Caleidoscópicas subversões e resistências lesbianas em Campina Grande-PB.

Abstract

This study has as main objective the investigation of the complexity of codes of identification and sociabilities established by lesbian women in a bar in the city of Campina Grande, interior of Paraíba. The establishment in question, called Cantinho JJ, is today the only public bar mainly composed by lesbians in the city. Its history is also inspired by a lesbian circuit that existed between bars in the mid-1970s and 1990s in the municipality, briefly presented in this writing. The problematizations and concepts that give rise to our reflections on the questions related to the limitations of the identity categories, experiences and sexualities of our interlocutors are based on discursively constructed notions about the production of truths about sex and the determination of heteronormativity as a political regime that goes beyond the scope of sexual and gender relations. We seek to understand to what extent the interlocutors of this work subjectivate, subvert and reiterate the dictates of “straight” normativity. To that end, we anchored ourselves in provocations by, among others, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. In order to reflect on the spaces covered and observed in the field work, we used the concepts of piece, path and circuit, coined by the Brazilian anthropologist José G. C. Magnani. The data were obtained from the interactions provided by the participant observation in Cantinho JJ, recorded in field diary, as well as through interviews, which, among other things, point simultaneously to different approaches and distances with theoretical and activist utterances, especially with regard to conceptions of identity and visibility. From the research and analysis carried out, we infer that the way in which the group studied deals with sexuality and visibility, diverges, in terms of claim, from the discourses of some lesbofeminismos. In addition, we perceive subversions by interlocutors engendered within inevitably contradictory contexts, so that they transgress the constructs of heterosexuality and reiterate the dictates of heteronormativity, often in the same movement.