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BRAZIL: Carnival, a Complex Annual
Revolution for Women, Gays
By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS) - Fátima Oliveira, one of Brazil's
few black women doctors, always goes to "the best
carnival," in Sabará, a city of 130,000 people in the
state of Minas Gerais, where "men dress up as women" at
a celebration that is "very informal, very local, with
few tourists."
Cross-dressers appear regularly at the many and varied
carnivals in Brazil, but particularly in Sabará, in the
southeast of the country, said Oliveira, who is a member
of the advisory board of the Latin American and
Caribbean Women's Health Network, and ex president of
Brazil's National Feminist Network for Health and Sexual
and Reproductive Rights.
Carnival in Brazil is "an all-encompassing libertarian
festivity where one can strip off the everyday self in
order to become what one would like to be," and that
benefits women, especially black women, who have become
its leading ladies, beauty queens and the models of new
aesthetic standards, she told IPS.
Carnival has pagan origins predating Christianity, with
a subversive character that turned the status quo upside
down. The Catholic religion co-opted the popular
festival, but modified the meaning to be one of
"farewell to the pleasures of the flesh."
Carnival, in this South American country of over 192
million people, is regarded as the most important of all
those celebrated worldwide before the Christian season
of Lent, and lasts more than a week. The "escolas do
samba" (dance and music groups) and bands rehearse
year-round for the parades held all over Brazil.
It is "a short-lived celebration, but its influence
endures for the rest of the year," said Oliveira.
Carnival "turns the world upside down," creating
"happiness, abundance, freedom and above all equality of
everyone within society;" it is a celebration of "the
feminine in a social and cosmological universe marked by
men," according to Roberto da Matta, who has written
extensively on anthropological interpretations of this
festivity.
But the event only serves to "show up its precise and
exact opposite" in real life, he told IPS.
"Women enjoy the reversal of the established order,
which overturns the pecking order," and they have always
had a strong presence in carnivals, where men also
"exert the power of their sexuality," said Sonia Correa,
co-chair of the international organisation Sexuality
Policy Watch (SPW).
Complex sexuality
But there are contradictions. The "sensual paradise"
which surprises foreigners, particularly Asians, with
the freedom with which Brazilians "move their bodies,"
also includes racial discrimination, "male dominance"
and violence against women and children, Correa pointed
out.
There is a growing explicit presence of transsexuals at
carnival, who have gone beyond simply coming out in
public and have earned legitimacy for the defence of
their rights. Recently their struggle has become more
politicised: one of their demands, for example, is the
right to separate bathrooms, said Correa.
A few years ago, she said, a television reporter was
charmed by the beauty of a young woman in an escola do
samba parade in Rio de Janeiro, and he followed her to
ask her name. "Wilson," was the reply.
Carnival "mixes the unequal," the result of a long
struggle by the black communities, who created the
present form of carnival in Rio and other cities. When
it all started, some 80 years ago, carnival was heavily
repressed by the police, Correa told IPS.
Today black people continue to be dominant in the music
and drumming groups at the heart of the escolas do
samba.
Gays have gained recognition as key artistic workers,
occupying distinguished roles in the escolas do samba,
and they are well accepted in the carnival environment -
but not in the northeastern state of Bahia, where
carnival is different.
Homophobic violence is not decreasing there, said Luiz
Mott, the founder of the Bahia Gay Group (GGB), the
oldest homosexuals' organisation in Latin America.
In Brazil, over 3,000 homosexuals and transvestites have
been killed since 1980, according to GGB's survey data,
which puts this country in first place for gay-bashing
crimes. The group's last report, covering 1980 to 2008,
counted 2,998 murders, and the numbers keep increasing.
In 2008 there were 190 killings, 55 percent more than in
2007.
In the huge street carnival in Salvador, the capital of
Bahia, various groups of men take part, dressed as women
and apparently "getting in touch with their feminine
side," but paradoxically "they are homophobic," Mott
said. They cross-dress in order to ridicule
transvestites, and "they reinforce their sexual
antagonism for the rest of the year," he said.
Many people make use of the permissive ambience of
carnival to "discharge their hate" at a time when the
atmosphere of liberation and alcohol consumption
increase the vulnerability of victims and the
aggressiveness of attackers.
The "tríos eléctricos," floats bearing bands and
heavy-duty amplifiers that provide the dance music for
the carnival crowds in Salvador, carry many gay and
lesbian singers and musicians, but they do not publicly
express their sexual preferences, he complained. Gay
pride parades, like the one in the southern city of São
Paulo that draws three million people, are more
effective than carnival in fighting homophobia, said
Mott. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people take
pride of place, gain visibility and share the event with
large numbers of heterosexuals, which has a socialising
effect, he said.
Breaking down prison walls
"Carnival is for women what football is for men," said
Maria Balé, a São Paulo psychologist who turned to
photography and pie-making because she prefers them to
"constructing new egos for people who only want to buy a
fake identity."
These explosive celebrations are "a means to free
oneself from the prisons" that societies have built up
throughout history, by "training" human beings for
survival with rules, boundaries and repressions that are
broken out of from time to time to reconnect with the
deepest part of human nature, "the animal, in the best
sense, in us" she said.
"It's a fleeting return to irrepressible nature, to
creative powers, to the exercise of human freedom, which
is important for widening the horizons of life without
repression," she added. The arts, other cultural
expressions and sports also fill this role.
Women reap more obvious benefits because they have "more
prisons from which to free themselves, and that's why
daughters have the hardest struggle with their families
to take part in carnival festivities," she said.
Carnival is also "a female festival, because it welcomes
everyone into its womb," she told IPS.
With regard to commercialisation of the body, with the
increasing near-nudity in carnival performances, she
said "fashion parades are more obscene, because they
only value the clothes worn, and involve the exercise of
material power," where women are used "as clothes
hangers."
Oliveira disagreed with moralistic criticisms of nudity,
which she called "a Brazilian cultural tradition."
Carnival "strips hypocrisy naked," and without this
annual festival "women would suffer more discrimination"
in their everyday lives, according to Balé.
Carnival in Rio and São Paulo has become a commercial
spectacle, with the escolas do samba parades taking
place in purpose-built stadiums. This is because they
have achieved "the status of street opera, a development
that demands an appropriate locale," she said.
Balé recalled the parade in Rio in the 1980s when for
the first time a black woman, known only by the name
Pinah, appeared in a magnificent costume on the pinnacle
of a carnival float in an unprecedented celebration of
black beauty.
Now, black actresses and models are everywhere to be
seen in the worlds of television and fashion, in this
country where blacks form a majority of the population
but continue to face discrimination that is largely
ignored in public debate.
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