Reconfiguring cinema: Linn da Quebrada and the queer creative act in Tranny Fag

Abstract

Thinking of a queer cinema means reflecting on how film, using its aesthetic-narrative strategies, can contribute to the antinormativity, disruption and destabilization of rigid standards of gender and sexuality. Based on the notion that a series of contemporary movies fulfils this goal by focusing on a queer creative act, this article intends to identify this act in Brazilian contemporary cinema, specifically in the aesthetic-political-corporal performance of the singer and multi-artist Linn da Quebrada in the documentary Tranny Fag (Claudia Priscilla and Kiko Goifman 2018). Combining an exercise of film analysis with the methodology proposed by the Filmmakers’ Theory, the investigation aims to examine how the gesture of self-fabulation performed by Linn in the movie – in her speeches, her body and, especially, in the gaze she directs at the camera – in/subverts not only the historical subject–object relationship in documentary production, but also the very tradition of objectification of the trans and black bodies by cinema. Through her words and her performance, she creates a co-authorship dialogue with the filmmaking duo, which establishes the trans body, as well as the inner-city neighbourhoods historically marginalized by audio-visual production, as subjects of the narrative. As a result, the movie walks away from the outdated notion of documentary as a genre in which reality simply happens and is captured by the genius gaze of the director, underlining the mise en scène and the filmmaking aspects inherent to the film – and how Linn is an integral part of their creation.