‘Afrontravas’: new podcast that highlights multiple transvestigender experiences debuts in Brazil

Priscilla Peixoto – Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – With the proposal to promote and disseminate the multiple transvestigender experiences
existing in the Brazilian territory, a collective formed by 5 transvestites dedicated to studies and work focused on trans existence founded the project @afrontravas podcast. The first season has 6 episodes, the first of which premiered this Monday, 21, on the streaming platforms, with the theme Transvestite Education.

“The project came from a collective we formed to write a paper about transvestite territorialities and how we perceive ourselves in the environment where we live. One of the ideas of the podcast is to open a dialogue for transvestites to see each other within the diversity that exists among us transvestites, whether black, fat, indigenous, mixed race”, explains member Ariel Kuma.

Issues such as health, employment, religion, affectivity, territoriality, and whiteness and raciality are included in this first phase of the podcast. “We spent three hours online recording everything and capturing audio, and it has been amazing”, says Ariel, who highlights that the dates for the next episodes are already available on March 23rd, 25th, 28th, and 30th, ending on April 1st.

Team

Besides Ariel Kuma, 37 years old transvestite, who at 35 entered a theater college and accepted her trans condition, and who uses Kuma Espaço de Criação: Arte & Yoga to support other trans people (transmasculinities, transvestites, racialized people (black, brown and indigenous), the realization of the podcast, which highlights distinct social, cultural and ethnic contexts throughout the country, counts with the performance of names like the multi-artist Judá Nunes.

Judá was born and raised in Vitória da Conquista, Bahia. She is a multi-artist in performance, audiovisual, dance, and theater and has a degree in theater from Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia – UESB (Jequié Campus). She is from Bahia and works as an art educator, writer, educational curator, and researcher of artistic-pedagogical relations and is responsible for the podcast’s debut episode.

The second edition with the theme “territoriality and transvestite boundaries” will be conducted by Fayola Caucaia, racialized transvestite, brown, self-declared mestizo, who uses this demarcator to make visible her ancestry crossed by black and indigenous identities whitened and permeated by erasure and silencing.

The poet, performer, and vocalist of the duo called “As mambas”, Sued Hosannah is also part of the podcasters’ team. Sued was born in Alagoinhas, located in the hinterland of Bahia, and grew up in the Arenoso neighborhood, located in the region known as Cabula, an urban quilombo. She is majoring in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia, (UFBA) and will be in charge of the third episode, with the theme “Whiteness and Racialities”.

Graduated from the Internet Systems course at the Instituto Federal Farroupilha, in Rio Grande do Sul, the Argentinean Alana Costa will be in charge of the topic “Formal and non-formal and informal employability”.

Created in the city called Panambi, colonized and composed until today by a
population of mostly white people of German descent, considered by her conservative and hostile to trans experiences, Alana used as a survival technology the disguise among the cis heteronormative environment as a method of protection and self-defense. Racialized brown, descendant of white and indigenous people.