"Queer avant la lettre": on ‘sapas’, tangerines, alligators and werewolves

Abstract

If the term queer has emerged and established itself as a critical device since the 1990s, certain textual, corporal and aesthetic procedures adopted by authors such as Al Berto (Portugal), Hebert Daniel and Leila Míccolis (Brazil), still in the 1970s, seem to anticipate the substantive conformation that that English adjective assumes in the field of studies on sexual and gender identities in the present time. It follows, therefore, from the premise that there was in Portuguese a queer aesthetic expression before the queer itself had – or had been – named as such. Thus, the present essay proposes to describe and analyze, from a comparatist perspective, some examples taken from the literary works of the previous authors, fragments that seem to foreshadow the signs of freedom and liberation that are now being defended by queer theory.