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.
