Queer Globalizations

Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Martin F. Manalansan, Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, Martin F. Manalansan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780814716243
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814772645
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Scholars of postcolonial and LGBT studies examine the validity of the globalization of queer cultures

Globalization has a taste for queer cultures. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the internet, or in the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, queerness sells and the transnational circulation of peoples, identities and social movements that we call "globalization" can be liberating to the extent that it incorporates queer lives and cultures. From this perspective, globalization is seen as allowing the emergence of queer identities and cultures on a global scale.

The essays in Queer Globalizations bring together scholars of postcolonial and lesbian and gay studies in order to examine from multiple perspectives the narratives that have sought to define globalization. In examining the tales that have been spun about globalization, these scholars have tried not only to assess the validity of the claims made for globalization, they have also attempted to identify the tactics and rhetorical strategies through which these claims and through which global circulation are constructed and operate.

Contributors include Joseba Gabilondo, Gayatri Gopinath, Janet Ann Jakobsen, Miranda Joseph, Katie King, William Leap, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Bill Maurer, Cindy Patton, Chela Sandoval, Ann Pellegrini, Silviano Santiago, and Roberto Strongman.

Part 1
GLOBALIZATION AND DISSIDENT SEXUALITIES

1 The Wily Homosexual
(First—and Necessarily Hasty—Notes)

Silviano Santiago

It is a commonplace that when Brazilian intellectuals travel to metropolitan sites, they are asked, How has Brazilian cultural production contributed to this or that critical theory, or how might Brazilian cultural production contribute to it? The question implicitly underscores not only the peripheral character of Brazilian culture (and thus of the intellectual who represents it) but also the subaltern condition of the Brazilian experience—even the ignorance of the historic specificity of Brazilian culture in the West. “Peripheral,” “subaltern,” and “particular” correspond semantically to the referent of the cosmopolitan question on the value of Brazilian culture, and these terms are respectively opposed to “metropolitan,” “superior,” and “universal,” features associated with the place of utterance.

I have a vigorous response for the curious metropolitan, and a polite one as well. In accepting the metropolitan’s dialogue I am not seeking a clumsy inversion of the hierarchy of values implicit in the metropolitan question; I am, rather, looking for a strategy to supplement such a question. My participation in the dialogue would attempt, then, to raise the inquirer’s awareness with respect to his or her utterance—an utterance charged with politically hegemonic values. I answer my interlocutor that I prefer to redirect the question to texts produced in the metropolis. I submit to him or her any and every text and author representative of the West and charge him or her with the task that has been assigned to me. I am indirectly reminding him or her that there is a moment of mediation in dialogue, and that that moment should be allowed to speak, for it is that moment that legitimates the values that inform the question initially asked of me.

Here is a contemporary example of the redirection of questions I am addressing. Within the corpus of Susan Sontag’s essays, how has Brazil contributed to the theories that she has expounded with such originality? I extract two answers and I sense a contribution. In Against Interpretation, Sontag credits Brazil, through Carmen Miranda, for contributing to her theory on camp; more recently, in the pages of the New Yorker, she proposes that the nineteenth-century Brazilian author Machado de Assis might have contributed, with his fiction, to the theory of the Western novel. Who will next be named in her texts?

Much more than those produced at great pains by Brazilianists, Sontag’s texts end up defining the meaning of Brazilian culture in a cosmopolitan setting such as the United States.¹ The academic research of the specialist in Brazilian culture, even that which is written in English, the universal idiom, becomes increasingly less significant in our globalized times, for it tends to resituate the peripheral, subaltern, and particular in a sort of cultural ghetto—from which it had ironically attempted to remove it. The many contemporary nationalist regionalisms—fragmented manifestations of political resistance in neoliberal times—are best summed up now by that other regionalism that in the metropolises goes by the name of “Little Brazil.”

Here are other classic and modern examples of the attempt to redirect the metropolitan question, this time the European question. The notion of cannibalism applied to Brazil, presented with unusual clairvoyance by a thinker of the magnitude of Montaigne in his similarly titled essay, has dominated the general meaning of Brazilian culture from the Renaissance to modern times. Clarice Lispector, promoted with great sympathy in France by Hélène Cixous (Vive l’orange), gave universal preeminence to Brazilian women’s literature and artistic production. On the rebound, Carmen Miranda, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and, of course, anthropophagy are overvalued internally in Brazil. The vicious circle that constitutes the specificity of national culture is complete.

As Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant contend in “On the Wiliness of Imperialist Reason,” “cultural imperialism lays the foundation for the power to universalize particularities tied to a single historic tradition, causing them to no longer be known as such.” According to these authors, universal conceits thus established are “true commonplaces in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with which one argues, but over which one does not argue.”² Astuteness versus astuteness and a half. Truth versus truth and a half.

The customary metropolitan question with which I began has been more insidiously construed in recent years—from the vantage point of theories about globalization—in various international seminars and conferences. It would not be right for me, though, in my position as a guest of this international conference, to simply redirect the question that you have posed to me. I could redirect your question to me by asking all of you, who have a greater knowledge of the critical texts produced in the metropolis, to tell me how Brazil has contributed to lesbian and gay studies. Tell me the meaning and I will tell you the direction. It would not be right, however, not to fulfill half of my obligation by putting the ball back in your court. I will venture, then, a response, knowing full well that I am falling into the trap of partiality (also known as particularity). I hardly hope to be beating out a new path; on the contrary, you will surely speak with greater knowledge than I.

To arrive where I would like to arrive, I will attempt first to refigure, albeit in a simplified manner, the core of the questions that homosexual activism has raised in Brazil. In the 1960s and 1970s a verb acquired enormous significance in the Brazilian gay universe: assumir (that is, “to come out” or “to assume” a homosexual identity or lifestyle) and its related terms: desmunhecar, dar bandeira, and so forth. From that moment on, it was understood that homosexuals, in whatever social or professional context, would call themselves bicha or sapatona and exhibit a different behavior in the public sphere and a particular sexual preference. They would come out publicly as marginal to the “norm.” It fell upon the homosexual in public life to bear a burden that the heterosexual has never carried.

The verb assumir exalted several different things. In the first place, it gave visibility to the private/public dichotomy in individual lives, making it a predominant aspect of research. Second, it showed how, within the area of the private itself, there was camouflaged, in the behavior of family members, another more complex dichotomy: family life/secret (closeted) life. On a subtle level, assumir implied a different conception of traditional family life. And finally, it declared the channels between heterosexuality and homosexuality incommunicable—it found, that is, the truth of the bisexual to be suspect.

It is from this time that a broader theoretical interest in the public/private dichotomy may be traced among us—something truly new in discussions about Brazilian society. Traditionally this barrier did not exist in our sociopolitical and economic practices; there was scarcely any widespread confusion on the border because of a lack of critical customs checks. Let me give two simple examples. Public servants had a private view of the business of the state. Businesspeople got around the financial difficulties of private enterprise with public subsidies. The verb assumir, originally pertaining only to homosexual customs and behavior, precipitated a critical shift in the analyses of most social, political, and economic issues.

Without a doubt, there exists in Brazil today an entire theoretical, critical, and cultural production whose weight can be attributed to the question originally raised by the verb assumir and its related terms. Its bibliography would be impossible to list in a few pages. Let me continue by making explicit that this production is directly related to the world of American ideas and concepts. One might praise it insofar as it has given us, on the rebound and on a grand scale, a new view of the Brazilian state vis-à-vis its “citizens.” One might criticize it, and many have been doing just that, by alerting us to the fact that once again a peripheral culture has adopted processes of modernization by copying the problems raised, debated, and theorized in societies whose historical past—or more precisely, whose ethical-religious past—is not similar to ours.

I will criticize it in this and other ways, showing how the public/private dichotomy ends up nowadays representing a certain social backwardness on a small scale, that is, in the area of gay and lesbian practices and behavior. First, I will try to show how privacy, introduced into Brazilian social practice, is a class conceit. As we shall see, popular classes in Brazil have found more spontaneous ways of transparent social relations that are not based on the clash of marginality and norm. Second, in becoming more widespread, the conceit of privacy made patently visible how gay and lesbian marginality did not exist among the lower classes, since lesbians and gays were there accepted as they were by their social peers.³ In this sense, as we see in Aluisio Azevedo’s novel O cortiço (1888), homosexuals are presented as marginal, and therefore as downtrodden, only upon crossing the borders of their lower-class community to enter into contact with the middle classes.

In the novel O cortiço, it is impossible for anyone to have privacy. The solidarity of the poor and the privacy of the rich have their own respective spaces: the tenement and the two-story house. In the latter, a woman is caught by her husband with the cashiers of the store of which he is the owner. The husband is prevented, however, from rejecting his wife because the store is his only because of her dowry. He is then obliged to compensate for her betrayal by betraying her with the household servants. Despite his hatred of his wife, the husband makes love to her one night, acting as if nothing had happened. The second time they make love, the woman does not pretend anymore and bursts out laughing. The narrator states, “She enjoyed the dishonesty of the act that debased each in the eyes of the other.” And continues, “Between them there was established a habit of mutual sexual satisfaction, as complete as either had ever enjoyed, despite the fact that deep down in each of them there persisted the same moral repugnance against the other, which in no way had weakened.” In the novel, heterosexual marriage appears as a faulty institution that gains meaning only in the perturbing privacy of the bedroom, and the nuclear family is meaningful and solid only to the extent that money backs up its private behavior, laying the foundations of its plenitude in the debasement of the married couple and in moral corruption.

In the tenement, doors are opened, lives are open, and everyone participates in a daily ritual in which everything is public and private at the same time. A Portuguese immigrant, dissatisfied with his wife, abandons her and goes to live with a Brazilian neighbor. The discussion of their separation and their new union is private and public. Day-to-day life in the tenement begins thus: “From some rooms, women emerge to hang outside, apparently, the cages of the parrot and parakeets, and with the birds’ resembling their masters, they complemented each other boisterously.” The morning cleaning is done collectively, the washerwomen taking turns at the water to fill their tubs. Among the washerwomen, one stood out, Albino, a homosexual. The narrator states, “He was a washerman who always lived among the women, with whom he was so familiar that they treated him like a person of the same sex; in his presence, they spoke of things that they never mentioned in the presence of other men.”

As a favor to his fellow washerwomen, Albino leaves the tenement and goes all over the city to collect laundry fees for them. He does this until one day when on his way to a student boarding house, they give him (nobody knew why) a dozen cakes, and the poor devil swears, between tears and sobs, that he will never again take up collecting fees. The text adds, “from then on … [Albino] would no longer go out of the building, except during carnival, when he would dress as a dancing girl and spend the afternoon out in the streets.” In the tenement, Albino is who he is; in the city, he dresses up as a dancing girl during carnival.

The male homosexuality of Albino, openly known in the tenement and dressed up in drag during carnival, is complemented in the novel by a case of female homosexuality. It is the case of Pombinha. An eighteen-year-old girl who is engaged to be married, Pombinha has not yet had her period. The novel reads, “There, in the tenement, everyone knew about this story; it was not kept secret [my emphasis] from anyone.” Leonie, a high-class prostitute, who often visits her former neighbors in the tenement, has a decided preference for Pombinha. One day, she invites Pombinha and her mother for lunch. The mother gets drunk on wine and falls asleep, and Leonie is left alone with Pombinha. Leonie loses control and devours the young girl with “violent, repeated, hot kisses.” And the next day, in the tenement, “the scream of puberty finally emerges from [Pombinha’s] viscera in a hot, vermilion wave.” In the end, Pombinha leaves her fiancé to follow in her godmother’s footsteps.

Couldn’t we suggest that the public exhibitionism and protesting demanded of homosexuals by North American activist movements might be balanced by a wily form of exhibitionism, also public, in the style of the Catholic confession, or of the rogue? Working necessarily with the ambiguity of language and behavior, lucidly separating conduct from norm, instead of distinguishing norm and deviancy, refusing to exhibit the appropriate condition, linguistically or through buttons or etiquette, the homosexual rogue would allow the social violence against him or her to be made explicit.

In exhibiting less social violence against themselves, homosexual rogues would better reveal the way the “norm” was and is being constituted socially and politically by heterosexual violence. It is precisely the violence of a heterosexual identity movement that expels from its space both homosexuals (whether out or not) and any and every other citizen who has “traits” that differ from the “norm.” The homosexual rogue inhibits, on the one hand, and exhibits, on the other, heterosexual violence by linguistically refusing to adopt appropriate bicha/sapatona conduct.

The linguistic violence, responsible for the constitution of a homosexual space as a margin, is, after all, the exclusive work of heterosexuals. It is up to heterosexuals to change their behavior, adopting contractual norms of tolerance. It is not up to homosexuals to assume guilt for “deviant” conduct—to atone for it by punishing themselves and to succeed at it by adopting contractual norms in which they exclude themselves from society as a whole as a way to attain normalization.

In other words, I ask whether the homosexual couldn’t and shouldn’t be more wily. Whether subtler forms of activism are not more profitable than aggressive ones. Whether subversion through the courageous anonymity of subjectivities in play—a slower process of consciousness-raising, I admit—doesn’t provide better conditions for future dialogue between homosexuals and heterosexuals than the open confrontation on the part of a group that marginalizes itself, proposed by North American culture as more rapid and efficient. More rapid and efficient, yes, but certainly less wily.

Notes

The author wishes to thank Italo Moriconi for his comments. Translated by Robert Mckee Irwin and edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé.

1. See, by the way, the excellent book by the young researcher Marcelo Sacron Bessa, Histórias positivas–a literatura (des)construindo a AIDS. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1997.

2. “Sur les ruses de la raison imperialiste,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, March 1995.

3. A distinction should be made here between the poor community and the lower-class nuclear family. The nuclear family has always reacted violently toward gay or lesbian behavior—in the same way as it reacts violently to interracial marriage. A reading that contrasted two novels with a homosexual theme published in the same year, O cortiço and O Ateneu, by Raul Pompéia, on the dichotomy private/public would be long and quite rich. This reading could be complemented by an analysis of Adolfo Caminha’s Bom Crioulo, in which the homosexual couple, two poor sailors, are accepted equally well aboard their ship as in the city.

2 Dissident Globalizations, Emancipatory
Methods, Social-Erotics

Chela Sandoval

The erotic is the nurturer … of all our deepest knowledges.

—Audre Lorde, 1978

Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each other. … itistotransfer ideas and information from one culture to another.

—Glor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms & Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV
• Part 1: Globalization and Dissident Sexualities
• Part 2: Queer Values in a Global Economy
• Part 3: Diasporic Queer Identities
• Part 4: The Nation as Global Border
• About the Contributors
• About the Editors
• Index