The Transgressive Force Of The Erotic: Boi Neon’s Sensual Speculation In The Brazilian Northeast

Since the 1950s, films set in the Brazilian Northeast have variously represented the region as the site of romanticised national origin, spectacularised poverty and violence, and popular anticolonial revolt, in each case defined by its opposition to metropolitan, urban centers. Gabriel Mascaro’s 2015 film Boi Neon breaks with these narratives, portraying a community of itinerant vaqueiros (“cowboys”) in the contemporary Northeast whose barren landscape is shot through with neon to mark its absorption into the globalised market as the textile industry and agribusiness encroach on the arid, traditionally cattle-raising region. Combining a Deleuzian approach to the body and desire with haptic and aural film theory, this article argues that, through careful attention to the affective ways in which humans interact with others and with a particular focus on the erotic, Boi Neon dispels conventional narratives of the region, drawing attention instead to the desires and tensions of bodies in their everyday activities. As time-space compression and reduction of humans, animals, and land to their exchange value make the dualisms that oppose nature to culture, rural to urban, premodern to modern, and mythical to historical increasingly difficult to sustain, I argue, Mascaro uses the contemporary Northeast as a setting to explore lines of flight from late capitalist agro-industry’s extractivist and heteropatriarchal order.