Mais Viva!

Abstract The author focuses on the concept of mais viva, a term in Brazilian Portuguese that can be roughly translated as “more alive, alert, savvy.” She theorizes the concept of mais viva as an embodied knowledge of black and trans resistance, a kind of critical awareness necessary for building self-love and building communities, along the lines of bell hooks's work. This discussion is an outcome of the dialogic theorizing that took place in the author's conversations with black Brazilian travesti activist Selen Ravache and her engagements with the work of Brazilian black feminist Beatriz Nascimento. The author argues that Selen's story is an instantiation of trans feminist work that taps on the Afro-diasporic legacy of fugitivity as refusal to lose oneself, even when one's self constitutes transformation, movement. She connects that discussion of fugitivity in the Brazilian African diaspora with the debates on trans and black fugitive principles in the United States indexed in the work of Tourmaline, Miss Major, C. Riley Snorton, Saidiya Hartman, and James Ford III, to name a few. Foregrounding black trans experiences from the southern hemisphere in relationship to transnational debates on gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality, among others, as part of a contingent conglomeration of elements, using Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore's terms, an assemblage constitutes one of the possibilities to rearrange, reassemble the ways we understand, move within, and intersect black, trans, and feminist studies.