Cross-dressing and Transgressing: The Queer Body in Madame Satã

The body is spatially important because it is at the threshold between self and other; it is the gatekeeper between the public and the truly private, both open and closed to the outside world. Perhaps most consequential, it is the interface between one’s sense (or senses) of self and the sense (or senses) of one that may be imposed by others. While scholars such as Butler (2004) have argued that the body is ultimately a space where cultural discourse is played out, others such as Johnston and Longhurst (2010) remind us that bodies are places and have a materiality that cannot be ignored. Because of this dual nature, the body is a locus for the exploration of meaning on many fronts when discussing sexuality and gender identity: How is the body used to convey queer identity? In what ways can the body be conceived of as place and space that reflect and affect queer sexuality and gender identity? In what ways does the body consolidate concerns related to sexuality with other factors such as class and race? And how can gender identity be manipulated through the use of the body to contest heteronormative standards? This essay responds to these questions while exploring the body as a space of intersection with the social discourses of gender, race, and class, how the body is portrayed in cinematic terms, and to what extent the use of the queer body transgresses heteronormativity in Karim Aïnouz’s film Madame Satã.

Released in Brazil in 2002 at the tail end of what is known as cinema da retomada (the reclaiming of cinema), ¹ Aïnouz’s first feature film was received with much critical acclaim and public success but not without thematic controversy. Madame Satã was widely considered a success for Aïnouz’s direction, the cinematography of Walter Carvalho, and the acting of Lázaro Ramos. It had an impressive run on the international film festival circuit and won Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Makeup at the 2003 Grande Prêmio do Cinema Brasileiro, among many other nominations and prizes both in and outside of Brazil. ² Even so, as Aïnouz has pointed out in interviews, the film “had a scandalous effect; it made people talk about racism and homosexuality, things that normally are slipped under the carpet in Brazil” (2008: 46).

The film is inspired by the life of João Francisco dos Santos, a famed figure in Lapa, the bohemian district of Rio de Janeiro during the 1930s and 1940s. ³ He lives in a sort of alternative family with two other prostitutes: Tabu, a passive feminine homosexual, and Laurita, with whom he raises a daughter. The real-life dos Santos, who became known as Madame Satã because of a costume he wore in a contest in the 1942 Carnival, spent 26 of his 76 years incarcerated. He was dichotomously known for being a bicha (a feminine homosexual) ⁴ and for being a capoeira expert, street fighter, and criminal (malandro). Rich (2013: 175) explains that the malandro “can be roughly characterized as a street tough, a Mack the Knife-type who lives by his wits, outside the law, shifty and seductive, turning society’s codes upside down and enjoying life.” Despite the film’s being about a character who was “aggressive and unfriendly,” Aïnouz (2008) has argued that it was “important for a lot of gay and black people because it promotes self-respect.” It focuses on the protagonist’s desire to be a cross-dressing performer, his nontraditional family life, his repeated encounters with the police, his struggles with prejudice of various kinds, and his love affair with another man. His body is at the intersection of several key factors that determine his identity: he is black, poor, gay, and a criminal in the Brazil of the 1930s. In the end, while he is able to express his fluid gender identity through performance, he is unable to manipulate or escape his social position as regulated by other factors.

The term “queer” is sometimes simply used as an umbrella term for nonheterosexuals, shorthand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning or queer (LGBTQ), but it can also connote active resistance to heteronormativity. In the broadest and most complete recent discussion of queer cinema, Schoonover and Galt (2016) explore the difficulties of defining queer cinema. As they point out, any particular way of defining and limiting queer cinema necessarily excludes. What is queer film may depend on queer characters, directors, representation of nonheteronormative sex acts and relations, and on the reception of films—including straight films—by queer audiences. But beyond these categories or markers, Schoonover and Galt view queerness as a force that is active across the field of cinema, one that does not exclude broad interpretations; queer film can be formally transgressive but can also be popular. They briefly discuss Madame Satã and the relationship between queer desire and the way the film plays with space and temporality to represent a queer history that has been largely untold in contemporary Brazilian history.

Schoonover and Galt’s open interpretation of “queer” and their discussion of queer world cinema through many examples bring us closer to a broad understanding of the power and variety of queer cinema but may leave us without a specific measuring tool for evaluating a “queer” work. For that reason, my use of the term “queer” more specifically aligns with that of Foster (2005: 234–235, my translation), who was at the forefront of queer Latin American studies and one of the few researchers who have published extensively about queer Latin American film: ⁵

As a marker of cultural production, “queer” points in two complementary directions. On the one hand, its intention is to reveal through an anti-establishment stance the way in which the patriarchy functions and, at the same time, it aims to defend all that stands against the patriarchy. Likewise, a queer critique, if it describes and interprets a cultural product that positions itself in opposition to the patriarchy, at the same time examines all cultural production to seek out cracks in the facade of the heteronormative patriarchy with the purpose of scrutinizing and putting them to work against it.

Foster’s interpretation emphasizes the double function of “queer”: it not only unmasks the ways in which the heteronormative patriarchy functions as hegemony but also defends that which works against the patriarchy. A queer reading of a cultural product, therefore, also works to subvert the patriarchy.

I also find Oswin’s (2008) understanding of “queer” particularly instructive for our discussion of Madame Satã. Discussing the need to move beyond the hetero/homosexual binary, she argues for continued use of the term and of the notion of queer space to understand the ways in which sexuality is used as part of “broad constellations of power” across the hetero/homosexual divide. By “broad constellations of power” she means the way queer space relates to other factors such as race, class, gender, cultural/ethnic group, and normative power positions. Class and other factors may supersede sexuality (or combine with it) in the creation of power positions.

It is useful to situate Madame Satã within a body of international work—the bulk of which debuted in the 1990s and 2000s—that began to deal with queer sexualities in innovative ways. As Aaron (2004: 4) points out, these films not only gave voice to the gay and lesbian community but also highlighted subgroups within it. ⁶ Unapologetic about their characters’ faults or crimes, they also often “firmly defy the sanctity of the past” by revisiting historical figures and addressing commonly overlooked homosexual or homoerotic relationships. After living in New York City for eight years, Aïnouz returned to his birth country, Brazil, to make his first feature-length film. As Rich (2013: 174) tells the story, “he carried with him not only a script but also the widely shared [New Queer Cinema] impulse to look to the past to unearth new heroes.” Just as Aïnouz physically returned to the Brazil of his own past, he directed his cinematic gaze “to the past and the mythic figure who awaited him there: Madame Satã.” The films of the New Queer Cinema exemplify the meaning of “queer” in that they frequently challenge and subvert heteronormativity and cinematic convention in form, content, and genre. Rich clearly situates Madame Satã in this wave of films, for these same reasons. ⁷

In Madame Satã, the transvestite body is used as a space for the temporary performance of gender-bending roles. The film deals with the transvestite man’s body as a physical simulacrum ⁸ of the feminine, the interplay between sexual identity and gender, and how they come together in the cross-dressing of the body and through expressions of gender that are incongruent with one’s biologically determined sex. Butler (2004) has argued that gender (the idea of what is masculine vs. what is feminine, for example) is a social construct that, through its constant and innumerable iterations, becomes ingrained in all of us from the time we are children. For Butler, gender is not a natural construct but something that we see performed all around us and therefore perform as well. In Undoing Gender, she discusses gender in terms of authorship: “What I call my ‘own’ gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself)” (2004: 1). While gender starts out as an unconscious performance, people can become aware of this and work to resist it, if they choose: “If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical.” In other words, the performance of gender can be used as a fluid, dynamic, and purposeful means for contesting heteronormative standards as we see in this film.

Cross-dressers and transgender people have been recurring figures in Latin American literature and film, ⁹ and their presence is often but not always in juxtaposition to heteronormative cultural values, such as those of machismo and marianismo prevalent in Latin America culture (Subero, 2008: 160–161). In his essay on phobia of transvestism in the new Latin American cinema, Subero criticizes Aïnouz’s film for not fully exploiting the transgressive nature of João’s character. The real-life João was a self-proclaimed bicha whose femininity clashed with his street-smarts and ability to fight and defend himself. Instead of emphasizing João’s desire to be or become woman-like, however, this film emphasizes the dichotomous presence of his masculine and feminine attributes together in one body. It focuses on his desire to be a gender-bending performer on stage, but in his personal life he weaves in and out of feminine and masculine constraints, in one moment referring to himself as a negra (black woman) with big muscular legs and in the next moment taking the active role in sex with another male. For Subero, the character’s lack of femininity, the lack of cross-dressing throughout the film, and the film’s emphasis on João’s masculine body reflect a heterosexual perspective on transvestitism rather than challenging it. Because João’s “body is always presented as a hypermasculine entity that crossdresses temporarily and without engaging in what Kulick (1998) regards . . . as ‘becoming a travesti’” (2008: 170, 173), the film

fails to offer in João a transvestitic subject whose body fully erases his masculine traits to create a copy of a feminine original that would allow him to be read and regarded as a woman. Instead, he creates an androgynous presentation of the protagonist that does not respond to the idea of the travesti, or at least of bicha, understood in Brazilian culture . . . and to which he openly subscribes. ¹⁰

Following this line of argument, the portrayal not only is unhistorical but also fails to present a queer use of the cross-dresser’s body.

If we limit ourselves to strict adherence to the historical realities of João’s personal life, however, we miss other opportunities for appreciating this film’s representation of transgression against heteronormativity. The sexual and gender paradoxes embodied in João are indeed a subversive use of the body as space. His body is strong and masculine, if slim (reflecting the real-life João, who was over 6 feet tall and weighed around 180 pounds), but in the scenes when he is dressed as a woman the camera hugs his body closely with extreme close-ups. The effect is that during the performance, we see parts of the body—his lips, his stomach, his legs, his thighs, etc.—and all are presented as individual body parts, not strictly masculine or feminine but definitely sensual. While the whole of João’s body is masculine, the camera focuses our attention on individual parts that display a sort of sensuality, a characteristic usually associated with femininity, and this has the effect of softening them. Instead of canceling the feminine, his body is a space in which the harsh masculine and the softer feminine come together without negating each other. The transposition of the masculine and the feminine onto/into one space, João’s body, escapes the masculine/feminine binary prescribed by heteronormativity.

Another subversive use of João’s body comes in a sex scene between João and Renatinho, a handsome, white, masculine young man. João feels affection for Renatinho, as evidenced by the fact that he spares him the scamming to which he and Tabu would normally subject men they pick up in bars. In the only scene that shows João having sex in this film, the director wants to portray a raw yet intimate love-making experience between two men. The scene is subversive in several ways. First, it was received by some as controversial for the explicit showing of homosexual sex and because João, the seemingly feminine black man, is the one who takes the active role and penetrates Renatinho, the seemingly masculine white man. The scene plays on the traditional Latin American view of the penetrative act as a sign of dominance and the receptive act as being passive and somehow weaker. Penetrative and receptive sexual acts of course do not necessarily function as markers of strength and weakness, but the film operates within a given cultural context, and it chooses rhetorically to operate within that understanding and symbolic lexicon in order to allow for a transgressive reading that will be understood by its Latin American audience. Also, as Aïnouz (2003) has discussed, in filmic scenes with homosexual sex the emphasis is often purely on the penetrative act, and here the emphasis is on the intimacy between the two, an aspect of the film that made some audiences, especially in Brazil, particularly uncomfortable. In order to better understand the transgressive nature of the scene, however, I would like to take a moment to address sexual roles and the issue of homosexual masculinity and femininity in Brazil.

In Brazilian society, as in other Latin American societies, sexual identity has historically been based more on gendered roles than on actual sexual practices. According to Parker (1999: 29), “cultural emphasis seems to be placed not merely on sexual practices in and of themselves, but on the relationship between sexual practices and gender roles—in particular, on a distinction between the perceived masculine atividade (activity) and feminine pasividade (passivity) as central to the organization of sexual reality.” Thus the gendered performed roles of acting masculine or feminine are what is often culturally determinant in deciding one’s sexual identity. This perspective can enable a man to have sex with another man without necessarily being considered gay or losing his masculinity. As Parker (1999: 30–31) has observed, “the homem who enters into a sexual relationship with another male, then, does not necessarily sacrifice his culturally constituted masculinidade—at least so long as he performs the culturally perceived active, masculine role during sexual intercourse and conducts himself as a male within society.” According to Parker, while this standard or method of judging/labeling sexual identity has been changing in contemporary Brazilian society, in the 1930s the active/passive distinction was still a way of determining one’s masculinity.

Expanding on this concept, Green (1999: 75) agrees that sexual roles were certainly important in determining one’s sexual identity in the 1930s: “One was either a ‘real’ man, who assumed the penetrating role during sex, or the penetrated, ‘passive,’ and feminine receptor.” Green’s studies also showed, however, that the “sexual practice of many men was much more complex than this prescribed model. Some men engaged in both ‘active’ and ‘passive’ sex, and thus undermined the dominant paradigm with its implicit logic of a bipolar dyad that structured sexual relations.” While the dominant cultural view was that men’s sexual identity could be classified as masculine/active or feminine/passive, the reality was (and is) that sexual roles and therefore identity could be practiced and seen as something fluid.

The sex scene between João and Renatinho has been criticized for pandering to a heterosexual audience because the protagonist takes the active role in order to keep his masculinity intact, even though, according to Green (1999: 90), the historical dos Santos “liked to be anally penetrated, a sexual desire that was stigmatized and the antithesis of manliness represented by the knife blade” that he would often wield in street fights. ¹¹ Although the sex scene seems to bolster João’s masculinity through careful alignment with acceptable sexual fluidity and the cultural context of the 1930s, we have to view the scene in a larger context in order to appreciate that it is not his masculinity that is preserved but rather the transgressive fluidity itself. As Green mentions, in reality many homosexuals practice both passive and active sexual roles, and the fact that João is the active member in this scene does not mean that he always would be—Parker (1999) tells us that even transvestites and bichas, who one might assume would always take the feminine role, sometimes take the active sexual role, either because of their own preference or to please their sexual partners. The fact that João’s body is a spatial infusion of the feminine and masculine throughout the movie is surely not erased by one active sexual act. In fact, it is more queerly transgressive that this character who is both masculine and feminine is the one who penetrates the character that the audience may assume to be the more masculine of the two. This scene escapes the traditional binary opposites of feminine-masculine imposed by heteronormativity in part because both of the men have masculine bodies and mannerisms but also because João is a much more complex figure because of his gender fluidity. As Parker (1999: 29) observes, on the sexual stage “the body itself, particularly in its sexual performances, becomes the raw material for the construction and reconstruction of gender, just as the relations of power that traditionally circumscribe and organize the universe of gender become the basic structures organizing the sexual field.” Thus, João’s body is a space that allows him to perform the sexually active role in one scene and to perform as a woman on stage in another. The message is about the body as a space for performance and fluidity and not rigid gender norms prescribed by the heteronormative patriarchy.

Another way in which the body is significant as space in this film is that it is a space that brings together many of the types of struggles that João faces. As mentioned earlier, Oswin (2008) reminds us that homosexuality does not exist in a vacuum. When we look at queer space as opposed to heterosexual space, we also need to look at that space as a nexus with other factors. She asks how queer space not only opposes heterosexual space but relates to other factors like race, class, gender, cultural/ethnic group, and normative power positions. In Madame Satã, we see that when all of these factors come together, the difficulty that João faces is multifaceted. Taking into account these other factors in the context of Brazilian history, we can expand our reading of the sex scene’s transgressive significance.

The penetration of Renatinho by João is also transgressive for reasons related to Brazilian race relations and historical power hierarchies. Echoing his own prior research and that of Foucault and Lancaster, Parker (1999: 28) reminds us that

sexual experience, and homosexual experience in particular, always takes shape (in Brazil as elsewhere) within limits—within a complex field of power and domination, in which the possibilities for transformation, the freedom of movement experienced by individuals or groups, the choices or options opened up by different cultural systems, are simultaneously shaped and molded by relations of force. ¹²

While João is normally discriminated against for the color of his skin, in the scene with Renatinho he is liberated from those limitations and is the one able to dominate the other. According to Schoonover and Galt (2016: 294), dos Santos, as the child of former slaves, “embodies histories of economically and racially marginalized countercultures often excluded from official narratives of nation.” In the sex scene, consequently, his homosexuality and his race momentarily become weapons of transgression against the normalized and expected way of being subservient to the white male and potentially against the state as well.

According to Leu (2010: 83),

As a black male [João] is subject to the repression described previously that was visited upon Afro-descendant men whose lifestyles clashed with the ethos of order and discipline prescribed by the New State. As a homosexual male, he belongs to a group denounced by the regime’s lawmakers and functionaries as a threat to the new social order. The film’s deconstruction of a queer black masculinity, therefore, highlights the dilemmas of self-representation where intersections of race and gender become “problematic” for hegemonic perceptions of the nation.

To understand the significance of the sex scene’s cinematographic embodiment, it will be instructive to consider some history related to Brazilian racial relations. According to Leu, once slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1851, Afro-Brazilians became unimportant, valueless for the state. Miscegenation was then systematically promoted by the state not to include Afro-Brazilians in mainstream society but to erase blackness. João’s “sex with a white but male partner also challenges the expectations of interracial relations with regard to the national project of miscegenation” (Leu, 2010: 87). In other words, this particular sex scene is important and subversive not only because of the black man’s sexual domination of the white man but because both are male and their bodies and their sexual act have no reproductive implications. Following Leu’s reading, in this scene there is an implicit subversion of the state’s desire to use reproduction between white and black people to further whiten Brazilian society. João’s body, therefore, is not purely his own. In the same way that the treatment and discrimination he faces is directed toward his objectified body for the combination of his sexuality, gender expression, race, class, and behavior, this scene turns all of that on its head and delivers an equally heavy jab to the heteronormative patriarchy in the name of the oppressed.

While we do not see João dressed fully as a woman throughout the film other than in his performances toward the end, his desire to do so is a key motif throughout the whole film. But that desire is in constant tension with the realities that constrain him, and that tension manifests itself in explosions of violence that spring forth from his body, directed at his loved ones and oppressors alike. In one discussion with Laurita, João describes the presence of an anger inside his body that he cannot explain; this anger comes from somewhere outside of himself, and he does not seem to have ultimate control over it. In several scenes building to the finale, João wears Laurita’s beads while they are at home and performs privately for her and Tabu, and when he discovers that they are not giving him their undivided attention he lashes out violently. At the beginning of the film, João works as a dresser for Vitória dos Anjos, a white cabaret singer. As she performs one of Josephine Baker’s greatest hits, “Nuit d’Alger,” João watches her from backstage, enthralled. At one point, he sits in her dressing room and tries on her clothes, singing the words to her performance from memory. When she discovers him, she angrily admonishes him, saying that she should not have trusted a black man and that now her clothes stink. Her negative reaction to having her clothes infected by direct contact with João’s black body is only one of the many examples in the film that underscore the discrimination that he faces. He immediately explodes out of his femininized performance back to his violent masculine self, assaulting Vitória for insulting him and the cabaret/bar owner for not paying him for his two months of employment. Although the bar owner is the one who pulled a gun on João and who has not paid João for his months of work, João is apprehended and sent to prison for the altercation. When João arrives at the prison, he is stripped by a white prison official and pelted with a stream of water from a powerful hose. The literal and symbolic meaning here should not be overlooked. The spraying of João’s nude body by the phallic hose in the hands of an official representative of the state is a punishment that can be read as an attempt to wash away the smell of the blackness that prompted the altercation with Vitória and as revenge for João’s penetration of the white man earlier in the film.

After João’s return from prison, his friend Amador, the owner of the Bar Danubio Azul, offers him the opportunity to work at the bar. João persuades Amador to allow him to realize his dream and perform publicly for the bar’s patrons fully dressed as a woman. In one of the film’s final sequences, after his performance on stage João is celebrating his success and dancing with Amador when a drunk and angry patron verbally assaults him, clearly bothered by the evening’s homosexual (or queer, to characterize it anachronistically) overtones. Amador encourages João to leave to avoid a physical confrontation. João returns home and eventually cannot contain his anger. He heads back to the bar with a gun and finds the man who has insulted him stumbling up the street. João shoots and kills the man, and in the next scene we learn that he has been apprehended and will return to prison to serve a 10-year sentence for murder.

The use of the gun is significant because in an earlier scene, after using capoeira to assault a man who was forcing himself on Laurita, João had said that real men do not need to use guns. It is ironic, then, that in precisely the moment when he is realizing his more feminine dreams (becoming less of a man, perhaps) he loses control and lets his anger get the best of him, using the tool that he views as antimasculine to kill his aggressor. The message is that despite his temporary ability to transgress the sexual limitations of his imposed gender role, while his body is a site and tool of transgression it must still operate in a social setting that does not always accept that transgression; this success comes with consequences for transgressing against heteronormativity and traditional Brazilian society. In the end, his transgression, which is physically represented in the sex scene with Renatinho and in João’s gender-bending performances (literally embodied), cannot overcome the limitations of Brazilian cultural norms. João remarks several times that he knows he will be a big star one day and that he wants to endireitar (roughly, to straighten out his life), but it is as if the transgression cannot have any significance beyond the place of his own body and the bar in which he performs in the marginalized bohemian Lapa district. In fact, Laurita reminds him on one occasion that he was born torcido (twisted), implying that he will always be struggling against the natural order of things.

Another way of understanding the significance of João’s body is to note some contrasts between João and Tabu. In Brazilian vernacular of the 1930s, Tabu would have been considered a bicha. According to Parker (1999: 31), bicha means “literally, worm or intestinal parasite, but also, instructively, the feminine form of bicho or animal, and thus a female animal.” The bicha occupies a difficult social role in Brazil:

On the basis of his/her perceived passivity and internalized femininity, then, the bicha or viado is seen as a kind of walking failure on both social and biological counts—as a being who is unable to realize his natural potential because of inappropriate social behaviour, yet who is equally unable to cross the culturally constituted boundaries of gender due to the unavoidable constraints of anatomy.

Interestingly enough, while the bicha is looked down on and often the object of violence (Parker, 1999: 35),

precisely because the bicha violates the traditional expectations of masculinidade in popular culture, s/he is at one and the same time rejected and yet necessary. S/he is subjected to violent discrimination, and often to outright physical violence, particularly in the impersonal world of the street, yet also accepted as a friend and neighbor, integrated into a network of personal relationships in the traditional culture.

I find it significant and a means of highlighting the transgressive nature (and limitations) of João’s gender-bending role that even the bicha in this film, who would have been viewed as a sort of societal worm, has more of a space in Brazilian society than a character like João who straddles the masculine-feminine divide. Although the real-life dos Santos was a self-proclaimed bicha, he is not portrayed that way in the film. Ultimately, there are no places other than the body, the stage, or the bedroom for this type of gender bending, and João is sent to prison on multiple occasions in effect for transgressing those norms. At the end of the film, a postscript shows that after leaving prison the historical dos Santos went on to dress and perform in Carnival and became known as Madame Satã at a time when the Brazilian Carnival was still not commonly seen as an occasion for cross-dressing. As we know from Bakhtin (1984), this is only one of the types of hierarchical oppositions that have been subverted in celebrations of Carnival since the Middle Ages. The cross-dressing in Brazil, however, started only in the 1930s and gained prevalence in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond while many other role reversals have been acceptable in Carnival for much longer. The gender-bending body has now carved out a space for itself in the national celebration, but in João’s earlier years it certainly was still considered transgressive.

The use of the body as space to deal with sexuality in this film is closely related to the cinematography and even to one of the techniques used to develop the film. Although my analysis of the transgressive nature of the sex scene hinges on the fact that João penetrates Renatinho, the scene is not intended to be about penetration. According to the director in an interview with Allen Frame (Aïnouz, 2003), it is filmed to highlight intimacy and reality. There is a lot of foreplay, and there is no soundtrack. “The sound is the noise of the body. There’s sweat. There’s no desire to make it glamorous or clean.” Throughout much of the scene, the camera operates in close-up and extreme close-up. In those scenes, “the camera is literally licking the body.” Besides the obvious synergy between the camera’s licking of the actors and the characters actual licking of each other, this has the effect of placing the viewer as close to the action as possible. Aïnouz (2003) describes it as “like watching someone have sex in front of you.” The close-up framing almost makes the scene feel palpable (we can see the pores of the skin and the drops of sweat) and situates the viewer uncomfortably in the midst of intimacy. Here the viewer is unable to look past and must reckon with the presence of the queer body.

One of the techniques that Aïnouz and Carvalho chose to use in this film highlights the body even further (Aïnouz, 2003). They experimented and did a 100 percent bleach bypass directly on the negative (as opposed to on the print). This has several aesthetic effects, such as making the film look somewhat warmer and more classic (which helped in reproducing a feel of the 1930s), but it also makes the colors more saturated. The blacks look darker and the whites look whiter. This makes the black characters blend into the darkness of their surroundings (90 percent of the film’s scenes were filmed at night) and the white characters stand out. As Leu (2010: 83) has observed:

the film relies heavily on a trope of visibilizing João’s dark-skinned body, using photographic techniques, lighting, mise-en-scène and the performances embedded into the narrative. There is a very pronounced contrast between light and shadow in an unusual number of scenes that, together with a framing motif that emphasizes the act of voyeurism, suggest spectatorial consumption of a prohibited body.

One of the effects of the dramatic and disproportionate use of contrasts between blacks and whites in the film, as Leu explains above, is a sort of exotification of João’s black body, which accentuates the exotification of his own body through his cross-dressing and onstage performances. In my view, in the same way that João’s exotification of his own body falsely leads us to believe he has transgressed the bounds of heteronormativity and other elements of Brazilian culture, the visual exotification of his cinematic body also has a paradoxical effect. At the same time that the black body becomes almost invisible in the film at times, so much visual attention is drawn to his color that we can be falsely led to believe that the film is primarily about his blackness. Instead of allowing the blackness to eclipse the complexity of his struggle, we must not look past the blackness but rather look within it, along with all of the other characteristics that make up his reality, to avoid objectifying and reducing João to his skin color or exotic gender-fluid performances.

When on stage, João appropriates stories from Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights and creates his own brand of Brazilian mythology as well. He makes the stories his own and reinvents himself as a first-person storyteller such as Jamacy, who once turned into the Golden Puma that fought with the Shark for 1,001 nights, and the Divina Mulata de Bulacochê, dancing samba dressed as a woman. Like the characters he appropriates and shares with his audience, João’s performances refuse to be completely masculine or completely feminine, mixing his feminine clothing and makeup with his masculine body, voice, and forceful movements of his body. Although he is masculine in these ways, the camera works to maintain the coexistence of the masculine and the feminine within the space of João’s body. When he is on stage, the camera alternates between mid-shots, medium close-ups, close-ups, and extreme close-ups. The former two types of shots emphasize the whole, the physical simulacrum of the feminine that cannot fully erase the context of its masculine bodily host. The latter two types of shots emphasize the individual body parts that could be either masculine or feminine but ultimately showcase his sensuality as a performer, a characteristic normally associated with the feminine. As the sweat rolls off of his back, chest, arms, and legs, his performance ignores the incongruity between his biological sex and the temporary gender role he plays on stage.

Our queer reading has exposed the transgressions by and limitations placed on João’s body that he cannot escape. His desire to dress and perform on stage as a woman demonstrates his attempt to convey a queer identity that is not accepted by the society within which he lives. While on stage, João escapes and challenges the gender binary imposed by heteronormativity. However, his cross-dressing is always only temporary. His femininity is reserved for his onstage performances and his everyday masculinity is placed in stark contrast to the femininity of Tabu, who plays a traditionally subservient role. His queer body is at least as much regulated by restrictions and prejudice based on race and class as it is by discrimination for his sexuality. Ultimately, João is sent to prison, a punishment, in effect, for his transgressions against society, but then he is released and is shown dancing in Carnival in full feminine drag. Combining all of these factors, we can critique the film for, along with João, falling into ambiguity with regard to levels of transgression. At the same time, we can praise it for not falling into the binary system that it seems to be critiquing.