Date Available
4-28-2016
Year of Publication
2016
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Document Type
Master's Thesis
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Geography
First Advisor
Dr. Patricia Ehrkamp
Abstract
São Paulo, Brazil is currently pursuing a project of creative urbanism. Though city rhetoric insists this project is rooted in tolerance of sexual diversity, I suggest that city policy effectively perpetuates normative conceptions of family and respectability. Using data gathered through a series of qualitative interviews with transgender and travesti individuals living in São Paulo, I argue that the straight time of São Paulo’s creative urbanism generates exclusionary temporalities and spatialities in the city that render travestis out of time and out of place. Furthermore, I argue that travestis use their capacity to enact shame through scandals to generate temporalities and spatialities of their own, ones not aligned with the reproductive, progressive futurity of straight time. In doing so, travestis participate in their own kind of creative urbanism and provide an affective challenge to the hetero- and homonormativity of São Paulo’s creative urban project. Building on recent scholarship in queer urbanism and affect, this thesis adds to critical efforts to understand how creative urbanism sexualizes space and time in contexts outside of EuroAmerica and how a queer theoretical approach contributes to critiques of progressive modernity.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2016.145
Recommended Citation
Woodward, Christine L., "STRAIGHT TIME AND SCANDAL: TRAVESTI URBAN POLITICS IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL" (2016). Theses and Dissertations--Geography. 43.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/43