Manifesto Transpofágico

In the beginning is the body. Illuminated by spotlights, performer Renata Carvalho moves across the stage, barely clothed. We do not see her face. She exposes her body to our gaze for us to assess it, judge it, classify it. This body has always been observed and examined. If it resists classification, it is free to be punished, humiliated and disenfranchised. Renata Carvalho’s performance »Manifesto Transpofágico« begins with the audience’s gaze on the body of a travesti, a term that in Brazil refers to people who were assigned to the male sex at birth but who have developed a female gender identity for themselves. By using this name, Carvalho is referring to a collective history that she makes the subject of her performance.

Exposed to our gaze, Carvalho uses documentary video material to depict the systematic exclusion of difference carried out by a macho, patriarchal system in which gender identities are delineated according to who commits violence and who has to suffer it in silence. The act of protest against this structure, which every travesti carries out purely by existing, is at the same time a work of art: Carvalho narrates her biography as a path to artistic self-creation. She reveals where she has changed and deformed her body with back- room cosmetic surgery and the health risks to which she has been forced to expose herself.

The performer herself steps into the auditorium and quizzes us: Can we describe how and why we read the people around us? What distinguishes the genders we assign—short or long hair, a piece of clothing, a backpack? At the end of the performance, we have to decide which view of the performer’s body to choose and learn how the ques- tions raised at the beginning of Carvalho’s show become superfluous: the exposed body becomes a phenomenon that simply demands respect and care.

Director Luiz Fernando Marques and performer and writer Renata Carvalho are both originally from Santos in the state of São Paulo. Renata defines herself as a transpologist, a combination of the terms transgender and anthropologist, and dedicates her artistic practice to trans* experiences and bodies.