Of Lesbians and Werewolves

On its face, the Brazilian film Good Manners appears as a formalist exercise in genre hybridity. This article explores the pliability of melodrama and horror as these genres are adapted into the Brazilian production and reception contexts while applying an analytical framework that underscores and unravels the film’s explorations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Classifying the film as “intersectional cinema,” the article argues that, in its blending of genres, the film highlights its own artifice, in turn guiding viewers in a symbolic reading. This intersectional framework reveals how, as it inscribes and circumscribes blackness and queerness in a fantastical and speculative text, Good Manners effectively weaponizes genre to expose patriarchal, heteronormative, and racist operations in both cinema and in Brazilian society

Art · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology