Exploring the implications of racial identity and power dynamics of Malagasy-French Interracial romances (Claudine)

This study investigates the anthropological aspects of relationships between Malagasy women and men with French citizenship, specifically the role of stereotypes in shaping the formation of such couples and their impact on the individuals involved. The study will bring a critical approach to personal narratives gathered through in-depth interviews, and examine power dynamics within these relationships. To gain a comprehensive understanding, the study will primarily focus on couples who have been together for 2-10 years, residing temporarily or permanently, between Madagascar and La Réunion.

Transatlantic Cruising: racialized spaces, mobility, intimacy, and Queer worlding (Kaue)

This project aims to analyze the erotization of Race and the racialization of space and sexuality in the fluxes of Queer mobility. The ethnographic work will be conducted on cruising practices across a transnational setting in and in-between two metropolises. Cruising is an eroticized social interaction among LGBTQIA+ people – predominantly male-performing – in public spaces. The chosen sites for research incursion are London, São Paulo, and a set of cruising ships in-between the two cities. Accordingly to a news piece in the Chicago Tribune by Alfred Borcover (2004), “Gay and Lesbians cruises cater to a fifty-four-billion a year niche market in the US alone.” The idea here is of cruising as a transatlantic network deeply connected with issues of mobility, Race, space, and intimacy.
The goal of this project is to address the making of Queer worlds, which implicates the weaving of a complex fabric marked by “partial connections” (Strathern, 2004) of embodied experiences (Ahmed, 2006; Bento, 2006; Butler, 2009; Csordas, 2002; McRuer, 2006). Additionally, cruising becomes a tool to muddle binary categorizations of the Global South and the Global North and to explore the entanglement of intimacy, anonymity, and belonging. While LGBTQIA+ populations recognize the same practice in all sites, they are complex in their own right. Thus, coloniality, racism, slavery, policing, and homophobia are sociohistorical issues in Brazil and England that can and should be contextualized. The idea is that cruising in these sites can be a powerful medium for these transnational populations’ socioeconomic and cultural transformations. Not for universal cartography of sexuality and the erotization of Race but rather for an intricate understanding of collective knowledge. One that positions queerness, intimacy, and therefore cruising, not as a supplement but as a core on the crossroads of canonical subjects.