The ballroom circuit in the city of São Paulo: between "centers" and "peripheries

• Grant number: 25/13502-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: September 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Urban Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Silvana de Souza Nascimento
• Grantee: Ali Watson Martins Pereira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project proposes an ethnography of the Ballroom community in the city of São Paulo, investigating how its members - predominantly racialized, LGBT+, and peripheral individuals - relate to urban space through their socio-spatial practices. Originating in the ghettos of New York in the 1970s, the community produces strategies of resistance to marginalization through ritualized performances at balls, transforming normative territories into spaces of celebration, identity affirmation, and the construction of alternative kinship networks. Using ethnographic methodology in dialogue with corpography, the study seeks to map the São Paulo Ballroom circuit and the trajectories it engenders between "center" and "periphery." The research is justified by the scarcity of anthropological work on Ballroom culture in Brazil and by the need to understand how dissident cultural practices redefine and resist the logics of urban spatial exclusion, contributing to urban anthropology studies at the intersection of dissident sexualities, race, territory, and mobility.Tentar novamenteO Claude pode cometer erros. Confira sempre as respostas.