. [3][4] In defining what is normalized, this kind of idealized behavior - through fashion - will fragment and hierarchize the subjects, condemning uncoordinated existences and subjectivities to ostracism and social disqualification. No wonder Brazil is - paradoxically the country that murders the most transgender people in the world and also the one that most consumes their image through pornography: an inherent tension between 90
