Queer hook/unhookings of velcro: bodies, images, and cinemas in friction

Abstract

This article proposes velcro as a theoretical-methodological concept, grounded in sapatão and queer experiences, which operates through frictions, disengagements, and material approximations between images, bodies, and desires. Inspired by feminist and queer critique, velcro does not seek permanent adhesion but rather a dynamic movement of sticking and unsticking, evoking tensions, affects, and resistances. Within this framework, spectatorship is not a fixed position but an ongoing gesture of negotiation with the audiovisual – a sensitive and inventive process mediated by memory, desire, and corporeality. The video essay emerges as a key practice in this proposal, enabling direct intervention into filmic material and embodying an engaged, embodied form of research. As a method, velcro mobilizes both cinephilic hypermemory – canonical repertoires and conscious references–and desire’s hypomemory – affective traces and involuntary recollections. This dual operation constructs an affective-political archive that challenges the norms of traditional film analysis, rejecting its claims to objectivity and critical neutrality. By reconfiguring cinema through lesbian desire, velcro does not seek to stabilize identities or methods but instead proposes a continuous movement of invention, inventorying, and intervention. Its power lies precisely in its capacity to disrupt hegemonic narratives, unsettle fixed categories, and retell cinema’s history from marginal perspectives. It is a porous critique, forged through contact, noise, and difference – a methodology that does not fix but instead opens fissures for new ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking cinema.