The Everyday Revolutions of ‘Madame Satã’

This article appears in the columns section of frieze 239, ‘Re-evaluations’

In the opening sequence of Karim Aïnouz’s debut feature, Madame Satã (2002), the protagonist appears beaten but not crestfallen. Their proud, enraged gaze seems to persist despite the violence being inflicted upon them. A voice-over, presumably from a police officer, reveals their criminal record: João Francisco dos Santos is well known in the jurisdiction of this district as a trouble­maker and is a regular visitor to Rio de Janeiro’s notorious Lapa neighbourhood. They have shaved eyebrows and adopt feminine attitudes, even moderating their voice. They have no religion. They smoke, gamble and are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Their education is rudimentary and they express themselves with difficulty, often using local slang.

I attended the premiere of Madame Satã more than 20 years ago as an undergraduate student in São Paulo. It was only while rewatching it recently, however, that I realized the film anticipated, both in form and content, some of today’s most pressing discussions on gender performativity, racial violence and identity politics, which, in turn, inform many of the most interesting contemporary artworks.

To think about Madame Satã nowadays means also to recognize the leaps in media representation of queerness and Blackness since its release

Madame Satã is a lustful and stylized reimagining of the life of Dos Santos, a transgressive outcast who defined queerness long before the term was reclaimed from its earlier derogatory usages in the 1960s and ’70s. Born to formerly enslaved parents in 1900, Dos Santos was an anti-hero who claimed a place in a society that would deny them even their personhood. ‘Why can’t I go in if everyone seems to be going in?’ they shout, after being bounced out of an elite nightclub in Rio. ‘You are not “everyone”,’ responds Dos Santos’s confidante Laurita, a sex worker, after holding them back. As a roster of decolonial and Black studies thinkers have persistently pointed out: ‘everyone’ is a selective club in which self-designated bouncers choose who fits their guidelines of what it means to be human.

Perhaps for the first time in Brazilian cinema, a director saw his queer protagonist through non-moralistic eyes, in their full complexity, refusing the disavowal that had previously made such a figure second-rate and disposable. Aïnouz’s decision to adopt such an open-minded approach to his portrayal of Dos Santos – particularly given the biases and omissions of the archive documentation about their life – recalls the stories featured in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), in which the scholar examines the everyday acts of revolution by young Black women and queer people that created and sustained expansive notions of freedom.

Dos Santos dances with the violence of the world, (re)inventing themself at every twist and turn. To frame their shifting persona – from patriarchal leader to foster parent to the femme-presenting cabaret singer Madame Satã – the film’s production and cinematography convey a mysteriously sparkling and saturated visual universe in which every detail seems to hold a fragment of a never-fully-disclosed story. Aïnouz deliberately eschews the prescriptive approach to social and political themes that abound to this day in Brazilian contemporary art and film.

Like his protagonist, Aïnouz is not afraid of inhabiting contradictions. The film’s flickering lights and bouncing close-ups serve to remind us that nothing is fixed or stable. For example, Dos Santos and their two roommates seduce closeted and often violent men to steal their money. Yet, this arguably reprovable practice seemingly provides the funds to maintain the trio and to help raise one roommate’s baby. By walking through an urban underworld, as well as by relying on the bonds of a chosen family and an improbable but functioning community, Aïnouz’s version of Dos Santos doesn’t conform to any stereotype. Instead, Madame Satã embodies what Cuban American theorist José Esteban Muñoz defined in Disidentifications (1999) as the ‘survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship’.

To think about Madame Satã nowadays means also to recognize the leaps in media representation of queerness and Blackness since its release and, above all, the long overdue and growing presence and recognition of queer, Black and Indigenous artists and filmmakers, who are reshaping the form and ethics of their own artistic representation. Finally, it seems, the ‘everyone club’ is abandoning its VIP protocols.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 239 with the headline ‘Beautiful Experiments’

_{Main image: Karim Aïnouz, Madame Satã, 2002, film still. Courtesy: © Wild Bunch}