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.
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Summer 2025
Research Article|
June 01 2025
Of Lesbians and Werewolves: The Queer Intersectionality of Good Manners Available to Purchase
Bruno Guaraná
Bruno Guaraná
Bruno Guaraná is a master lecturer of film studies in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University. Originally from Recife, Brazil, he earned his PhD in cinema studies from New York University and his MA in film from Columbia University. His research explores intersectionality and negotiations of cultural citizenship in contemporary Brazilian media.
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Film Quarterly (2025) 78 (4): 17–26.
Citation
Bruno Guaraná; Of Lesbians and Werewolves: The Queer Intersectionality of Good Manners. Film Quarterly 1 June 2025; 78 (4): 17–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2025.78.4.17
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