Reclaiming Body-Territory in the Carnival of Olinda: Feminist Blocos and the Politics of Desire

During the Carnaval in northeastern Brazil, feminist and LGBTQIAPN+ blocos transform the streets into laboratories of political imagination. Through collective dancing, nudity, and joy, they contest patriarchal and colonial orders that have historically regulated women’s and dissident bodies in public space. This paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with four feminist blocos-Sambadeiras, Bloco da Diversidade, Vacas Profanas, and Quem Cola Entra-to analyze how participants create forms of resistance, visibility, and collective care in the midst of celebration. Grounded in feminist and decolonial anthropology, and drawing on the Latin American notion of body-territory, the study argues that Carnaval operates as a field of political action and epistemic creation. By claiming pleasure and eroticism as political forces, these groups expand the meaning of citizenship and participation beyond institutional politics, enacting feminist and sexual politics through the body. However, these same spaces also reveal the tensions and ambivalences of Carnaval life: moments of autonomy and exposure, solidarity and exclusion, coexist within the same streets. Rather than a pure experience of freedom, Carnaval becomes a contested terrain where new possibilities of living and desiring emerge amid persistent inequalities and hierarchies.