Geographies of desire : (re)mapping Black LGBTT life in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Tracing Black LGBTT Bahian memory and being throughout Salvador da Bahia, this thesis illuminates the multifaceted, and at times contradictory, relationship that non-normative bodies share with the urban landscape. Concerned with the past, present, and future of Black LGBTT Bahian identity, I analyze how desire, a repertoire of sexual, romantic, and platonic practices in consumption and pleasure-making, serves as a through line for the disciplining, delimiting, and (de)construction of the Black LGBTT body across space-time. Comprised of a performative engagement with Salvador’s historic center, a (re)mapping of the city’s waterfront areas, and an analysis of the experiments in Black futurity and possibility taking place in low-income peripheral neighborhoods, this thesis demonstrates that desire is always at play in determining whether or not non-normative bodies are deserving of space or, under the most extreme circumstances, life. A multimodal ethnography that brings together critical geography, performance studies, and Africana studies, I argue for geographies of desire as a conceptual framework to understand how Black LGBTT bodies are read into/out of space in the city. By centering the racial-gendered-sexual treatment of the Black Brazilian body in analyzing the physical and ideological construction of urban space, this work illustrates the global threat that exclusionary planning, global capitalism, and White supremacy pose to the lives and well-being of Black queer and trans folks. This threat to life can only be ameliorated by attending to the myriad spatial, temporal, cultural, and affective anxieties that Black queer and trans bodies are forced to bear for their survival.Latin American Studie