Queer Friendships

 

Probably my favorite film we watched this term had to to be Mosquita y Mari. The film follows to young girls in high school and their unexpected friendship as they are pretty different people. Mosquita is a shy book nerd with overprotective parents, while Mari is more the rebel kind doing what she can trying to support her family. Mosquita and Mari become friends when Mosquita reaches out and offers to tutor, Mari. During the film you watch their friendship evolve to a point where it leave the viewer questioning whether they are actually friends or are they just lover in denial. This idea of them being lovers is further pushed in the film when Mosquita finds Mari involved with a man and she seems to grown jealous because of this. With this I would argue that Mosquita and Mari are actually friends the entire time and we live in a society that doesn't value platonic relationships, making us the viewer want "more" from them.  Our society has a hyper focus on sexual/ romantic relationships, to the point where we see two people who are close we automatically assume there must be a sexual/ romantic bond. And when we see as in the relationship between Mosquita and Mari, there is not sexual/ romantic bond we want there to be one. I found myself while watching the film screaming at my t.v. "just kiss already". But why, why do we expect for relationships to be sexual/ romantic why are they valued more than platonic ones. When you watch the film you can see Mosquita and Mari had a good relationship as friends and when the expectation for them to be sexual/romantic is taken out of it you can value there relationship as friends. They fill each other through there friendship and that should be enough.This reminds of the Caleb Luna piece we read before watching this film, and how we as a society need to learn how to sustain ourselves through self love, platonic love, and love from community not holding all of our value into sexual/romantic love. 

Pelo Malo

Henry Stephen in music video for Limon Limonero 

 This week we proceed from our conversation on queer childhoods and moved on to explore queer family dynamics.  We watched a Venezuelan film called Pelo Melo. The film is said to "tackle racism and homophobia", which it does, very well. The light it shines on homophobia was a lot clearer to me at first than it commentary on racism, this is most likely due to there being a difference in race relations. 

 The most surprising part of the film for me was when the protagonist, Junior, begins to reject his grandmother and a suit she made for him. Throughout the film Junior is fixated on having straight and looking like a singer a picture he has to take for school. Junior's mother reads into this and sees it as a an expression of his sexuality. Whenever he bring up this fantasy of his, his mother  rejects/ reprimands him. His grandmother however, had quite the opposite reaction, supporting his dream of  having straight hair and looking like a signer. She did this by actually straightening his hair and sewing him a suit. Junior very fond of his grandmother and appreciated the things she did for him in the beginning of the film, this was until she made him a suit for his photo. When Junior saw the suit his grandmother made him, he said no to the suit and stormed away. After that moment Junior began to reject his grandmother. I was very surprised by this action because up to that moment Junior embraced the way his grandmother encouraged him. Junior began to adopt the rhetoric of his mother, saying no to the suit because it looked to close to a dress. (I later learned after watching the film, the suit was a replica of the suit worn by Henry Stephen, a Venezuelan singer, that wrote the song was introduced to by his grandmother Junior. )Junior rejecting his grandmother and the suit she made him was so surprising to me, because Junior seemed to embrace and ask for things he truly wanted from his grandmother with out fear of judgement. It was as if Junior was his most authentic self with his grandmother and would switch when his mother was around. I made this assumption based on the first scene with him and his grandmother, where she straightens his hair and when his mother returns to pick him up, he runs to the bathroom to re-curl his hair so his mother does not see. With this in mind, Junior rejecting the the suit his grandmother makes for him without his mother being around and without a shift in the grandmothers behavior was shocking. I felt for Junior as we saw the homophobia that was being put onto to him by his mother had internalized itself, that she no longer had to be there for him to experience it- he was able to enact it on himself. This ended up being a huge turning point for Junior as after this point we saw he was able to enact the homophobia he had been experiencing on himself. We see this in the scene  where he is walking throughout the complex alone talking to himself about how it was wrong for him to wear the suit because it looked like a dress, all leading up to him cutting his hair on his own. 

Blck+Brwn+Queer First Post: Intro

 

Hello reader, 

My name is Awa Badiane (she/her) I am a senior at Lawrence University majoring in Government and minoring in Ethnic Studies. I am currently taking Black Brown and Queer. I am taking this class in my final term at Lawrence and I am very excited for the content we are about to explore (I am also excited that this is my last term of Lawrence). Not sure if I can pin point on reason for taking the class most likely it because I've had the professor before and I love being in there class. I do not usually venture far away when I find professors I like, and thats on being Black at a PWI. 

Back to being excited for this class, I am very excited to take this class and look at the way the intersection between being BIPOC and Queer play out and how being BIPOC is inherently queer. 

Already in the first week of class we have explored all of this looking into queerness and childhoods for two Black queer artist and the queering of Native childhoods. In the queering of Native children we see how the systems that colonial American have implemented othered Native children making them outsiders, which is when boiled down what queerness is. Alongside this, when look at queerness in childhoods we saw how queerness looks in children and how again the social frameworks around queerness impact the lived experience of queer children. In this exploration we see how queer children have to "man up" and learn to stand up for themselves, essentially maturing them faster than non-queer children taking their childhood away from them. 

Already the topics explored in the class have peak my interest and I am excited for the rest of the term!