1. Já devem ter visto pelas redes que o grupo de leitura da Odete deste domingo teve de ser cancelado. O plano agora é tudo avançar um mês, desaparecendo o último título que seria lido. Ou seja, «Parable of the Sower» de Octavia E. Butler passa para 25 de junho, «Testo Junkie» de Paul B. Preciado fecha a 23 de julho, a trilogia de N.K. Jemisin deixa de fazer parte desta edição.
2.
3-4-5. Escrevi uma carta sobre erros e fracassos (e de como isso é sempre uma comparação, um ponto de vista), sobre caixas de livros chegarem à livraria no pior dia possível, sobre ter ficado doente esta semana no pior dia possível, sobre as dúvidas que eu e o Ricardo vamos tendo em relação a um negócio que poderá namorar sempre de forma perigosa com o fracasso (numa lógica capitalista), sobre espaços impossíveis de registar porque estão em constante mudança, sobre a piada de sermos péssimos comerciais numa loja sem sinalética em que até o nome é equívoco (a frase na porta «Livraria aberta, das 10h às 13h30 e das 14h30 às 19h» é frequentemente treslida), sobre a visão do homossexual como um fracasso relativamente a um modelo heterossexual de casamento monogâmico para a procriação, com muitas considerações autobiográficas pelo meio como não raro me acontece. E depois apaguei tudo e fiz uma carta alternativa, que é a que estão a ler (uma aberta é também uma falha). O que vos transcrevo hoje pertence a The Queer Art of Failure (Jack Halberstam 2011), do terceiro capítulo homónimo, última secção «Children and Failure»:
(…) and so to conclude this chapter I want to discuss the queerness that circulates quite openly in mainstream children’s cinema with clear political commitments.
Mainstream films marketed to children produce, almost accidentally, plenty of perverse narratives of belonging, relating, and evolving, and they often associate these narratives with some sense of the politics of success and failure. Rather than be surprised by the presence of patently queer characters and narratives in mainstream kids’ films and by the easy affiliation with failure and disappointment, we should recognize the children’s animated feature as a genre that has to engage the attentions of immature desiring subjects and which does so by appealing to a wide range of perverse embodiments and relations. Rather than protesting the presence of queer characters in these films, as one Village Voice reviewer did in relation to Shrek 2, we should use them to disrupt idealized and saccharine myths about children, sexuality, and innocence and imagine new versions of maturation, Bildung, and growth that do not depend upon the logic of succession and success.
Mainstream teen comedies and children’s animated features are replete with fantasies of otherness and difference, alternative embodiment, group affiliations, and eccentric desires. In many of these “queer fairy tales” romance gives way to friendship, individuation gives way to collectivity, and “successful” heterosexual coupling is upended, displaced, and challenged by queer contact: princes turn into frogs rather than vice versa, ogres refuse to become beautiful, and characters regularly choose collectivity over domesticity. Almost all of these films foreground temporality itself and favor models of nonlinear and non-Oedipal development and disrupted and often forgotten histories. Repetition is privileged over sequence; fairy tale time (long, long ago) and mythic space (far, far away) form the fantastical backdrop for properly adolescent or childish and very often patently queer ways of life. So while children’s films like Babe, Chicken Run, Finding Nemo, and Shrek are often hailed as children’s fare that adults can enjoy, they are in fact children’s films made in full acknowledgment of the unsentimental, amoral, and antiteleological narrative desires of children. Adults are the viewers who demand sentiment, progress, and closure; children, these films recognize, could care less. Just to illustrate my point about these queer fairy tales as both exciting ways of staging queer time and radical new imaginings of community and association, I want to point to a few common political themes in these films and to note the abundance of explicitly queer characters within them.
Queer fairy tales are often organized around heroes who are in some way “different” and whose difference is offensive to some larger community: Shrek is an ogre forced to live far away from judgmental villagers; Babe is an orphaned pig who thinks he is a sheepdog; and Nemo is a motherless fish with a deformed fin. Each “disabled” hero has to fight off or compete with a counterpart who represents wealth, health, success, and perfection. While these narratives of difference could easily serve to deliver a tidy moral lesson about learning to accept yourself, each links the struggle of the rejected individual to larger struggles of the dispossessed. In Shrek, for example, the ogre becomes a freedom fighter for the refugee fairy tale figures whom Lord Farquaad (“Fuck wad,” a.k.a. Bush) has kicked off his land; in Chicken Run the chickens band together to overthrow the evil Tweedy farmers and to save themselves from exploitation; in Babe the sheep rise up to resist an authoritarian sheepdog; and in Finding Nemo Nemo leads a fish rebellion against the fishermen.
Each film makes explicit the connection between queerness and this joining of the personal and the political: monstrosity in Shrek, disability in Finding Nemo, and species dysphoria in Babe become figurations of the pernicious effects of exclusion, abjection, and displacement in the name of family, home, and nation. The beauty of these films is that they do not fear failure, they do not favor success, and they picture children not as preadults figuring the future but as anarchic beings who partake in strange and inconsistent temporal logics. Children, as Edelman would remind us, have been deployed as part of a hetero-logic of futurity or as a link to positive political imaginings of alternatives. But there are alternative productions of the child that recognize in the image of the nonadult body a propensity to incompetence, a clumsy inability to make sense, a desire for independence from the tyranny of the adult, and a total indifference to adult conceptions of success and failure. Edelman’s negative critique strands queerness between two equally unbearable options (futurity and positivity in opposition to nihilism and negation). Can we produce generative models of failure that do not posit two equally bleak alternatives?
Renton, Johnny Rotten, Ginger, Dory, and Babe, like those athletes who finish fourth, remind us that there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing, and that all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner. Let’s leave success and its achievement to the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers. The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and, with Walter Benjamin, to recognize that “empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers”. All losers are the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company.
6. Uma escolha muito pessoal de seis curtas e longas da década de 1990, para terminar
, My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant 1991)
, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott 1994)
, Crash (David Cronenberg 1996)
, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye 1996)
, Chun gwong cha sit – Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai 1997)
, Ta’m e guilass – Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami 1997).
Uma lista de filmes sobre viagens, grupos de solitários, o River Phoenix a dizer «I love you and you don’t pay me».