Dando um close: produções de gênero no cinema documental do Pará e do Maranhão

Abstract

Gender involves comprehending an analysis category of power relations that can be questioned and a subject of deconstruction, disturbing the boundaries of the Cartesian binarisms in the production of power-knowledge and in language (discourse) as production of truths and identities. To comprehend the processes of gender production, based on the discourses that are present in our society, allows us to address problems related to processes of precarity and resistance. Considering this, cinema constitutes a power/knowledge mechanism, given that it is a media of transit for discourses related to a certain historical time. Therefore, cinema is a social technology of gender production or, in other words, a gender technology. This research aims to analyze the gender productions that occur in documentary movies produced in the estate of Pará and Maranhão during the 21st century. Documentary cinema involves comprehending which discourses are produced in regions that are rarely noticed in a national scope – Brazil’s North and Northeast regions in the case of this work. Besides that, to study the production of documentary movies that portray the experiences of subjects considered deviants or dissidents from intelligible cultural patterns – typical of a cisheteronormative framework –, in these regions, allows us to look more closely upon the local demands concerning such problems and to understand which narratives are getting produced over this theme, as well as to recognize the gender productions that circulate in these contexts. The main theoretical and methodological references of this work are Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis and the transfeminist Brazilian intellectuals Jaqueline de Jesus, Luma Andrade, Letícia Lanz, based on the connections with post-structuralist perspectives. This research was conducted, initially, through the mapping of documentary movies produced in Pará and in Maranhão, in internet databases – doctoral thesis, movie festivals, movie production companies, reports and cultural promotion, video broadcast platforms and social networks. The selection of the investigated movies happened based on the second research criterion: movies that approach decentered experiences in relation to the cisheteronormative cultural intelligibility, produced between 2001 and 2019. In Pará, an overall review of movies was conducted, with 54 preselected movies. From this number, only 2 movies matched the research criteria: As Filhas da Chiquita, Priscilla Brasil (2006) and Noite Suja, Allyster Fagundes (2016). In Maranhão, 136 movies were pre-selected, in an amount from which also 2 movies matched the research criteria: Marginais: vozes da resistência LGBT em Imperatriz, Kelver Padilha (2016) and Fala! Diálogos femininos, Ingrid Barros (2017). The movies were seen and transcribed, considering the dialogue, scenes, sounds, images and filmic aspects. In the analysis, I observed the disruption of boundaries related to the production of gender identity categories, intersectionalities with class, religiosity and region, as well as strategies of resistance against processes of vulnerability, precarity and exclusion. I also noticed problems related to the right of appearing, in processes of alliance between groups of people, as strategies of resistance against precarity processes; and disruptions related to the production of gender identity categories, touched by class, religiosity and region markers.