Black Trans Music Challenging Conservative Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – When you live in a country whose President said he would rather his son “die in an accident” than be gay, does not hesitate to show his misogyny and collects racist comments, to be a black trans woman is to turn your voice and body into a means of political expression, both in private and public space.

Linn da Quebrada (São Paulo, 1990) and Jup do Bairro (São Paulo, 1993), two trans women who are swimming against the stream of the Brazilian music industry, are aware of this challenge and have been working for years to disrupt this hate speech.

“Sexuality and gender are open fields of our personalities / What is a body without judgment?”, asks Jup do Bairro in her debut album, ‘Corpo sem Juízo’ (Self-Produced, 2020), in which she invites us to reflect on diversity and self-imposed physical limits.

In her work released last August, the Brazilian performer uses her body, that of a “fat, queer, black and peripheral transvestite”, as she describes herself, and places it at the center of a social battle against the bodily, aesthetic, and gender norms in a country like her Brazil, in which minorities, and specifically the LGTBIQ+ group, had to rise again faced with threats from President Jair Bolsonaro to curtail their rights.

Through the rhythm of funk dance and electronic music, Jup builds a narrative about the release of bodies and the reaffirmation of their own identity. In ‘Transgressão’, the song that begins this album, she compares her trans process to a caterpillar’s metamorphosis, tracing her journey in an oneiric synthesizers’ beat.

“In the created suffocation of my own change/ A membrane covering emptiness and false hopes/In the grip of the cocoon of my own creation/ Thinking of inevitable death, I prepare myself to die in solitude”, sings Jup do Bairro in this song written when still a teenager.

But in the personal suffocation that she expresses in her songs, there is also a collective cry and a social denunciation. In ‘Corpo sem Juízo’, the song that names the album, the Brazilian singer lends her own name to the hundreds of trans people and transvestites murdered every year in her country. The figures, with 130 murders in 2019, make Brazil the most dangerous country for this community. Behind the numbers, youths like Theusa Passarelli, a well-known trans activist who was killed in Rio de Janeiro, and to whom Jup do Bairro pays tribute, retrieving and sampling her voice for this song. “It’s like facing death and remaining immortal”, Jup chants in the lyrics.

Linn da Quebrada’s songs are equally forceful: “I got so dressed up to be applauded, but so far they’ve only laughed at me,” she says in ‘A Lenda’. The lyrics are part of her first album, ‘Pajubá’ (Vinyl, 2017), in which she attacks a “they” that seems to be a reflection of political power, but also of the executives in the music industry who have kept her on the sidelines for years. Because, although Brazilian music has its roots in black culture, the musicians with the highest income are still mainly white and cisgender.

With ‘Pajubá’, Linn helped fight this reality, with lyrics that blend gay humor and social criticism, she ensured that black transvestites and transsexuals could be reflected in the music and become acknowledged and included in the mainstream artistic movement. In this album, Linn rediscovers her identity and leads the notion of the body as a political ground to its fullest extent.

A philosophy that resonates in her songs and in all her artistic projects, where dance and scenic presence become a visceral struggle. This is clear in her shows, performances, and participation in documentaries such as Meu Corpo é Político (Alice Riff, 2017) and Bixa Travesty (Kiko Goifman and Claudia Priscilla, 2018). The latter, an autobiographical film in which Linn speaks openly of the chauvinism she faced at the end of her transition and in which she proclaims that it was she who “broke Adam’s rib” to become the “new Eve”. A resurgence that now continues in what will be her new album, ‘Trava Línguas’ (2020), of which she has already anticipated ‘A nova Eva’ on her social media, a musical piece about the release of bodies.

‘Bixa Travesty’ is also evidence of the powerful alliance of Linn da Quebrada and Jup do Barrio. An artistic trans, black, and peripheral women bomb willing to open new spaces and together challenge the status quo of such a conservative political context as that of Brazil.

The production of their albums by Badsista was crucial in this entire process. At only 26 years of age, this young DJ and producer is responsible for promoting new narratives in the country’s music industry and welcoming artists who are left out of the commercial circuit. In 2016 she founded the group Bandida, a trans-feminist initiative that seeks to give voice to other women in the Brazilian music scene, mainly black, queer and low-income artists. New spaces that inspire others to follow their own path and to which the TransMissão program is added, a kind of diversity celebration broadcast on Canal Brasil, where Linn and Jup talk about race, sexuality, and gender with different celebrities.

And it is there, through resistance, that they have converted the struggle for their personal identity into a collective and political revolution. From the intimate to the public. A thunderous spark visible in their bodies, in their dance, and in their music. From samba to tropicalism to funk dancing, in Brazil, there have always been voices that stood up against repressive actions, and now Linn, Jup, and Badsista are pursuing this tradition to encourage social change.

Source: El País

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