DISSIDENCES ERUPTING THROUGH THE CITY’S FISSURES: SÃO CRISTÓVÃO ARTS FESTIVAL AND THE REAPPROPRIATION OF PUBLIC SPACE

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between the São Cristóvão Arts Festival (FASC) and emerging forms of public space occupation through the visibility and presence of dissident bodies and sexualities. It explores how the FASC reconfigures the public space of the historic city by fostering claims and resistance from marginalized identities, where subjects emerge not as mere recipients of norms but as agents who, through performative subversion, critically reappropriate the gender structures embedded in everyday spatial practices. The Festival operates as a site of contestation by opening fissures at the boundary between normativity and subversion, where expressions of gender and sexuality manifest in the public sphere. The research thus seeks to apprehend the dynamics of public space appropriation as a means of claim-making, resistance, and subversion by subalternized identities that erupt at the threshold of spatial normativity.