Afro-Brazilian travesti voodoo in Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro or the implosion of the theatre of representation: body, gender, blackness

Abstract:

Our interest herein resides in how the poetical, black and travesti body of the artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro opposes and confronts the hegemonic Art History and its System, while contributing to a revision of its discursive practices of inclusion and exclusion through its poiesis, its poetical fabrication in which the artist’s afro-ameridian ancestry is both visited and reinvented. The apparition and vision of Castiel’s black, dissident body suggests, in our reading, a destabilization of what Hubert Damisch calls “the theatre of representation”. Theoretically, this text resorts to a field characterized by interdisciplinarity with a view to attempting to contemplate the complexity of its objet: gender studies, queer theory, philosophy, Lacanian theory, art history and theory, which would qualify it as an exercise in Cultural Analysis, as Dutch theorist Mieke Bal would have it.

Keywords: Gender; Body; Blackness; Cultural Analysis; Art Theory and History