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.
