AN MOCKED CURRICULUM SCRATCHED ON THE FLOOR OF STARS¹

ABSTRACT:

Through post-critical theories of the curriculum, the aim of this text is to map the dissidences of masculinity portrayed in the movie Tatuagem (Brazil, 2013, directed by Hilton Lacerda) understanding the power of the film in educating the viewer's perspective towards gender and sexuality differences. The film, which is one of the representatives of the new wave of cinema fromPernambuco, tells the story of the romantic relationship between Clécio, a tropicalist artist, and Arlindo, a shy soldier under the military regime in the year 1978. As a methodology, cartography, inspired by the philosophers of difference Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, guided us ina creative and inventive attention around images. We conclude that the countercultural experience of the characters in Tatuagem produces an anarchic-curriculum that operates dissidences in masculinities through two movements: 1) through the power of irony and debauchery, the anarchy of language and performance and 2) through a becoming-woman that leaks from behind, a territory of pleasure abjectified by heterosexual culture, but which gains rhizome strength in the film

Keywords:
Curriculum; gender; sexuality; cinema; cartography

RESUMO:

Por meio das teorias pós-críticas do currículo, temos como objetivo, neste texto, cartografar as dissidências de masculinidade produzidas no filme Tatuagem (Brasil, 2013, direção de Hilton Lacerda), entendendo a potência do filme na educação do olhar para as diferenças de gênero e de sexualidade. O filme, um dos representantes da nova seara do cinema pernambucano, conta a história da relação amorosa entre Clécio, um artista tropicalista, e Arlindo, um tímido soldado que serve ao regime militar em pleno ano de 1978. Como metodologia, a cartografia, inspirada nos filósofos da diferença Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, nos serviu de guia para uma atenção criativa e inventiva em torno das imagens. Concluímos que a experiência contracultural dos personagens de Tatuagem produz um currículo-desbunde, que opera dissidências nas masculinidades em dois movimentos: 1) através da força da ironia e do deboche, da anarquia da linguagem e da performance e 2) por meio de um devir-mulher que vaza por trás, um território de prazer abjetificado pela cultura heterossexual, mas que ganha força de rizoma no filme.

Palavras-chave:
Currículo; gênero; sexualidade; cinema; cartografia

RESUMEN:

A través de las teorías poscríticas del currículum, nuestro objetivo en este texto es mapear las disidencias de masculinidad que se producen en la película Tatuagem (Brasil, 2013, dirigida por Hilton Lacerda) entendiendo el poder de la película en la educación de las diferencias de género y sexualidad. La película, una de las representantes de la nueva era del cine pernambucano, cuenta la historia de la relación amorosa entre Clécio, un artista tropicalista, y Arlindo, un tímido soldado que sirve al régimen militar en el año 1978. Como metodología, la cartografía, inspirada en los filósofos de la diferencia Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari, nos sirvió de guía para una atención creativa e inventiva en torno a las imágenes. Concluimos que la experiencia contracultural de los personajes de Tatuagem produce un currículo-anárquico que opera disidencias en las masculinidades en dos movimientos: 1) mediante la fuerza de la ironía y el libertinaje, la anarquía del lenguaje y la performance y 2) a través de un devenir mujer que se filtra por detrás, un territorio de placer abyectado por la cultura heterosexual, pero que cobra fuerza de rizoma en la película.

Palabras clave:
Currículo; género; sexualidad; cine; cartografía

FIRST SCENES...

Brazil, 1978. Everywhere, a repressive atmosphere still insists on being present, even if it is painted with less unbearable colors. Tinted with modest tones, as if waiting for the moment of a more hopeful turn, the waves that vibrate boldly point to the future, leaving the past as the background of this canvas to be reworked, since its total erasure is impossible in the face of the many marks already tattooed on the skin. In the clearing of death opened without mercy by the military regime in Brazil, which had been in power since the first day of April 1964, signaling the shadow of Mars that crowned the times that followed us with aggression and violence, lives in resistance were taken in the most diverse aspects of their presence in the world. These violent events were revealed through the bodies never found in the Araguaia region, the painful occupation of eternally resentful souls, or through exile, that pale path searching for flying saucers (Veloso, 1971).

The film Tatuagem (2013), the focus of this article and the first production of Pernambuco filmmaker and screenwriter Hilton Lacerda, is set in 1978. With the military dictatorship showing signs of exhaustion, and in the face of the first organized initiatives of the Brazilian homosexual movement, including the launch of the newspaper Lampião da Esquina, a reference in these incipient articulations, as well as the sexually contested influence of artists such as Secos & Molhados (Trevisan, 1986; Facchini, 2003), we are introduced to the Chão de Estrelas Theater Company, directed by Clécio Wanderley (Irandhir Santos), which operates in the cities of Recife and Olinda (Pernambuco), where he creates a house cabaret on the outskirts of the city that serves as a home and space for the group's performances. Through debauchery and anarchy, the artists, mostly representatives of marginalized groups such as the transvestite Paulete (Rodrigo García), provoke the power and moralism of the military regime. With performances that blur the boundaries of gender and sexuality, religiosity, and dominant conservatism, they signal another form of resistance that some leftist political groups have not yet understood as such.

In this tortuous scenario, where the political opening is still taking place under the desire to silence the most pronounced differences that do not agree with the hegemonic sectors of Brazil (white, heterosexual, religious, conservative, etc.), a moral panic reigns, generating a series of persecutions that seek to eliminate - or at least stifle - the presence of dissenting social subjects and all their cultural expressions from social life and public visibility. For Rodolfo Londero (2014), the narrative of the moral crisis that spread throughout Brazil, which was even more evident during the government of General Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), was intended as a discursive legitimization of the repressive acts of that period, massaging the interests of conservative groups responsible for maintaining the military dictatorship.

In the field of the struggle for self-affirmation, which is therefore opposed to any form of suffocation of multiple existences, we include artists in general, and we consider gay and lesbian activists during the military dictatorship. Along with leftist activists, they were the preferred targets of conservative sectors, as if they were responsible for the moral degradation of Brazilian society and therefore worthy of existential erasure. We are not only highlighting here the macro political aspects of power struggles, that is, those that affect the institutionality and the main forms of governance of a nation, which are the targets of contention, for example, of the militants of the armed organizations of the dictatorship, but also of contemporary political parties (Rolnik, 1987; 2018; 2023). There is a micropolitical aspect to be considered that works with the production of subjectivities at the level of everyday life, intimacy, and sexuality, in the relationship with oneself and with others, and in the occupation of other possible worlds that do not necessarily pass through laws and/or morals established collectively. Thus, “[...] unlike the accumulated experience of resistance in the macro-political sphere, micropolitical activism is relatively recent in the history of the modern West, which makes this task even more challenging” (Rolnik, 2023, s/p).

In the lines of this article, we're not just talking about a revolution limited to weapons or the resonating stages of discourses that have become conventional and normative even on the left, but also a revolution that involves dicks, pussies, asses, kisses, sex, flips, frizzy hair in the air, clothes that mock gender binarism, censored films, and words that are out of step with their times. It's an anarchic-curriculum², as we'll develop later, inspired by Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Gilberto Gil, by the groups Secos & Molhados, Novos Baianos and all the queerness of Dzi Croquetes and Vivencial Diversiones³, all those Molotov bodies thrown from hand to hand against the authoritarianism of the dictatorship.

At one of the Chão de Estrelas' performances - a ravishing version of Caetano Veloso's song Esse cara - Clécio meets Arlindo (Jesuíta Barbosa), aka Fininha, a soldier from the countryside who serves in the army in the capital. Arlindo, previously Paulete's brother-in-law, becomes involved with the group's director in a romance that changes both their lives. Clécio's encounter with Fininha, like the Chão de Estrelas event in the soldier's life, becomes an agency, as the bodies act to different degrees in the transformation of the other. If Arlindo's discipline and rigor are subtly broken during the film, to the point where he attends a performance by the theater group at the height of his mockery of conservative society, Clécio also changes his perception of the world and, because of his passion for the boy, comes to question the free love he had previously proclaimed to others. This encounter gives rise to an affection that, according to Deleuze (2019, p. 44), “is a mixture of two bodies, one that is supposed to act on the other and the other that will receive the mark of the first”. We could say that Tatuagem is a movie of or about micropolitical resistance to dictatorship, but in a coexistent way, it deals with affections, modes of (un)learning that liberate our lives through pleasure, restoring pleasure to its character, inherited from Judeo-Christian culture, and its power of jubilation, necessary in a nebulous world.

It's interesting how, in Tatuagem we draw the lines that make up these subjectivities at every moment. In the cartography, the characters illustrate the movements that not only deterritorialize and leak identities, but also show the structures that found territories. If Clécio is the one who dares to challenge the prevailing authoritarian order through performance, he is also the one who, as mentioned above, at certain moments, through an ideal of romantic love, departs from the affective and desiring freedom that he used to proclaim when he fell in love with Fininha. It is also the artist, the father of a boy, who warns his mother that the house of the Chão de Estrelas company is not an environment for the boy's education. We are thus confronted with interesting movements that spread through the processes of subjectivation of gender, sexuality, and desire among the characters.

Using post-critical theories of the curriculum, our aim in this text is to map the dissidence of masculinity that is produced in tattoos and to understand the power of the film in educating people to look at differences in gender and sexuality. Through cartography and this desire to “give language to affections” (Rolnik, 1989), we seek to follow the lines of composition of subjectivities in the film, whether they are stratified, organized, territorialized in their family and identity zones, or deterritorialized in their processes of escape and production of difference (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011). In this “labyrinthine disposition” (Corazza, 1996), we attempt an “art of immanent attention” and a “creativity of the senses” (Stengers, 2017) to look at the details, the fragmentation of the pieces, the contours of the lines, attentive to imperceptible becoming, to what is overlooked in our objects of study, which becomes precisely the intensive dimension for a writing intensified by cinema.

What we are arguing here is that there is an anarchic-curriculum in Tatuagem that operates a becoming woman who passes through the ass in resistance to dictatorship, the result of a countercultural experience and a force for self-transformation. To this end, in addition to this introduction, we have organized the text into three points that cover a brief discussion of post-critical theories of the curriculum, the tropicalia traversal in the production of the curricular debunking, and the singularization in/of the ass as a micropolitical territory for experimenting with other masculinities.

CONNECTING WITH POST-CRITICAL THEORIES OF CURRICULUM

To broaden the objects of study to be problematized in the field of education, we turn to post-critical theories of curriculum, whose concern is to “[...] reveal the type of subject and subjectivities that different practices form, modify, educate, produce, fix, disseminate” (Paraíso, 2004, p. 293). Moving away from single truths, the philosophy of representation, language as a mere description of reality, and the emancipation of a rational and coherent subject, as the so-called critical theories in the field of education have so often proclaimed (Silva, 2017), post-critical perspectives on the curriculum become a creative and inventive arsenal so that not only the school and other formal spaces of education are understood as places of learning manners, habits, and values, but also the most diverse artifacts and cultural scenarios of contemporaneity.

Uncertainty, instability, and disorder, as forces of thought and politics (Gandin et al., 2002), are considered by post-critical authors in all their germinating power, signaling the necessary disengagement from hegemonic models of thought in favor of provisional, localized, and perspectival knowledge. To this end, post-critical curriculum theories draw on multiple sources, including postmodernism, poststructuralism, the philosophy of difference, cultural studies, queer theory, ecological, multiculturalist, and postcolonialism studies, among others (Maknamara; Paraíso, 2013), enlivening the educational field with "[...] a material of thought capable of capturing the myriad forces of the cosmos” (Corazza, 2002, p. 14).

A cartography of the Tatuagem curriculum, which could be understood as a cultural curriculum in its capacity to govern subjects amid the games of power and truth in the discourses conveyed in the media (Costa; Wortmann; Bonin, 2016), or an image curriculum that provides aesthetic experiences in the production of affections with the power to undo established forms and fixed ideas (Silva Junior, 2022), is possible because post-critical theories “imply the acceptance, experimentation, and legitimization of alternative forms that assume and privilege the dissident, the local, the partial, and the provisional in the processes of knowledge in education” (Maknamara, 2021, p. 182). 182) and also “[...] encourage the recognition that in the contemporary world, new cultural configurations compete with schools for the privilege of educating people” (Maknamara; Paraíso, 2013, p. 42). In arriving at curriculum theory, postcritical movements understand that the curriculum is “[...] inherently rhizomatic because it is a territory of proliferation of senses and multiplication of meanings” (Paraíso, 2010, p. 588).

Thus, beyond the promotion of watertight models of formatted identities, there is an understanding of the possibility of the proliferation of difference through curricula that are compositions of unexpected forces searching for a vitalist affirmation. The curriculum of Tatuagem, structured in a language of desire, is understood here through post-critical theories that are adept at identifying “signifiers, meanings, sounds, images, concepts, speeches, language, discursive positions, representations, metaphors, metonymies, ironies, inventions, flows, cuts..."(Corazza, 2001, p. 09). In the scrutiny proposed by cartography, one of the post-critical methodologies inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophy of difference, there is a desire to traverse a territory of (un)learning through film, taking “unforeseen directions or promoting disordered actions [...] subject to constant modification; connectable in all dimensions; dismountable, tearable, and reversible, in its multiple entrances and exits” (Corazza, 2010, p. 159-160).

Since truth is a "[...] fiction, invention, and creation” (Silva, 2001, p. 16), it is necessary to question the lines, images, representations, and power relations that produce curricula and to pay attention to all the desires and sayings that aim to construct subjects, not to reveal or emancipate them. As Sandra Corazza (2001, p. 12) tells us when talking about the curriculum, “[...] its language not only'represents' the world of things, but also manufactures this world, the things themselves, and the modality of relations between things”. In the interesting and intriguing game of curricular desires, it is up to post-critical theories to dance between forms and forces, always aiming, in all its temporality, to map a diagram whose emphasis is on the immanence of social and cultural games.

“MY BODY IN YOURS, IN GENERAL ANARCHIC”: THE POETICS OF A DEBAUCHED CURRICULUM

“Apaches, punks, existentialists, hippies, beatniks of all times: come together!”

Caetano Veloso, in Ele me deu um beijo na boca

(1982).

Caetano Veloso, in the excerpt from the song above, takes us back to the tone of the Chão de Estrelas Theater Company in its micropolitical operation in the authoritarian times of 1978. Paraphrasing the classic Marxist slogan (“Proletarians of all countries, come together!”), Veloso frays the political fabric of macro-political and economic hegemony, the banner of the leftist groups opposed to the Brazilian dictatorship. As a poet of the Brazilian countercultural movement, attuned to the Paris uprisings of 1968 and other international uprisings led by so-called minorities (women, gays, lesbians, transvestites, blacks, etc.) in their demand for a new society, this is the lyrical expression of a “molecular revolution” (Guattari; Rolnik, 1996) taking shape in Brazil and represented in Tatuagem.

Together with Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik (1996), we understand the molecular revolution as an intense effervescence in the creation of new subjectivities around repetitive patterns, moving away from the alienation of the mere reproduction of current frameworks. In this revolutionary process, not only the social relations of larger geographies are transformed, but also the daily and interpersonal ones, through the invention of other sociabilities, affections, and loves, in which the new emergences of dreams, imagination, and desire also stand out. For Guattari and Rolnik (1996, p. 46), “these are molecular revolutions that produce mutations in the conscious and unconscious subjectivity of individuals and social groups.

00:00:49 - To the sound of applause and a voice with a circus-like intonation introducing an as-yet-unnamed show, the camera pans to the right across a dimly lit room. What we see, aside from the poorly cut silver stars stuck to the walls, are a few precarious props scattered about the set, to be traversed by our eyes eager for revelation. “The Moulin Rouge of the suburbs, the Broadway of the poor, the Studio 54 of the favela: welcome to Chão de Estrelas! With these words, the animator introduces us to the universe of Tatuagem, drawing more applause from the audience and preparing us for an evening whose arsenal is debauchery.

The first few minutes of Tatuagem, as shown in the fragment above, introduce us to Chão de Estrelas as the opposite/periphery of trendy places like the French Moulin Rouge, the American Broadway, and Studio 54. With attractions such as Paulete Beirinha, Suzane Estilo de Gata, Marquinhos Odara and the “Golden Member” contest, the group announces through its cicerone that its weapon is debauchery that shakes the block and “makes all forms of authority tremble”. By using mocking language in the composition of their show, Chão de Estrelas celebrates precariousness as a way of empowering a place of enunciation - which we could call queer - by turning insults and the vocabulary of the peripheral transvestite into tactics of struggle. The chosen language becomes performative because it creates a specific atmosphere for this group's show, as if we were already entering a recognized precariousness, but it is also the basis for a politics of alliance (Butler, 2018) necessary for survival in times of ruin. Along with Judith Butler (2018, p. 36), we understand that the performativity of language, in this case in the resumption of the precarious as a spectacle to be made visible, “[...] makes something happen or brings some phenomenon into existence,” such as the cooperative rescue of lives on the margins of hegemonic culture.

At another point, when a shopkeeper calls her a “fucking boring chicken” (00:07:25) while she's sunbathing on the beach with Clécio, Paulete, the hyperbole of the dissident body in the transvestite's expression, ridicules and blocks the insult through her claim to that place: “Oh, chicken! You discovered Brazil, you! Be careful not to attack me with this offense...". If we place the event at the end of the 1970s, during the protracted political reopening of Brazil, we can see how dissident lines began to take shape in society, albeit under the whip of the prevailing moral panic. Clécio, who comments with Paulete on the future steps of the theater group shortly after the event, expresses his desire for “the practice of the improbable, along with the revelation of disorder. It's interesting to note the effects produced by a queer body that affirm its existence - hair blowing in the wind, a smile on its face, graceful gestures - and that materially announce Clécio's words. This is not an abstract statement, but a brief condensation of what the discourse of Chão de Estrelas can represent in the reterritorialization of her subjectivities: in liquid form, but with the ability to enter the multiple orifices of society, such as the douche through the ass, a territory of frights and desires.

Because Paulete doesn't “understand” the words, even though she is her own language in motion, Clécio explains: “Practice; instead of thinking, you practice. Fucking instead of jerking off. And epiphany is to give direction to life, to give body to the soul, to give vent to desire”. The director, by using the words praxis and epiphany in a different tone than usual, the former with an always marked Marxist meaning, the latter religious/mystical, gives us a new expression that illustrates micropolitical action, part of the counter-cultural movement that came to life in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s through tropicalism and what came to be called anarchic. We can see that Chão de Estrelas fits into this creative gap that opened up in the midst of the gray authoritarian cycle that shook Brazil, marked by a latent desire to transform not only the social body as a whole, but also relations with others and with oneself, daily life, pleasure...

Such forms of [other] struggle in the military dictatorship were interpreted by the traditional left as debauchery, that is, an irresponsible and depoliticized way of understanding the reality of their time, as well as its participants, “[...] labeled 'Marcuse's boys', 'alienated' and, finally, 'crazy' for their appreciation of intuitive, sensory, and imaginative processes” (Barros, 2014, p. 47). However, according to Sheyla Diniz (2020), the debauched would be all those who radically adopted an anarchist, anti-bourgeois position, were supporters of the hippie movement, communal life, and psychedelic drug experiences, were curious about Eastern, indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian religions, and, what notoriously disturbed the traditional left, rejected totalizing historical explanations, as well as experiencing the pleasures of the body and sexuality in a freer way. Thus, the Anarchic became the Tupiniquim version of the countercultural movement that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s, which “[...] demanded transformations at the subjective and cultural levels, beyond the structural revolution itself, although one and the other were not excluded” (Diniz, 2020, p. 02).

Persecuted by the traditional left for not supporting the armed struggle against the dictatorship, as well as by conservative groups who considered them a threat to bourgeois values and good morals, many artists, and here we highlight the Tropicalists, used an aesthetic arsenal to provoke micropolitical upheavals in society. According to Arnaldo Contier et al. (2003, p. 149), “[...] their aesthetic principles came from synthesis, imagination, aggression, invention, surprise, the shock image, the ridiculous, the tasteless, the grotesque,", which promoted a whirlwind of questioning the status quo and the dominant powers, creating subjectivities that conformed to the model of society in force. According to Celso Favaretto (2000, p. 114), “Tropicalist activity materializes as a surrealist exercise: a practice in which reality is fertilized by imagination and dream, illuminating repressed possibilities,” as illustrated in the following scenes:

00:17:46 - A general shot⁴ to the sound of applause opens the sequence of sketches that Chão de Estrelas performs, although we don't know for sure if it's the same night: (1) Dressed as a queer version of the Dragon of Independence - the Dragoness - Clécio salutes the audience to the sound of a military melody. Cuts to sequential shots⁵ show the audience divided into active spectators and others kissing. To the sound of the Brazilian national anthem, Dragonesa introduces two characters who crown Brazil: "Pri" and "Quito". (2) After intertextual speeches by Clécio quoting Glauber Rocha and Glauce Rocha, two idols of the new Brazilian cinema, Professor Joubert recites a poem in which he proclaims the difference, the multiple, and the future. The camera cuts back and forth between the first and the very first shots⁶, revealing the figure of Paulete in a dress made from the fabric of a sticky towel, performing to the sound of the Pernambuco anthem. (3) Medium shot and low lighting - with only the flashing lights in the background - and two female figures in red dresses dancing while a black man snaps his fingers. The camera focuses first on the breasts of one and then on the hairy dick of the other while the audience shouts. (4) In medium shot, three figures, perhaps civil servants, divide themselves between the mechanics of bureaucracy and the fruition of libido to soften the hard lines of boredom to the sound of Vivaldi's Concerto no. 1 Primavera. (5) With a tone of debauchery, Chão de Estrelas presents a pastoral with two shepherdesses, one of whom is an effeminate homosexual, while the old man, played by Clécio, advises the two about marriage: the soldier is not suitable for marriage, but the transvestite is because he can come as a man and as a woman.

The excerpt describes the subversive content and the lines of tension, including those of gender and sexuality, which accompany the entire film and that can be better worked out here in the cartography of images. A tropicalist aesthetic is a hallmark of Tatuagem, as we see the predominance of a series of characteristics associated with tropicalism, such as dialogism, the critical reinvention of Brazilian culture, ambiguity, the juxtaposition of images, the cult of pleasure, laughter, debauchery, and satire. As “agents of provocation” (Contier et al., 2003), the Tropicalists of Chão de Estrelas undertake what we have here called an anarchic-curriculum, approaching queer by promoting previously marginalized, pejorative, and undignified quotes in word games and images that celebrate difference and promote the visualization of the despicable. In this way, “the logic of offense is tensioned when, in a movement of refusal to normalize, the place of strangeness and deviance is assumed to be possible" (Silva; Paraíso, 2020, p. 134, emphasis added).

Caetano Veloso points out that the anarchic is a Brazilian version of the counterculture, suggesting looseness and mismanagement, telling us that "desbundar" means to let oneself be carried away by the buttocks, taking here as a synecdoche for "body" the Afro-Brazilian word that designates the part close to excretory functions and sex (Veloso, 1997, p. 469). An anarchic curriculum operates in the spaces between normalizations, giving space and privilege to micropolitical confrontations through debauchery, the juxtaposition of contradictory images and ambiguity, and turning inside out the ways of life and the materials of expression that uncritically conform to hegemonic forms. If for traditional groups - right-wing or left-wing - the prefix “des”, of negation, next to butt (bunda), was a sign of a lack of courage on the part of the agents of the micro-political provocation of their time, because it meant, “[...] in good colloquial Portuguese, ‘getting your ass away from the syringe’ or ‘cover one’s ass', that is, abstaining, retreating” (Diniz, 2020, p. 04), we see anarchic as a movement that pulls the strings that seek to limit the meanings of politics.

Making use of anarchic thinking, we rummage through the meanings given to this way of life and understand them not as acts of cowardice or depoliticization. Quite the opposite, the anarchic-curriculum, as a practice of signification, promotes multiple (un)learnings that retreat in the face of straight modes - linear, direct, rights - but advance into unoccupied territories, releasing becomings that have desire as their maximum force of attraction. A curriculum that “takes its ass out of the line” because it's not just made up of two points, but of a myriad of points that form oblique curves meeting on all sides in an uncontrollable way. It has a rhizomatic expression, because “[...] it can be broken, broken anywhere, and it also resumes along one or other of its lines and along other lines” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011, p. 25). By taking its ass out of the line, the anarchic-curriculum chooses to temporarily inhabit the tortuous, the pleated, the marginal, and the opaque canvas, even if, at some point, it crosses the line so that it can debauch it again.

Under the inspiration of Jack Halberstam (2011) in celebrating the inadequacy of queer, we see the anarchic-curriculum as a failed art, since it does not conform to the moral ruler of its time, preferring the margin to the center, the transvestite to the soldier, free love to bourgeois marriage, the difference that comes and goes (in and out, in and out, in and out...) through the ass to the phallocratic that confuses power with power. The anarchic-curriculum thus promotes processes of singularization (Guattari; Rolnik, 1996), that is, singular modes of subjectivation that assert themselves differently from a subjective massification that grasps the norm and dominant values as a way of life.

In the scenes described, there are a number of "points of singularity" (Guattari; Rolnik, 1996) as responses to their time. Faced with the authoritarianism of current forms of hegemonic culture, a point of singularity, according to the author, can fall into limbo, becoming barren, or it can become a process of singularization, which, according to Guattari, "[...] coincides with a desire, with a taste for life, with the will to build the world in which we find ourselves, with the establishment of devices to change the types of society, the types of values that are not ours" (1985, p. 17). By praising difference and the multiple as forces for the future, as in Professor Joubert's poem, Tatuagem teaches us that identities, especially those privileged by the dominant culture, are bonds that strangle becoming, allowing gangrene to spread throughout the body, making the flow of life impossible. In this way, there is a micro-political struggle materialized in the images against a majority, understood not as "[...] a greater relative quantity, but [as] the determination of a state or a pattern in relation to which both the greater and the lesser quantities are said to be minorities: white-man, adult-male, etc." (Deleuze; Gattoni). (Deleuze; Guattari, 2012, p. 92).

By overlapping images in the described settings - (1) militarism and the queer; (2) the formality of the anthem and the exaltation of the multiple; (3) the delicate female body and the hairy dick; (4) bureaucracy and libido; (5) the soldier and the transvestite - Tatuagem shows us that an anarchic-curriculum specializes in contrasting images so that a critical discomfort can announce itself, rehearse a gesture, a slight movement... For Georges Didi-Huberman (2018, p. 20, my emphasis), "[...] the past becomes legible, and therefore knowable, when singularities appear and articulate dynamically with each other - through montage, writing, cinematography - like so many moving images." The tail that appears in the middle of a body interpreted as female shows us how misinterpretations are since they are based on the codes of a dominant semiotics (Guattari, 1985), so experimentation is preferable. The Pastoral, a symbol of the culture that desecrates the sacred by proclaiming the privilege of a transvestite over a soldier in marriage because of the multiple possibilities of pleasure she can offer, shows us that montage causes tremors because it de-hierarchizes existences, placing them as contradictory for the fructification of thought. According to Didi-Huberman (2017, p. 119), "politics can only be revealed by showing the conflicts, the paradoxes [...] this is why montage appears as the procedure par excellence [...] things appear there taking a position".

In Tatuagem, as we'll see in the next section, the anarchic-curriculum carnavalizes issues of gender and sexuality in particular (Silva Junior, 2021) because it expands the possibilities and no longer surrounds itself with heteronormative limits. This is in line with the arguments of Patrícia Barros (2014), when she says that tropicalism transformed Brazil from "this or that" into Brazil of "this and that" through an anthropophagy of images, new values and aesthetic experimentation. Thus, by making the multiple (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011), there is an opening for the rhizome, the nutrient of the anarchic-curriculum in Tatuagem, to take as its "fabric the conjunction 'and...and...and...'" capable of shaking up the verb to be, linked to essences and affiliations (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011, p. 48).

THE ASS AS MICROPOLITICAL TERRITORY: THE HOLE OF SINGULARITY

“Ass: masculine noun; orifice at the lower end of the large intestine, through which excrement is expelled; anus.”

Oxford Languages Dictionary

“My ass is yours; my ass is yours. My ass is yours, it's yours, it's yours, you've already licked it, you've already fucked it [...]

You defeated me, my ass is yours”.

Valesca Popozuda

“My asshole is revolutionary”.

Guy Hocquengheim

“Hey, Bolsonaro, kiss my ass!”

Brazil

These passages - from songs, philosophies, formalities, and slogans - show us that the ass is in everyone's mouth. In an (un)voluntary Greek kiss, many people have rubbed their asses on their tongues to offend someone, to praise pleasure, or to share in words what everyone has, even if not everyone wants to give it. From philosophy to funk, there is something in the middle of the ass that puzzles us, makes us uncomfortable, and makes us laugh, nurturing a series of taboos and jokes that haunt us regardless of age or social group. The ass is omnipresent and therefore part of the divine.

In Tatuagem, although the first scenes reveal, in a normative slip, a certain importance given to the cock, as in the “Golden Member” contest mentioned at the beginning of this article, it is the ass that gains importance in the film's narrative, as if experimenting with a new territory that has not yet been explored. Javier Saéz and Sejo Carrascosa's (2016, p. 10) thought-provoking question, “How is it possible to think from the ass or through the ass?” seems to animate filmmaker Hilton Lacerda and the Chão de Estrelas Theater Company in their experimentation with language and the body, pointing to a countercultural performance. Thinking from and through the ass is about producing new meanings for a world codified by the majority, appealing to other marginal configurations that enrich the alternatives of not only interpreting the environment but of coitus with all that lives, of anthropologically devouring existences. Thinking from and through the ass is tantamount to understanding that there is a “state of domination” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2012), but that the libertine impulse is necessary in order, inspired by Deleuze (2013), to enrage the majority, as he has done with other authors, producing a monster but one full of vitality to create other sensibilities.

The opening scenes of Tatuagem point to the contrasts celebrated at every moment in the film. It's as if we were looking at a visual metaphor for the lines of tension that produce the lives of the characters: the retreats and advances, contractions and loosening, like an ass that flashes with pleasure [or fear]. Arlindo, in his militarized context, always appears hardened, permeated by situations of bodily control and discipline, under constant suspicion of his masculinity. Paulete, on the other hand, like the other characters in Chão de Estrelas, seems to play with gender, weaving an anarchic-curriculum that carnavalizes performances and which, according to Favaretto (2000, p. 132-133), “[...] abolishes the distance between men, between the sacred and the profane, between the sublime and the insignificant, between the comic and the serious, between the high and the low, etc.; relativizing all values”. If, in the barracks of Tatuagem, we have a curriculum whose ass is always on the line, in Chão de Estrelas, there is what is called a “[...] discursive contingency producing affections and folds - ethical, aesthetic, and political” (Pocahy, 2020, p. 316), putting the ass into play and expanding all its possibilities of opening up to desire.

Arlindo - or Fininha - is, at all times, negotiating the performance of his masculinity. Even when he sets up temporary stakes in the “men's houses” (Welzer-Lang, 2001), such as in the barracks and at soccer matches with his fellow soldiers, or when he manages the closet, this device for regulating what is exposed/assumed or not in homosexuality (Sedgwick, 2007), such as when he visits his relatives in the countryside and his girlfriend, there are open gaps from which experimentation and becoming can flow. Even before she meets Clécio, we see that a suspicion - which will later be confirmed - surrounds Fininha's life: her affair with a high-ranking soldier in the army, which gave her protection in the barracks. His colleagues constantly question him (00:06:14), making fun of his 'fear of spiders', when referring to women's vulvae, or his running away when asked to go out and screw some girls.

However, it is important to point out, along with Daniel Welzer-Lang (2001), that these spaces of homosocialization are not only conducive to homophobic acts, whether physical or psychological, such as those experienced by Arlindo, but there are also many games of male eroticism. It's as if the ass was always lurking in the wings, emitting Dionysian vibrations that were impossible to contain in those young, libertine bodies. In one of the scenes, soldier Gusmão (Ariclenes Barroso), surrounded by a swarm of dicks on all sides, questions Arlindo's masculinity in an attempt to fit him into the attributes expected of a 'true' male: virility, sexual potency, and, above all, heterosexuality. We can see here that “[...] male domination produces homophobia so that, with threats, men can put on the so-called normal schemes of virility” (Welzer-Lang, 2001, p. 465). Even though he was Fininha's tormentor in the scene described, a little later in the film, soldier Gusmão lets slip his desires for Arlindo, which shows how sexuality and gender are shaky lines that, as much as they are subjected to a series of pedagogies of masculinity throughout life, are unstable, undefined, and potent in their variation. We understand, using the formulations of Suely Rolnik (1989, p. 49), that the lines of gender and sexuality are like lines of simulation, which are “[...] always oscillating in the direction of pure flow and disenchanting matter, causing territory to collapse”.

The military dictatorship represented the maximization of hegemonic masculinity, which, supported by fierce persecution of homosexuals, sought to consolidate a model of gender and sexuality that had been in constant question since the 1960s throughout the world. Among Brazil's censors during this authoritarian period, homosexuality was seen as a manifestation of subversion, as immorality, and as the fruit of communism, as we can see in the ban on one of Chão de Estrelas' performances (01:31:27) and in the repression that invaded one of the nights at the group's concert hall (01:37:46). In Tatuagem, if on the one hand we have the attempt to preserve the anal folds as a trophy of a virility to be reinforced in shaky times, we also have a certain positivization of the ass (Saéz; Carrascosa, 2016), that is, the elastic affirmation of a hole that is the singularity of the undoing of the Man-Form, that is, of the model of masculinity expected for the subjection of men.

So many are the debates raised by the ass that one of the torture practices chosen by the military in authoritarian times, especially for men who were captured for their resistance to the regime, was centered on the anus. In his research on the gender implications of the systematic use of torture during the military dictatorship, Emerson Gracia (2018) reports on rape, shocks to the anus, penetration with fingers, and metal objects, among many other ways in which women and especially men were subjected to snitching on fellow members of the opposition to the military. In the case of men, “the focus on the genitals and anus and the frequent threats of rape, especially with objects, sought to diminish the militant in his masculinity, bending him to the will of the torturer and humiliating him” (Gracia, 2018, p. 132).

In an attempt to dismantle the resistance groups, the military appealed to the inferiority of the tortured man, limiting his masculinity by breaking his impenetrability, since passive penetration is part of the exclusively female performance. Since "[...] a penetrated man is no longer a man, he is a woman” (Sáez; Carrascosa, 2016, p. 181), not only physical torture, but also psychological [and gendered] violence was used by the military, which wanted to preserve not only the macro-political management of society according to the dominant groups, but also the micropolitical performance. Perhaps this is where the frequent association between homosexuality and communism came from, as “[...] threats to Brazil's security and viability” (Cowan, 2018, p. 49).

In a country whose symbols of authority exude hypermasculinity, the control of the ass becomes essential to the maintenance of social and cultural frameworks. Giving the ass, or “distributing” (Popozuda, 2013), becomes a micropolitical tool consisting of “[...] acts of creation inscribed in the established existential territories and their respective cartographies, breaking the peaceful scene of the instituted” (Rolnik, 2018, p. 61). What we mean by this is that the curriculum anarchic, as seen in Tatuagem, is countercultural because when we are immersed in a “cisheteropatriarchal culture” (Silva; Nascimento; Caetano, 2021), when we debase the tangled lines of production of dominant gender and sexuality, we invent alternatives for difference to take shape in the world.

The dominant culture tries to bind us rigidly to certain semiotic systems for the organization and orientation of society. Also, according to Guattari and Rolnik (1996), we have an industrialization of subjectivities that serves the interests of dominant groups in an attempt to block the processes of singularization. If we say that the anarchic-curriculum in Tatuagem is countercultural, it is precisely because it opens up passageways between the dominant semiotics of gender and sexuality. There is a semiotics of/in the ass that differs from the cultural privilege given to the tail. A production of meanings of the opposite order, full of folds and reaching territories that are only marginally explored in cisheteropatriarchal culture. If "[...] the architecture of the body is political” (Preciado, 2014, p. 31), the exclusion of the ass as a territory of pleasure and as a space of freedom for all forms of gender has everything to do with the maintenance of heteronormativity, being in a scenario of constant flickering because it is performative.

In their genealogy of the donkey, Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa (2016) show us how the body has historically been dismembered and signified in many ways, focusing on the parts that are or are not worthy of sexual pleasure, especially when they are part of a heteronormative regime of truth. By highlighting the strength of the ethics of passivity, the authors point out that “[...] the construction of sexuality, of desire, is traversed by many transversal variables, but above all within a system, the heteropatriarchal one, where the values of the penetrator [the donkey] are the highest” (Sáez; Carrascosa, 2016, p. 161). Thus, because of heterosexual lifestyles, the ass has become a repulsive area that is directed only at the excretory functions of the digestive system, since the cock-pussy conjunction, the basis of sexual reproduction in the heteronormative regime, has become the only acceptable and legitimate possibility in hegemonic culture. If we believe, with Preciado (2014), that contrassexuality is the denaturalization of heteronormativity, provoking incisive questions about how bodies are hierarchized and defined under a supposed nature, we also understand that the donkey is a “universal contrassexual center” (Preciado, 2014, p. 36). From this center - diffuse, disjointed, and deliciously unstable - deterritorialization is generated that provokes a becoming-woman among men as they thaw the masculine form in favor of a multiplicity of experiences of masculinities.

00:29:19 - Under a light reminiscent of the colors of the Brazilian flag, Clécio appears in the right corner of a dimly lit stage, while a guitar strums a few chords. In singing the song Esse Cara, by Caetano Veloso, Clécio looks at Arlindo, who is in the audience for the first time. There we see their glances cross and an atmosphere of seduction gain density with the soldier in the blurred foreground of the image. Cut.

00:32:32 - After the show, Paulete introduces her brother-in-law, Arlindo, to the group. Clécio and Arlindo greet each other and the young man sits down for a chat. Another contrast in the film is evident in the way the characters look at each other and gesture in the scene: Fininha's collected shyness and Clécio's extravagant magnetism. During the conversation and exchange of glances, the camera zooms in to capture the hard-on that vibrates between the two. Cut. Back in the dressing room, Dolores Duran's voice resonates on the LP as the two approach each other. The scene, all in sequence, transforms the camera into our eyes, mouth, and nose, and we follow the conversation that ends in an intense kiss. Cut. On the bed, Clécio performs oral sex on Arlindo who, after more caresses, turns his ass over to be fucked.

One of the most intense moments in the narrative of Tatuagem is the scene described above, which shows the first meeting between Clécio and Fininha in the cabaret house of Chão de Estrelas. The actor, dressed up on stage, seduces the soldier with the lyricism of Caetano Veloso, a landmark of tropicalism. The atmosphere of desire that spreads like dust from the performance of the song Esse Cara unleashes an aesthetic experience with the image that seems to put us in touch with the very excitement of the two characters. If the filmic atmosphere is an “[...] energy field that circulates in a specific context from a body or a specific situation”, as Inês Gil (2005, p. 141-142) tells us, it can also be the sensitive expression of a counter-space, as Michel Foucault (2013) tells us. For the philosopher, this type of space would be a heterotopia, as it has “the rule of juxtaposing in a real place several spaces that would normally be or should be incompatible” (Foucault, 2013, p. 24). By placing a soldier - a representative of the dictatorship - in a house-cabaret inhabited by bodies on the margins of this same regime, the film teaches us the power of montage as a producer of experiences that unleash unimaginable becomings. The atmosphere, full of intensities, densities and dynamisms (Gil, 2005), leads us to feel the possible openings of these counter-spaces in our own bodies. The drama of Dolores Duran's music, the characters' dancing, the sequence shot that accompanies the scene, the sound of the kisses and the dim lighting place us as spectators of an unexpected romance that, because of its preciousness, fills us with urgency.

It's as if Tatuagem were offering us a micro-political attack on the military dictatorship through the affirmation of desire between a soldier and an artist from the counter-cultural resistance. In the film - and in this scene in particular - Fininha not only gets involved affectively and sexually with another man, but also distorts the hegemonic geography of pleasure and offers his ass to Clécio. The film shows a soldier with a performance of masculinity that we could interpret as heteronormative, giving his ass to a queer woman who moves between different degrees of affection. In this positivization of the ass and sexual passivity, in other words, of the body being penetrated by another, the ass of a soldier being screwed by an artist, leaks deterritorializations of masculinities everywhere because it doesn't obey the logic of the passive-feminine queer who is fucked by the active-dominating male, present in the heterosexual-inspired imaginary. In the cultural and historical context staged in the film, the gender dichotomy with repercussions on heteronormative-inspired sexual performance (male-active-eater x faggot-passive-eater) is turned upside down and calls into question the complexity of the body as a material support for multiple points of pleasure.

Since “the ass is the essence of the queer, it is their leitmotif and the organ through which they lose their dignity and become the abject, the undesirable and exterminable” (Saéz; Carrascosa, 2016, p. 95, emphasis added), what affections are provoked by the dictatorship's ass, being devoured precisely by everything it most abhors? Is there a becoming-woman that passes through Arlindo's ass? In view of the scenes, we understand that Hilton Lacerda promotes an anarchic-curriculum by mocking cisheteropatriarchal culture, by overturning hegemonic positions, and by problematizing the signifiers that are tattooed on the body and in sexual performances, trying to detach them from the performative acts that produce the naturalization of gender and sexuality.

Among the various cogs, divisions, and machinery of this orgasm factory, this article intentionally focuses on the ass, this pleasurable geography of the human body that slips between meanings of repulsion, debauchery, biological functionalism, and desire. Here, we don't want to explore the content of various other bodily possibilities for sex, but rather emphasize how, specifically, the ass was mapped by these researchers in Tatuagem. Perception is always subtraction (Deleuze, 2018; Sauvagnargues; Raniere; Hack, 2020) and cuts out a specific object that satisfies the viewer's needs from a number of possible points of luminosity. For Deleuze (2018, p. 106), “in perception thus defined, there is never something else, or more than in the thing: on the contrary, there is ‘less’. We perceive the thing minus what does not interest us according to our needs", with our receiving face being a set of lines and points that retain the thing perceived. In cartography as a'methodological' path, the researcher's perception translates the affections on display, which could be different as the subjectivities of those who are in front of the images change and then write down their affections. Calling into question sexual difference [everyone has an anus], reproductive work, and the romantic image (Lauro, 2023), our theoretical-methodological disposition in this text is to prolapse the ass for as long as jouissance lasts.

For Félix Guattari (1985, p. 35, my emphasis), “a man who detaches himself from the phallic disputes inherent in all formations of power will engage, in various possible ways, in such a becoming woman”. Functioning as an unleasher that proliferates differences, becoming-woman erupts when bodies follow different routes to what the norms establish as truth, preferring experimentation to the reproduction of identity. Since “[...] the ass is the supreme shield of masculinity” (Saéz; Carrascosa, 2016, p. 32) and “[...] if it is penetrated, it is feminine; if it is impenetrable, it is masculine” (Idem, p. 180), Arlindo's becoming-woman is expressed in the empowerment of his anal pleasure, affirming a masculinity that does not repeat the configurations of the Man-Form. If hegemonic masculinity, a symbol valued by the dominant culture, is impenetrable, because it only uses its cock as a devourer and can never assume a passive-female position in sexual relations, with Fininha, we see how “the body is a socially constructed text” (Preciado, 2014, p. 26), which can be experienced in multiple ways.

The active-male x passive-female binarism is a territorialization of power that operates on models of gender and sexuality. If the male is the one who eats and the female is the one who gives - under the dictates of an organization and hierarchization of the geographies of pleasure - the becoming-woman presents herself when the desiring, tired of the daddy-mommy congruence, breaks the cisheteropatriarchal curriculum and turns her entire body into an orgasm factory. This includes both homosexual and heterosexual relationships, which experience the extension of their pleasures beyond the watertight dichotomies taught and reproduced in the most diverse instances of society.

In this argument, we are not only referring to passive gay men who use their asses for pleasure, but also to heterosexual men who venture into anal practices such as finger introduction, gender role reversals—being penetrated by cisgender women with penis simulators or by trans women with their tails—and the infinite other possibilities not categorized here. We understand that these experiences unleash a deconstruction of what we understand by man and masculinity in our cisheteropatriarchal culture: becoming women.

This becoming-woman "[...] is much more than becoming other, it is a step towards becoming other than what the repressive social body has authoritatively determined for us" (Guattari, 1985, pp. 43-44, emphasis added). If to be macho, a symbol of the military dictatorship, is to be impenetrable, Arlindo's performance puts the authoritarian regime on its ass and mocks it from behind, destabilizing the sites of desire production valued by cisheteropatriarchy. In the anarchic-curriculum, debauchery becomes a counter-sexual device because it is counter-cultural, that is, because it engages in a micro-political struggle against the dominant semiotics, inventing other ways of experiencing genders and sexualities. By stuttering the dominant language and modifying conventional sign systems (Corazza, 2000), curricular debauchery carnivalizes situations of oppression and makes the improbable a possibility for countercultural questioning.

With the understanding that "every curriculum is a text imbued with power - it prescribes knowledge, ways of being, thinking, and acting, indicating thoughts, values, exercises, and attitudes to be practiced in the sense of constituting certain types of subjects" (Maknamara, 2020, p. 59), some aspects resonate in the anarchic-curriculum of Tatuagem. By working with montage and ambiguity, the film teaches us how the lines of conformation of gender and sexuality are transitory, shifting, and contingent. In the performances of Chão de Estrelas, we see a curriculum from the moment that this montage opens up space for the creation of new values because there is a well-delineated contrast between bodies, experiences, and performances when placed in de-hierarchized conditions: the valorization of the transvestite and not the soldier; the joy of abject bodies in contrast to the sad face of the traditional family; free love as an affirmation of a way of relating beyond traditional monogamous relationships, etc. From the aesthetic (and technical) point of view of the film, realism also invites us to enter the universe of Tatuagem, as Isaac Aragão (2018) shows us, whether it's the filming in real locations, the sequence shots, the simultaneous dialogues between the characters, or the songs with popular appeal, as if to seduce us to embark on a journey that also makes us question our lives.

There is an exercise that provokes effects of meaning in the gazes, understanding them as disturbing our unquestionable perspectives, since the gaze "is the rumination of seeing: its experience extended in time and space and which therefore establishes us in another consciousness of being" (Tiburi, 2004, s/p). The meanings in Tatuagem emerge with a large dose of debauchery, and this is another critical exercise in the anarchic-curriculum in question that can generate new "models of sociability and affectivity" (Maknamara, 2020, p. 59). Since the ass, that humiliated territory of the human body, is what gives density to the aesthetic atmosphere of Tatuagem, as in the scene where the soldier Fininha takes it up the ass, and in the next scenes that proclaim the anal utopia as a festival of experimentation with unbridled pleasures, we see that debauchery is a hallmark of this curricular exercise, since it is a grammar that ridicules norms and puts them in abeyance through humor and contempt. By making the dictatorship take it up the ass, Tatuagem teaches us to use aesthetic means to question order, to create breaks in norms and spaces of suspension and hiatus that can open up creative spaces of time and space for the exercise of new values.

01:19:47 - After Chão de Estrelas makes fun of the censorship imposed on them in a previous skit, the camera moves to several asses rolling around on stage. Against a backdrop of tropicalist costumes, the music exalts the diversity of asses. As if conducting an orchestra, Clécio has fun with the become-violin of the ass, the become-flute of the ass, the become-piano of the ass... “There's an ass for everyone. There's ass for me, and there's ass for you. There's ass to give and ass to sell. There's an ass that has a medal; there's the colonel's ass that brings happiness to everyone in the headquarters [...] The pope has ass, our illustrious president has ass, the working class has ass and, if you doubt it, even God has the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotent ass,” they sing as they mingle naked in the middle of the audience in a chorus of exaltation of the ass.

The performance of the ass is undoubtedly a celebration of counterculture in Tatuagem. If the cock-pussy conjunction is an ode to cisheteropatriarchal culture and the dominant semiotics of capitalism, since the family and (hetero)sexual reproduction are part of the machinery that sustains the relations of production in this regime, the ass is a marginal opening that leads to the affirmation of becoming a woman. This becoming is, according to Guattari and Rolnik (1996, p. 73), “an economy of desire that tends to question a certain kind of finality in the production of social relations, a certain kind of demarcation that makes it possible to speak of a world dominated by male subjectivity. By singing about the pope's donkey, the colonel's donkey, and God, symbols of religiosity and conservatism in authoritarian times, Chão de Estrelas desierarchize positions of power based on the geographies of the gendered body, operating through language and performance a minoritization that could be “[...] a political affair, [which] calls for a whole work of power, an active micropolitics” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2012, p. 93). At another point (01:35:49), Arlindo also participates in the “ass performance." His lighter, laughing face shows a transformation of his subjectivities in the encounter with the group of artists.

Although this last performance was repressed by the military forces that violently entered the cabaret house, we can see that the lines of escape are impossible and leave the characters with alternatives in the face of what has already been established.

According to Deleuze and Guattari (2012, p. 93), “[...] it is always'man' who is the subject of a becoming, but he is only such a subject when he enters into a becoming-minority that tears him away from his greater identity”. This deterritorialization is made possible by experimenting with the body through the actualization of all the virtues of pleasure. In Tatuagem, the ass, a symbol of homosexual passivity—in other words, of the position and subject devalued in relations between the sexes and sexualities, including among homosexuals themselves—becomes a zone of intensities that seeks to stimulate us to question the social order of jouissance, heteronormativity, and the authoritarianism that clothe themselves in impenetrable masculinities. It is therefore “a body transformed into a bundle of forces” (Carneiro, 2018, p. 337, my emphasis) that overcomes the invisibilization promoted by the form.

Declaring that “the only thing that saves us, the only thing that unites us, the only possible utopia, is the utopia of the ass” (01:22:17), Clécio teaches us through performance Michel Foucault's (2013) reflections on utopian bodies. According to the philosopher, as much as utopia has been constructed in places of idealization, including the attempt to suffocate the body, it is from the body that utopias emerge—the ways of constructing other spaces that operate on the body itself. To say that the utopia that unites us is the utopia of the ass is to understand the mysteries—the visible and the invisible—that relate to our corporeality. Our presence in the world, perceived through our pores and all the cavities of our matter, acts on the collective forces that surround us, and from there, the powers of the new can be extracted.

Whether it's the colonel or the peripheral queer, everyone has the same tool for deterritorialization - the ass - and can use the lines of force that run through us to create a flight that diverges from the usual routes. Since "[...] the body is the zero point of the world” (Foucault, 2013, p. 14), the utopia of the ass is the experience of a creative marginality that confuses rather than proposes solutions or syntheses. Thus, to make the ass a shining star in/of the utopian body is to experience the world from its perspective: from behind, in invisibility, in the multiplicity of its uses, and in the privileging of the agendered differential folds that make us singular.

FINAL CREDITS

By problematizing Tatuagem from the perspective of post-critical theories of curriculum, we have been able to highlight the power of images to displace the hardened, closed meanings of life that seek to consolidate themselves in the logic of representation. Since the curriculum is a language whose “[...] nature of its discursiveness is arbitrary and fictional, as it is historically and socially constructed” (Corazza, 2001), we can perceive the speeds and slowness, the advances and setbacks of the lines of desire that run through its constitution, these movements that produce gazes and (un)learnings that leave in the air desires and statements with a desire for truth.

In the anarchic-curriculum of Tatuagem, we learn the power of irony and debauchery, the anarchy of language and performance, through the Chão de Estrelas Theater Company and its artists in the tropicalism of Pernambuco. In a micropolitical confrontation, these bodies want to deviate from heteronormativity, inventing other modes of behavior, even under precarious conditions, always drunk on a politics of contrast and hybridism, revealing unexpected seams in the violent times of the Brazilian military dictatorship. We also learn that the anarchic-curriculum is one that experiences a becoming woman who comes from the ass, this territory of pleasure rejected by heterosexual culture, but which gains a rhizomic force in the film, spreading like a glorifying presence that pierces the supreme shield of masculinity (Sáez; Carrascosa, 2016).

The countercultural experience in Tatuagem inspires us to move forward in the debates on masculinities, as it is an increasingly visible field (Silva Junior; Carvalho, 2023), displacing men from naturalized positions of gender and sexuality. Since cinema is an art that can change the way we see the world (Berger, 1999), Tatuagem teaches us that art, as that which produces affections, promotes new readings of the world that are crossed by the curriculum of images in films, and is therefore a territory of inventiveness that germinates the existence of other possibilities of being in the world.

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• 1
  Article published with funding from theConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico- CNPq/Brazil for editing, layout and XML conversion services.
• 2
  Translator's note: As there is no term in English equivalent to “desbunde”, which deals with behavioral irreverence with a political bias (although not necessarily of a partisan nature), we chose the term “anarchic” because it symbolizes resistance and rebellion to all forms of majority order, including the performative.
• 3
  Although all of these Brazilian artists played a major role in the counter-cultural movement in the midst of the military dictatorship, we would like to highlight the importance of Vivencial Diversiones (1974-1983), a marginal theater group based in Olinda, Pernambuco, during the dictatorship, which was the inspiration for Companhia Chão de Estrelas in Tatuagem.
• 4
  Also known as an open shot, it is a type of framing of the image for ambience in which we delimit a space where the characters are, occupying only a small part of it.
• 5
  According to Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie (2003, p. 231), a sequence shot “[...] is a very long shot that is articulated to represent the equivalent of a sequence”. In this shot, there are no cuts and the characters are accompanied in their entirety by an action dramatized in the film.
• 6
  As for the framing of the camera, the first shot is when the character is filmed from the chest up; in the very first shot, the focus is from the shoulders up, highlighting the face more; and in the medium shot, the human figure is shown in its entirety with a subtle spacing over the head and under the feet.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  07 June 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  16 Nov 2023
• Accepted
  06 Jan 2024

• This document has a preprint version
  10.1590/SciELOPreprints.3767