Subversive Porn

the Porn Art Movement during Brazil’s democratic Opening (1980-1982)

Abstract

This article contextualizes and analyzes the mediatic strategies deployed by the Movimento de Arte Pornô (MAP) during Brazil’s process of re-democratization in the early 1980s—a period marked by political transition, moral conservatism, and the increasing circulation of hardcore pornography in Latin America. By revisiting a small portion of the MAP’s literary, visual, and performative practices, this article explores how the collective developed a distinctly “artivist” aesthetic that challenged normative representations of sexuality and interrogated the public/private divide that structured both artistic and political expression under authoritarian legacies. While recent scholarship has emphasized the rise of identity politics and the flourishing of small press and marginal literature during this period, such frameworks often remain constrained by stable categories of sexual identity and/or orientation. This article argues that the MAP’s interventions—particularly their manifestos, zines, body-centric performances, and poetic provocations with foul language—cultivated a radical sexual politics that moved beyond the affirmation of identity, embracing instead the subversive pleasure of sexual dissidence in such a way that it resonates today with the theory-laden term “queer”. By re-signifying obscenity and indecency through minor media and ephemeral formats, the MAP turned the erotic into a public, sensuous force capable of unsettling both aesthetic parameters and social stigma. This article thus situates the MAP within broader transnational debates on pornography and it demonstrates how the collective’s experimental use of subversive symbols complicated notions of politicity and revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, the MAP’s cultural output is read as a generative archive of sexual politics in transition, revealing the potential of art practices to estabilize and reimagine public life through embodied and unruly forms of expression.