Abstract
It isn’t that Pajuba isn’t a language; rather, a tool with which to channel the voice, autonomy, racial justice, political activism, and beauty of gendered performance in excess. A Quare Linguistic Anthropological approach (Lane 2019, 10), as method, unearths the disparate ways Afro-Brazilian trans* communities do extraordinary things at all levels of language (phonetic, lexical, and discursive) to defy discrimination, exclusion, and a narrowing of quare futurities. Engaging the reality competition series Drag Race Brasil (S1. Ep1-12; 2023) as a prime site of non-normative linguistics, this work establishes Pajubá within a Black queer—or quare—theorization examining how Black transness is discursively mediated. This analysis aims to answer the question: How do Afro-Brazilian trans communities draw on lived experiences to create new forms of speech or add to the linguistic lexicon to negotiate their identity and place in the world? Such introspection provides a three-pronged analysis of Pajubá to interrogate sentence framing denoting emotion, each chapter independently centering on (I) endearment, (II) shade, and (III) neutrality in the drag queens’ language. Alongside the television excerpts, commentary from its official Instagram account serves as a digital archive (Britton 2024, 43) permitting a non-linear transgression through time among unrestricted exchange of current ideology and its discourse. Pajubá illustrates how racialized trans* communities upend binary categorizations in pronoun variation, neologisms, reduplication, and simplification of verb conjugation. I affirm that quaring language contrasts with the modern ideology that has “debased” race and gender, limiting it through societal norms and their legitimization.
Presenters
Andraya YearwoodFLAS Fellow, Institute of Latin American Studies, Columbia University in the City of New York, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Communications and Linguistic Studies
KEYWORDS
Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies, Digital Ethnography, Queer of Color Critique, Linguistic Anthropology
