During its military dictatorship's toughest years, Brazil witnessed the emergence and meteoric rise to (inter)national fame of the theater and dance group/family Dzi Croquettes in the 1970s. Their queer performances were so contagious that an increasingly visible entourage began to adopt the Dzi way of being and “philosophy of life.” This article examines the Dzi movement based on the existing literature and primary data generated through archival research and oral history interviews. It begins with an overview of the state of affairs surrounding the Croquettes's emergence and proceeds with two thematic sections where the primary data are presented and examined: the first one regarding the multidirectional identifications that formed between/among performers and spectators before, during, and after performances; and the second, focused on the enhanced but “costly” sense of freedom and transgression in/as the aftermath of the Dzi performances. Lastly, the article elaborates on the notion of the Dzi contagion and charts its affective and sociopolitical potentials by analyzing the articulation and dissemination of ontologies, subjectivities, and vocabularies (such as freedom, difference, and equality) beyond/against the liberal episteme. This piece contributes, both empirically and theoretically, to broader debates about the world-making and political powers of queer performances and utopias in/from the global South.
From Theater to Social Movement: The Dzi Croquettes's Queer and Contagious Performances in 1970s Brazil
André Prado Fernandes's interest in the interfaces between law, politics, and queer studies began during his undergraduate studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His master's degree at the University of Cape Town examined the evidentiary hurdles navigated by homosexual men from African countries applying for asylum in South Africa. More recently, he completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh, which offers a critique of the (neo)liberal framing of mainstream LGBT human rights discourse and builds on the notion of legal decentering by looking at the extralegal, political potentials of queer performances such as the 1970s theater and dance group Dzi Croquettes from Brazil.
André Prado Fernandes; From Theater to Social Movement: The Dzi Croquettes's Queer and Contagious Performances in 1970s Brazil. GLQ 1 January 2025; 31 (1): 1–27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11521534
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