“Sodom & Gomorrah: ‘Homo-Cultures’ ”
by Wilton Garcia
1“We are all by-products of Sodom and Gomorrah: children of Earth heat. We were born from the original sin and we live in the fantasy of waiting for a special happening in our lives – sex. The march of the time announces an anthropologic emergence of sexuality at youth. We are made of flash and we get ready for this corporal combat. We look forward to desire! When we study about homo-eroticism and image, it is important to point out some (re)formulations about the sexual diversity in the present time intermediated by the use of cultural products, especially in Brazil. When I overlap homo-eroticism and image I face a mesh which involves different social-cultural elements: politics, aesthetic, desire, ideology, and power among others. That overlapping suggests the human sexuality field as a representational expression. At this point, I try to single out the idea of a (re)construction of the dominant discursive system carried through in one movement absorbed by the theoretical updating regarding the homo-eroticism theme. I believe that a homoerotic deed occurs reflecting a crystallised situation, which can be checked in the contemporary declaration proposition.
1 Researcher and visual artist working in movies, photography, video and digital images, developing studies about the contemporary body. Doctor in Audiovisual Communication and Aesthetic ECA/USP. Author of Introduction to the intertextual Cinema by Peter
According to José Carlos Barcellos:
“(...) it is important to keep in mind that the diversity of desires, identities and homoerotic practices is vast. Thus, it is not possible to place them neither in a homogeneous place nor time. On the contrary, in order to capture this vast spectrum in its different configurations, it is necessary to respect time specification, spaces and articulations of the homoerotic cultural historic experiences” (Barcellos, 2002, 130)
Effectively, identity, desire and sexuality are complex teams and must be singled out by their cultural dynamic mainly when we verify in those identification processes with an object, according to cultural studies (Bhabha, 1998; Escosteguy, 2001; Hall, 2001; e Moreiras, 2000). Consequently, I am searching for those themes discussing about the utter construction of the homo-cultural concept.
Homo-culture
In Brazil, the knowledge field which has demonstrated interest in the homo-eroticism studies and culture elects the conceptual notion of homo-culture as a denomination that comes from a hybrid state: ambiguous, erotic and heterogeneous. That hybrid evinces in a chain of partial results in the enunciated properties of the homo-culture as the elaboration of an inter/trans-discipline proposal in the epistemological action on the Gays and Lesbian Studies that emerge in the Brazilian university. The homo-eroticism construction is already recognised in the reading of a consensual dynamic research by Jurandir Freire Costa (1992 and 1995) when he described the affective, erotic and sexual relations among people from the same sex as a critical category in the representation field. The homo-eroticism understanding, however, is based on an expended culture in theoretical prepositions developed by the author.
I would like to single out that I am trying to present the homo-culture concept knowing it is an arid part of language. Keeping in the mind the canonical discourse problematic that legitimate the normalisation of the thought. It is necessary to explore the multiform terminology flexibility which demonstrates the transformations in a complex text which
provides the displacement of the contemporary object representation. In the book’s presentation “A escrita de adé”, it is written:
“The homo-culture notion emerges from a discursive dynamic, when it overlaps homo-eroticism and culture as a conversation net that comprehends the malleability of the reasons, concerning sexual minorities. We consider this territory of home-eroticism study, homosexuals, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, and so on. The homo-culture notion appeared, historically, in the I Worldwide Conference about Homo-culture promoted by International Gay Association (ILGA), in Stockholm, in 1998. Several researchers from centers of gay-lesbians study, universities and militant communities took part actively in the cooperation of conceptual notions and theory premises which composed the principle of the manifested differences on sexual minorities.The objective of this meeting was to register the diversity of the homo-eroticism culture in gay and lesbians communities in the world, allowing us to observe the flexibility of the term homo-culture” (Santos: 2002, .7).
Thus, the homo-culture studies emerge from the exhaustion of a lot of knowledge (Anthropology, communications, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, sociology, among others), which in its outcome inter/ Trans discipline must establish the correct theory-conceptual about the homo-eroticism cultural production, homosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transsexual. The homo-eroticism universe mobilises the right and respect concerning the difference, it goes into knowledge and observes and absorbs the acceptance and inclusion of the so called sexual minorities. The systemic treatment from these studies implies in enunciated considerations concerning the homo-eroticism object distended in the cultural environment: since the specifications inherent to the body, the erotic to the desire, sex, and sexuality constitute scene peculiarities. In this way, the body understanding subverts itself into altering considerations sediment by poetry and up dating in the cultural nets. Consequently, I go back to the incommensurability of the representation when it declares the transformations which distend the effective
Nowadays, there are a lot of sexuality manifestations, mainly in the homo-eroticism field, which is still seen as a taboo to may people. When dealing with different speeches about sex, the different social contexts are realized. The sexuality concept is a recent socio-cultural construction, as Foucalt (1990) showed. Reviewed by Jurandir Freire Costa (1992) the contemporary sexuality can be criticised by the intervention of the scientific and juridical division among heterosexual and homosexual, independent from their contextualised implications. The expression can be applied to a series of different realities, as biological-medical descriptions of the reproductive sex organ; feeling descriptions such as love, passion, affection, body sensation as orgasm, physical excitement, ejaculation, rules and institutions descriptions such as family, marriage, husbands, wives, children, dating, flirt; judgment descriptions and moral attitudes towards what is allowed, forbidden, desired, condemned, depreciated, and ridiculous. Therefore, the sex and gender are referred by Thomas Laqueur (2001) as notions of “biological sex differences” and “cultural gender differences”. It is important to show the difference between complexes systems comprehended in one contemporary discourse manner. That system, however, constitutes the biological and cultural differences involved by scientific, political, philosophical and religious beliefs about the social culture nature presented in a body. Sex and gender interact by different ways which seem to approximate and distance the circumstantial elements of their expressions. That is the reason why I start reasoning about the body, the flesh language and anatomy to the scientific paradigms about sexuality and gender; it also establishes equal ideals, discussing the ethic in the construction of social identities.
I identify myself with the conceptual notion of the pan- sexuality, which can be seen/ read as an intense social-cultural manifestation of the multiform sexuality ( Couto, 1999 and, Berutti, 2001, 121-126), making one’s step toward an inter textual diversity of sounds ( Garcia, 2000,45). The denominations that absorb and characterise the affective, sexual and erotic relations among people from the same sex are vast. Sodomy, congenital homosexuality, male homosexuality, homosexual, homosexuality, homo-eroticism, gay, fruit, fag and poofy among others are terms which have different meanings based on socio-cultural experiences. According to Maturana the scientific explanations are propositions presented as reformulations of experiences and the belief in those explanations occur from acceptance criteria (2000). The validity criteria of a scientific
explanation incorporate the operational implications approached by the scientific discourse, leading to an occurrence of instruments which I call methodological passages: from the term to the concept, the doubt to the belief, the reflection to the explanation, and theory to practice. These specified passages shoe the objects displacement that in their description context must evidence a contemporary scientific proposition. To face this hard reality it is necessary to (sub) interpreter the order of the hegemonic system from the daring action of Sodomy & Gomorrah. In situations of crises, the impact of a determined provocation ends up limiting the territory- a leitmotiv. I consider peculiar a sentence of mine that I usually mention in difficult moments: I am not from the mud, I am the mud!
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