2025 Theses Master's

Samba’o na cara da sociedade: A Quare Linguistic Anthropological Account of Brazilian Portuguese

Yearwood, Andraya

The very content of language is intertwined with culture, such that what may appear as disparate realities are, in fact, intricately shaped by the cultural frameworks through which we interpret them. A quare—Black queer—linguistic anthropological approach (Lane 2019) as method unearths the linguistic ways Afro-Brazilian queer communities speak in pajubá—LGBTQIA+ speech practices of Afro-Brazilian communities—to define their subjectivity, with and against, the country’s myth as a racial paradise and its glorification of miscegenation. Divided into three chapters, the first will draw on my summer 2023 study abroad experience in Rio de Janeiro to provide context concerning the motivation of this study and its on-the-ground connection to quare language practices in Brazilian media. Engaging the competition television series Drag Race Brasil (S1. Ep1-12; 2023) as a prime site of quare linguistics, the latter two chapters analyze the pajubá of two Afro-Brazilian queer contestants, Organzza and Shannon Skarllet. First, endearment will be characterized by the use of pronoun variation and inclusive language, whereas the second will focus on throwing shade/reading characterized by kinship terminology and relationality. Framing my analysis at the language, gender, and race intersection, I ask how language is operated to perform both Blackness and queerness and how this behavior contests unchallenged doctrines that render marginalized people less than human. Contributing to the wider sociolinguistic study of pajubá, I conclude by concentrating on the complex process of its coincident erosion and encryption and exploring how language has become a broader metaphor for 21st-century Brazilian society.

Keywords: Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies, autoethnography, queer of color critique, critical discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology