Sleepovers, Silliness, and the Sacred in São Paulo: Minor Methods of Queer and Trans Pentecostal Study

This paper theorizes the sleepover party as a form of queer and trans Pentecostal study. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research with differentially racialized queer and trans Pentecostals in São Paulo, Brazil, I examine all-night, intergenerational sleepovers held in cramped apartments as sites of queer and trans Pentecostal worldmaking. Building on queer anthropological approaches to the “infraordinary,” Moten and Harney’s notion of “study,” and recent work that troubles binaries of sacred/profane, ecstatic/secular embodiment, and serious/silly, I argue that the sleepover emerges as a sacred practice of collective respite within an anti-Black, LGBTQ+-phobic, and class-stratified world. Singing praise music, putting on wigs, gossiping, sharing miracles and prophesies, drinking wine, and staying awake through stretches of boredom, the sleepover is a kind of vigil. As a “minor method,” it redirects attention toward the “micropractices” that sustain queer religious life and the infraordinary of queer religiosity.