Tran­ny Fag

The title of this scrap­py doc­u­men­tary pro­file refers to one of the many epi­thets used by its sub­ject, extro­vert per­for­mance artist Linn da Que­bra­da, to self iden­ti­fy. She does so while twerk­ing on stage at a club, kit­ted out in black net­ting and a chain­mail mitt with pointy metal­lic cones attached to each dig­it. This is all part and par­cel of a musi­cal stage act where she intones con­fronta­tion­al poet­ry set to a back­ground beat – tech­ni­cal­ly, her schtick lacks finesse and verve, but to the many pun­ters in the crowd, who bob and grind in the pur­ple spot­lights, she is an out­spo­ken goddess.

Clau­dia Priscil­la and Kika Goifman’s impres­sion­is­tic film offers a loose biog­ra­phy of Linn, splic­ing togeth­er her ener­getic per­for­mances with footage of her chat­ting to friends and a few snatch­es of archive in which she under­goes treat­ment for tes­tic­u­lar can­cer in the most glam­orous way imag­in­able. Iden­ti­ty, abuse and wide­spread trans­pho­bia are hot top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion, and there’s a lot of deep dis­cus­sion about how a per­son can have an almost sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with their own body. Linn doesn’t real­ly talk about any­thing oth­er than her attempts at self def­i­n­i­tion, which is total­ly under­stand­ably see­ing as she comes from such a mar­gin­alised sub-set.

Even at just over 70 min­utes, the film doesn’t real­ly have any cohe­sive struc­ture or even attempt to con­trive a wider arc. It’s just a series of ran­dom episodes in Linn’s life which can involve sil­ly drink­ing games with one of her band­mates, or just splay­ing her anus in extreme close-up while tak­ing a show­er. In one strange and rather mov­ing sequence, she takes a show­er with her moth­er, and they wash each oth­er with no sense that they’re play­ing to the camera.

One oth­er ele­ment that makes Linn an inter­est­ing case study is that she comes from the favela and is open­ly inter­est­ed in rep­re­sent­ing LGBQT+ folks who come from a back­ground of pover­ty. Her flam­boy­ant man­ner, allied with the almost com­i­cal­ly con­fronta­tion­al con­tent of her lyrics (sam­ple: ​“step inside my anus / it’s as big as an apart­ment.”) makes more sense when it’s clear that her mis­sion is to empow­er those who maybe don’t have the mox­ie to, say, spend their time in chemother­a­py vogu­ing into a mirror.