(Ser)tão Animal: Facing the Human Animality in Gabriel Mascaro’s Boi neon (2015)

This article argues that Gabriel Mascaro’s Boi neon (2015) challenges the longstanding division between human and nonhuman animals in the sertão, a landscape that has been a fixture of Brazilian cinema. Boi neon blurs that dichotomy by presenting a group of characters that form a gender-destabilizing, nontraditional nomadic family who mainly works for vaquejadas, a Brazilian rodeo held in an arid region undergoing accelerating industrialization. The film collapses the Western cultural hierarchy between humans and animals in a key scene where Galega, a female truck driver, wears a horse’s head mask during an erotic dance. According to the anthropologist David Le Breton, the face is the body region where the human condition acquires meaning and incarnates a person’s identity. For Le Breton, modifying a face is the equivalent of changing existence. By analyzing Galega’s performance in dialogue with Le Breton’s theory, this article explores how Boi neon disrupts the ontological division between human and nonhuman animals in the landscape of the sertão, which historically became a stereotyped idea of impoverished, savage land that has only existed to be tamed or destroyed in the name of progress. Additionally, the article claims that Mascaro’s film encourages viewers to recognize their own animality, challenging the speciesist view of humans as rational beings distinct from their animal nature.