Dar “close” nas romarias: percursos de vidas transexuais e travestis nas peregrinações e devoções a Padre Cícero

Abstract

The first pilgrimages to the village of Joaseiro date from 1889, when there was a displacement of people from the municipality of Crato to the village, after the disclosure of the miracle of the hóstia that involved Father Cicero and Beata Maria de Araújo. This fact fomented devotional practices within popular Catholicism, which at the time was opposed by the Romanization movement of Catholicism, with changes in this scenario after the Second Vatican Council. The priest's charism with the sertanejos, together with the hierophanies resulting from the bloody handkerchiefs of the blessed, gave motivation to a flow of constant displacements of subjects who sought and seek in the city of Juazeiro the sacred, considering it the "new Jerusalem", a land of conversion and penance. The history of Juazeiro, as well as that of the pilgrimages, runs through a process of invisibilization of gender, initially with the Beata Maria de Araújo, and nowadays, with the transgender population in their devotional practices. This research seeks to understand the insertion of transgender subjects in popular Catholic practices, especially in Padre Cícero pilgrimages, based on the stories of the lives of these individuals, using the ethnographic perspective, which allows a greater insertion in the field for understand the flow of pilgrimages. The category of pilgrim is fluid and in constant construction from the realities of the subjects that compose it. In this panorama, the transgender population reaffirms popular practices, especially through the insertion of their bodies in the pilgrimages, trying to experience a Catholicism in the measure that is allowed.