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Volume 14, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 2045-6298
  • E-ISSN: 2045-6301

Abstract

This article takes up Amy Villarejo’s question about the costs of lesbian visibility, including the risk of commodification and the tendency to frame lesbian identity as stable and easily readable. It explores how contemporary Brazilian cinema articulates lesbian existence in ways that resist such reductive constructions. We argue that lesbian desire activates other senses (not only sight and sound) in the filmic experience, creating an audio-visual landscape we call . The term is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of , which evokes a collective, plural and unstable experience of bordering. In our reading, Anzaldúa’s becomes a : a body of cinematic works, the body of the film and the body of the spectator. thus refers to the dynamic interplay between the lesbian character’s body, the filmic body and the viewer’s body. A number of recent Brazilian short films construct their own as a means of resisting dominant narratives of isolation and political disillusionment. These films reimagine lesbian existence through associations with non-human elements such as water, fire and earth, generating as multisensorial modes of perceiving and experiencing lesbian desire. In doing so, they propose alternative imaginaries of lesbian life within the Brazilian context. This article, then, delineates ways of thinking lesbian existence in Brazilian cinema beyond the framework of in/visibility understood merely in terms of the gaze and representation – whether as portrayal or as proxy.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • Instituto Ânima
© 2025 Intellect Ltd
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2025-11-11
2026-04-17

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Towards lesbian bodylands: Refiguring lesbian communities in Brazilian cinema
MIRAJ: The Moving Image Review & Art Journal 14, 209 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00159_1
/content/journals/10.1386/miraj_00159_1
/content/journals/10.1386/miraj_00159_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Brazilian short films; Glória Anzaldúa; haptic visuality; lesbian spectatorship; lesbian visibility; queer cinema; queer methodologies

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