Cidade em desvio: uma etnografia das relações entre o design e as dissidências sexuais e de gênero no centro do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This thesis deals with the relations between urban design in the city of Rio de Janeiro and aspects of LGBTQIA+ experiences. It is based on the understanding that the center of Rio has a referential linguistic multiplicity that not only supports/reserves/identifies codes and practices, but also acts upon the people who live/work/circulate within it. An ethnographic praxis is employed, bringing together textual notes and visual records to investigate how, through queer appropriations, urban furniture, collective bathrooms, and public space acquire new forms and meanings in their common functions, with the aim of producing understandings of the dynamics of use of these three designs by dissident sex-gender presences in the center. Based on a theoretical framework that understands design as language, this research operates from an inter- and transdisciplinary approach that, while fostering collaboration, brings together different areas of knowledge to think about design. Through social dialogues and participant observations involving prostitution pamphlets, latrine inscriptions, and traces of sexual encounters in the Centro, Lapa, and Glória neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, between 2022 and 2025, it critically reflects on how design, used in practices of deviation, resignification, and even subversion, constitutes an important lexicon of permanence, denunciation, and reinvention of sexual and gender dissidences in this/of this region. The results indicate that people like us, gays, bisexuals, trans people, and transvestites, making use of the designs available in the urban environment for sexual purposes, ultimately activate alternative modes of social interaction, of struggles for citizenship and, through networking, also of transformation of Rio's own territory, historically (cishetero)normative, corporatist-elitist, and contradictory, shifting perceptions of our territorialities from the margins to the center. This study, embedded in the street and guided by ethics, argues that a deviant design constitutes, above all, an action affirming the rights of dissident sex-gender populations to the city.