Renata Carvalho

Manifesto Transpofágico (Transpophagic Manifest) is the transpophagy of a transpologist’s transpology. “Today I decided to wear my own skin. My travesti body.” Renata “wears” her own body to narrate the historicity of her corporeity. “My body came before me, without me asking. It is older than me.” Renata feeds off of her “transcestrality”. She eats, digests it—transpophagy. “Of my story, or my stories, or our stories—most are alike.” Renata talks about the transgender body’s social and image construct, sexualisation, stereotypes, structural transphobia, criminalisation, mass incarceration, violence and the pathological rendering that pervades these bodies, like hers. Travesti living. She calls upon us to look, to watch, to see her transvestite body. She brings it to us first-hand. The travesti body as an experiment, a lab rat. This is a transvesturgy, a writexperience. The manifest of a travesti body. The sign blinks TRAVESTI. TRAVESTI. TRAVESTI. — Renata Carvalho 


RENATA CARVALHO was born in 1981, in Santos (São Paulo). She is an actress, theatre director, playwright and transpologist (transgender anthropologist). She founded MONART (National Trans Artists Movement) and created the Trans Representativeness Manifest, which sustains that transgender characters be played by transgender artists. She also founded Coletivo T, the first art collective solely formed by transgender artists in São Paulo.