On The Queerness of Brazilian Children in Xuxa

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She is wearing knee-high boots, a short, tight-fitting ensemble and pigtails. The landing of the shuttle is prolonged so as to maximize the euphoria of the awaiting children below it, non-paid non-actors who chant, scream and cry as they look up at the giant woman inside the pink blob of a shuttle, which is accented by enormous red lips (surely the spacecraft’s windows). Xuxa [Shoo-sha] is too tall to be ordinarily female, too white to be ordinarily Brazilian. Her teeth couldn’t be whiter, her skin couldn’t be paler, and her hair couldn’t be blonder, or finer. As reported by the press, the children are often shocked to find out that Xuxa, the Aryan alien stepping out of the pink spaceship, actually pees. The children on the set don colourful pompoms and handmade banners expressing their unwavering devotion. They burst into tears in anticipation of Xuxa’s extended exiting. The excitement is so manic you would think Xuxa’s landing were a rather rare affair akin to a Virgin Mary appearance, or the apparition of a comet. Yet, this scene, and its continuation, repeated itself every single morning, from Monday to Saturday, for five consecutive hours on Brazilian television from 1986 until 1992. Gilberto Felisberto Vasconcellos describes Xuxa as an anti-housewife whore (‘rapariga ante-dona de casa’), the perfect embodiment of the family’s fantasies: the one who will do to father all the sexual things the housewife won’t (in child drag, nonetheless), a role model for daughter’s heterosexual dreams of replacement and incestuous seduction, and something for the heterosexual son-in-training to look forward to, as his turn will come sooner than later. This leaves the queer child, or the child’s queerness, without recognition, but certainly not without a place – albeit not a readymade one. 259 May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-259 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 260 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary The sartorial in/of Xuxa is a multivalent currency, able to prop up a variety of identificatory and sexual investments from children and adults, and needs to be analysed in its potential modularity and resignification. I here, then, fall back into the place of the queer child watching Xuxa in my native Brazil in the 1980s in order to flesh out such an analysis. If the father can fondle Xuxa with his very eyes in the present, in her massive entirety made visible by the television screen (we first see her from below, towering over the hysteric children, as though we could peek at her underwear), the children’s investment seem linked to a deferral (I can have her later, I can look like her later), until they are able to purchase Xuxa’s products (her line of clothes, sandals and knee-high boots for kids) and experience her erotic promises in the present, in the flesh, justified by the ludic that makes up Xuxa’s world. But if the father’s perception can function as a type of fondling in the present, the queer child can also touch Xuxa, the child tout court can also get in touch with queerness through Xuxa. Xuxa’s toys are geared towards little girls who can make the deferred whitening eroticness of the Xuxa experience a (mock-up) reality not only for themselves, but for the adults (the fathers) looking at them – through consumption of her products. The heterosexual boys-in-training are left to consume Xuxa through the father’s visual investments (as in Freud’s theory of perception, in which the eyes are basically tentacles), as well as through a sublimation of, and strategized re-encounter with, the pleasures of looking at her not as a reminder of the ideal bodies that might soon be available for their sexual feasting, but for the clothes themselves. It turns out Xuxa isn’t just apt material for the pleasures of femininity by proxy of queer boys, but for soon-to-be heterosexual boys’ falling backward onto/into/through queerness as well: the queerness of Xuxa’s clothes, whose gaze is largely permitted as she is the only thing to look at (in morning television). Looking at Xuxa, as though forced to give in to her feminine excesses, the boy is able to take in the pleasures of the sartorial without compromising his masculine position – in the eyes of the adult or the nation. A doll without orifices and the sexual logic of (colonial) intercourse Freud describes Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings as ‘props’ for his anatomical investigations, an alibi-practice that enables other kinds of practices and discoveries (Freud, 1957). Jean Laplanche describes sublimation, which appears as a doing ‘something else’ with sexual energy, sometimes in opposition, sometimes working together with sexuality, as an instinct of ‘excessive strength [that] triggers the earliest childhood sexual theories,’ the first of which revolves around ‘Where do babies come from?’ Not from Xuxa’s pink spaceship, nor from her very body without cavities (Laplanche, 1984: 20). Laplanche gives the example of the mother’s pregnancy with another child May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-260 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF Diego Costa 261 as igniting that puzzling question. It provokes an investigation linked to a fantasy of construction faced with the parents’ refusal to come up with an adequate answer, establishing a connection between sublimation in the form of having-to-know and ‘turning back’ (Laplanche, 1984: 17). Xuxa’s erotic anxiety-soothing powers, her holelessness – her myth takes away from her the possibility of pores and orifices (though she comes out of a pink one every morning on TV), may soothe similarly primal fantasies of origin for Brazilians. As Vasconcellos argues, the first Brazilian was mix-raced, the child of a European father and an Ameraba (Native Brazilian) mother; perhaps not unlike the child Xuxa would have had with legendary soccer player Pelé, ‘the black millionaire celebrity’ she dated before rising to stardom (Simpson, 1993: 32).1 A central part of the genesis of Xuxa’s myth (of holelessness) is that she was a virgin, at age 17, when she started going out with Pelé, who was 40, and allegedly refused to deflower her, leading Xuxa, whose real name is Maria da Graça, to lose her virginity with someone else first, and then go back to Pelé. For Amelia Simpson, their relationship offers a ‘proof of immunity to racism, which then functions as a license to exploit the appetite for the blond and blue-eyed ideal in a country with the largest black population outside Africa’ (Simpson, 1993: 32). Although the primal question that both produced and terrorized the first Brazilian child, Who is my father? cannot be claimed to be exclusively Brazilian, such a child’s question was sustained by a very specific narrative. From the beginning, this child’s question was not just triggered by a genealogical-ontological curiosity, but brought forth by a colonial act of rape. A series of questions torment the first Brazilian child as he wonders about the mother–father coitus in that April of the year 1500, visualizing, or rather constructing with his very eyes-cum-hands the mise en scène of the nation’s primal scene. Was it love at first sight? Or did they leave it for the morning after? Was there no love, only sex? If my father spoke a language that my mother did not understand, how did their communication take place? Or was there copulation without linguistic communication? Voices, gestures, moans, whispers, yet no dialogue to speak of? Was there only a transmission of the signifier, but not of the signified: each one’s words addressed to their own selves, or to the sky of Bahia’s coastline? (Simpson, 1993: 45)2 This child is thus not only a ‘ballet dancer’ owing to the ‘ludic disposition’ such not-knowing (yet knowing) must have inaugurated, as Vasconcellos has it, but an accident (Simpson, 1993: 45).3 An accident which perhaps Xuxa would have avoided, either because a doll without orifices would never get pregnant, the child wouldn’t have been produced (he is dead from the beginning), or because in the event that she did get pregnant, her biological aesthetics would have matched the European father’s, at which point the child could signify an effect of mutual parental Desire, not a colonializing rape. May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-261 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 262 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary A fantasy of Xuxa as the original mother (nature) would certainly work to abate anxieties around what Christopher Bollas calls ‘the sexual logic of intercourse’. Xuxa’s dollish impenetrability, akin to the not-yet-deflowered young girls watching her show, would have meant the child no longer has to deal with the problematic (racial) mismatch of the parents’ intercourse. Despite the history of violence inherent to this set of symbolic parents (the original Brazilian non-family), ‘intercourse’ appears as a disruptive key figure in ‘any’ three-year-old child’s sexual epiphany that, ‘apart from Jesus (or “the Holy Family”), the child did not enter existence through maternal immaculate conception’ (Bollas, 2000: 169). In this epistemological crisis the child realizes that instead of being the centre of the universe, she may actually just be ‘an after-effect of parental sexual passion sought after for its own sake’. The crux of such narcissistic crisis represented by the notion of the ‘intercourse’, as opposed to some kind of divine alignment of the stars to produce a child God, is the idea that the self may be mere fallout from an act that actually wasn’t meant to be productive, but merely conducive. This disruption takes the child away from his status of an effect of Desire and closer to a barebacking accident. Reclaiming woman’s skin It wasn’t until the 18th century that the investment in bodily exhibition became woman’s business, reserving for men the labour of looking. The naturalization of ornate dress as a domain of woman guaranteed by the l/Law – juridical and symbolic – is, then, a relatively new process, and one filled with anxiety particularly for boys who must give up on the objects that have served as signs and substitutes for Mother, whereas girls (and a certain type of queer boy) don’t. When Xuxa comes out, some of mother’s properties that had to be given up as objects of desire fall back into the frame of possibilities for visual, tactile and erotic pleasure for any boy, no matter how conscious their fascination with femininity in the sartorial may be. Of course, while boys may not be allowed to wear the clothing or speak about it, they do, in many ways, control it in their manifested resignation (but latent omnipresence). In this sense, Xuxa serves as the Mother who goes along with the child’s ludic disposition, willing to put on and model the sartorial for him (Xuxa began her career as a fashion model, after all). This dynamic in Xuxa echoes one of the gender system’s most basic naturalized fictions: the appearance of woman collapses the look with the (her)self as an unquestionable given. What is put on is read as skin – as if the costuming that renders her visible as woman were as natural and inevitable an effect of nature as an epidermis. In the formation of man’s self- display as unsheddable realness (while accoutrements make the woman, the non-detachability of the penis itself makes the man), there is nothing, really, to take off if there is nothing to put May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-262 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF Diego Costa 263 on; it is woman whose visible artifice renders her susceptible to loss. Xuxa fosters a reclaiming of what has been renounced by boys, the pleasures of the sartorial (coded as feminine), as, despite the specificities of one’s Desire, the child is radically confronted with the clothing that (un)settles, while assuaging it. Xuxa’s well documented relationship to nature – she repetitively claims that only children and animals (‘bichos’, a word dangerous close to ‘bichas’, one of many Portuguese terms for ‘faggots’) understand her; that she has, like Michael Jackson, a zoo at home – helps seal the deal. When boys ‘usurp’ Xuxa’s iconography, to use Winnicott’s term, are they not usurping ‘the mother’s position and her seat or garments’ (Winnicott, 1990: 85)?4 The queer boy is granted access to Xuxa through an imaginary usurping (rendered possible by the secretive extensions, and aims, of his ludic disposition) or through the literal stealing of the Xuxa products, or props, including a doll that is at least three times Barbie’s size, that might belong to his sister(s). Without a symbolic system that accounts for his presence in the world, this is the queer boy’s dynamic for life: usurping the Other’s object through fantasy. The heterosexual(izing) Brazilian boy is here, then, able to enjoy Xuxa’s/Woman’s feminine props without getting blood on his hands owing to Xuxa’s televisual omnipresence as electronic babysitter on the most watched network in Brazil, Rede Globo. Under the aegis of omniscience Xuxa’s goodbye, five hours after her spectacular arrival, is just as dramatic, extensive and ritualized as her arrival. The children’s desperation in face of her departure is akin to a child’s reading of a parent’s going away as abandonment. Xuxa’s farewell is an unbearable interruption like that of a dream, like that of intercourse. When her show is over, real life begins. The children bawl, they scream, they beg her to stay. They profess their love for her with gifts, pleading that the banners they hold with loving messages for Xuxa be read. At this moment, Xuxa acts as though she has been put in a situation, in her own show, that is out of her control. She reads some of the banners with loving messages, often begging the director (of the show, and of Xuxa’s career and finances), Marlene Mattos – Xuxa is the body, Marlene is the head, the saying goes, rumoured to be Xuxa’s lesbian lover – to allow her to read more banners before she is forced to hop back into her pink spaceship. She asks, ‘Marlene, one more banner, please.’ And begs, ‘Zoom in on that one, too, please, please.’ It is significant that while the children’s pleading for this towering alien (m)Other to stay is directed at her very apparition, Xuxa’s plea for the camera to show more banners is addressed to the disembodied authority of ‘Marlene’, whom no one gets to see. Without ever having seen Marlene, we know, from press accounts and gossip, what she looks like, and it’s enough May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-263 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 264 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary to scare us into accepting, and understanding, her controlling role: she is mannish, she is dark-skinned, she comes from the poor north-eastern part of Brazil; she is the anti-Xuxa. If the children seem to be begging Xuxa-cum-Mummy to stay, Mummy’s coup de théâtre involves her own pleading to Marlene-cum-Daddy’s authoritative omnipresent-absence. The fact that Marlene is mannish, yet not a man, suggests another kind of queer usurpation here, of the masculine position, at the heart of Xuxa’s worlding. Contrary to Winnicott’s childrearing advice that the father be present ‘at breakfast’, for Colette Soler the father is much more present when he isn’t actually there – and thus remains invulnerable to the eventual contradictions that grant him his status as father, risking an unmasking. If the father surrendered his clothes in the name of an irrevocable naturalization of his standing in the great masculine renunciation of the 18th century, as Silverman argues, by now his body can (must?) be safely taken out of view to guarantee and guard his position. Xuxa’s world, then, dramatizes the heterosexual gender dynamic at its most basic as she parades around the stage bearing man’s rejected skin, resignified as feminine skin, while Marlene, the man-like creator running the show, ventriloquizes the action without granting the audience her/his very materiality. Xuxa is probed; Marlene is safe (Soler, 2013). A child is cumming Very little has been said about Xuxa’s bacchanal, and virtually nothing from the point of view of the child such bacchanal has helped to produce. For if stars are fabricated by a complex and contradictory network of signifiers – from the hypercontrolled concoction of her idealized image (her image in theory, we could say) to the non-diegetic images that befall alongside it (the image in practice), so are the children, the baixinhos (‘small ones’), as Xuxa calls them (Dyer, 2003: 7.). Yet, since the position of the child qua child keeps her/him from speaking, or, rather, keeps us from listening, to talk about children is often to talk down to them, reiterating the very infantilizing fantasies (of inherent purity and innocence, for example) that have manufactured the figure of the child as we know it. Xuxa’s relationship to children has always been based on the refusal to treat them as children. Her refusal to use ‘baby talk’, addressing them as though they were adults, just physically smaller, was often read as a violence she performed against them.5 Amelia Simpson’s 1993 book Xuxa: The MegaMarketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity remains the only lengthy academic text devoted to the Xuxa phenomenon. Simpson thoroughly contextualizes the glorious Xuxa years right before her decline (in the late 1990s, when she has a child of her own, demystifying her holelessness, and cuts her hair short), locating the star as the materialization of a perfect storm onto which Brazilians could project their fantasies of escape from that country’s descent May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-264 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF Diego Costa 265 from a series of coups d’état into a hopeless socio-economic reality in the 1980s and 1990s. But Simpson offers little nuance in her reading of Xuxa, which is mostly based on popular press accounts and interviews with the star. She often demonizes Xuxa as an emblematic cog in the machinery of Brazilian selfdelusional fantasies of racial, gender and economic harmony, democracy and progress towards a First World-like modernity that promises happiness through consumption. Simpson ignores not only the possibility for imaginary usurpation from the child producing and being produced by Xuxa, downplaying the child’s own (queer) agency and overestimating Xuxa’s, but also the ways her performance actually lends itself to such (queer) usurpations. The star is an agent of transcendence, but what of the (queer) child who doesn’t coincide so hermetically with the heterocapitalist Brazilian project driven by Anglo-Saxon mimicry? What of the child who falls short, or behind, and is left to grow sideways, or in whatever other ways? Serge Lebovici reminds us that identification is a way of resolving an infantile conflict. Identification in Oedipus, for example, involves ‘being like’ (Daddy) in order to have (Mummy, or someone like her). Given that a queer Oedipus would leave a child left out of a clear lining up of that being-andhaving scheme, Xuxa’s alienness could function as a signpost for something else altogether: a non-mummy, even an anti-mummy without orifices, still able to seduce Daddy – without leaving traces (which the child identifies as). Xuxa can appear, then, against her own project of post-colonial magnetism, as an assuaging figure for the violent schisms of childhood’s queerness. In reading Xuxa as a symptom for Brazil’s post-colonial proclivities, Simpson never turns to the Brazilian child whose queer growth coincides with his/her country’s own miraculous emergence from a baixinho in the 1980s and 1990s to a major global economic player in the 2000s, at which point Xuxa’s star and virtual babysitting services are dismissed as grotesquely passé. Simpson follows the familiar way in which work that directly involves children fails to actually hear them, or make room for their presence as children, not as an adult fantasy of them. Simpson, for instance, highlights the status quo-supporting contradictions that Xuxa symbolizes, and reiterates en masse, but doesn’t pay attention to the way such child-effacing readings may also help produce retrograde ideas about the inherent purity of the child who arrives into the world only to get spoiled by a horrible system ailing with post-colonial inferiority complexes. In this logic, Xuxa would represent little new in the landscape of Brazil’s fascination with a ‘civilized’ and ‘modern’ ideal of a nation based on hygienic fantasies of North American and European ‘progress’; besides the primal anxieties around the origins of the first Brazilian owing to the unbearable ontological distance between his parents: the civilized European who raped the Native Brazilian woman to produce the un-Desired child that is I. May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-265 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 266 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary Brazil’s eugenic ideal was packaged from mass consumption since the early days of cinema. The history of film in Brazil is often described as yet another kind of rape, with the invasion of ‘the offices of large yankee companies’ (Bicalho, 1993: 22) which monopolized movie distribution and exhibition after the First World War, and gave rise to several publications that specialized in the dissemination of feminine images produced abroad. It also helped create a national cinematographic industry that aimed to display a kind of Brazil that did away with undesirable elements that were incompatible with the images of modernity imported from the cinema of the ‘civilized world’. This promotion of a whitewashed national image involved an assimilation of: the eugenic ideals accompanying the aesthetic standards of cinema of the United States and Europe, especially in regards to the ‘Aryan’ model of screen personalities ( . . . ) The nation should be represented on screen by the image of the pure, white woman, symbol of moral integrity as well as racial eugenics. (Bicalho, 1993: 24) The child as the one who (already) knows Part of Xuxa’s stock defence against criticisms that she isn’t pedagogical has always been that she has never intended to teach children, but to conduct the fun in their break from school. Interestingly, years after Xuxa’s heyday, she is relegated to the role of the pedagogical master of ceremonies in a series of DVDs named Xuxa Só Para Baixinhos (‘Xuxa Only for Little Ones’, a play on the warning message printed across female nude magazines in Brazil, Só Para Maiores, or ‘Only for Those 18 and Over’). By the time Xuxa turns to a baby talk aesthetic, in 2000 (eight years after Xou da Xuxa goes off the air), talking to children like babies, covering her now chubbier body and singing innocent songs that teach little kids how to count, she is largely regarded as a gauche clown living off a dead hysteria that has turned into a lukewarm niche market. One of the greatest critical responses against Xuxa at her peak is that she spoiled an entire generation of kids by sexualizing them too early. The assumption here is that kids aren’t inherently sexual when we know the opposite is true. We know this from looking and listening to children as children, both from a science-centric approach (even foetuses have erections and masturbate in the womb) and from the body of knowledge, theoretical and clinical, borne out of children’s psychoanalysis. We can say that this logic (the sexual in the child) functions as one of psychoanalysis’ main pillars. From Freud we can also surmise that the construction of a child’s sexuality begins way before conception, through the symbolic inheritance (the history of the child’s family and nation, for example) that predates the child’s May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-266 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF Diego Costa 267 birth and will certainly serve as raw material for the constitution of his or her subjectivity. Freud recognized not only babies’ and children’s ability to self-inflict pleasure, but their incredible investment in it as masturbatory, whether or not the corporal area of choice was genital. ‘Thus the quality of the stimulus has more to do with producing the pleasurable feeling than has the nature of the part of the body concerned.’ Here we clearly see the queerness of psychoanalysis as a mode of looking at children that recognizes not only their relationship to (sexual) pleasure as always there, but renders the entirety of the human body (and beyond) as potential sources, and objects, for such pleasure (Freud, 2000: 52, 49).6 We also know that not only are children sexual (they have, perform and are driven by a sexuality, even if they aren’t having sex – although some are), but adults can take a roundabout paedophilic pleasure in looking at children, a pleasure that is put in motion by, for example, the very discussions about whether Xuxa, Mary Kay Letourneau or the latest Calvin Klein ads are doing the unthinkable and mixing childhood with sex.7 Panic over the possibility of a sexual child, contradicted by the avid production of the sexy child, emblematizes a culture bent on presuming that sexuality comes from outside the child, imposing on him/her, always as an unspeakable violence, as though ‘we’ weren’t all inextricable to a child-loving culture that projects the link between sexuality and the infantile into a perverse Other (the homosexual, the sexual predator, or Xuxa, for instance) so that it can ‘save’ the children from a sexual threat that could never come from ourselves, that would never be the founding condition for our own subjectivity. We can think of Joon Oluchi Lee’s ‘The Joy of The Castrated Boy’ as one intervention in the way the child’s purity is guaranteed by his/her muteness. Lee structures his reading of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula around and through the child (s)he once was. His selfcentric reparation attempt involves a rereading of his gender-assigned-at-birth, and policed thereafter at penalty of getting his ‘pee-pee’ cut off if he didn’t ‘stop acting like a girl and start being a boy’, and whose favourite objects could only become part of his ludic disposition through usurpation. They included his little sister’s beige coat (‘which I wore once with a sash’), lipstick (‘addicted from the moment I slathered my mother’s on in bathroom secrecy’) and ‘books for girls, filled with love stories starring medusa-curled girls with huge galaxy for eyes, filled with stars and rainbows and tears, of happiness and depression’. (Lee, 2005).8 Lee’s falling back into queer-childness for the purpose of critical analyses (among others) illustrates what Heather Love describes as ‘feeling backward’, a non-hagiographic scavenging of the (queerness of the) past (Love, 2009). It is also predicated on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept of the ghostliness of the (always already) queer child: a child can only speak, or be heard, in remembrance (re-member-ance), in the precarious act of reappearance, après coup (Stockton, 2009). May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-267 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 268 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary Lee’s deployment of the child’s voice and sensorial experiences (‘castration grew on me’ [Lee, 2005: 36]) are evidently a redramatization of what was once inescapably lived in the flesh without the luxury of becoming-adult retrospect. While such inevitable strategy of producing knowledge is obvious in Lee, it becomes a different device, albeit triggered by a similar disposition, in G. Winston James’s Uncle (James, 2009), a short story about a boy fascinated by his uncle’s physical presence, experienced with the anxiety-giving precariousness of the apparition we see so dramatically performed in Xuxa’s arrival and exit. James’s’ story is completely told in the first person. A child speaks. Now. We hear a child. His sexuality is not yet to come. The child is cumming. This is certainly not the child whose innocence must be saved from the predatorial Other. This is a child invested in the thickness of his uncle’s eyebrows (‘so thick I can’t even tell if there’s skin underneath’), the smooth darkness of his skin and the way his eyes go from light brown to blue when exposed to the sunlight (‘It’s kinda scary, but kinda nice.’) (James, 2009: 2). James’s child is in touch with what touches him, and what he would like to touch (the uncle’s body). This child’s ludic usurpation is a form of paranoid telekinesis. The child’s burden, and his blessing, is the urgent need to outsmart the readymade paths for horizontal growth that have been paved and signposted as devoid of alternatives. His is a haptically aware child (‘His fingers and his lips kinda tickle my ear when they brush it’), a sexually aware child who is articulated into being, as child, through James’s literary device, revealing to the reader the ways in which, in some register, a child is like a small adult, a baixinho, negotiating the tension between sexual desire and ability to have the (supposedly satisfying) object (of desire). While we may think of sexual and innocent as antithetical terms, the child’s so-called innocence itself appears as particularly sexual in James, as it does in Xuxa, and in the queer boys we can imagine to have mimicked her in the bathroom for their own uncles (never) to see. The child in theory, the child in practice Xuxa’s rise as non-Brazilian Brazilian royalty in the 1980s and 1990s coincide with Brazil’s trajectory of emergence, from a global baixinho to the world’s sixth largest economy, ‘expected to move up to 4th place ahead of Japan’ by 2050.9 Brazilians’ emergence, from childhood into the presumed adulthood of capitalist-style progress, involves socio-economic growth and a symbolic unsettling that amounts to what we could call a positive crisis. Like Stockton’s (ghostly) queer child, these changes are also achieved through sideways growth, as when one is unable to grow according to the dicta provided by the normative moulds/modes of growing – upwards. Taking the emerging country-child analogy further, we can say that the price for Brazil’s emergence (upward emergence, sideways emergence, May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-268 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF Diego Costa 269 re-emergence of the repressed) has been the death of the child – of its child(ren) and itself as child, particularly if we take television programming as an emblematic symptom for a country ‘of illiterate folk’ where, according to Gilberto Felisberto Vasconcellos, ‘what isn’t television has no cultural value’ (Vasconcellos, 1991: 118). The string of events that illustrates Brazil’s multipronged emergence (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, jagged and in ways we can’t yet map) largely involve an investment, financial and symbolic, of properties (of aesthetics, class, race) that do not line up with what Xuxa represented. If Xuxa’s zenith was built on a stoking of post-colonial inferiority complexes and anxieties about ambiguous lines between the Brazilian class system, the post-Xuxa years have been characterized by an embracing of what counts as Brazilian, or a fantasy of what constitutes the lower class for the higher classes, which are still the producers of television content, having ceded some of the place within the television frame to representatives of the (previous) lower classes. What used to fall under the category of bad taste, that is, poor folks’ taste, and thus deemed un-televisable now occupies centre stage in television shows dominated by Brazilian country music artists, a much larger number of brown and black actors in soap operas, and, for the first time, set in the poor slum-like suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, instead of mansions and modelling agencies. We can follow the traces that lead to this shift in taste, and thus, in the specificity of objects deemed televisable, in various events that have produced Brazilian history in the 21st century – from the 40 million people pulled out of poverty in the Lula years (2002–2010) to the ruling by the Brazilian Supreme court that same-sex couples are legally entitled to civil unions in 2011. These signal not the fostering of ghostly apparitions from abroad that land in Brazilian territory to fill its lack, but to a literal changing of positions and meanings, with an unexpected investment of what was previously seen as shamefully Brazilian into the poster children (and here the children are precisely not literal, for they are absent) of the new Brazil. Of course, the raw material sustaining this new country had already been ‘used’ in a very different way, and for very different purposes, in the aesthetics of hunger of Glauber Rocha’s cinema of the 1960s, which portrayed Brazilian misery as misery, not as happiness despite conditions, in the hopes of ringing a revolutionary alarm. For Giberto Felisberto Vasconcellos, Rocha’s death in 1981 was felt to be a relief by the cultural industry, largely controlled by Xuxa’s network, Rede Globo – the same network which would appropriate the hunger of the new middle class (the 40 million Brazilians who went from miserables to consumers) into soap opera material: ‘now we don’t have to hear that old crap about hunger, porno-chanchada, the Third World anymore. Now everything is possible’ (Vasconcellos, 1991: 98).10 For Vasconcellos, Rocha’s death marks the end of the dictatorship years, and the engaged critical responses (‘that old crap about hunger’) they had May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-269 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 270 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary triggered, as well as the beginning of an opening at the end of the 1970s, when the Brazilian intellectual was invested in doing whatever it took not to seem like a moralist. ‘It thus follows that Xuxa would come about as the epitome of such de-sublimating in-video tendencies’, whose performance wasn’t seen through the framework of repressive/obscene, but under the rubric of modernization (Vasconcellos, 1991: 101). This propensity was able to sustain Xuxa’s phenomenon despite the criticisms hurled at her. This modernization, at the time, was only a dream, exactly the stuff Xuxa was made of on daily television, and as purchasable goods – a dream that wouldn’t catch up with Brazil for at least two more decades after Xuxa’s first apparition. In the meantime, Vasconcellos claims Xuxa was entrusted with the chore of making childhood ‘as brief as possible’. He refers to her as a ‘comedian’ (Vasconcellos, 1991: 113) – for Freud, the comic is an awakening of the infantile11 – doing Hollywood’s colonizing work, and her show as a televised brothel whose mission was the production of adults through the killing of the children ‘and the compulsory elimination of kids’ qualities’ (Vasconcellos, 1991: 107). Whether we call Brazil’s new phase modernization, progress or emergence, this encounter of (a version of) the actual nation with the imagined nation, the moment and aftershock when Brazil begins to embody aspects of living that could only have been thought of as a life beyond its borders, is not only (unevenly distributed) new class mobility, but it fosters the desire for more, and it demands the unsettling of positions that had been naturalized as static. Brazil’s surprising and massive wave of protests that began in June 2013 is also a (re-)emergence of a new/old ‘crap about hunger’. They also make evident the unpredictable ways in which Desire arranges itself, always volatile to changes of form, scarcity and tending towards an excess that is bound to leak, drown, wash up and wash away. Notes 1. ‘Pelé and Xuxa represent the extremes on the scale of black and white. Pelé’s features, hair, and complexion are what Brazilians consider truly black, while Xuxa, whose grandparents come from Austria, Poland, Italy, and Germany, is even whiter than the white of Portuguese origin’ (Simpson, 1993: 32). 2. My translation. 3. The Portuguese term is ‘disponibilidade lúdica’, which Vasconcellos borrows from Brazilian historian and anthropologist Luís da Câmara Cascudo (Vasconcellos, 1991: 49). 4. Freud links sight to touch, viewing perception as the ‘sending out of feelers, of sensitive tentacles, at rhythmic intervals’ (Laplanche, 1984: 15). 5. On reproductionist futurism and the notion of the child as the embodiment of an innocence that must be saved as heterosexuality’s fundamental, and fundamentally harmful, and anti-oppositional device, see Lee Edelman (2004). 6. Beatriz Preciado takes Freud’s point on the latency of any body part, ‘real’ or phantom, as an erotic zone further in Manifeste Contra-Sexuel (Preciado, 2000). May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-270 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF Diego Costa 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 271 For Preciado, any body part can also be/work as a penis, which makes the penis itself not the phallus, but a dildo. On anxiety over children’s exposure to paedophiles, see Adler (2011). Also see Egan and Hawkes (2010), Angelides (2004) and Kincaid (1998). Also see Lee’s ghostly intervention/reparation take shape in his blog, lipstickeater.blogspot.com. PwC report, ‘World in 2050. The BRICs and Beyond: Prospects, Challenges and Opportunities,’ January 2013. http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/world-2050/ assets/pwc-world-in-2050-report-january-2013.pdf (accessed 12 June 2013). Rocha was, for Vasconcellos, the number one enemy of Rede Globo’s cultural monopoly, established with the help of military officers in power during the dictatorship years. (Vasconcellos, 1991: 114). Freud traces the relationship between that which is funny with a difference that is recognized, or projected, in the way I does something and the way the Other does it: ‘he does it as I used to do it as a child’ (Freud, 1990: 279, 280). References AQ2 Adler, A. (2001) The perverse law of child pornography. Columbia Law Review, 101, 209–273. Angelides, S. (2004) Feminism, child sexual abuse, and the erasure of child sexuality. GLQ, 10 (2), 141–177. Bicalho, M. F. B. (1993) The art of seduction: Representation of women in Brazilian silent cinema. Luso-Brazilian Review, XXX, 21–33. Bollas, C. (2000) Hysteria. London and New York: Routledge. Dyer, R. (2003) Heavenly bodies: Film stars and society. London: Routledge. Edelman, L. (2004) No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Egan, R. D., & Hawkes, G. (2010) Theorizing the sexual child in modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Freud, S. (1957) Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.). London: The Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1990) Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Freud, S. (2000) The three essays on the theory of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Halper, K. (20 June 2013) Yes, Fetuses masturbate. Salon. Retrieved from http://www. salon.com/2013/06/20/the_science_of_masturbating_fetuses/>. James, G. W. (2009) Uncle. Shaming the devil: Collected short stories. Hollywood, FL: Top Pen Press. Kincaid, J. (1998) Erotic innocence: The culture of child molesting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Laplanche, J. (1984, Spring) To situate sublimation. 28 October. Lee, J. O. (2005, Fall–Winter) The joy of the castrated boy. Social Text, 23 (3–4), 84–85. Love, H. (2009) Feeling backward: Loss and the politics of queer history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simpson, A. (1993) Xuxa: The mega-marketing of gender, race, and modernity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Soler, C. (6 July 2013) Presentation at the research group of clinical formations of the Lacanian field seminar. The Names of the Father and Fathers. Paris. May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-271 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF 272 Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary Stockton, K. B. (2009) The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vasconcellos, G. F. (1991) Eu & a Xuxa: Sociologia do Cabaré Infantil. São Paulo: Editora Leia Mais. Winnicott, D. W. (1990) Playing and reality. London: Routledge. May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-272 9781137353382_17_cha16 PROOF QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR (SEE MARGINAL MARKS) IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to these queries directly onto the proof at the relevant place. Do NOT mark your corrections on this query sheet. Chapter 16 Query No. Page No. AQ1 259 Query Title (A doll has no holes: On the queerness of Brazilian children) different to version on chapter itself. Please confirm correct version and make appropriate correction AQ2 271 Please check the initial abbreviated for Strachey in Freud (1957). May 26, 2015 20:26 MAC/RENI Page-272 9781137353382_17_cha16