This is the fifth post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.
On November 11, 2023, I was drunk at Boteco Socialista when a carimbó circle began.1 I like to begin there because the origin of Carimônias has nothing heroic about it, nothing clean, nothing like those neatly arranged narratives we reconstruct afterward, as if everything had already been moving toward some beautiful destination. It had not. We were laughing, drinking, watching a very traditional circle, and in the middle of that slightly reckless joy we decided that we were going to start a carimbó band too, even without instruments, even without knowing how to play, even without any guarantee that the idea would make it past the table at the bar. The decision came before technique, before rehearsal, before competence, and perhaps the band really began right there, at that point where collective desire arrives first and everything else has to catch up.
But Carimônias did not come from nowhere. To say only that a group of drunk people decided to make carimbó would be funny, but it would not be enough, almost just an anecdote without substance. Carimônias is the carimbó group of the Movimento Cultural das Themônias, and without explaining what the Themônias are, the whole text becomes empty.
“Themônia is not only a character, nor only an onstage identity, but a form of relation, a method of invention, a network of recognition, a way of remaining.”
The Themônias emerged in Belém in 2013, within the drag scene, but for a long time now they have exceeded that frame. The movement thickened until it became something larger, more unstable, harder to reduce to a single label, a field in which performance, partying, visuality, language, affect, movement through the city, self-invention, and collective forms of care became so entangled with one another that they produced another way of existing. This is not simply a set of artists who share an aesthetic or a social circle. It is an Amazonian network of creation and survival, in which certain bodies learn, together, how to exist in a world that repeatedly tries to push them outside legibility, outside art, outside beauty, outside the night, outside the city, and even outside the very idea of community. In this sense, Themônia is not only a character, nor only an onstage identity, but a form of relation, a method of invention, a network of recognition, a way of remaining.2
In several academic texts we have insisted that the Themônias cannot be reduced to the formula “Amazonian drags,” as if adding region and performance together were enough to account for what has been produced there. The movement begins in montação, yes, but it spills beyond montação, producing vocabulary, convention, repertoire, pedagogy, precarious family, alliance, living archive, party, protection.3 The hierogritos, for example, are a concept that appears throughout this body of work not as a playful linguistic flourish, but as a way of locating presences, activating networks, producing shelter within a city that does not distribute safety equally, and that detail changes a great deal, because it prevents language from being read as ornament.4 It is an infrastructure of care. It holds bodies up. It helps someone move through the night without having to cross it alone.
“It is an infrastructure of care. It holds bodies up. It helps someone move through the night without having to cross it alone.”
Carimônias emerges precisely out of that atmosphere. It is not a parallel musical project that just happens to bring together some people from the movement. It is one of the ways in which the themônia experience enters carimbó and forces traditional carimbó to answer back.
After that night at Boteco Socialista, the band did not die with the hangover. We learned how to play, I became a curimbó drummer, we found our way toward instruments, error, listening, rhythm, presence, and this year, 2026, our first song finally came out on Spotify.5 What moves me about it is that the song does not arrive apologizing, or asking permission, or offering a prior translation. It arrives calling people in. “Tonight is dirty / tonight is hot / call your friends / to come dance with us.” Then the call widens: “Carimbó for the Themônias / carimbó for Travestis / carimbó for Non-Binary people / for Boyceta and Femme Queen.”6 There is a force there that matters a great deal to me. The lyrics do not name identities in order to seem inclusive, as if they were filling a symbolic quota for the party. They redraw the circle, shift who can be summoned into it, who can dance at its center without first having to correct themselves, who can enter a tradition without leaving parts of their body and language at the door.
It is here that the idea of queer joy really begins to make sense to me, not as a slogan, not as an optimistic wrapper around resistance, not as a colorful photograph taken after pain in order to prove that life goes on. All of that would be insufficient, and perhaps even false. What I see in Carimônias is a denser joy, sweatier, more committed to the material of life, a joy made of collective presence, humor, erotic charge, noise, summons, bodies that take risks and bodies that support one another, people gathering so that the quality of space itself changes. When the song calls for the megazord, when the hierogrito appears, when the chorus mixes carimbó, travestility, drag, night, and catuaba, what is happening is not only a celebration. What is happening is an affective reorganization of space. The circle stops being mere entertainment and becomes a small system of world-making.
“It appears as something alive, crossed by the city, by heat, by drumskin, by wood, by sweat, by clothing, by the night in Belém, by the weight of existing in public when your body was not designed to be received calmly.”
Maybe I am insisting too much on the word world, but I still think it is the closest word to what I am trying to say, because carimbó here does not appear as a preserved piece of Amazonian tradition to be revered from a distance, nor as a regional sign ready for display. It appears as something alive, crossed by the city, by heat, by drumskin, by wood, by sweat, by clothing, by the night in Belém, by the weight of existing in public when your body was not designed to be received calmly. The band does not place dissidence on top of carimbó the way one pastes a contemporary concept onto an older form. It lets dissidence, the city, the night, and collective affect pass through that form until it begins to answer differently.
Belém enters this whole story not as a regional backdrop, but as pressure. The city participates. Belém must not be treated as an illustrative margin for debates formulated somewhere else because the urban Amazon is not an exotic setting for an imported queer lens, but a hot, humid, unequal, festive, Catholic, improvised, violent, and inventive ground all at once, a place that forces thought to change shape if it wants to account for what it sees. The Themônias emerge within that setting and respond to it by producing language, repertoire, alliance, presence, and excess. Carimônias does the same, only with drums.7
“Belém must not be treated as an illustrative margin for debates formulated somewhere else because the urban Amazon is not an exotic setting for an imported queer lens, but a hot, humid, unequal, festive, Catholic, improvised, violent, and inventive ground all at once, a place that forces thought to change shape if it wants to account for what it sees.”
That is why it feels so weak to say that Carimônias merely represents diversity within carimbó. It is doing something else. It alters the grammar of what can be recognized as carimbó, as tradition, as peoplehood, as Amazonia, as legitimate presence. It does not decorate a ready-made form with difference. It enters that form to the point that the form itself has to change.
And perhaps what moves me most in this story is precisely the fact that everything began in a common, ridiculous, drunken, almost irresponsible scene, and still produced something serious, durable, alive. The band began when we stopped waiting for permission to play within that language, when we decided that desire could also be a method, that we could learn by doing, make mistakes in public, enter the circle not as visitors but as a living part of it. Today, when I think about Carimônias, I do not think only of a carimbó band formed by dissident bodies. I think of a sonic consequence of the Themônias. I think of the moment when a network of affect, language, night, montação, care, and Amazonian invention decides to strike the drum. I think of a joy that does not come after struggle as a prize, but in the middle of it, as a condition for continuing.
And that, for me, is already a form of world.
Feature Image: Performance by Carimônias at Festa !PULSA! convida NoiteSuja, held at Casa Apoena in Belém on November 16, 2024. Photo by Ana Paula Gomes. Published with permission.
Notes
- Carimbó is a traditional musical and dance practice from northern Brazil, especially the state of Pará, shaped by Afro-Indigenous and popular cultural traditions through percussion, singing, and circular dancing. The curimbó is the hand drum central to many carimbó ensembles. ↩︎
- Juliano Bentes Nascimento, Trans-Themonização: Metamorfoses do processo criativo de Themônias em trânsito de gênero (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Pará, 2026); Manuela do Corral Vieira and Matheus Henrique Cardoso Luz, “Muito além das palavras: linguagem, territórios e sociabilidades das Themônias em Belém,” Movendo Ideias 26, no. 1 (2021): 46–59. ↩︎
- I retain the Portuguese term montação because there is no exact English equivalent for it. In Brazilian queer and drag cultures, montação refers not only to “getting into drag,” but to a broader transformative labor of embodiment, styling, visual construction, and self-invention. See Gabriela Luz da Cunha, Abraçar a themônia, para exorcizar demônios: formação de megazord, em themonização (master’s thesis, Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho,” 2024); Nascimento, Trans-Themonização. ↩︎
- I also retain the term hierogritos in Portuguese. Within the Themônias’ vocabulary, hierogritos are vocal calls or shouted codes used to announce presence, locate one another, and activate circuits of recognition, protection, and care across the city. See Vieira and Luz, “Muito além das palavras,” 46–59; Nascimento, Trans-Themonização. ↩︎
- In Portuguese, a curimboleiro is the musician who plays the curimbó, the hand drum that anchors much of carimbó’s rhythm and pulse. I translate the term here as “curimbó drummer,” while retaining the original instrument name. ↩︎
- Carimônias, “Carimbó das Themônias,” Spotify, 2026, https://open.spotify.com/intl-pt/album/01zzyDuDdhGjPI3JbSF9su?si=fDwEEQgFQzunyz-3zl5U3g. ↩︎
- For my reading of Belém and the urban Amazon not as a peripheral illustration of theory produced elsewhere, but as a place that forces thought itself to change shape, see Nascimento, Trans-Themonização. ↩︎
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