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Deeply academic mumbo jumbo
11 years ago
***This is actually a theoretical essay I wrote in response to a certain furry who posited a fascinating desire. Since this is about the fuzzy creatures, I thought it would make sense to post it here as well. Who knows, maybe someone'll think it makes sense***
Towards a Furry Praxis of Queer Familial Ties, or How I Learned to Not Fear AIDS
"’Ohana’ means ‘family.’ ‘Family’ means ‘no one gets left behind.’ But if you want to leave, you can. I'll remember you though.”- Lilo (Lilo and Stitch, 2002)
The Queer Child in the Straight State
I was one of those kids who knew they were different and unconventional very early on. I remember falling desperately in love with my sister’s second-grade English teacher when I was a first grader. I guess that impossible romance of a five year old and a twentysomething heralded my awareness of my own queerness and my lifelong fascination with older white women. Queerness came to me as naturally as breathing. And for many years the conflict that plagued me was to reconcile that almost a priori queerness with the desires to belong, to be a part of something bigger than myself. At the crux of my queerness and my belonging was the specter of AIDS, the boogeyman of every other late-eighties early-nineties faggot. At the side of the memory of Ms. Ocasio, that first love of mine, lies the memory of Míster Torres, my first queer role model. Míster Torres, con acento, was a man whose body was ravaged by AIDS. Míster Torres, el sidoso, taught me the greatest fear and the most rewarding of realizations.
What follows is a recollection of a queer childhood haunted by the specter of AIDS and solitude in the tropics, as well as a recollection of animalistic family formations to live an alternative to this solitude. This trip down memory lane serves several purposes: one is to discuss the associations of AIDS with queer life (and death); another is to speak of queer family formations and the drive towards life, a life recognized as worth living. Lastly, I hope this account helps to underscore what my particular aims-as a queer, as a scholar, as a person-are. At this point I do not know if I can write anything that can sway a heart, but I hope that explaining this in paper might help myself understand what this unfamiliar sense of peace is.
My queer childhood, like countless others, was marked by the exposure to HIV-as the virus that defined us, los maricones. Representations of HIV as a queer disease, whether intentional or not, left their impression on a good chunk of my generation, those of us who grew up listening to El Gran Varón in elementary school. AIDS as an integral part of the queer experience metonymized another aspect of queer existence: solitude. Loneliness and AIDS seem like the only sure outcomes of being a homosexual in the Early Nineties in Puerto Rico. My awareness of both of these was marked by some powerful events in my childhood. The first, as I mentioned earlier, was Míster Torres, an older homosexual man with a young lover that my mother would take us to have dinners with. I was under five and my sister was under seven in those years when we’d help míster make lasagna in his house. As a child from a broken home marred by domestic violence, these moments of quotidian meal making were a welcome respite from an otherwise horrible childhood. I learned early on that my joy was being alongside other queers and that reaching out to them would be a central piece in my pursuit of happiness. Not long afterwards, míster died from AIDS-related complications. My mother, having always lacked tact, took my elementary school self with her to his funeral, to pray for him to get the peace in the next world he did not achieve in this one, to beg for a respite to the sarcoma Kaposi that we feared was eating at his soul as it had eaten at his flesh. “How alone one remains when one is dead”, said my mother between bouts of prayers when it was just the two of us in front of míster’s casket. I think this moment left one of the strongest impressions I have had in my life. I developed a pathological fear of AIDS that hounded me until my mid twenties.
It took me a long time to learn that what I was terrified of was not a diseased body, but the promise of crushing loneliness such a body marked.
The homosexual body, seropositive or not, was marked as a space of abject loneliness in the Puerto Rican canon, in characters such as Simón/Simone, the sissy fag or trans woman (one cannot be sure) of Willie Colón’s salsa classic “El gran varón” (“The Great Man.”) Sure, the lines in Colón’s song resonate as a call for understanding and compassion: “a tree that is born bent will not straighten out its trunk” as both the song and the Puerto Rican saying go. However, Simón/Simone’s body is the site of another desolate death: “En la sala de un hospital/ de una extraña enfermedad/ murió Simón./ Es el verano del ochentaiseis/ al enfermo de la cama diez/ nadie lloró.” It doesn’t take much to know that this “strange disease” Simón/Simone died of is a reference to AIDS. Colón, while calling for compassion towards those of us who are different, didn’t mind giving this character an all-too familiar end. A lonely death in a forsaken place is also the end of Tío Sergio, one of the main characters of Magaly García Ramis’ novel Felices Días Tío Sergio, a classic of postmodernist Puerto Rican literature and a book in many high school Spanish reading lists in the island. This novel is near and dear to my heart as it outlines the growing pains of a girl learning to come into adulthood in this intersticial, political no-man’s land of my dear island. Against the ingrained patriarchal values of the many adult women in the novel, Lidia, the protagonist, comes into contact with the figure of the timid Tío Sergio, the radical homosexual who lives at the margins of the family order. Sergio “manages to awaken in the protagonist the desire for a Signifier of diverse signifiers, something that in culture individuals tend to desire in an unconscious manner (and don’t often get to obtain.) On an initial level, the protagonist (and the novelist) are searching for a cultural expression of another order, related with a social and human praxis that is more authentic and humane, with a politics of compromise and less contradictory, and with a more genuine pleasure for art”[1] (Luis Felipe Díaz, my translation, no page in the original.) And this is exactly what Sergio, the homosexual uncle, offers Lidia. However, even a pivotal figure in this narrative such as Sergio is reduced to a lonely, unknown death. His death is not narrated in the book and the readers learn about it as an afterthought of an adult Lidia. Us, the queer children reading this book for class, end up once again thrown into the labyrinth of our collective solitudes.
Queer Kinship Structures and Familial Affects: Escaping the Labyrinth of Solitude
“[R]elationality is world-hood”
- Eva Hayward, “Lessons From A Starfish”
I mentioned earlier in this confessional/essay that for many years I harbored a pathological fear of HIV/AIDS. It would not be an understatement to say it was a phobia, and for this an example will suffice. At age seventeen I was stabbed as the result of a botched robbery. My immediate fear was not the blood or the grease oozing out of the open wound, or a reasonable fear such as tetanus. The very next day I spent money I did not have in order to get tested for STIs, particularly HIV. Why? At that point I knew that the HIV virus cannot survive exposed to air for more than a couple of seconds, so even if the pathogen was in the blade from a previous shanking, it would be extremely unlikely for contagion to occur. I also knew that an ELISA test the day after the possible infection would not tell me anything useful as it takes at least six months for results to show an actual infection…seventeen-year-old me knew these things, but didn’t care. The only thing they cared about was seeing a negative result in that piece of paper, logic be damned. Because it meant that as long as that response was negative, as long as that metonymied queerness remained in remission, there was still a chance I could be part of something-a family, society, a clique-that I was not yet condemned to a death as lonely as Sergio’s, as Simón/Simone’s, as míster’s. That fear ate away at the contours of my often-trembling body until I went headfirst into a queer world-making project, one household (my household) at a time.
It wasn’t until my late teens, after I went to college that I began to toy with the idea of forging a family outside of the bounds of genealogies, of professionalism, of genetics. I was estranged from my biological family and I turned to the queers in the barra, the queer professors and fellow faggots here and there to ease the pain of not belonging, of beginning to realize that my destiny was to see myself as I saw that one professor who paid my drinks and spun a yarn of how he was just as lacking a family as I was, but with a good thirty years on me. I don’t think he realized it, but slowly getting drunk with that one sociology professor, drink after drink of the sweet sugary shit only I seem to love, left another strong and powerful thought ingrained in my brain. I wanted to have a family. I didn’t want a life sustained by casual relationships. I wanted a full house filled with people just as weird as I, caring for and loving one another. My idea of family never included marrying a man and expelling children from my womb-the examples of “traditional” families in my life were failed and miserable, pathetic affairs. I wanted something more, even if I was not quite sure what that would look like.
We all know what a nuclear family looks like: mom, dad, two kids and a dog named Fido living in a white picket fence in a suburb as white as its fences. We have all been taught to conceptualize this sort of family. In fact, kinship structures including-but not limited to- this one are discussed by several queer and feminist theorists as sources of societal inequality, including in Gayle Rubin’s seminal work “The Traffic in Women” (169.) What has often not been so ingrained is what alternatives there are to such an arrangement. I propose that we look at other forms of kinship structures outside of the Western white human experience to draw inspiration for queer kinship formations. As a furry that identifies as a coyote, I particularly look at the kinship formations of the canis latrans to model a relational experience that is neither normative nor readable under a conventional human familial lens.
Pack formations are commonplace for many canids, including wolves, dingoes, coyotes, dogs and hyenas. Every species has its own pack formations-in some (such as coyote packs), alloparenting is commonplace, and so is inter-species breeding. Gray wolf packs tend to more closely resemble the idea of a nuclear family, with breeding wolves and their offspring forming a pack. African wild dogs hunt cooperatively while Ethiopian wolves are tasked with sustenance on an individual basis. Blood-related individuals do not necessarily forge packs, and conversely packs are not always formed by blood relatives. Monogamy is rarely a given, as Cecilia Hennessy explains in her thesis work “Mating Strategies and Pack Formations in an Urban Landscape: A Genetic Investigation”,
Recent investigations of the mating behaviors of Canidae raise doubts as to whether any canid species is genetically monogamous. For instance, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), the swift fox (Vulpes velox), and the island fox (Urocyon littoralis), all of which were thought to have exclusive mated pair systems, were shown through genetic analysis to be polygamous (Baker et al. 2004; Kitchen et al. 2006; Roemer et al. 2001). Observational and genetic investigations have shown that extra-pair mating occurs among two canid species that are phylogenetically closer to the coyote (Wayne et al. 1997), the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) and the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus; Girman et al. 1997; Gottelli et al. 1994). As predicted by Moehlman and Hofer (1997), genetic investigations thus far of canid mating have revealed a flexible mating structure, similar to the findings of investigations into mating structure of socially monogamous birds (Hughes 1998).
And despite the persisting image of the “alpha male” amongst grey wolves, unless the pack is exceptionally large it is more the role of a parent with their young than a full-blown war over dominance. How can these wildly divergent experiences enrich our understanding of human kinship formations?
Others scholars have already suggested that as far as queerness goes, something has to give in terms of family formations. Laura Kipnis’ majestic piece “Adultery” made it clear: Kipnis rationalizes adultery and the way it is symptomatic-and transgressive- of a pattern of labor exploitation in the name of the state and capitalist (re)production. In a refreshing writing style full of lovely turn of phrases, she argues that adultery is an affront at the core of an intimate component of late capitalism: the production of intimate labor, the labor that happens not in factories or office desks but in houses, family reunions and picnics. Kipnis suggests that adultery should not be looked as the fault of an individual to live up to their marriage vows but as an escape valve for the drudge of emotional labor-of making a monogamic marriage work as the state wants it to when it simply can’t hold. She makes a comparison of the labor conditions in the factories and in the bedrooms and, unsurprisingly, the similarities are stunning. She also argues that, just like many people settle for a job that pays the bills regardless of how much they hate it, many people also settle for the relative boredom that often comes from marriage. Adultery is one of the “avenues of resistance” (295) that people who want more than to live in a state of relative unhappiness have. Why do we need these escape valves? Perhaps because conventionality works for even less of us than we’d assume. Perhaps because we get stuck with that shitty job or that conventional marriage since we’ve been programmed to think our other option is to live in destitution, in solitude, in the land of untouchability and unlovability. When we frame relationalities of species, of ethnicities and circumstances, of temporalities, as open spaces of becoming, as sites of possibilities, we open lines of flight that depart from the conventional options that I, at least grew with.
Conclusions, Or How I learned To Sleep At Night
“Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don't you? You think if Catherine lives, you won't wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: I don't know. I don't know.
Hannibal Lecter: Thank you, Clarice. Thank you […] Brave Clarice. You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won't you?” (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991)
The convoluted approach that I have taken to examining and outlining the issues of queer solitude and family forging has its reasons. New lines of flight can arise when we allow ourselves to think in unconventional-rhyzomatic-thought patterns. The previous mental exercise spawned from an equally unconventional place: finding myself desiring-yearning for, even-a seropositive body[2]. Confronted with this desire, I found myself surprised to find that pathological fear assuaged. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it is because I have successfully managed to forge a relational space where I can thrive as a queer and as a canine, modalities of interactions between my humans, my animals and those fuzzy people in between that convinces me that my power to be relatable is no longer tied in my mind to my T-Cell count or the various tales of míster, Simón/Simone and Tío Sergio. It is not that I desire HIV, but that my pack has shown me that I am loved regardless of my circumstances, and that in turn gives me the lexicon to love others regardless of theirs. In any case, all I can say is that I can finally hear the silence of the lambs.
[1] “Sergio logra despertar en la protagonista el deseo por un Significante de significantes diverso, aquello que en la cultura los individuos suelen desear pero de manera inconsciente (y que en el fondo no logran obtener). A nivel inicial, la protagonista (y la novelista) están en la búsqueda de una expresión cultural de orden diverso, relacionada con una práctica social y humana más auténticas, con una política comprometida y menos contradictoria, y con un placer más genuino por el arte”.
[2] Whoever said sublimation is not the source of great work has clearly not met a femme fatale.
Towards a Furry Praxis of Queer Familial Ties, or How I Learned to Not Fear AIDS
"’Ohana’ means ‘family.’ ‘Family’ means ‘no one gets left behind.’ But if you want to leave, you can. I'll remember you though.”- Lilo (Lilo and Stitch, 2002)
The Queer Child in the Straight State
I was one of those kids who knew they were different and unconventional very early on. I remember falling desperately in love with my sister’s second-grade English teacher when I was a first grader. I guess that impossible romance of a five year old and a twentysomething heralded my awareness of my own queerness and my lifelong fascination with older white women. Queerness came to me as naturally as breathing. And for many years the conflict that plagued me was to reconcile that almost a priori queerness with the desires to belong, to be a part of something bigger than myself. At the crux of my queerness and my belonging was the specter of AIDS, the boogeyman of every other late-eighties early-nineties faggot. At the side of the memory of Ms. Ocasio, that first love of mine, lies the memory of Míster Torres, my first queer role model. Míster Torres, con acento, was a man whose body was ravaged by AIDS. Míster Torres, el sidoso, taught me the greatest fear and the most rewarding of realizations.
What follows is a recollection of a queer childhood haunted by the specter of AIDS and solitude in the tropics, as well as a recollection of animalistic family formations to live an alternative to this solitude. This trip down memory lane serves several purposes: one is to discuss the associations of AIDS with queer life (and death); another is to speak of queer family formations and the drive towards life, a life recognized as worth living. Lastly, I hope this account helps to underscore what my particular aims-as a queer, as a scholar, as a person-are. At this point I do not know if I can write anything that can sway a heart, but I hope that explaining this in paper might help myself understand what this unfamiliar sense of peace is.
My queer childhood, like countless others, was marked by the exposure to HIV-as the virus that defined us, los maricones. Representations of HIV as a queer disease, whether intentional or not, left their impression on a good chunk of my generation, those of us who grew up listening to El Gran Varón in elementary school. AIDS as an integral part of the queer experience metonymized another aspect of queer existence: solitude. Loneliness and AIDS seem like the only sure outcomes of being a homosexual in the Early Nineties in Puerto Rico. My awareness of both of these was marked by some powerful events in my childhood. The first, as I mentioned earlier, was Míster Torres, an older homosexual man with a young lover that my mother would take us to have dinners with. I was under five and my sister was under seven in those years when we’d help míster make lasagna in his house. As a child from a broken home marred by domestic violence, these moments of quotidian meal making were a welcome respite from an otherwise horrible childhood. I learned early on that my joy was being alongside other queers and that reaching out to them would be a central piece in my pursuit of happiness. Not long afterwards, míster died from AIDS-related complications. My mother, having always lacked tact, took my elementary school self with her to his funeral, to pray for him to get the peace in the next world he did not achieve in this one, to beg for a respite to the sarcoma Kaposi that we feared was eating at his soul as it had eaten at his flesh. “How alone one remains when one is dead”, said my mother between bouts of prayers when it was just the two of us in front of míster’s casket. I think this moment left one of the strongest impressions I have had in my life. I developed a pathological fear of AIDS that hounded me until my mid twenties.
It took me a long time to learn that what I was terrified of was not a diseased body, but the promise of crushing loneliness such a body marked.
The homosexual body, seropositive or not, was marked as a space of abject loneliness in the Puerto Rican canon, in characters such as Simón/Simone, the sissy fag or trans woman (one cannot be sure) of Willie Colón’s salsa classic “El gran varón” (“The Great Man.”) Sure, the lines in Colón’s song resonate as a call for understanding and compassion: “a tree that is born bent will not straighten out its trunk” as both the song and the Puerto Rican saying go. However, Simón/Simone’s body is the site of another desolate death: “En la sala de un hospital/ de una extraña enfermedad/ murió Simón./ Es el verano del ochentaiseis/ al enfermo de la cama diez/ nadie lloró.” It doesn’t take much to know that this “strange disease” Simón/Simone died of is a reference to AIDS. Colón, while calling for compassion towards those of us who are different, didn’t mind giving this character an all-too familiar end. A lonely death in a forsaken place is also the end of Tío Sergio, one of the main characters of Magaly García Ramis’ novel Felices Días Tío Sergio, a classic of postmodernist Puerto Rican literature and a book in many high school Spanish reading lists in the island. This novel is near and dear to my heart as it outlines the growing pains of a girl learning to come into adulthood in this intersticial, political no-man’s land of my dear island. Against the ingrained patriarchal values of the many adult women in the novel, Lidia, the protagonist, comes into contact with the figure of the timid Tío Sergio, the radical homosexual who lives at the margins of the family order. Sergio “manages to awaken in the protagonist the desire for a Signifier of diverse signifiers, something that in culture individuals tend to desire in an unconscious manner (and don’t often get to obtain.) On an initial level, the protagonist (and the novelist) are searching for a cultural expression of another order, related with a social and human praxis that is more authentic and humane, with a politics of compromise and less contradictory, and with a more genuine pleasure for art”[1] (Luis Felipe Díaz, my translation, no page in the original.) And this is exactly what Sergio, the homosexual uncle, offers Lidia. However, even a pivotal figure in this narrative such as Sergio is reduced to a lonely, unknown death. His death is not narrated in the book and the readers learn about it as an afterthought of an adult Lidia. Us, the queer children reading this book for class, end up once again thrown into the labyrinth of our collective solitudes.
Queer Kinship Structures and Familial Affects: Escaping the Labyrinth of Solitude
“[R]elationality is world-hood”
- Eva Hayward, “Lessons From A Starfish”
I mentioned earlier in this confessional/essay that for many years I harbored a pathological fear of HIV/AIDS. It would not be an understatement to say it was a phobia, and for this an example will suffice. At age seventeen I was stabbed as the result of a botched robbery. My immediate fear was not the blood or the grease oozing out of the open wound, or a reasonable fear such as tetanus. The very next day I spent money I did not have in order to get tested for STIs, particularly HIV. Why? At that point I knew that the HIV virus cannot survive exposed to air for more than a couple of seconds, so even if the pathogen was in the blade from a previous shanking, it would be extremely unlikely for contagion to occur. I also knew that an ELISA test the day after the possible infection would not tell me anything useful as it takes at least six months for results to show an actual infection…seventeen-year-old me knew these things, but didn’t care. The only thing they cared about was seeing a negative result in that piece of paper, logic be damned. Because it meant that as long as that response was negative, as long as that metonymied queerness remained in remission, there was still a chance I could be part of something-a family, society, a clique-that I was not yet condemned to a death as lonely as Sergio’s, as Simón/Simone’s, as míster’s. That fear ate away at the contours of my often-trembling body until I went headfirst into a queer world-making project, one household (my household) at a time.
It wasn’t until my late teens, after I went to college that I began to toy with the idea of forging a family outside of the bounds of genealogies, of professionalism, of genetics. I was estranged from my biological family and I turned to the queers in the barra, the queer professors and fellow faggots here and there to ease the pain of not belonging, of beginning to realize that my destiny was to see myself as I saw that one professor who paid my drinks and spun a yarn of how he was just as lacking a family as I was, but with a good thirty years on me. I don’t think he realized it, but slowly getting drunk with that one sociology professor, drink after drink of the sweet sugary shit only I seem to love, left another strong and powerful thought ingrained in my brain. I wanted to have a family. I didn’t want a life sustained by casual relationships. I wanted a full house filled with people just as weird as I, caring for and loving one another. My idea of family never included marrying a man and expelling children from my womb-the examples of “traditional” families in my life were failed and miserable, pathetic affairs. I wanted something more, even if I was not quite sure what that would look like.
We all know what a nuclear family looks like: mom, dad, two kids and a dog named Fido living in a white picket fence in a suburb as white as its fences. We have all been taught to conceptualize this sort of family. In fact, kinship structures including-but not limited to- this one are discussed by several queer and feminist theorists as sources of societal inequality, including in Gayle Rubin’s seminal work “The Traffic in Women” (169.) What has often not been so ingrained is what alternatives there are to such an arrangement. I propose that we look at other forms of kinship structures outside of the Western white human experience to draw inspiration for queer kinship formations. As a furry that identifies as a coyote, I particularly look at the kinship formations of the canis latrans to model a relational experience that is neither normative nor readable under a conventional human familial lens.
Pack formations are commonplace for many canids, including wolves, dingoes, coyotes, dogs and hyenas. Every species has its own pack formations-in some (such as coyote packs), alloparenting is commonplace, and so is inter-species breeding. Gray wolf packs tend to more closely resemble the idea of a nuclear family, with breeding wolves and their offspring forming a pack. African wild dogs hunt cooperatively while Ethiopian wolves are tasked with sustenance on an individual basis. Blood-related individuals do not necessarily forge packs, and conversely packs are not always formed by blood relatives. Monogamy is rarely a given, as Cecilia Hennessy explains in her thesis work “Mating Strategies and Pack Formations in an Urban Landscape: A Genetic Investigation”,
Recent investigations of the mating behaviors of Canidae raise doubts as to whether any canid species is genetically monogamous. For instance, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), the swift fox (Vulpes velox), and the island fox (Urocyon littoralis), all of which were thought to have exclusive mated pair systems, were shown through genetic analysis to be polygamous (Baker et al. 2004; Kitchen et al. 2006; Roemer et al. 2001). Observational and genetic investigations have shown that extra-pair mating occurs among two canid species that are phylogenetically closer to the coyote (Wayne et al. 1997), the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) and the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus; Girman et al. 1997; Gottelli et al. 1994). As predicted by Moehlman and Hofer (1997), genetic investigations thus far of canid mating have revealed a flexible mating structure, similar to the findings of investigations into mating structure of socially monogamous birds (Hughes 1998).
And despite the persisting image of the “alpha male” amongst grey wolves, unless the pack is exceptionally large it is more the role of a parent with their young than a full-blown war over dominance. How can these wildly divergent experiences enrich our understanding of human kinship formations?
Others scholars have already suggested that as far as queerness goes, something has to give in terms of family formations. Laura Kipnis’ majestic piece “Adultery” made it clear: Kipnis rationalizes adultery and the way it is symptomatic-and transgressive- of a pattern of labor exploitation in the name of the state and capitalist (re)production. In a refreshing writing style full of lovely turn of phrases, she argues that adultery is an affront at the core of an intimate component of late capitalism: the production of intimate labor, the labor that happens not in factories or office desks but in houses, family reunions and picnics. Kipnis suggests that adultery should not be looked as the fault of an individual to live up to their marriage vows but as an escape valve for the drudge of emotional labor-of making a monogamic marriage work as the state wants it to when it simply can’t hold. She makes a comparison of the labor conditions in the factories and in the bedrooms and, unsurprisingly, the similarities are stunning. She also argues that, just like many people settle for a job that pays the bills regardless of how much they hate it, many people also settle for the relative boredom that often comes from marriage. Adultery is one of the “avenues of resistance” (295) that people who want more than to live in a state of relative unhappiness have. Why do we need these escape valves? Perhaps because conventionality works for even less of us than we’d assume. Perhaps because we get stuck with that shitty job or that conventional marriage since we’ve been programmed to think our other option is to live in destitution, in solitude, in the land of untouchability and unlovability. When we frame relationalities of species, of ethnicities and circumstances, of temporalities, as open spaces of becoming, as sites of possibilities, we open lines of flight that depart from the conventional options that I, at least grew with.
Conclusions, Or How I learned To Sleep At Night
“Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don't you? You think if Catherine lives, you won't wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: I don't know. I don't know.
Hannibal Lecter: Thank you, Clarice. Thank you […] Brave Clarice. You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won't you?” (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991)
The convoluted approach that I have taken to examining and outlining the issues of queer solitude and family forging has its reasons. New lines of flight can arise when we allow ourselves to think in unconventional-rhyzomatic-thought patterns. The previous mental exercise spawned from an equally unconventional place: finding myself desiring-yearning for, even-a seropositive body[2]. Confronted with this desire, I found myself surprised to find that pathological fear assuaged. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it is because I have successfully managed to forge a relational space where I can thrive as a queer and as a canine, modalities of interactions between my humans, my animals and those fuzzy people in between that convinces me that my power to be relatable is no longer tied in my mind to my T-Cell count or the various tales of míster, Simón/Simone and Tío Sergio. It is not that I desire HIV, but that my pack has shown me that I am loved regardless of my circumstances, and that in turn gives me the lexicon to love others regardless of theirs. In any case, all I can say is that I can finally hear the silence of the lambs.
[1] “Sergio logra despertar en la protagonista el deseo por un Significante de significantes diverso, aquello que en la cultura los individuos suelen desear pero de manera inconsciente (y que en el fondo no logran obtener). A nivel inicial, la protagonista (y la novelista) están en la búsqueda de una expresión cultural de orden diverso, relacionada con una práctica social y humana más auténticas, con una política comprometida y menos contradictoria, y con un placer más genuino por el arte”.
[2] Whoever said sublimation is not the source of great work has clearly not met a femme fatale.
