Joshua K. Reason

A multimodal ethnography of transdisciplinary artists, this dissertation analyzes embodiments that upend colonial logics. The project uses documentary filmmaking to connect Black and Indigenous LGBTQIA+ artists across Northern-Northeastern Brazil in their search for sustainable, liberatory relations with one another, urban environments, and other-than-human beings. These relations manifest through performative expressions of memory, haunting, and desire, unifying creatives at the geographic and epistemic fringes of Brazilian society as they transgress the racial-gender-sexual norms of Christian morality. By documenting resonances in regional linguistic, visual, and movement repertoires, the dissertation offers new vocabularies for intimacy, pleasure, and erotics beyond consumption under global gay capitalism.