Bodies and affects in Amazon border-crossing cities: rethinking urbanization, sexuality and social transformation in Alto Solimões

• Grant number: 19/02852-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2019
• End date: December 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Urban Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Silvana de Souza Nascimento
• Grantee: Thiago de Lima Oliveira
• Supervisor: Marjolein Elizabeth Maria de Theije
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University Amsterdam (VU), Netherlands
• Associated to the scholarship: 16/23046-4 - Desires and/on becoming, border cities: homosexualities and social transformation in Alto Solimões region, BP.DR

Abstract

This project explores the narratives politics considering the tensions between Nation State and alternative narratives to the urbanization process in small and medium cities of Alto Solimões region. The research is based in the ethnographical fieldwork I realized between 2016 and 2018 with people engaged in same-sex relations in Alto Solimões, a transbordered urban complex formed in the boundaries between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Since 1970 this region is passing by moments of intensification in urbanization because of projects of the national integration, development, and occupation of borders demanded by the State. Grounded in ethnography, the research offers a glimpse into how the body, affects and difference produce meaning to city and urban. Its central question is how the urbanization process can be analysed considering the emic ideas of difference and how they operate in the organization of spatial/relational borders. To this, I aim to develop the idea of "operator of border" in a localized perspective of narrative productions, due to, the discursive privilege of speaking is addressed to specific agents in order to organize the flows of meaning, even in bordered city where questions related to border/frontier organizes the daily life. Thus, the research aims to rethink how narrative are political tools in organization life and produce a gendered and sexualized perspective on urbanization in the Amazon contemporary history.