– Something I’ve worked on:
I worked on a project to discuss gender performativity and queer cultures with communities in Brazil, that generated a music video from their experiences. The music video is composed in queer language/slangs, using stories co-written with the performers.
– What’s the full scope of the problem?
Gender and sexuality in Brazil are still a very taboo/problematic discussion, although there are several policy, cultural, artistic and governmental efforts. Brazil has a very high rate of violence toward queer people (specially trans/travesti people; see: http://www.refworld.org/docid/58736b5f4.html). Several projects have attempted to shift these norms, including the Museum of Sexual Diversity, in Sao Paulo, and several other smaller campaigns. Law projects have been passed that turn homophobia into a crime, for example, but these are still not enforced by the police and courts as they should.
– Who’s affected?
The queer community is very diverse, serving as an umbrella for various identifications. In the community we worked with, there were drag queens, drag kings, transgender, travestis (which mean a different thing in Portuguese than the English transvestite), lesbians, gays, non-binary, etc. Queer communities that suffer from social exclusion/economic inequality are even more affected.
– Who’s best positioned to address the problem?
We considered that it was important to bridge our queer community in the university environment (more priviledged economically) with a peripheric queer community of drag queens, who were already producing their own drag show. Their drag queen show was very successful in their neighborhood, but was not able to connect to other communities, e.g. in other neighbor cities. We decided to create a music video/documentary, using our expertise in audiovisual communication, while also looking at their/our experiences as queer people.
– What are predictable consequences of the proposed solution?
We expected that the video, when publicized, would draw attention, empower queer communities in the region/country and, by exposing some of the problems that affect these communities, raise consciousness about these problems. Unlike many other similar productions, we were focusing on a peripheric community of drag queens, and not on middle-class gay communities of the big cities. This, we believed, would bring more diversity and voices to the discussion. One of the more direct outcomes we predicted was that the drag queen performers would also be able to use the video in their show, but also as a way for them to get more performances.
– What were unpredictable consequences of the proposed solution?
In our production, we were naïve and did not account for some of the problematic of not having as diverse of a team as we could have. For example, although all the stories told in the music video were co-written with the drag queens/trans/travestis, the video production team was composed only of cisgendered people whos studied in the same university. This became problematic when the music video was presetned in video festivals, where it was questioned for not being as diverse as it could, specially considering its thematic.
The members working on this project valued uplifting marginalized or less-heard voices in the queer community, which was something I thought was an important guiding feature in the project that allowed them to be conscious and realistic about the unpredicted consequences of not having a diverse production team for the video. This team’s consistent focus on their values would help make future iterations of the project improved, because there are clear areas that the group can seek to identify growth points for.
A value I would suggest in addition and in response to the above is collaboration. I know that this is something that the group already explicitly identified as something that they value a lot, but I propose that the value could be refined to specify that collaboration means the team will strive to have representation and collaboration across all teams of their project (in this case, collaboration was only a focus during the storytelling process and not in production, which led to one of their unforeseen consequences).
Since this already happened once, I can imagine this convening taking place as a more recurring project perhaps on a yearly basis where LGBTQ folks in Brazil can come together to create a new music video. This would also allow the group to refine and implement their values to become better and better each year. I would love to be part of the team that interfaces with drag queens to collect, produce, and amplify their stories as I’m also cisgender and would not want to contribute to the problem of having a mostly cis production team.