“All awakening to love is a spiritual awakening” (hooks, 2000, 83).
PRE(FACE)BODY
The beginning is not the starting point because my body performs a pre-formed body.
My perceptions and practices, judgments and tastes are part of a CIStem socio-ideologically automated in individuals through an incorporation since childhood, a reproduction without critical reflection. This is how Jorge Hilton de Assis Miranda (2017, 66) defines Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to analyze the configurations of racism. It is a network structured with diverse fields, for instance, economic, educational, artistic, journalistic, scientific, religious, political, and familiar. They are not separated from each other.
My body; my artistic body; does not scape habitus.
I invite you to read my body while I tell you who is writing: my body.
“You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13)
My first home was my mother; her pelvis. Inside her I got to know her dark places, those that I do not know the stories; she never told me, but I felt it, I was built in them. All her thoughts were connected to me through the belly button. She fed me with her darkness, and then, when she gave me light, she also gave light to her darkness. Her fears, her insecurities, her lack of trust, her traumas, her sensibility, her strength. In our relationship there is affection and control, openness and shame. I am in between; I am still trying to understand. Mom was my first strong relationship, one that g(i)ave(s) me life, but also intoxicate(s)d me. I am trying to nourish myself instead. But I am the same tree. My roots are my family. My stem is how I was structured. My branches are the consequences. I am trying to nourish myself instead. So, my leaves are renewal, an ongoing change during autumns. I am trying to nourish myself instead. For my flowers and fruits to be the future. A different one - even if I am the same tree.
By reading Judith Butler, I started to ask myself in what ways my body is constituted through specific corporal acts (pre-formations) and what are the possibilities of transformation through such acts. I discovered that my body is an incessant and ongoing materialization of possibilities because I am not simply my body - I do my body. To understand how gender is instituted, Butler analyzes the structured acts that are internally discontinuous, which are repeated through time constructing a believable appearance: a performance capable of compelling the actors by creating a script to perform gender. In order to subvert such repetitions, the author proposes different sorts of repeating by exposing, deconstructing and reconstructing (1997) the believable gender images. Peggy Phelan says that “a believable image is the product of a negotiation with an unverifiable real.” (1993, 1). To question its reality is to doubt who makes and describes the image. For my parents, it would be rejecting the creator of everything, the one that created the images.
If gender is an identity constituted throughout time by a stylized repetition of acts, the possibilities of gender transformations are in a different sort of repeating, generating subversive repetitions (Butler, 1997). Gender norms are a shared experience because the script of gender performativity is culturally restricted. Besides the individual enaction of the script, it is performed in the cultural delimitations. The representation and the real (as a believable image) are an ongoing cycle through time made without critical reflection (habitus). Therefore, to subvert this image it is essential to make visible the structured social fictions. In other words, it is crucial to expose the categories and how they work in order to deconstruct and reconstruct them.
To bring the conversation of exposure to race issues, Tatiana Nascimento (2020) affirms that before the colonial notion of race ends white people need to get out of the closet. There is neither peace nor good whiteness in the colonial era. Taking in account this argument, and dialoguing with Phelan (1993) ideas of visibility, whiteness needs to be remarked. To follow her argument, in social reproductions, there are the marked and the unmarked images, structures. The marked are the ones with value, with power, because they are the norm, which makes them being capable of claiming the other, “declaiming the boundaries where the self diverges and merges with the other” (Phelan, 1993, 17). The unmarked structure is a non-universal and non-hegemonic place, hence, invisible. The unmarked are remarked by the marked social structures, signified by them. In that cycle, the marked structures are unremarkable, and the visibility of the unmarked is remarked through the gaze of the marked. To demonstrate such logic in tangible examples, white heterosexual cis-masculinity is a marked structure, one that is universal in the history books, behind the cameras of fashion magazines, behind the pens that write books, behind the brushes that paint the canvas. They paint, write, photograph the other, define the place of the other, defining, in that way, themselves, the normativity - they own the discourse. They are the visible in the sense of capturing the power of universality, of being free to write their own subjectivities by claiming the other and not letting themselves to be claimed, remarked.
From now one, to subvert myself (self-identity), it is necessary to expose my roots, and continuously reevaluate my actions; change the leaves constantly. My marked places need to be exposed (remarked); my unmarked places need to find space to remark themselves instead of being remarked, even if that means to take avantage of the invisibility. It is an ongoing conversation to be visible and invisible at the same time; dialogues that are the intersections in my articulated body; the articulations from which I move. It is a game of creating unfixed definitions by recognizing privileges – mine and of the ones that remark me.
That is why I am writing. I always liked to write. I have always seen beauty in writing. It is like eternalize the neurologic images into the world; it is as to draw in a paper what is electrically happening inside our bodies. Every time I think images, they have come basically from my reading or from listening to a sentence, a word that become image in my mind. Every time I think words, they are images dancing in papers. Even being aware of the importance to read and write for me, I have never systematized it, and I was reluctant about doing something written in this reflective journal. It did not look so performative for me, so artistic. However, every time I am writing I am performing, putting myself out, thinking about the way I want to be read. It is a way of understanding myself. By writing, I transform myself in a clear image, or not, but an image. It is like having clouds in my mind; the letters drip through my hands and become rain. This water can make myself flourish. I also like when other author's clouds can define and expose myself; reading their rains, making them rain on me, nourish my blooming.
Returning to Butler’s matter of exposure, let us now make a storm.
EXPOSING ROOTS
(Music: Espiral de Ilusão - Criolo, 2020)
My parents have a very fundamentalist perspective of the Bible, which reduces it to a guidebook of values. For them, there are rules to express my relationship with the spirit. However, how to worship God(ess) with all my heart if I must punish my most loving desires? Besides, I was taught to love a white-man-god and demonize African religious matrices. I have learned to hate the word macumba without even knowing what it meant. Paradoxically, Christians say “tá amarrado” (it is tied) when see a macumba, and then make a whole speech about freeing “those” people from “hell”, and bringing (white) salvation. This is such a colonial and racist logic that we learn and reproduce; one that dehumanizes the person in front of you by transforming them in a demon; there is a demon that needs to be expelled from this body for it to be free. You must deny your flash every day and chose the spirit, like our body and spirit are separated boxes that are not interlaced. We learn to control ours and others bodies, punish and oppress it. I prefer to pursue my body as a temple of my spirit. A love temple. Thus, love needs to be exhaled through my pores. Love is not religion; love is such a powerful strength that can be frightening for letting us vulnerable. So, we learn to control it, giving space to violence and injustices. I rather see the Bible in its complexity, in a gathering of writings about a people and their relationship with God among their history, with their culture, poetry, laws, myths, wisdom.
The same fundamentalist logic is applied for gender and sexuality. Pastors preach a compulsory heterosexuality justified by the cultural contents in Bible, without even taking in account the social and historical context of what was written. It is not about a lovable and critical conversation with the Bible, but about maintaining a status quo of power; a colonial-cis-male-heterosexual-white one. It is a compulsory and compulsive way to read the Bible, without reflection, without critical lenses.
In order to maintain a status quo in the structural hegemonic (Brazilian) whiteness, my parents unconsciously have never told me I am white. They have never realized that we own the privilege of coming from an Italian family of immigrants who had received help from the government to work in lands over here, the same “help” that was not given to black people after the “abolishment” of slavery, which affects the economical campus of the racist structure. This specific historical issue marks also a very complex politic of whitening Brazil, promoting the miscegenation of innumerous peoples, and creating the myth of racial democracy. Such myth creates the idea that nobody is actually white in Brazil. Maybe we are not white-white, but who said that white is only the phenotypical blond-blue-eyes European people? When Tatiana Nascimento (2020) says about the importance of reviewing and criticizing the subjective identities of whiteness, she is also talking about such status quo of defining “the other” and not defining ourselves and our complexities, of not acknowledging our privileges to maintain them, even if unconsciously. This is how my parents never told me I am white. And this silence is part of my white privilege.
My attempt to have the above conversations relies on the fact that I am seeking a spiritual awakening. I woke up today and realized that my gender, the guilty about my sexuality, my white privileges, my white savior delusion, are all connected with the way my spirit was nourish by a colonial slander. A slanderous notion of love. My attempt to have the above conversations relies in a search for the meaning of love in oder to understand how to love myself, my friends, my partners, my peers; to figure out how to love a community; to think about which community I want to build, imagine, project into the future, and move my artistic body.
My attempt to have the above conversations relies on the desire of deconstructing and reconstructing my body.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Butler, J. (1997). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. In: S.-E. Case, ed., Performing feminisms: feminist critical theory and theatre. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, pp. 270-282.
De Assis Miranda, J. (2017). Branquitude Invisível – Pessoas brancas e a não percepçõ dos privilégios: verdade ou hipocrisita?. In: T. Pedroso Müller, L. Cardoso, ed., Branquitude: estudos sobre a identidade branca no Brasil. Curitiba: Appris, pp. 53-69.
HOOKS, B. (2018). All about love: new visions.
Nascimento, T., 2020. Branquitude & Seus Silêncios. [online] Instagram.com. Available at: <https://www.instagram.com/branquietude/> [Accessed 15 November 2020].
PHELAN, P. (1993). Unmarked: the politics of performance. London, Routledge.
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