Hair aesthetics, embodied materialities, and the choreography of hair along the Amazonian triple frontier

Abstract (English)

This papper, based on my postdoctoral research, explores the ethnographic landscape of beauty salons and barbershops across the tri-border Amazon region comprising Tabatinga (Brazil), Leticia (Colombia), and Santa Rosa (Peru), with a focus on establishments led by trans feminine professionals. It investigates how gender and corporeality intersect in the production of gendered personhoods through haircare practices. Hair emerges as a central technology of gender transition and bodily transformation, particularly among trans women and travestis whose identities are often validated more as laboring bodies than as recipients of beauty care. The research highlights the paradox wherein trans bodies perform transformative labor for others, especially cis women, yet are structurally excluded from receiving similar services within these same beauty spaces. Through narratives and embodied practices like the "baile do cabelo" (hair ball), the study emphasizes how gender transitions are enacted through surface-level yet deeply material elements such as hair, voice, motion, makeup, and clothing—often in the absence of hormones or surgeries. The work critiques dominant biomedical frameworks of transition and draws on decolonial and trans epistemologies to understand how trans corporeality resists and reconfigures hegemonic notions of gender, beauty, and labor in a socio-racially complex border context. I wonder what a body in transition means in this context, given that it is not the same body conceived by modern biomedical ontologies. These processes reveal assemblages of embodyment materialities and that challenge cisnormative femininity, illustrating how trans bodies both embody and generate continuous material transformations. Despite being a region profoundly governed by militarist and Bolsonarist ideologies, where travestis and trans women are marked for erasure by the necropolitics of states and sociality, they transform beauty into a practice of inhabiting the ruins, making heads, bodies and living