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Carnival
as a Ghetto of Homosexual Behaviour:
This role of carnival as a “temporal ghetto” is necessary because in Brazilian society the social order is not challenged head on, but rather it is “fooled” from behind a façade of normality. The taboos are officially respected and their breaking is only tolerated if it happens away from the public gaze, or on specific occasions, primarily carnival. Ours is a society where conflicts are not explicit, where social confrontation is discouraged and diluted. In many of our social conflicts, there is no clear division between opposing sides, “us” and “them”. Especially in the case of the minorities’ conflicts, many have not yet organised themselves politically, to establish their rights. In general, in Brazil, the minorities’ movements are very little organised and, therefore, they do not find recognition of their oppression, nor a political expression that could give them power. There isn’t even a generalised awareness that their oppression is a political fact and that it could be overcome through political organisation. Thus, in Brazil, minorities movements, such as the gay movement, the women’s movement, the black movement, etc. (with rare exceptions, such as the Movimento Gay da Bahia / Bahia Gay Movement) are not very organised politically. Carnival allows an expression of the repressed behaviours and social tensions suffered by the Brazilian minorities, which are little voiced during the apparent normality of the rest of the year. In the carnival period, the repressed aspects of society can surface, though, in a playful and caricatured way. This limitation of time and aesthetics acts simultaneously as a protective barrier and as an escape valve for the Status Quo and its tensions. The order of the “serious days” of the rest of the year is thus more easily kept. These repressed aspects of society which are expressed during carnival include issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. At carnival, for instance, it is common for the social roles of gender to be temporarily subverted. It is a tradition of Brazilian carnival that both homosexual and heterosexual men dress up as women and behave in an effeminate way. Through such behaviour, they escape momentarily from the oppression and the limitations of male gender behaviour, which is imposed upon them for the rest of the year. Their personification of the feminine is caricatured and shows that gender behaviour (both male and female) is socially constructed. However, such personification also shows that this gender construct is imposed and that its transgression has to happen in a controlled way, within the limits of carnival. It is true that in recent years, the homosexual minority in Brazil has witnessed a wave of liberalisation and greater visibility, especially during carnival. The carnival in the big cities has become a festival where gay aesthetics and behaviour are omnipresent, in the street carnival, in the samba school parades, in the Banda de Ipanema, in the carnival club balls, etc. Even the São Paulo Gay Parade, although not part of the official carnival, can be seen as part of this phenomenon. It is now a demonstration with a carnival atmosphere, which is one of the biggest gay parades in the world, which in the last few years has attracted hundreds of thousands of participants (2.5 million people in 2005), including the mayor of the biggest Brazilian city. However, this homosexual “liberalisation” in Brazil, especially the queering of carnival over the last few years happened more on a level of greater visibility and frankness regarding the existence of sexual attraction between people of the same gender, than on a level of real social acceptance. The greater visibility and the queering of carnival does not reflect the acceptance and recognition of homosexual relationships by society and by the state, particularly in connection with such matters as marriage, inheritance, adoption, etc. Brazil also remains one of the countries with the greatest indexes of violence against homosexuals, reflecting a repressive attitude against this section of the population. The ever-stronger expression of homosexual behaviour within the temporal and aesthetic limits of carnival can, on the one hand, be seen as a reflex of the greater social expression and visibility of homosexuals in society; on the other hand however, this might be seen as yet another symptom of the fact that their oppression is still present, rather than of their real social acceptance. |
