#Carnaval

[veudluar]

Adele Fátima no carnaval de 1980, Rio de Janeiro. Foto: Bruno Barbey.

fonte: fadotropical no twitter

[cosmonautroger]

Paolla Oliveira, Carnaval, Brasil, 2024

[polisena-art]

HI IT'S CARNAVAL HIIII

[fireheartwraith]

There are a lot of different traditions during Carnaval, but the allegoric cars players have been building are known to be part of the Parade of the Samba Schools, so I thought I'd explain how it works!

For starters, the Parade is a competition. Each team is called a samba school and they have their own flag and history. People can be really hard or die for their teams! Some are connected to soccer teams, like Gaviões da Fiel (the school) is connected to Corinthians. The two main parades (of this type of carnaval) happen in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Each school has one hour to completely walk across the sambódromo, and in that hour they have to tell a story or message. That is one of the things they are judged on! The criteria are the drums, the samba-enredo (enredo literally means plot, but this is a genre of samba), the evolution (how the story develops), the harmony (is everyone singing together? Do the people in the parade know the lyrics?), the plot itself, the allegoric cars and accessories, the costumes, the opening act, and the mestre-sala and porta-bandeira.

The parade is divided into sections called alas, and each one of them functions as a chapter in the story being told and have their own separate choreography. The first one is the Comissão de Frente (the opening act). They set the tone for the rest of the team and the public, so it’s common to see celebrities here to get the audience hyped.

Another crucial part is the drums. They are setting the beat that everyone is dancing to, so they shouldn’t make any mistakes. To both hype them and keep the pacing is the Rainha da Bateria (the Queen of the Drums). She’s a woman dancing samba in very minimal clothing but very heavy accessories. This is a very prestigious spot, the dream of any passista (this is what the samba dancers are called). Since they are the face of the parade, celebrities are sometimes given the position, and not all of them deserve it.

There are other passistas atop the allegoric cars, but they are not the only type of dancers. There’s the Ala das Baianas (ala of the baiana women): older (usually black but not necessarily) women dancing in traditional clothing. Honestly one of my favorite parts of the parades.

But my favorite part is the mestre-sala and porta-bandeira. There are several throughout the parade, but only the first one is graded. They are a couple: the man is the mestre-sala dancing around the porta-bandeira (literally 'flag carrier'), who dances with the school flag, and wears a big skirt, usually in the school colors. I wanted to be one when I was a kid, they dance doing twirls and it just looked like so much fun.

There are other unnamed alas, of course, and the allegoric cars.

The samba schools are very tied to black history and black communities, so their stories are usually very powerful. Like the year they represented a former president as a blood sucking vampire with the presidential sash, or this year, where they showed a statue of a known slaver graffited and on fire. Seriously, some of these cars are insane, and most of them have moving parts while also being light enough to be pushed or motored across the sambódromo, but sturdy enough to support all the dancers on top of it. A true feat of engineering! See the size of the woman near the statue's feet compared to the whole thing?

Most people celebrate carnaval by going to street parties called "bloco de carnaval" (basically a mini parade with live music), but these huge parade still get a big audience, despite streaming so late at night.

Here's this year's presentation from Vai-Vai if you're curious to see everything in motion! Originally, I had put a link to Estácio de Sá's presentation, but some politicians want to apply sanctions to Vai-Vai because it represented cops as demons. A few days later, a white man attempted to kill a black man, and the black man was arrested despite witnesses telling the cops what really happened. When news broke out, they kept him in prison on claims of "resisting arrest." So, why is it wrong to say cops are devils?

Anyways, the Vai-Vai presentation is about celebrating blackness and black creativity and resilience. Happy Carnaval! The winners this year were Mocidade Alegre in São Paulo and Unidos da Viradouro in Rio de Janeiro. You can look up their presentations if you want to.

[useless-catalanfacts]

A bit of trans and crossdressing history of Barcelona (Catalonia's capital city) in the 1920s-1930s

Did "the Carolines" hold the first documented queer march in 1933?

Contestants in the 1934 edition of "Miss Barri Xino" for crossdressers. Photo from the book La Criolla: la puerta dorada del Barrio Chino by Paco Villar.

The Barri Xino, nowadays more commonly known as Raval, is a working class neighbourhood of Barcelona, Catalonia's capital city. Being one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, it was the meeting place for people who were outside of the law or the morality of the time, including homosexuals and people who dressed in the way that is associated with the sex they were not assigned at birth (all called crossdressers at the time, this category would include a wide range of people including those we nowadays would call transgender, drag queens, homosexual men, sex workers, as well as thieves and other criminals who used women's clothes for their robberies on passerbies or for hiding). When referring to them, this post will use the term "crossdresser" in this broad meaning, as is used in the sources of the time and was used by the people we are talking about.

At the time, trans people and others who didn't want to follow the time's gender norms faced a lot of hardships. It was not uncommon for men to dress as women and viceversa during Carnival (annual holidays where people dress up, often with satirical purposes, considered a time of turning social convention upside-down) or for men to dress as women in theatre and concert halls. Even though these were situations where many found a place for self-expression and fun, the clothing transgression was limited to very specific ambits and often related to the arts or to things considered funny, but it wasn't normalized to freely exist on the streets outside of the Carnival period. In fact, traditions like Carnival (where the lower class rules and everyone makes fun of the Church and government, where the behaviours that aren't allowed the rest of the year or considered sinful are encouraged) or Saint Agatha's (where women get to form a government for 1 day a year) are found in many cultures around the world as an outlet in repressive societies, and are celebrated in a strongest and wildest way the more repressive their society is.

Carnival in Barcelona's Jardinets de Gràcia (richer area of the city), 1936. Photo from Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona.

Photos of the parties that continued after King Carnestoltes's burial was over in Barcelona's Jardinets de Gràcia, 1935. Context: in Catalan culture, the Carnival holidays are personified in King Carnestoltes (King Carnival). On the last day of the Carnival period, the King is buried in a humourous event called "the burial of the sardine". For the burial, people of all genders dress as mournerers (the women who, often professionally getting paid for it, cry desperately at funerals) and the funeral procession parades on the streets exaggeratedly crying and wailing. Photos from Finestres de Memòria.

When talking about 1930s Catalonia, it's impossible not to mention anarchism, which was the mainstream political ideology of the Catalan working class. We must not assume that leftist movements gave support to queer liberation at the time, it clearly was not the case for most of the CNT and anarchism in general, who saw homosexuality and crossdressing as a bourgeois vice.

Outside of Carnival holidays, it wasn't normalized for people seen as men to walk on the streets wearing women's clothing. The most famous meeting place for those who wanted to wear them was the bar La Criolla, in the Barri Xino/Raval quarter. El Bataclan and El Sacristà were also frequented. Another common meeting place for some of them were the "vespasianes" (public urinals on the streets), where crossdresser AMAB people offered their services as sex workers or stole the wallet of the men who were distracted peeing. According to a witness, the people who crossdressed as women and attended the vespasianes and its surrounding areas were known as the carolines (les carolines). They are the protagonists of the 1933 march.

Sadly, we only have one source of information, so it's difficult to tell how accurate the explanation is. This source is the book Journal du Voleur ("Diary of a Thief") by Jean Genet, where he explains his experiences in Barcelona's crossdressing circles of the 1920s and 1930s when he was one of the crossdressers who stole from men peeing: a carolina. At the time, it was common for anarchists to bomb places frequented by the bourgeoisie, and sometimes other places, too. According to Genet, in 1933 one of these anarchist bombs ended up in one of these vespasianes urinals frequented by the carolines. This sparked one of the first documented queer marches, maybe encouraged by their bad relation with the anarchists.

Genet explains that the carolines were outraged at the destruction of the urinal, and that "[wearing] shawls, mantillas, silk dresses and fitted short jackets, they formed a solemn delegation to place a bouquet of red flowers tied with a gauze crape" on the destroyed urinal. They marched from Paral·lel avenue through Sant Pau street, down the Rambles until Colom statue shouting about what had happened.

Even though the Barcelona City Council talks about these events as true and Barcelona's LGBT associations call it "the first documented LGBT march in history", it's unknown how much of Genet's description is true. Genet was known for his proclivity to embellish and exaggerate real events and, after all, the only source of information is a literary work (memoir). There is no other recorded use of the word carolines to refer to these people, but precisely because of their marginalization it's not a demographic that was often talked about in newspapers or other historicals sources of the time.

Despite the lack of knowledge about the carolines's march specifically, the crossdressing meeting places are well-known, with many photos and witnesses of the time. We also know what happened next: in 1936, the fascists in the Spanish Army did a coup d'état which started the Spanish Civil War, ending with the fascist victory in 1939. About the bars where crossdressers and others used to meet, we know that La Criolla was destroyed by a fascist bomb in August 1938, during the war. Cal Sacristà (which had changed its name to Wu-Li-Chang in 1934) was also destroyed when the fascists were bombing the city. Bataclan was forced to change its name to Rataclán and ended up closing in 1942. The fascist dictatorship of Spain (1939-1978) imposed a strict Nationalcatholic morale and persecuted those who did not follow its strict gender roles (trans people, homosexuals, feminists), national minorities (like Catalans, Basques, Galicians), and political dissidents. The dictatorship even forbid Carnival for years, event though it's a holiday of the Catholic religion (Carnival is the excess before the fasting period of Lent). The only crossdressing that was legally allowed were transformist male artists who imitated famous female stars in theatres and concert halls, and even they had to be discreet. Their life on the streets was persecuted, but they never eliminated the presence of crossdressing in Raval. You can read more about homosexuality and crossdressing during the dictatorship in this previous post, about the Law of Social Danger in this one, about Catalonia's first Pride march (1977) in this one, and as always find out more about Catalan queer people and history in this blog's tag #uselesslgbtfacts.

Information sources: Transvestits en acció by Lluís Permanyer (in Catalan), La Revolta de les Carolines by Leopold Estapé (in Catalan), Vespasiana by Ailo Ribas (in English). A good explanation that helped me contextualize is found in this entry in La Barcelona Diversa (in Catalan).

[pop-sesivo]

La épica carroza de Star Wars en el Carnaval de Río, en Brasil.

The epic Star Wars float at the Rio Carnival 2023 in Brazil.

[viejospellejos]

De qué color era el…bah, ¡ni lo intento!

La actriz brasileña Paolla Oliveira convirtiendose en jaguar en el carnaval de Rio de Janeiro

[gentlenmensarts]

[jolivira]

saw an idea on twitter to draw your favorite doctor as your nationality so here's a quick sketch of thasmin but i brazilified them

feliz carnaval!!!

[mote-historie]

Paul Gavarni, Le Carnaval à Paris, Les Bals masques, 1830s.

Chez Aubert & Cie & Chez Bauger, Paris s.d. (1842 et 1839), 25,5x34cm, relié.

For sale: EditionOriginale

Paul Gavarni was the pen name of Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier (13 January 1804 – 24 November 1866), a French illustrator, born in Paris. (x)

[niccoguedes]

Pra quê amor?

[lib-arts]

Acotar x Brazilian Carnival

Gwyn and Azriel 🧜‍♀️⚓️

Elain and Lucien 🌸🐝

Art by me

(Feysand and Nessian are next)

[isabel-ov-o]

SMG4 WOFTI 2024? 🗣️✨

Yy chicos ya tengo cuenta de X! ^^ por si desean ir a seguirme ahí! 😉💖

[igcelebrity]

dedesecco Como foi o carnaval de vcs? Por aqui só alegria.