Body Politics in 1968 Brazil

Body Politics in 1968 Brazil: Student Militancy, Gender and Embodied Struggles for Social Transformation

Opening Keynote by Victoria Langland (Ann Arbor) at the International Conference “The other 68: Anthropophagic Revolutions in Brazilian Counterculture after 1968” at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, 23-25 May 2018

This talk addresses the centrality of the gendered body for the student protests of 1968 in Brazil. From the martyred figure of young male militants, to the much more ambivalent representations of female activists’ sexualized bodies, it asks how the discursive and material bodies of student activists became key sites for social transformation. By looking at how students made bodies central to both their protest tactics and their political demands, it allows us to consider the importance of the body as a site of public protest during 1968 and into the post-68 period.

Victoria Langland is Associate Professor of History and Romance Literature and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is the author of Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (2013).

Presented by:
The conference is part of the series “Tropical Underground” and is organized by the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” with the Department of Theatre, Cinema and Media Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.