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Castellanos Gonella, Carolina. Beautiful Male Bodies: Gay and Male Homoerotic Relationships in Caio Fernando Abreu's Morangos Mofados. Chasqui 44, no. 2 (2015): 272-284.

The works of the Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu (1948-96) deal with a variety of topics, amongst which issues of love, hate, identity, truncated relationships, AIDS, and homophobia play a major role. This essay focuses on how the short stories Terça-feira gorda and Aqueles dois, from Morangos mofados (1982), portray gay and male homoerotic relationships. Regarding the first short story, I argue that it promotes positive affects towards the main characters and attacks homophobia by showing how harmonic, beautiful, and genuine their relationship is. For the second short story, I propose that the main characters' harmonic and homoerotic relationship questions the heterosexual agreement of homosociality. In Abreu's short stories, gay and homoerotic relationships challenge hegemonic discourses and heteronormativity. Additionally, my analysis contends that these texts construct politics of desire based on harmony and on positive affects that expose and attack homophobia and homofear. These politics of desire, although based on a traditional view of male bodies, are part of Abreu's agenda of promoting queer relationships by showing them as beautiful and opposing them to the ugly homophobia of his Brazilian context. In order to carry out this examination, I first establish the theoretical frame that informs the study of homophobia, homofear, and affects; second, I analyze the harmonic similarities between both short stories and I define homoeroticism; third, I discuss how beautiful male bodies and homophobic bodies and voices are narratively displaced in the texts and, lastly, I elaborate on the politics of desire proposed by both texts.