A política da lacração como “estética da existência” nos coletivos de juventudes LGBTQIA+ da cidade de Fortaleza

Abstract

This work aims to investigate how the practice of lacração promoted by LGBTQIA+ youth collectives in the city of Fortaleza is systematized as a way of life – a strategy for the preservation and protection of their lives – constituting an “aesthetics of existence,” as elaborated by Foucault (2019). Through this practice, these groups promote a reinvention of meanings around the body and its relationship with the city’s hybrid spaces (the physical urban space and the online spaces of social media), as well as with the people who inhabit these spaces and with the world. I refer to this phenomenon as the politics of lacração. The research sought to identify the meanings developed by these LGBTQIA+ youth through their lacradora practices, focusing on how they engage with their bodies and their existence through their movements and activities across the city. This involves observing how they occupy and use public spaces (both offline and online), where gender and sexuality performances are marked, artistic interventions and parties are held, and a particular consumption of lacração is elaborated. The central hypothesis of the thesis is that lacração becomes systematized and constructs a politics of “care of the self,” which takes shape as the politics of lacração. This politics is articulated by youth collectives as a means of resisting and reinventing forms and uses of hybrid public spaces, disrupting the rules established by the heterosexual regime and presenting other possibilities of social and political existence, as well as forms of affection among bodies historically marginalized in and by the city. The research is based on ethnographic engagements, mobilizing tools from both anthropology and digital anthropology. Intersectionality is used as an analytical framework, allowing me to understand how power relations established within the heteropatriarchal domain are mobilized and contested through intersections of gender, sexuality, race, youth, class, urban and digital territorialities, affects, art, and consumption. The analysis led me to reflect that the politics of lacração, as an aesthetics of life developed by youth collectives, builds alliances among various bodies whose lives are rendered precarious by heterosexual moral and generational norms. It elaborates a subversion within the field of gender and sexualities, but it does not fully establish itself as a queer politics, insofar as it does not break with the structural elements of capitalist society. Through the consumption of lacração, it reproduces attempts at inclusion through consumerism, which is one of the critiques raised by queer theory toward LGBTQIA+ movements. Thus, the politics of lacração systematizes and enacts a process of subverting the “cis-tem” and creates other possibilities for an abundance of life centered on gender and sexuality performances, but it does not move toward an alternative to the modes of life shaped by consumption under capitalism.