Estética butch: performance e agenciamentos do vestuário na construção de um corpo político

Abstract

The research addresses the topic of gender and sexuality expressions through digital platforms. It focuses on masculinity performances materialized through clothing artifacts and interactions between women in the face of cis-heteronormative regulations. Specifically, Instagram profiles are addressed where women can be seen manipulating conventionally male aesthetic codes. This work dialogues with the production on lesbianities in Brazil, based on an anthropological understanding of fashion and clothing. The relationships between the expression of sexuality and the expression of gender are privileged, which articulate the clothing choices with other aspects of daily life. From the ethnographic method in cyberspace, we sought to observe this important space of sociality for young lesbian women, even more emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Posts about family agreements and silencing, self-disclosure, relationship publicity and sharing of dissident forms of eroticization through images and the agency of clothing allowed reflection on their purposes, reaching results such as erotic investment, an emancipation of heterosexuality, subversion of pornography and connecting women through recognizable forms and emblems. The data are analyzed from the dialogue with the assimilations of the "butch" aesthetics identified during the ethnographic fieldwork and in other spaces of questioning of heteronormative conventions.