The Cisgender Camera: Framing and Ruptures of the Gaze in the Brazilian Documentary

Abstract

The tenure of president Jair Bolsonaro – right-wing and reactionary – began in 2019, when the Brazilian audiovisual sector had a high circulation of documentaries on gender diversity and biographical narratives of trans people. Given this ambiguity, I am interested in analyzing the crossing of cisgenderism in these productions. In this work, I analyze three contemporary Brazilian documentaries: Katia, o filme (2012), Lembro mais dos corvos (2018) and Bixa Travesty (2018), which were produced after 2010 and are run by cisgender people. With references from critical social psychology, I aim to point out and think about the crossings of cisgenderism in Brazilian documentary, considering the neoliberal CIScapitalist system that we face and the possibilities of emancipation through culture, such as the public policy Audiovisual Sectorial Fund. The methodology articulates film analysis, immanent discourse analysis and constellation. Preliminary results confirmed crossings of cisgenderism in the three films, linked to indicatives of subversion to the classic way of producing images. The continuity of this research should be added to academic and civil efforts in the denaturalization of cisgenderness and in the problematization of cisheteronorm.