The other desire
A sexual scene imprints itself on the psyche constantly, until it is assumed as normality
PalmaApril 26th is Lesbian Visibility Day. I like that April is highlighted, because I've always imagined that being a lesbian has something to do with violets and spring. It has been celebrated since 2008, just when I was walking through Barcelona, exploring the possibility of not being heterosexual. In case you need to buy books this month, I would like to pass on my enthusiasm for the latest one published by Sara Torres, it is titled El pensamiento erótico.
The essay begins with a lucidity that provokes laughter or discomfort. It analyzes how from documentaries, “innocent” ones, about animals mating, we were often educated in the heteronorm, in the nineties. The voice-over guided us towards the culminating moment recorded by the cameras: the encounter, sometimes violent, between a male and a female. The author argues that documentaries are an example of the secret grammar that runs through all narratives, which advance towards the same conclusion: life is the story of encounters between men and women, two different categories, two opposite natures that exist to meet each other.
Sara Torres would like to travel back in time, sit next to the nineties girl and tell her that the eternally repeated story doesn't have to go like this, the encounter between male and female is a possibility, a contingency, a convention that hegemony has prioritized as a norm. Nature is not binary, nor heterosexual, it is human imagination that causes this biased reading. Beyond the nineties, in our present, if we value the imaginary that predominates in classrooms or the violence that takes place in the streets, it is evident that children understand very early what the privileged destiny is. A sexual scene is imprinted on the psyche constantly, until it is assumed as normality: the encounter between a male and a female.
Sara Torres's essay invites us to think about how heterosexual thought is constructed through images and narratives, consciously and unconsciously. In fact, as she shows us in the pages of the book, it is possible that when we speak of “obligatory heterosexuality” we are not speaking so much about the obligation to have heterosexual relationships (which also), but about the obligation to receive a heterosexual unconscious when we are educated. Children are always exposed to this dominant narrative. Heterosexuality is the central reference that gives meaning to relationships, it is represented everywhere, it is the hegemonic framework of interpretation. Thus, bodies are read from a binary system, organized from heterosexual encounters.
Obligatory unconscious base
It was the French thinker Monique Wittig who pointed out, in the seventies, how heterosexual thought is an unconscious mandatory basis; however, the power of Sara Torres's writing is that she dares not only to point out this imposition that operates today, but also to draw an alternative to it. Thus, the proposal she offers us is to build an "erotic thought" that erases the mandatory path, that "deheterosexualizes" the imaginary.
Myth, imagination, and desire have a close link. A dissident sexuality cannot be put into practice without the ability to imagine a new sexual order. We need imagination and myth to make room for other desires. Erotic thought, unlike heterosexual thought, will be non-binary, vitalist, critical of all logics that violate difference. From the depths of our childhood, a secret grammar trains us in heterosexuality, teaching us only one passable path amidst the jungle of desire. Sara Torres does not want to draw a closed alternative, such as homosexuality, but rather wants to erase the shortcut, to open the possibility of exploring the jungle in many ways. She does not want to sell us another ideology, but rather to make room for the hope that enters when you open a window, which has been closed for a long time. It is the art of unwriting the received code, revising misogyny, boycotting the inertia of heterosexual thought, to make room for a freer and more ethical vitality.
As Angelica Francesca Rimini says, Erotic thought is a conversation between friends sharing a table, it is not born of abstraction but of shared intimacy. And the interlocutors that Sara invites to the table are bookworms, lesbians, outsiders, seekers of new languages that allow us to speak of reality more poetically and more justly. Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Teresa de Lauretis, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Anne Carson, Anne Dufourmantelle, and Suely Rolnik help her to denaturalize the dominant narrative, to liberate imagination and practices of love.
Because love is the affection that allows us to have a world and make life worthwhile. Love cannot be conjugated with violence, fear, or shame. Instead, sweetness, tenderness, and freedom are necessary for it. Sara Torres vindicates sweetness. A concept full of depth that can generate misunderstandings in this fast-paced present we live in. Sweetness is the type of intelligence that takes care of life amidst so much confusion; not sugared words, nor superficial affections that generate a sense of precarious kindness, but presence, responsiveness, dissent, the persistent imagination of another life, of another desire, that does not cause suffering.
