Frankfurt Lab

The body as an arena: in “Manifesto transprofágico” the Brazilian activist and performer Renata Carvalho stands before the audience naked – for Carvalho, naked means travesti*. With a combination of autobiographical storytelling and political manifesto, she describes a life under constant observation. “My body is always ahead of me,” she says, and deliberately exposes it to the audience’s gaze, inviting them to look at it impartially.

While doing so, she also talks about its conscious step-by-step transformation – through hormones, industrial silicone and breast implants: “in a way I became pregnant with myself. I gave birth to myself.” Carvalho’s work deliberately opens the gaze to the performativity, variability and fluid identity of bodies and places herself in a broader context of transpophagy – a process of adopting and transforming one’s own and the collective trans* ancestry – the transcestralidade*.

Punishment, mass incarceration, censorship, pathologization, AIDS, diaspora and structural violence against and murder of trans* and travesti bodies form the historical and political background to Carvalho’s manifesto. Carvalho says: “I didn’t discover myself to be travesti – they shouted it at me.”

* In a Brazilian context travesti refers to an autonomous trans* identity and is therefore not translated.

* The term transcestralidade is also more than a poetic metaphor. It describes the notion of a trans* genealogy – a connection with the stories, struggles and forms of knowledge of earlier travestis and trans* persons who have often remained invisible in official historical accounts.