The body as an arena: in “Manifesto transprof\u00e1gico” the Brazilian activist and performer Renata Carvalho stands before the audience naked \u2013 for Carvalho, naked means travesti*. With a combination of autobiographical storytelling and political manifesto, she describes a life under constant observation. \u201cMy body is always ahead of me,\u201d she says, and deliberately exposes it to the audience\u2019s gaze, inviting them to look at it impartially. <\/p>\n
While doing so, she also talks about its conscious step-by-step transformation \u2013 through hormones, industrial silicone and breast implants: \u201cin a way I became pregnant with myself. I gave birth to myself.\u201d Carvalho\u2019s work deliberately opens the gaze to the performativity, variability and fluid identity of bodies and places herself in a broader context of transpophagy \u2013 a process of adopting and transforming one\u2019s own and the collective trans* ancestry \u2013 the transcestralidade*. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s manifesto. Carvalho says: \u201cI didn\u2019t discover myself to be travesti \u2013 they shouted it at me.\u201d <\/p>\n
* In a Brazilian context travesti refers to an autonomous trans* identity and is therefore not translated.<\/p>\n
* The term transcestralidade is also more than a poetic metaphor. It describes the notion of a trans* genealogy \u2013 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1671,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false},"class_list":["post-1672","events","type-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/frankfurt-lab.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events\/1672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/frankfurt-lab.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/frankfurt-lab.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/events"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frankfurt-lab.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/frankfurt-lab.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}