The First Sex

"The First Sex" is a collective exercise of visual and theoretical rupture, promoted by three queer bodies from the global south, which aims to respond to a little-formulated and even less-answered question, both in the private and public spheres, within families or in the academic study groups; “What is a man?”.

Our impetus with said project was to promote an ontological turn, where identities and bodies like ours - a bisexual cisgender woman, a lesbian non-binary person and a transvestite - were historically objects of research. We seek to reflect on the crossings of the category and political regime of gender, from the identity and body of those who founded it, the cisgender man.

To achieve such aesthetic and epistemic profanation, all dissident existences not enclosed in the normality of the cisgender man were brought into focus, as opposed to the methodologies used by the psi sciences, in which men sought to understand the female subject and people of non-conforming genders.

The few studies on “being a man” generally start from parallel issues such as domestic violence (Muszcat, 2006) and hierarchical relations in penitentiaries (Schpun, 2004), but it is difficult for works focused on the male as an object of study to be found. The project brings as thinkers to rationalize about the question “What is a man?” precisely these “Other” subjects.

In this sense, we have as a resource and tool for multimedia materialization of this critical turn, the proposal to photograph and interview, with audio recordings, cisgender women and transgender people, that is, bodies and identities traditionally placed as subjects by cisgender men, here presented as individuals capable of defining and qualifying what a man is.

With this, we hope to generate debates about this masculinity and possibly collaborate with the construction of a “less colonial, racializing, capitalistic and patriarchal collective unconscious” (Rolnik, 2018), that is, more realistic and ethical regarding this illusory category constructed centuries ago for those men who have been placing us, for centuries, as second-rate beings, second-rate social and political subjects.

The First Sex was selected to represent Brazil in the E-CO/22 call, “D[E•CO]NSTRUIR LA MIRADA, Narrativas Visuales Contemporáneas en Clave de Gênero”, sponsored by the Vist foundation and the Embassy of Spain in Brazil. The project was conceived by me and produced and carried out by the collective Chama Sapatão, of which I am one of the founders. The final result of the project is a video that can be seen at this link: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/792051588.

As the creator of the project, I propose to carry out the same proposal in the Landskrona residency, only now with the inhabitants of the city, I aim to ask cisgender women and trans people “What is a man?”, record the answers in audio and to make a portrait of each person, to ideally one day assemble an installation .

I am curious to know what people from a culture so different from mine think about what it means to be a man, if Swedish masculinity is somehow similar to the toxic masculinity prevalent in Latin America and how masculinity, supported until today by patriarchy and capitalism, affects bodies other than the cisgender man. I’m also very interested about the light in Landskrona, I’ve been photographing only with natural light for over 20 years, the idea of getting to know it and adapting it to may work fascinates me.