Queerly Cosmopolitan: Bohemia and Belonging in a Brazilian Middle-Of-Nowhere City

ISBN-13: 9783030002954 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 157 str.

Timothy Eugene Murphy

Opis

Queerly Cosmopolitan offers a rare anthropological glimpse of a now common global condition: middle-class life in the fast-growing, lower-tier cities of the developing world. How do people construct a sense of belonging and self-worth in a place that, in the Brazilian national imagination, is a provincial "nowhere"? Creatively employing queer theory, Murphy follows an aspirational avant-garde who attempt to transform their command over global cosmopolitan styles, practices, and norms into the means of claiming a valued place within the local social universe. Murphy deftly demonstrates how widely circulating global cultural forms-from music to sexualities-offer upwardly-mobile communities ways to fashion cosmopolitan lives in even the most peripheral locations.

Spis treści

1. A Middle-of-Nowhere Somewhere

2. From Terehell to Terenowhere: Place-making in Teresina

3. Chique Distinction in a Big Small Town 

4. Nocturnal Bohemia

5. Black Sheep by Day

6. Friends of Dusk and Dawn

7. Epilogue

O autorze

Timothy Eugene Murphy is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Worcester State University, USA.

Blurb

An ethnography of urban citizenship, global belonging, and queerness in a rapidly growing provincial city in the Global South, Queerly Cosmopolitan explores how people develop a sense of belonging in a city understood by many to be “unimportant” and “in the middle of nowhere.” In his exploration of the city of Teresina and its inhabitants’ attempts to establish a sense of belonging and self-worth, Timothy Eugene Murphy creatively employs queer theory to investigate a community of bohemians. As he follows the participants through different realms of life—nocturnal bohemia, work, family, and intimate friendships—Murphy demonstrates how widely circulating cultural forms, from music to sexuality, offer upwardly mobile communities ways to fashion cosmopolitan lives in even the most peripheral locations.