This article examines disco aesthetics and queer experiences in Brazil, highlighting cultural dialogues and narratives. It reveals how disco embodies both joy and melancholy from the 1970s.
Moving back to the dance floor in the second half of the 1970s, we seek in this article not only to defend but also to think about disco aesthetics in Brazil. Beyond an Anglophone framework, centered on the North American context and based in New York, we return to the disco sensibility not from a nostalgic look, but from a glimpse of a queer experience that takes place in the disco as a scenic and dramatic space through bodies, dances and the night. In the dialog between Richard Dyer's essay In the defense of disco (1979), Andrew Holleran's novel Dancer from the Dance (1978) and the group Frenéticas from the soap opera Dancin' Days (1978-1979), we follow the neon of a joy that fades into melancholy in the 1970s. There is still a disco story to be told in Brazil through other sensations. After all, what can disco still bring us today?
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Lopes et al. (2025) studied this question.
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