DeCUlonial Carnival in Lisbon: “piranhagem“ as a queer immigrant political practice

Abstract

Our view on “Carnival deCUlonial“ intertwines four lenses: queer embodied epistemologies, intersectionality, Carnival as occupation of public space and deCUloniality. The Carnival blocks observed (and lived) in Lisbon: 1) bloCU, 2) Colombina Clandestina, 3) Precário. We elaborate on how these manifestations challenge the ways of being present in Portuguese society. We reflect on the term “Piranha“ (slang in Brazilian-Portuguese to refer to what would be considered, by Christian morality, a “promiscuous female”), shared by a group of agents who make these blocks. “Piranha” works in a similar way to the term queer: an intersectional umbrella that groups deviant bodies around the resignification of a slur. “Piranha”, however, comes from the global south and may have greater potential for accommodating southern experiences, while queer, being an Anglo-American term, resonates in different ways when travelling through other contexts (Pelúcio, 2016, p. 126). We aim to reflect on DeCUloniality because we’re talking about a phenomenon that activates the CU (slang in Portuguese for “anus”) in the social field: the first privatized human organ (Deleuze & Guattari, Preciado, in Sáez & Carrascosa, 2016, p. 12) as a point of intersection for the performative decolonial coalition of various dissidences on the streets. Within a participatory nature, to think with (and not about) people (Ingold, 2018, p. 4), our autoethnographic view of the experience is not guided by a principle of separability from the field, but by active participation in (and memories of) the festivities, at the crossroads between acting in, living in and researching with.