ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the semantic effects on people's lives of digital semiotic practices carried out in a specific lanhouse, located in a marginal district of the city of Rio de Janeiro in a small business center, away from well-off neighborhoods. It seeks to observe locally occasioned queer performativities of genders and sexualities, that is, researchers follow the theoretical view that genders and sexualities are not given before discourse and, as such, they come about performatively. Scaling analogizes, perspectivizes, categorizes and evaluates, forging perception in particular ways. It is in the doing that performativity effects count as particular genders and sexualities. One may be in the periphery of the world, for instance, and be actively involved with globalization processes, which are typical of central positionings. Their get-together produced social occasions in which digital and face-to-face encounters got entangled, promoting different socialization practices, other than playing network games on the Internet.