Abstract
This chapter provides an approximation to queer masculinity through the study of the figure of Zé do Caixão as part of the Brazilian horror canon. Zé inhabits an interstitial space between overt machismo and clear queerness. He seems able to trespass into both territories without calling into question his own masculinity, or rather, there being anyone who would dare to call into question his masculinity for fear of perishing at his hands. The character also evidences the constructedness of masculinity in Latin America and, more specifically, the performativity of machismo whereby this template of male behaviour and sexuality is rendered a learnt behaviour more than an innate quality of all men of the continent.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Barcinski and Fanotti (1998), Mojica Marins’s films did not really enjoy a great deal of popularity in his native Brazil on release. While visiting the United States Barcinski showed a number of the films to Mike Vraney (who owned the independent film company Something Weird Video), who decided to release the films in the American market, which led to Mojica Marins’s work beginning to be recognized elsewhere.
- 2.
For instance, the television series Sólo para machos (Bolivia 2015), novels such as Jaime Bayly’s No se lo digas a nadie (1994), and the films by Julián Hernandez in Mexico are a few examples of anti-machista texts that have become popular across the Latin American continent.
- 3.
Among the most notable films of this subgenre are Sílvio de Abreu’s A Árvores do Sexos (1977) and Mulher Objeto (1981), and Oswaldo de Oliveira’s Histórias que Nossas Babás não Contavam (1979).
- 4.
Cinema novo emerged in Brazil in the 1960s and was characterised by a willingness to favour the social and political agenda and stories of films over their aesthetic qualities. Film directors and theoreticians emphasised the political commitment and the necessity to intellectualise filmmaking. The aesthetics of hunger derived from the ideas of cinema novo and was theorized by Glauber Rocha. In his manifesto, Rocha argues for a cinema with a documentary quality, using hand-held cameras, shot in black and white and with simple stark scenery that emphasised the harshness of the Brazilian landscape.
- 5.
Cinema do lixo was a type of cinema that emerged after the dissolution of Cinema novo (towards the end of the 1960s) and lasted approximately three years. It enjoyed a clandestine existence due to the desire of filmmakers, but also due to the obstacles for distribution and censorship that prevailed in Brazil at the time. Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes regards this type of cinema as proposing ‘an anarchistic culture [that] tends to transform the populace into rabble, the colonized into trash. This degraded sub-world, traversed by grotesque processions, condemned to the absurd, mutilated by crime, sex, and exploitation, hopeless and fallacious, is, however, animated and redeemed by its inarticulate wrath’ (1997: 269)
- 6.
This rejection of mariana identity is best shown in the character of Laura (Tina Wohlers) in Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver, who defiantly opposes her father (an army colonel) in order to become Zé’s partner. The way she rejoices at the tortures to which she is subjected in order to prove her worth, as well as the way she encourages Zé to commit evil crimes, clearly contradicts the predicates of mothering and nurturing that make up the basis of mariana identity.
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Subero, G. (2016). Zé do Caixão and the Queering of Monstrosity in Brazil. In: Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56495-5_2
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