Carnival is the future – 02/20/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

We barely set foot on the block and, like Mohammed, we mentally divided the sea of ​​people into men and women. We automatically assess age group, social class, said race and so on. From these coordinates, we separate the desirable from the undesirable or too dangerous. Classifying the other is a strategy to try to guarantee who we are in the serpentine queue.

We feel ugly at a party with beautiful people, more or less young depending on the average age, rich or poor depending on the ostentation. By classifying who the others are, we try to forget that our I am has the firmness of a pudding.

It turns out that Carnival is a game of false clues, in which the coordinates are deliberately scrambled, its frisson passing through the suspension of known parameters. As Assis Valente wrote: “I kissed on the mouth of someone I shouldn’t have, I took the hand of someone I didn’t know”. The fact that it has an end date allows the game to run wild. With the exception of notorious cases, the moral hangover does not reach the following year’s party.

But what if the markers that help us to know who we are became permanently blurred for the rest of the year as well, making explicit the gelatinous quality of what we call the self?

“Betrayed by Desire”, by Stephen Frears, exposes the shock of the encounter with desire when the gender boundaries are suspended. Desiring something different from what the conscious will imposes on us is to be surprised, therefore, the thing does not go without anguish. And, with it, the golden opportunity to deal with what hangs in our unconscious.

Riobaldo loved Diadorim without knowing what would be revealed about the second. If she imagined her as a man, what was the distinctive trait that captured the jagunço? Desiring someone without knowing what’s under the costume forces us to admit that desire always happens elsewhere.

This is what young people make explicit when they demonstrate that gender and sexual orientation are fluid borders and not walls. They are people whose haircut, beard, clothes, makeup, mannerisms leave us not knowing which pronoun fits them. We lost the markings that allowed us to read, not without serious errors, our place in the love dispute. Not knowing which box to put the other in, we end up feeling out of the box.

Heteronormativity hides the fact that love between men and women does not clarify what is loved in each man or in each woman. It promotes the false idea of ​​the homogeneity of desire.

By revealing the inconsistency of desire, young people promote anguish and receive innumerable forms of violence in response. Among them, nostalgia for a time when the dictatorship sought to control the irreproachable human desire. Period in which bodies were at the mercy of perverts who barely disguised the enjoyment they extracted from torture. Enjoyment disguised as order and progress is a typical example of perverse pleasure, which occurs in spite of the desire of the other.

Carnival starts from the opposite premise: the freedom to see and be seen, to desire and be desired, where there can be no room for abuse or subjection. He is the antidote to basements, he is the celebration of life and sexuality that moves us. Momo’s party hurts moralism to the same extent that it is supported by the ethics of desire and absolute responsibility for who one can be.

Carnival is the future.

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