Sometimes the little epiphanies get to you.
In my
research on LGBT political organizing in São Paulo, I have listened to a
number of coming out stories. (In point of fact, most people use the
word assumir-se, lit. to take responsibility for, which I hope to
argue is parallel but slightly askew to North American 'coming out').
I have heard these stories in bars, in meetings, on the street, in
taped and in off-the-cuff settings. Today, I was, in fact, in a
community drop-in group, where gays, lesbians, and travestis were
telling stories about their families. And almost every story had to do
with disclosure. As the moderator was going around, I had the nervous
sensation that he might pick me to speak. In general I don't like to
speak in Portuguese to big groups that I don't know. I feel like all
people are hearing is my accent. I also felt that I would have to
explain a bunch about U.S. kinship and intimacy for my story to make
sense.
As I sat there, scared to talk and trying to think how what I might say, I came to a realization about what I was not
hearing and have never heard within the Brazilian genre of coming out
stories. Homophobic and transphobic parents in Brazil might call their
queer kids a litany of insults: pedaphiles, permiscuous, etc. They
might say that their child has taken the wrong path (deu errado),
that they would prefer a bandit son to a homosexual son, or even wish
their child was dead. Indeed they admonish their children, often
strongly, using phrases that they might use for a variety of
dissaprobation. But I have never heard someone relate to me that their
parents called them a failure, or a loser, or told them that they
wouldn't amount to anything, etc. In general, parents can call their
children to task for being lazy, unproductive. Yet the charge of being a
vagabundo (lit a vagabond, a good-for-nothing), doesn't carry the same moral internalized condemnation of being a failure.
This
got me thinking about the particularly North American character of
anxieties of success/failure winning/losing are. It also made me
realize just one more way that I have had trouble expressing my feelings
to many Brazilians. Looking back on conversations I have had, whenever
I put my emotional frustration in terms of 'having failed at
something,' no one quite knew what I meant. Often their question was
'how is x something you fail?' Some areas of life seemed to be harder
to understand then others. 'Failure' in work or finances was something a
conversation partner could wrap their head around. When I put romance
in such terms, people just shook their heads. And trying to talk about
happiness in terms of success and failure was a lost cause. 'Be happy
or be sad' was the basic advice I received in one way or another.
Perhaps it was better, in this case, to be a lost cause instead of a
failure.
As I was reflecting on this very American
obsession of mine with success and failure and attempting to
re-comprehend past conversations I have had while in Brazil, I also came
to realize how much failure has come to shape my intellectual archive.
In contemporary American critical theory, embracing failure in its many
forms seems to be a transparently uncomplicated act of transgression.
Even more so in some of what I look on as queer takes on American crisis
(Berlant's Cruel Optimism, Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure,
Povinelli's Economies of Abandonment). Sometimes it seems like we have
failed as a nation. One of the constant measurements of crisis that the
North American public has been subjected to are the statistics of
20-somethings moving back in with their parents, 60 somethings no longer
able to pay for care of their parents. These seemingly new
multigenerational homes appear to be some indicator of Americans'
failures to be self-sufficient, to make something of themselves. In
São Paulo, I am watching the inverse trend. Increasingly middle class,
unmarried, professional youth deciding not to live with their parents
for the first time. Yet the idea of living with one's parents isn't
abhorent. It isn't a sign that something has gone wrong.
At any rate, for now, I am taking a step back from failure.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
The Paulista Crowd
[note: I don't know when I wrote this draft, but then I went looking for it as I set upon writing something else. Doesn't hurt to publish this fragment now, I suppose.]
This morning, I was reading the Brazilian magazine Carta Capital, which reads like the Economist but is much much closer to Keynes than to Friedman. Anyways, the article in question described how other developing countries are exporting the "Brazilian model" of social welfare programs. The unqualified but far from total success that programs like Bolsa Familia have had are truly remarkable. The article continues discussing the plans that the Dilma administration has in expanding many of these programs started under Lula. The article also briefly makes vague reference to critiques of the program from the left and the right. And, after discussing Dilma's latest welfare program, the article concludes with the rather cryptic sentence:
"Vamos ver como a turma da Avenida Paulista vai reagir."
[We'll see how the Avenida Paulista crowd will react.]
I thought the sentence was as clever as it was misleading. Two key issues were left unresolved by the author's concluding sentence. First, why does the Av. Paulista crowd matter in an article that is largely talking about social welfare programs that are largely targeted at rural areas and urban peripheries? Second, just who is exactly is the Av. Paulista crowd?
Are they the protesters that are continuing to shut down the main avenue of the city over a series of interarticulated but politically separate social movements? Are they the bankers and financial interests who have always dominated the Avenida Paulista? As one friend put it, the reference to the paulista crowd is polysemic.
This morning, I was reading the Brazilian magazine Carta Capital, which reads like the Economist but is much much closer to Keynes than to Friedman. Anyways, the article in question described how other developing countries are exporting the "Brazilian model" of social welfare programs. The unqualified but far from total success that programs like Bolsa Familia have had are truly remarkable. The article continues discussing the plans that the Dilma administration has in expanding many of these programs started under Lula. The article also briefly makes vague reference to critiques of the program from the left and the right. And, after discussing Dilma's latest welfare program, the article concludes with the rather cryptic sentence:
"Vamos ver como a turma da Avenida Paulista vai reagir."
[We'll see how the Avenida Paulista crowd will react.]
I thought the sentence was as clever as it was misleading. Two key issues were left unresolved by the author's concluding sentence. First, why does the Av. Paulista crowd matter in an article that is largely talking about social welfare programs that are largely targeted at rural areas and urban peripheries? Second, just who is exactly is the Av. Paulista crowd?
Are they the protesters that are continuing to shut down the main avenue of the city over a series of interarticulated but politically separate social movements? Are they the bankers and financial interests who have always dominated the Avenida Paulista? As one friend put it, the reference to the paulista crowd is polysemic.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Party of One, Party of None
The other day, my roommate was reading the newspaper, shaking her head at a new candidate that appears to be gaining support in the São Paulo mayoral elections. I hadn't heard of this candidate before, and I asked her more about him and what party he belonged to, seeing as the major parties (PT, PSDB, PMDB, PSOL) already have closed slates. My roommate looked up his campaign's website, and researched for some minutes. To her consternation, she couldn't find a political party. "Maybe he is running as an independent?" I asked. My roommate shook her head. "You can't run for office without a party," she informed me. This new found fact about the Brazilian political system tickled my ethnographic funny bone for some reason, and I mused about about the differences between the U.S. and Brazilian political systems. "Isn't it funny," I remarked, "that in the U.S. we only have two major political parties that successfully field high profile candidates, but people run as independents all the time." She looked back at me from the coffee pot, her head tilted as if in disapproval, "é porque você vem de um pais individualista." [that's because you come from an individualist country.]
Friday, August 17, 2012
random thoughts on brazilian politics
Two months ago, a small tempest brewed around the publication of political philosopher Vladmir Safatle's slim manifestic tome The Left that Doesn't Fear Speaking its Name. The 80-page volume calls for a left that is based around popular and engaged democracy, and defined by the radical igalitarianism of all people. To this latter end, Saftle called for a "politics of indifference" with respect to social differences, where politics would not be invoked in the name of a group or identity, but in the demand for equality. The "politics of indifference" proved to be quite controversial for the professor, and soon he found himself in a public dispute with Caetano Veloso, the famed tropicalia singer. In a guest editorial in the Folha de São Paulo, Veloso wrote that Safatle's dismissal of identity politics was a rather unapologetic call to return to some of the bad habits of the old left, who put all their claims in terms of workers' struggle and was resentful of the needs of minorities. Safatle's response six of staying firm and a half dozen of backtracking: saying that what he was really driving at was a "post-identitarian politics, radically open to alterity," but where difference would not be legislated but be absorbed into wider horizon of demands for justice.
Perhaps I am too generous in my interpretation of what is clearly the most problematic part of Safatle's book. In fact, Veloso and Safatle seem to be at impasse about how to democratize society. Drawing upon the tradition of French/Brazilian philosophers Claude Lefort and Paulo Arante, Safatle argues that democracy is always in excess of a rule of law. Thus, the differences that are going to define the left's political struggles must be decided democratically and unifiedly. Veloso's counter reminds us, however, that universality of democratic political action is not a given (far from it). That is, the calls to difference that Safatle argues will be resolved by participatory action are the very challenges to a universal democratic actor upon which Safatle rests his argument. This debate, far from being conclusive demonstrates the challenges if not internal limits of participatory democracy. In fact, for all of its very interesting points, Safatle's text seems to curl back from a full notion of the people precisely at the moments where majoritarian tyrrany might overrun the human dignity and egaltarian participation of the minority.
Perhaps I am too generous in my interpretation of what is clearly the most problematic part of Safatle's book. In fact, Veloso and Safatle seem to be at impasse about how to democratize society. Drawing upon the tradition of French/Brazilian philosophers Claude Lefort and Paulo Arante, Safatle argues that democracy is always in excess of a rule of law. Thus, the differences that are going to define the left's political struggles must be decided democratically and unifiedly. Veloso's counter reminds us, however, that universality of democratic political action is not a given (far from it). That is, the calls to difference that Safatle argues will be resolved by participatory action are the very challenges to a universal democratic actor upon which Safatle rests his argument. This debate, far from being conclusive demonstrates the challenges if not internal limits of participatory democracy. In fact, for all of its very interesting points, Safatle's text seems to curl back from a full notion of the people precisely at the moments where majoritarian tyrrany might overrun the human dignity and egaltarian participation of the minority.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Over overloaded (in fragments)
This is a continuation of my posts on the subway...
I have been thinking a lot about how an ethnography of the metro in São Paulo demands an overwhelming emphasis on the experience of riding the train. Reading a news paper article on the subway the other week, I was impressed by the term superlotação. Lotado means to be full to the point of not being able to fit more. Somewhere between "at capacity" and "bursting at the seems" would perhaps aptly cover the word. Superlotação, whatever its technical definition being employed by metro technicians, politicians or journalists, connotes a particular miserable state of affairs. And yet, for all the talk of new lines, different services, qualitative improvements, newspaper articles seem incapable or unwilling to capture the frustrating and inhumane conditions of what superlotação means. I began to think about what it would take to document and explain superlotação. this is the beginning of an explanation, in fragments...
- An American friend tells me that people have told him they don't trust the automatic doors on the new yellow lines trains. I don't believe him until, one day, I see the doors take five times to close. The car is so full that people can fit into the external doors (shielding the train from the platform) but not the internal doors (closing the actual metro car). On one attempt, the external doors close without the internal doors. Nothing happens for 20 seconds. From the other side of the glass doors, I can see the look of terror on one the face of one woman squeezed to the very margen of the open doorway. I imagine that she is asking herself the same question that I am asking: "would the train actually begin without closing the inside doors?"
The outer doors open again so as to begin the process over again. A petit young woman jumps on and worms her way into the pressed bodies. Bodies have to move, but they don't exactly master the physics of where their matter can go.
-I try to avoid using the train during rush hour. Almost everyone I know who uses the metro does the same. Everyone has different strategies. Many just stay at work. It is a Brazilian national stereotype that Paulistanos work too much. And many people stay two or three hours later than they need to. Of course, if they were to leave their offices at 5:30 p.m., they would spend those next three hours trying to go ten miles.
-While the middle class plays on the internet in their office, shopping malls contain the overflow of workers who decide to wait out rush hour. Whole economies spring up around waiting. Food stands, knick knack vendors, news kiosks.
-I had to go to an event that was hosted by the city governement in the "periphery," the poorer outer neighborhoods less serviced by public infrastructure. To do this, I had to take a train, which is different from the metro. About seven old suburban train lines built at the beginning of the 20th century still serve what have now become the outer neighboorhoods of São Paulo. Although integrated with the metro, which serves mostly central neighborhoods and was not constructed until the mid-1970s, the two sets of lines are kept administratively separate. They are also separate in the public imagination. As much as the São Paulo elite demonizes subway riders, those who take the "train" are even more socially marginalized. If you don't feel demoralized by telling someone you take the train, you will feel demoralized when you actually ride it.
When I arrive at the event, the city employees tell me they are impressed, that they wouldn't know how to use the train.
-Sometimes, I forget and call the train by it's formal acronym, the CPTM (Compania Paulista de Trens Metropolitanos). People parodically tell me how fancy I sound using the formal name.
-On a train line that should be superlotado for the time of day, I am pleasantly surprised to find a piece of wall to lean against for the ride. The women who come aboard at the next station seem pleased as well. One looks knowingly at the other and says, "milagres existem" (miracles exist).
[ok, I have about three times as much stuff written in my examples...wait for fragments part II]
I have been thinking a lot about how an ethnography of the metro in São Paulo demands an overwhelming emphasis on the experience of riding the train. Reading a news paper article on the subway the other week, I was impressed by the term superlotação. Lotado means to be full to the point of not being able to fit more. Somewhere between "at capacity" and "bursting at the seems" would perhaps aptly cover the word. Superlotação, whatever its technical definition being employed by metro technicians, politicians or journalists, connotes a particular miserable state of affairs. And yet, for all the talk of new lines, different services, qualitative improvements, newspaper articles seem incapable or unwilling to capture the frustrating and inhumane conditions of what superlotação means. I began to think about what it would take to document and explain superlotação. this is the beginning of an explanation, in fragments...
- An American friend tells me that people have told him they don't trust the automatic doors on the new yellow lines trains. I don't believe him until, one day, I see the doors take five times to close. The car is so full that people can fit into the external doors (shielding the train from the platform) but not the internal doors (closing the actual metro car). On one attempt, the external doors close without the internal doors. Nothing happens for 20 seconds. From the other side of the glass doors, I can see the look of terror on one the face of one woman squeezed to the very margen of the open doorway. I imagine that she is asking herself the same question that I am asking: "would the train actually begin without closing the inside doors?"
The outer doors open again so as to begin the process over again. A petit young woman jumps on and worms her way into the pressed bodies. Bodies have to move, but they don't exactly master the physics of where their matter can go.
-I try to avoid using the train during rush hour. Almost everyone I know who uses the metro does the same. Everyone has different strategies. Many just stay at work. It is a Brazilian national stereotype that Paulistanos work too much. And many people stay two or three hours later than they need to. Of course, if they were to leave their offices at 5:30 p.m., they would spend those next three hours trying to go ten miles.
-While the middle class plays on the internet in their office, shopping malls contain the overflow of workers who decide to wait out rush hour. Whole economies spring up around waiting. Food stands, knick knack vendors, news kiosks.
-I had to go to an event that was hosted by the city governement in the "periphery," the poorer outer neighborhoods less serviced by public infrastructure. To do this, I had to take a train, which is different from the metro. About seven old suburban train lines built at the beginning of the 20th century still serve what have now become the outer neighboorhoods of São Paulo. Although integrated with the metro, which serves mostly central neighborhoods and was not constructed until the mid-1970s, the two sets of lines are kept administratively separate. They are also separate in the public imagination. As much as the São Paulo elite demonizes subway riders, those who take the "train" are even more socially marginalized. If you don't feel demoralized by telling someone you take the train, you will feel demoralized when you actually ride it.
When I arrive at the event, the city employees tell me they are impressed, that they wouldn't know how to use the train.
-Sometimes, I forget and call the train by it's formal acronym, the CPTM (Compania Paulista de Trens Metropolitanos). People parodically tell me how fancy I sound using the formal name.
-On a train line that should be superlotado for the time of day, I am pleasantly surprised to find a piece of wall to lean against for the ride. The women who come aboard at the next station seem pleased as well. One looks knowingly at the other and says, "milagres existem" (miracles exist).
[ok, I have about three times as much stuff written in my examples...wait for fragments part II]
Monday, July 16, 2012
Back on the Train
***rather big pause, was away from Sampa. back, trying to get back on the horse***
We are getting a free month of the Estado de São Paulo at home. We don't know what to do with this traditionally conservative newspaper. I am googling paper machê projects. Today's metro section, however, featured a number of stories about the São Paulo metro system, one of my pet interests.
The title of the lead article pretty much says a lot about the state of the São Paulo metro system. "Overfilled trains force Metro to close park and rides." Essentially, the metro had a project to create an integrated ticket that would include twenty-four hour parking and two metro rides (there and back). They had already rolled out two parking lots, but are going to have to cut the entire program because they can't encourage any more ridership during rush hours. How ridiculous is that!! To say that they are over capacity is putting it mildly. During rush hour, you can wait one or two trains to get on. And these trains are full to the brim, you're often touching multiple people, and there's no way around it.
The irony about this article is that it shows how far behind demand the metro system is, that it becomes impossible to plan how to one day meet that demand. Oddly enough, straight-forward solutions create new problems. A perfect example are transfer stations. In general, you want transfer stations (with two or more lines). This offers riders more flexibility, which means more circulation and fewer bottle-necks. In the past year, a new "yellow" line opened up, and was dubbed: "the transfer line" (a linha de baudiações). The yellow line would connect to all three existent subway lines, (blue, red, green) is planned to connect one day to the planned orange line (what will be the "line of the universities"), and also connects to one of the regional train lines (emerald). In theory, the yellow line was (among other things) supposed to ease the overloading of a section of the blue line that connected the red and green lines.
But what happened?
We are getting a free month of the Estado de São Paulo at home. We don't know what to do with this traditionally conservative newspaper. I am googling paper machê projects. Today's metro section, however, featured a number of stories about the São Paulo metro system, one of my pet interests.
The title of the lead article pretty much says a lot about the state of the São Paulo metro system. "Overfilled trains force Metro to close park and rides." Essentially, the metro had a project to create an integrated ticket that would include twenty-four hour parking and two metro rides (there and back). They had already rolled out two parking lots, but are going to have to cut the entire program because they can't encourage any more ridership during rush hours. How ridiculous is that!! To say that they are over capacity is putting it mildly. During rush hour, you can wait one or two trains to get on. And these trains are full to the brim, you're often touching multiple people, and there's no way around it.
The irony about this article is that it shows how far behind demand the metro system is, that it becomes impossible to plan how to one day meet that demand. Oddly enough, straight-forward solutions create new problems. A perfect example are transfer stations. In general, you want transfer stations (with two or more lines). This offers riders more flexibility, which means more circulation and fewer bottle-necks. In the past year, a new "yellow" line opened up, and was dubbed: "the transfer line" (a linha de baudiações). The yellow line would connect to all three existent subway lines, (blue, red, green) is planned to connect one day to the planned orange line (what will be the "line of the universities"), and also connects to one of the regional train lines (emerald). In theory, the yellow line was (among other things) supposed to ease the overloading of a section of the blue line that connected the red and green lines.
But what happened?
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Ice cream evangelicals
I have posted before on how expensive it is to eat on the street on São Paulo. I often wonder, then, how people manage to do so. One thing that I notice that a lot of homeless people do is eat a rice and bean combination out of either Styrofoam (like a reused takeout container) or out of reused 1 liter ice cream tubs. In Brazil, most of the range ice cream one finds in the super market (particularly domestic brands) comes in plastic (not cardboard) 1 liter tubs. I have often seen these tubs, usually a solid blue or white, used as impromptu tupperware by lots of people. At home, we use one as a small, countertop trash bin.
When it comes to people on the street who ostensibly don't have steady access to housing or food, I often wonder how they manage to secure the food in ice-cream-tubs. When I glance at the food, it looks organized enough for me to think it wasn't scavenged. One thought would be that they get it from extra portions at restaurants, except that by law restaurants in São Paulo must dispose of food by throwing it in the dumpster. Another thought would be social services, except that I have been at enough social services in Brazil to know that they serve pre-wrapped-and-assembled sandwhiches, with one fruit and one drink. They do not vary from these packages, which they compulsively hand out to anyone who passes through their offices (even me, coming for an interview). Most of the sexual health social services I know will arrive at an event with a giant box of snacks and a giant box of condoms and lubricants. And the (mostly) female social service workers will complain about lifting heavy boxes until everyone agrees to divide the remaining snacks and condoms.
Yesterday, I saw a very different interaction that made me think about how these ice-cream tubs may circulate. An attendant at a private parking lot near the downtown area was sitting in a rather rickity chair near the entrance, while another guy (I presumed homeless) sat cross-legged on the sidewalk just outside the parking lot entrance. Their presentation was starkly contrasting. the parking attendant had a sharp hair cut, neck tie, and a buttondown shortsleeve shirt. The other guy had mangled hair and several layers of dirt on his face. Between them was a 2-liter bottle of coca-cola that they took turns chugging. The guy sitting on the floor was not wasting any time scooping spoonful after spoonful of rice and beans from a blue ice-cream container. And as I turned back, I saw him handing the ice-cream tub back to the parking attendant, who casually placed it atop some other objects behind the entrance to the garage.
Between bites and gulps, they were conversing, but I only caught one turn in the conversation. The parking attendant said, "É Jesus que dá tudo nesse mundo," and the homeless guy replied, "é." While I couldn't get further into the situation, it makes me wonder what else is circulating beyond ice-cream tubs.
When it comes to people on the street who ostensibly don't have steady access to housing or food, I often wonder how they manage to secure the food in ice-cream-tubs. When I glance at the food, it looks organized enough for me to think it wasn't scavenged. One thought would be that they get it from extra portions at restaurants, except that by law restaurants in São Paulo must dispose of food by throwing it in the dumpster. Another thought would be social services, except that I have been at enough social services in Brazil to know that they serve pre-wrapped-and-assembled sandwhiches, with one fruit and one drink. They do not vary from these packages, which they compulsively hand out to anyone who passes through their offices (even me, coming for an interview). Most of the sexual health social services I know will arrive at an event with a giant box of snacks and a giant box of condoms and lubricants. And the (mostly) female social service workers will complain about lifting heavy boxes until everyone agrees to divide the remaining snacks and condoms.
Yesterday, I saw a very different interaction that made me think about how these ice-cream tubs may circulate. An attendant at a private parking lot near the downtown area was sitting in a rather rickity chair near the entrance, while another guy (I presumed homeless) sat cross-legged on the sidewalk just outside the parking lot entrance. Their presentation was starkly contrasting. the parking attendant had a sharp hair cut, neck tie, and a buttondown shortsleeve shirt. The other guy had mangled hair and several layers of dirt on his face. Between them was a 2-liter bottle of coca-cola that they took turns chugging. The guy sitting on the floor was not wasting any time scooping spoonful after spoonful of rice and beans from a blue ice-cream container. And as I turned back, I saw him handing the ice-cream tub back to the parking attendant, who casually placed it atop some other objects behind the entrance to the garage.
Between bites and gulps, they were conversing, but I only caught one turn in the conversation. The parking attendant said, "É Jesus que dá tudo nesse mundo," and the homeless guy replied, "é." While I couldn't get further into the situation, it makes me wonder what else is circulating beyond ice-cream tubs.
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