Manifesto written by T. Angel in 2015 starting from her experiments and experiences in the brazilian body modification culture. Thought based on the anarchic and poetic interlocutions fomented by the first decade of the FRRRKguys (2006-2016). Inspired by body hackitivism, queer theory, crip theory, and all the theories about the possibilities of deviant lives. Sketching what we can call as a Freak Theory or Abnormal Theory. Appropriating and renaming the term freak. 

This material has only been published in brazilian portuguese, until now. If you think you can improve the translation into English, let us know. Thank you!

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Osasco, December 27, 2015.

Manifesto Freak

– We are freaks!

Our bodies and subjectivities are strange, weird, abject, abnormal, monstrous. We are our bodies.

– We are the fatest body, the most muscular, the thinest, the whitest, the blackest, the redest, the yellowest, we are noisy polychromy. We are the excess, we are the exaggeration that causes disturbance in your comfort zone.

– We are the vampire woman, the enigma, the lizard man. We are the cat that is not male or female and is. We are the woman with penis, the man with vagina, the boy without genital, without nose, we are the people who have no gender. We are the noise of sexual normativies. We are the angel, the demon, the alien, the cyborg, the shaman. We are the bird, the black diamond, the board, the goddesses, the heroes and the villains of the stories and mythologies. We are the past, the present and the future. We are zombies, la negra, warriors, entities of horns, splitted tongues and serene soul. We are chimeras. We are the scars of our bodies. We are the amputees, the blind dancers, the deaf and the eloquent dumb. We rock the world in a wheelchair.

– We are the caterpillar, the cocoon, the butterfly and the dust. We are the metamorphosis. Star dust.

– We know that our monstrosity varies according to our financial power. The less money we have, the more monstrous and abject we are. The size of our monstrosity increases by following the size of the hypocrisy and bad charactism of those who follow this line of reasoning.

– We modify by personal initiative and, for the most diverse motivations, the colors of our skins, sclera and the silhouettes of our bodies. We pierce ourselves and we allow consensually to be pierced. In our bodies we insert artificial prostheses, remove parts, create reliefs, invent textures and new aesthetic, mystical and ethical possibilities of existence.

– There’s no point in worrying about the harmony of colors and shapes when we think about our bodies. The concern is to answer our own demands, needs and our wishes, desires and tastes, based on what we individually believe and understand as beautiful or grotesque and the infinity of all possibilities between one concept and another. Our bodies, our choices.

– We seek the harmony between our presence and experience, this is, the way we put ourselves in the world.

– We do not care whether the labor market will accept us or not. Our concern is why we still accept that the labor market excludes people based on the vileness of judgments about appearance. These judgments feed, above all, a racist principle. Character does not come printed on the outside of the body. 

– Our body is a social construction. So is yours.

– Body modification is a social, cultural, political, artistic, and historical legacy of humanity. An ephemeral patrimony, a precious and sacred legacy.

– Body modification is an extension of what you are. Be proud of who you are. Do not let anyone take your pride away from you.

– There is no body modification that is not political. The body is political in itself. Living in itself is a political act.

– There is no living body that is not modified.

– We seek to understand and to make understand the body modifications recognizing our Tupiniquins and Latin specificities. We have a rich and complex experience that cannot and should not be detailed. Our history with bodily modifications predates colonization. The colonization was responsible for the extermination of part of this history. Colonization is not over yet.

– We refuse to continue perpetuating colonized and colonizing notions about our bodies. We refuse to continue perpetuating colonized and colonizing notions about the knowledge of body studies.

– We don’t want anymore that just the doctors theorize and look for definitions about what we are. We want to tell what we are, with our own voice, with our own writing, with our own silence, with our own body.

– The Freak Theory should be written by the freaks themselves. The Freak Theory must be told, mainly, by the freaks themselves. And then, only in the absence of these freaks or in the total impossibility of their presence, will we need someone to speak for us. We claim our presence, we refuse the confinement of our existence in the shadows and the downtake gullies.

-We assume and stand against normativity and the domestication of life. We are not docile bodies. We want to dance to the sound of the destruction of compulsory normativity.

– We do not accept that the family, the church, science, or even the state, tell us what we can do with our bodies. We do not need a seal of approval or a label of authenticity from any institution to exist, we are already a reality. We are not asking for permission to exist, we are saying loud and clear that we are already here and we seek a peaceful coexistence.

– We do not need to ask permission to be who we are, so we dispense those patriarchal, violent, controlling, authoritarian notion of having to ask permission and prove that we are what we are – then, only after someone other than us, say that – our existence has validity and dignity. We already are a reality. Our existence is not only valid but full of legitimacy. We demand dignity!

– There is no dignity without autonomy over our own body.

– Every offense about our aesthetics only exposes your lack of ethics about the fullness of life.

– Biology says that without diversity there would be no life. The culture says that without diversity there would be no life. We say that without diversity there would be no life.

– We understand that we make up a minority. We understand that, like so-called minorities, we suffer oppression and part of a process of social exclusion and spatial segregation. That’s why, and with the full awareness of the violent system we are experiencing, we endorse discourses and struggles against misogyny, machismo, elitism, sexism, fatphobia, racism, capacitism, ageism, LGBTphobia, xenophobia and etc. We also call attention to the importance of awareness of the struggle against specism. We humans are not at the top of absolutely nothing. Let us not overestimate ourselves.

– We must fight against authoritarianism, injustice, oppression and control of bodies, even it implicates upraising against the people of body modification community. The hegemonic discourse is powerful, money is powerful and corrupt, the power is powerful, corrupt and it is vicious.

– We will not allow happening the assimilation of what we are. Neither by economic imposition, nor by family imposition, nor by religious imposition, neither by imposition of the State, by you and by no one. We will only be invisible – and we can be invisible – when we want to. We choose!

– Being invisible is resistance against a violent, authoritarian and oppressive state institutional apparatus. If we must be invisible for that our existence is not exterminated and erased, we will be. To repeat: to be invisible must be our choice and not an imposition of another.

– We do not want to serve the interests of a normative life, because we do not believe in this manufactured and canned model. Normativity is a violent illusion that made you believe that it is the only one possible truth.

– There is no single possible reality.

– There is no single model of body possible.

– There is no single possibility of happiness possible.

– There is not a single path. It never existed and will never exist. If it is necessary to walk in the earth, we will walk. If it is necessary to walk in the water, we will walk. If we must learn to fly, we will learn. Adaptation, evolution, revolution.

T. Angel