Masculinities on the Wall: An approach to mural representations of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon

In 2014, several Portuguese muralists painted murals about the Carnation Revolution to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The initiative aimed at reviving the memory of the murals and graffiti painted in Portugal during the 1970s. These murals represent the memory of struggles in which the figure of the hero lends substance to the narrativity of the popular revolution that overthrew the New State dictatorship in 1974. This article argues that when analyzing those murals, they show that the memory on the Revolution generated a discursiveness represented by hegemonic masculinity, which also conforms to the gendered discourse of the neoliberal agenda. Feminism and negritude were hardly ever empowered as alternative forms of masculinity to represent the revolutionaries and were relegated to (quasi-)invisibility. The figures represented in those male-authored murals located in the centre of Lisbon convey hegemonic masculinity and most have already been washed off. Those representing negritude and feminism as alternative forms of masculinity emerge - though not exclusively - in the urban periphery. In the periphery, they resist time and convey an interventive discourse of memory of resistance, showing what the prevailing memory discursiveness has not considered central in the Revolution