Etnografia da "cena quente": dramas, campos e alegorias no Centro Antigo de Salvador

Abstract

This ethnography engages with a network of racialized social actors shaping the sex-diverse cultural scene in the Old Center of Salvador. Inspired by multidisciplinary performance studies and drawing on two native categories that shape the moral zone of downtown Salvador - termed fechação and cena quente - I weave together dramatic, allegorical, and memorable scripts, which are enmeshed in a diverse web of signs that traverse the performative identities and social lives of these actors. With this aim, I articulate hybrid and critical aspects of the social agency of participants in the viadeiro on Avenida Sete de Setembro during the Dois de Julho Parade in Salvador; artists and regulars of the gay enclaves on Rua Carlos Gomes; and emblematic figures who circulate in the surroundings of the Pelourinho. The work aims to create a theoretical, memorial, and fabulative record of the cultural scene in the Old Center of Salvador. It was observed that its social actors, marked by stigmas of race, sexuality, and class, seek to represent locally and nationally rooted alternatives of resistance to various forms of subalternity. These actors are distinguished by processes related to identity affirmation and political disputes shaped within this field. From an empirical perspective, I understand that the cena quente, a generator of talent within the ambiguous and deteriorated social fabric in the Old Center of Salvador, also produces conflicts and contradictions, oscillating diffusely between histories of glory and decay, consequences of the unequivocal structural inequalities of contemporary society.