[sources]

Butterman, Steven Fred - BRAZILIAN LITERATURE OF TRANSGRESSION AND
POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETICS IN GLAUCO MATTOSO. Madison, University of
Wisconsin, 2000. 264 p. (PhD thesis) [1]

Butterman, Steven F. - PERVERSIONS ON PARADE: BRAZILIAN LITERATURE OF
TRANSGRESSION AND POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETICS IN GLAUCO MATTOSO.
San Diego, Hyperbole Books/San Diego State University Press, 2005. 266 p.
(based on the thesis above) [1]



Foster, David William - "Some Proposals for the Study of Latin American
Gay Culture." In his CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE.
Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1994. p. 25-71. [2]



Foster, David William (ed.) - LATIN AMERICAN WRITERS ON GAY AND LESBIAN
THEMES: A BIO-CRITICAL SOURCEBOOK. Westport, Greenwood, 1994. p.
217-220. [3]

Mattoso, Glauco - "The Saddest Thing is that it's Over." In Leyland,
Winston (ed.) - MY DEEP DARK PAIN IS LOVE: A COLLECTION OF LATIN
AMERICAN GAY FICTION. San Francisco, Gay Sunshine Press, 1983. p.
318-319. (short story translated by E. A. Lacey) [4]



Perrone, Charles A. - SEVEN FACES: BRAZILIAN POETRY SINCE MODERNISM.
Durham, N.C.: Duke U P, 1996.

Perrone, Charles A. - "Margins and Marginals: New Brazilian Poetry of
the 1970s." LUSO-BRAZILIAN REVIEW 31.1 (1994): 17-37.

Trevisan, João Silvério - "The Ambiguous Art of being Ambiguous." In his
PERVERTS IN PARADISE. London, GMP, 1986. p. 90-132. (translated by
Martin Foreman) [5]




[NOTES]

[1] Click: [A TRANSGRESSOR AS CASE STUDY].

[2] Click [THE "FIXATION-FICTION" WRITER] for Foster's essay.

[3] Foster's article reads as below:

MATTOSO, GLAUCO (pseud. of Pedro José Ferreira da Silva; Brazil; 1951)

Mattoso suffers from glaucoma, which has led him to abandon his
profession of librarian. His first name is an assumed reference to his
eye problems. His distinctive persona in photographs and drawn images is
thick glasses, accompanied by leather clothing, jackboats, and a
skinhead haircut. Mattoso's persona is a public sign of his commitment
to an explicit, in-your-face representation of various forms of
sexuality considered deviant less for their antiheterosexist and
homoerotic dimensions than for their defiance of middle-class hygiene
and its most recent manifestation, safe sex.

Mattoso is the author of several books of poetry that are marked more by
verbal and graphic images of an exaggerated masculinity calculated to
swamp the prevailing belief, in a country like Brazil, that
homosexuality means limp-wristed faggotry than they are by good writing.
Clearly inspired by the concrete poetry movement in Brazil of the 1950s
and 1960s, books like LÍNGUAS NA PAPA (Tongues on the Cock; 1982),
MEMÓRIAS DE UM PUETEIRO: AS MELHORES GOZAÇÕES DE GLAUCO
MATTOSO (Recollections of a Whorehouse [?]: The Best Tidbits of Glauco Mattoso;
1982) and LIMEIRIQUES & OUTROS DEBIQUES GLAUQUIANOS (Limericks and
Other Glauquian Morcels; 1989) are characterized both by ingeniously
outrageous graphics and by impressive verbal acrobatics, which makes for
a challenging task in translating his texts: "pueteiro" is clearly
derived from "puteiro" (brothel), which is in turn derived from "puta"
(whore), while "línguas na papa" is a trope extracted from "papas na
língua": "falar sem papas na língua" means not to beat around the bush.
In the original metaphor "papa" means potato, but in Mattoso's trope it
has its vulgar sexual meaning, cock. Mattoso's dedication to often
complicated and multilingual wordplay in his texts serves to unpack
conventional sexual meanings through various forms of troping (with all
of the unsubtlety associated with limericking and other broad forms of
wordplay), as well as to naturalize unconventional sexual metaphors,
especially those he associates with the representation of "dirty sex"
(including sadomasochism) and its challenges to a bland and ultimately
antierotic conventional sexuality.

ROCKABILLYRICS (1988) is a series of Brazilian song lyrics, with an
underlying erotic content, based on the American rockabilly tradition.
This work demonstrates Mattoso's interest in American cultural sources,
already evident in the U.S. English-based wordplay in his erotic poetry
and in his incorporation of extensive American material in his
quasi-sociological treatise O CALVÁRIO DOS CARECAS: HISTÓRIAS [sic] DO
TROTE ESTUDANTIL (The Calvary of the Pledges: Tales of Student
Fraternities; 1985), which develops the views that Anglo-American and
Brazilian academic fraternities are veiled manifestations of
homoeroticism, with the notable naturalization of practices that echo
conventional society's rejection of deviant dirty sex. Mattoso's use of
English-language sources and his careful documentation of them reveals
his training in library science.

Mattoso's most ambitious work brings together his analysis of so-called
dirty sex and the judicious use of bibliographic sources. MANUAL DO
PEDÓLATRA AMADOR: AVENTURAS & LEITURAS DE UM TARADO POR PÉS
(Manual of the Amateur Foot Fetishist: Adventures and Readings of Someone Really
into Feet; 1986) is loosely structured as the autobiography of the
narrator, who describes his discovery, through the initiation rites of
an academic fraternity, that he is a foot fetishist. His sexual
explorations and development, both heterosexual and homosexual, turn on
the increasingly metonymic displacement of sexual possibilities,
especially those of the allegedly dirty variety, toward the foot –
dirty or clean, shod or bare – and include the establishment of a
professional practice based on the manipulation of the foot to cure
illness and disease, with the added dimension of the erotic
possibilities of that manipulation (at least for the attending
professional). In part a send-up of Western-style sex manuals and
first-person "sentimental education" narratives, Mattoso's work is most
productively read as part of his larger literary project of naturalizing
the supposedly outer fringes of erotic experience and, in the process,
underscoring the hypocrisies and ideological slippages of heterosexism.
Thus, one of the virtues attributed to foot fetishes is a range of
intensely erotic experiences that all fall within the range of safe sex,
since the MANUAL poses the rhetorical question of how many people have
contracted AIDS through pedal manipulation. With the graphic artist
Marcatti, Mattoso has produced a comic book version of the MANUAL, AS
AVENTURAS DE GLAUCOMIX, O PEDÓLATRA (The Adventures of Glaucomix, the
Foot Lover; 1990).

Mattoso was involved with Brazil's famous gay-rights journal of the
1970s, LAMPIÃO (Lantern/Streetlight), and he has published his own
broadsheets, JORNAL DOBRABIL (1977-1981) and REVISTA DEDO MINGO (Little
Finger Review; 1982). In typical Mattoso fashion, JORNAL DOBRABIL
involves a wordplay: it is a trope of JORNAL DO BRASIL (Journal of
Brazil), the Rio de Janeiro daily that is considered one of most
influential media forms of the hegemonic bourgeoisie: good taste, solid
values, expository objectivity and liberal good conscience.


CRITICISM

Foster, David William. "Sexual theory in the tropics: Glauco Mattoso's
MANUAL DO PEDÓLATRA AMADOR." In his ESSAYS ON LATIN AMERICAN
CULTURAL DIVERSITY. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

Parker, Richard G. BODIES, PLEASURES, AND PASSIONS: SEXUAL CULTURE IN
CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

[4] Click: [THE "FIXATION-FICTION" WRITER].

[5] Trevisan's analysis reads as below:

Even more significant is the emergence today of poets of both sexes who
are directly involved with homosexual erotica – an unheard – of
situation in Brazil, where poets have only dared to tackle the theme
very metaphorically and vaguely. Among these new poets the truly
exceptional are Roberto Piva and Glauco Mattoso. [...]

Glauco Mattoso's approach is anarchic and dadaist, frequently tinged
with semiotic suggestions whose nuances of magisterial ambivalence come
from the insertion of an obscene element by which the attempts at
academic intellectualization so typical of semiologists are seen to be
destroyed. Thus the foul-mouthed Glauco speaks: "I want poetry to be
much more lascivious, / with athlete's foot on the tongue, sweat in the
saliva, / cum in the phlegm, piss on the gums, / prick in neutral, cunt
in raw flesh." With a destructive sarcasm that places him in the
tradition of Gregório de Matos, he often adopts various pseudonyms such
as Pedro o Podre ("Peter the Putrid") who adores scat-games – "If a
poem seems to me to be shit, I eat it. This is being a coprophagic
poet." Glauco is also brutally irreverent and virulent in his creation
of apocryphal texts by such personalities as Pol Pot, Edith Piaf,
Tennessee Williams, Shakespeare, John Paul II, etc. Thus he
sarcastically places this phrase in Khomeini's mouth: "If sodomy is
committed with an ox, ram or camel, the animal's urine and excrement
becomes impure." But perversion and deviance, which he uses to
explosive effect, are the medium as well as the message, for Glauco
adopts the marginality of his poetic work and simply prints subversive
pamphlets which he sends through the post to his chosen readers. His
work seems to me to have that breath of radicality rare and necessary to
poetry, which thereby loses its limits and inhibitions and contaminates
everything: "Oh shit with your sea of urine / with your fetid sky / you
are my continent fertile land where germinates / my independence my
indiscipline."

Click: [A TRANSGRESSOR AS CASE STUDY]; click also [SCATOLOGY AND
"COPROPHAGY"] and see the poem "Manifesto Coprofágico."

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