BOYS WEAR BLUE, GIRLS WEAR PINK: MOLOTOV-FASHION & CULTURAL RESISTANCE IN BRAZILIAN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

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

submission to the accepted norm and the impulse of individual - and not standardized - desire.

THE BODY: A BATTLEFIELD

The body is a space for struggles and the central component that manifests tensions and deviations from norms. [5] The restriction of bodies - habits, clothing - corroborates a reapplicable notion of a certain civilizational process. [6] What is experienced in Brazil at this moment is precisely a new effort of internal colonization of the Other (the strange among us), producing existential molds based on a politicalreligious logic, which defines and civilizes ‘barbarism’, that is, everything that intended to be dissident. The norm seeks to conform subjectivities; it exerts power in social macro-structures - removing, for example, gender debates from schools or even through massive television advertising - concentrating the discursiveness of what is possible / acceptable as a body, desire, behavior and clothing. If on the one hand there is an evident civilizing project (in a politicalideological sphere), there is, in opposition, the elaboration of heretical experiences, that is, the emergence of what Wouters (2004) establishes as informalization of social life. [7] The informalization is about relaxing emotional and behavioral constraints in social interactions, and points to a rupture with patterns. Informalization as a complex (re)codification process manifests itself, sometimes, through a carnivalization, a suspension of rules that allows other bodies and subjectivities. Therefore, if there is a civilizing project, there are also alternative processes of disruption of the social life, which find in fashion - as perhaps in no other cultural phenomenon - their material means of manifestation.

DISSIDENCE HETEROTOPIES

Fashion, especially that developed experimentally and alien to the specifications of the large market, assumes in this context a potential for resistance and definition of reexistences. [8] This definition of the norm and gender is challenged in Brazil by fashion designers and fashion collectives managed by queer people - transgender people, agenders, gender fluids, gays and lesbians, etc. - that is, active members of society although in disconnection with the norms currently enacted by the government. In a social space where only, either boys or girls clothing can exist, brands like Daspu (created by a collective of prostitutes from São Paulo) and Vicente Perrota (whom only uses queer people in his production and fashion shows) compete in the practical world for other possible manifestations of sexuality and different forms of clothing: a way of writing their existences in the social imaginary, in the city, and in institutions. These deviant bodies are promoting an idea of fashion and desire that transcend the current reductionist and subjugating dualization. Similar to Daspu and Perrota, the Debauxe [9] brand, idealized by Noah Mancini, mobilizes dissent existences in a festive and affective space, in which carnivalization is a fundamental break with this [new] civilizational project. Noah’s brand manifests itself not only in clothes but also in the construction of a lifestyle expressed as an eternal fête nocturne (images 1-4). In this sense, fashion can be both a photograph of the social imaginary and a response to it; whereupon the disruptive fashion has a certain premonitory and emancipatory potential in outlining others ways of existing. In a country of continental proportions - where there is a state project that aims to disqualify the minorities - the aesthetics of creators such as Daspu, Perrota and especially Debauxe become Molotov-experiences, sublevaciones [10], pointing to a new trend in Brazilian underground fashion. A revolution born from youth, this DIY queerpunk explodes from sounds and voices of marginalized and

peripheral groups, promoting a constant rewriting of culture as a social practice. In mocking attempts at ideological imprisonment, this guerrilla fashion not only embraces the displaced people constantly attacked by the system, but also promotes their own communities with security and emotional support. The molotov-fashion have been acting in a social redemption in the flawed Latin American democracies.