Thinking about Sweden, and other mappings...

"To learn from travel, one must train
oneself to capture messages."
Fatema Mernissi.


Sweden is a country I had never really thought about visiting, although in the back of my mind there lingered some awareness of its status as the best-ranking country in the world in gender inequality, and some notion that this wealthy Scandinavian nation is recognized as exemplary in terms of social equality in general and successful welfare state policy.
Would it be "too boring", too "solved" to really capture my imagination, I wondered, when the chance to go there came in the form of professional commitment.  Of course, there would always be historical monuments, natural beauty, perhaps the chance to take a ride through the countryside on a fine Swedish (or Icelandic) horse, and then of course, the numerous museums to visit....

Now I am already on my second trip there. On the plane from Amsterdam to Stockholm, after a grueling 11 hour flight from São Paulo, I sit next to a Swedish woman whom I soon learn has gone from nursing to a doctorate in public health. Probably well into her fifties, she is a still youthful mother of three, now in her second marriage to a man who had several children of his own. When I comment, “So, I know that your country is considered number one in gender equality”, her reply comes quickly, together with a wide smile and, I detect, a twinkle in her eyes, “Yes, this is true! But we are still not satisfied [with the way things are]!”

My first stroll around Stockholm takes place on a drizzly, mid-November afternoon. There, at the boutique she works at in a trendy Stockholm neighborhood, I meet Sari, a young Afghani immigrant. Although the acute perceptions of life in Sweden that she shares with me lead me to believe she has a real penchant for the social sciences, she tells me, in beautiful English, that she has finished high school and not gone on the university. Then she explains that in Sweden, her adopted country, everyone has all their basic needs taken care of, so that the real difference between rich and poor can be seen through access to spheres such as hobbies and leisure. “There are many things you may want to do but if you are from a poor family, perhaps an immigrant family, you just won´t get the chance”. She also tells me that her mom wanted to bring her daughters to Sweden so that they could have the opportunities she never did. And as her daughters lives unfold in new ways, Sari´s father "isn´t too happy with it".

Later, in the evening, I am at a bar with my Rumanian friend, enjoying a bit of the city's night life. As the night draws to its end, emptying out rather early, in fact (well, it is a Tuesday evening, after all) there is just us and a large party at another table. One member of the group, a young man, gets up and starts to dance, showing off his not-so-meager talents in flashy movements of hands, legs and body, rather à la Michael Jackson. Then the d.j., who seems to be a friend of the group, switches the track to Middle-Eastern music, and a middle aged woman and another, somewhat younger one, who we later learn is her daughter get up from the table as well. Soon we are all dancing and laughing together, this one brief chance meeting pulsing with a sweet and dizzying current of something larger. Tamara, the older woman, tells us it is her daughter´s birthday, gestures toward her lovely granddaughter, a girl of about 16, and then goes on to lament the closed-off nature of Swedish life, its families and reserved society. “Look at us, we are all from somewhere else!,” she exclaims. Somewhere, in this case, means mostly Iran, but also Cabo Verde and Chile. Later, the young Chilean I speak to in Spanish tells me she was born in Sweden, daughter of people who found exile there, after Pinochet´s coup wrought fear and terror in their native land.



I am in Uppsala, after day one of our conference, chatting with Johanna and Ingrid over a beer. It is rather noisy in the pub, populated at the moment by a gregarious crowd that doesn´t seem to fit the “boring” label I have heard foreigners apply to the Swedes over the past few days. So I ask my friends to tell me something about young people in Sweden today, their habits and their life style. Johanna tells me her older sister is a Lutheran pastor, a single mother who “made” her child under the auspices of a Danish sperm bank and with current plans to follow suit for a second one. Ingrid, who tells me she still dreams of a rather conventional married life, like the ones who parents built and enjoy, to date, also adds, “A husband! Yes, I would like one. But I can also easily make my life without one. In fact, my best friends are a bunch of guys, and I´m almost always hanging out them, só for them, maybe, I´m just... well, one of the boys!”

On the final evening of my stay in Uppsala, snow is falling lightly, covering the ground with a thin and gauzy sheet. It is almost warm outside, and better yet, I have the prospect of a toasty, cozy hotel room awaiting me. So, there is none of the discomfort of Curitiba at the end of a winter day in store for me tonight. I feel satisfied after several days of “communing with kindred spirits” and after a well- received talk on fellow women travelers - in this case the Brazilian women in Barcelona who have shared their life stories of searching for self, of border-crossings, introspection and sometimes, “muito jogo de cintura” (a particular kind of cleverness, roughly speaking). On the plane home the next day, I read stories from the book my son has given me for my recent birthday. There are many good ones among them, but one in particular (Conversa de Bar, by the gaucha Renata Wolff)catches my attention, reminding me of the session my students and I “back home” spent re-visiting Rosario* . Like Castellanos, Woolff, Plath and others I so admire, Wolff's story takes a humorous and ironic look at mythologizing - and often disabling- ways of writing women, and perhaps also, of being women: the scripts, the "contracts" we accept and their “fine print” - and bringing me back again to a one of the questions that so often, or from time to time, come backs to haunt me: if in our ocean and border crossing, if, amidst our changing circumstances and selves, there is something we must still, most urgently, most importantly, dislodge from within.

*(Castellanos, El eterno femenino)

"Corpos e crise"

Muito tempo ausente! Nem era minha intenção, mas gente do ceu, quanto trabalho tive nestes meses!!! Vou postar um pedaçinho de uma resenha que escrevi, que logo sairá publicado...


Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence and Women’s Resistance in Neo-liberal Argentina, by Barbara Sutton. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780813547404 $25.95


The history of contemporary feminism the world over has been characterized by practical struggles and political debate which bring women’s bodies into focus. At the theoretical level, this has included the critique of a disembodied, universal enlightenment notion of the human being (“man”), portrayed as fully human insofar as “he” is revealed to be a subject of reason and fully in control over the “messier side” of existence (body, emotions, etc.) and perpetuating a dichotomy in which women are ultimately defined as Other: body, emotion and the danger of all that threatens to escape disciplinary control. This of course has been a contradictory cultural legacy, one in which women were (are) exhorted or expected to “be [just] the body”… yet certainly not a body of their [our] own; rather, a body to be constantly shaped and redefined according to the vicissitudes of the patriarchal imaginary, according to openly or surreptitiously imposed codes and languages of “what a woman is” – whether domestic servant, wife (and mother), piece of property, Playboy bunny, prostitute or “ human dictaphone”, as Gayle Rubin ironically commented in her pioneering text (1975). It also enables us to understand why a political-discursive focus on re-thinking and re-claiming our bodies became such an important focus of late 20th century feminism.
Argentine-born and raised, sociologist Barbara Sutton provides a unique account of the social and political conjuncture in her country at the beginning of the 21st century that is both a brilliant attempt to theorize women’s lives and struggles by bringing the body clearly “back” into the picture, and a rendering of a concrete story of oppression and resistance in which women come to life as embodied (and rational/reflective and emotional) subjects of history...

new one of mine...

Ties


He loves a devastated land
the warring tribes have stilled
but the uprooted fields, the children
with open hands and limp hair
cows gone to bone, still swaggering on their feet,
an utter impossibility to reconstruct –

it is not like the way his kinsmen repopulate,
not like the way age comes to green mountainsides
in the Pyrenees, where balding hikers set down to
an evening meal they have chosen to make meager, the dry wine,
the goat cheese, so carefully selected

perhaps a bit closer it is, to we who have chosen love
in its strangest formulae-
the broken-winged sparrows, our children’s freedom,
happiness or toil in the hardest tongues or feats.

Work in progress...

ORIENTAL BARBIE

Denise Duhamel
versão: Miriam Adelman

Ela pode ser do Japão, do Hong Kong, da China,
das Filipinas, do Vietnã, da Tailândia o da Coréia.
A menininha que brinca com ela pode decidir:
O sul, o norte, uma província
nebulosa. Tanto faz, segundo a Mattel, que relata
que esta Barbie continua tendo “olhos arredondados”
porém “boca e busto menores” do que
sua irmã dos EUA. As meninas, como alguns homens já crescidos
gostam da variedade, desde que bonita, desde que
haja cabelo comprido para mexer.
Num comercial nas horas noturnas, a Manhattan Cable
oferece um serviço de acompanhantes “Geishas to Go”
garotas do “Oriente, onde os homens são rei...”
O Ken Branco deita barriga para baixo
enquanto uma Barbie Oriental caminha sobre suas costas.
Ou é uma mulher de verdade pisando no Ken?
Ou uma Barbie Oriental pisando num homem real?
Você precisa viajar ao Japão
para comprar esta Barbie específica. Uma garota geisha
pode chegar à porta do teu apartamento em Nova Iorque
em menos de uma hora. Por sinal,
não existe um Ken Oriental.
Os que estudam o delicado equilíbrio
do comércio e câmbio americanos
entenderão.

Workin' on it...

Mais um poema da genial Denise Duhamel, que estou traduzindo.
Curtam primeiro a versão original:

ORIENTAL BARBIE
Denise Duhamel (from Kinky, Orchises Press, 1997)



She could be from Japan, Hong Kong, China,
the Phillipines, Vietnam, Thailand or Korea.
The little girl who plays with her can decide.
The south, the north, a nebulous
province. It´s all the same, according to Mattel, who says
this Barbie still has “round eyes”
but “a smaller mouth and bust”
than her U.S. sister. Girls, like some grown men,
like variety, as long as it’s pretty, as long
as there’s long hair to play with.
On a late night Manhattan Cable commercial
One escort service sells Geishas to Go,
girls from “the Orient, where men are kings…”
White Ken lies on his stomach
while an Oriental Barbie walks on his back.
Or is it a real woman stepping on Ken?
Or Oriental Barbie stepping on a real man?
You have to travel to Japan
to buy this particular Barbie doll. A geisha girl
can be at your door of your New York apartment
in less than an hour. Of course,
there is no Oriental Ken.
Those who study the delicate balance
of American commerce and trade understand.

"The World We Have Won"...

Vários meses já passaram sem nova postagem... Aliás,é a primeira vez que isto acontece desde que iniciei o blog, em 2008. Muitas viagens, muitas demandas para atender e pouco tempo para deixar fluir coisas "mais livres" ou traduzir poesia.
Percebo que vou continuar um pouco mais neste ritmo, pelo que opto, hoje, por compartilhar um trechinho do livro de Jeffrey Weeks,de título supra-citado. Estou gostando da crítica que ele faz, de vários autores/ perspectivas que já foram objetos de crítica minha também-- além dos abertamente conservadores, a de Zygmunt Bauman, por exemplo, cuja acolhida aqui no Brasil me parece muito "sem ressalvas" demais* . Este livro de Weeks, publicado em 2007, me parece, como um todo,um ótimo antídoto para as inúmeras tentativas de fazer um balanço sobre nosso momento histórico que circulam por aí que evitam incorporar nas suas análises um olhar
para as dimensões da vida social tão centrais - e tão profundamente vinculadas a "todo o resto" - que são as questões de gênero e sexualidade. Inclusive, me parece um absurdo tentar (re)pensar noções de política, cultura, comunidade, sujeito, "indivíduo" etc. sem contempla-las .... mas isto discutirei mais, pois pretendo postar uma resenha do livro depois de terminar a leitura!

"An emphasis on individual autonomy, and the individualization of moral choice, is, I argue, a characteristic feature of the contemporary world, but it is closely linked to values of reciprocity and mutual care, which are lived out in ordinary everyday life. I challenge currently fashionable theories about deficits in 'social capital' and argue that, on the contrary, despite huge and potentially disruptive changes in everyday life, there are both strong continuities in values and behaviour, and new sources of social capital that sustain life experiments. One important aspect of this is the rise of a 'friendship ethic', especially among
LGBT ... people, which underpins various ways of doing family, and which poses genuine challenges to heteronormative values... [the querying/queering of traditional institutions] throws new light on debates about rights, commitment and recognition..." (Weeks, p. XIII)

Com as devidas especificidades que diferenciam, entre outras coisas, realidades de "centros e periferias", e centros com suas periferias, e os centros das periferias, e lembrando -como nos disse a maravilhosa antropóloga colombiana-norteamericana Marcia Ochoa, quem esteve por aqui recentemente - La moda nace en Paris y muere en Caracas! E todo continua "aberto ao debate"... por supuesto!

* Ver meu texto, "Visões da pós-modernidade" publicado na Revista Sociologias (da UFRGS)

and another one of mine....

(Ok, I have to admit that it's hard to post these
humble creations on the same pages that host poets
like Sandra Cisneros and Denise Duhamel, but
what the hell, it may be my only chance...)

Quilting
(for N and D)

though we use the same threads
and choose our patches from the same mound
there is still some need to
explain the design, make explicit
the meaning, the final picture.

so, i turn myself inside out for you, so
like a garment you can see my seams and my
rough edges, whatever there is to turn and
run from, whatever there is that can melt into
some small kindness

into the dusk,
there’s tapering, cutting –
here the snipped thread is already too short,
a story that can’t be finished, a version
nipped in the bud,
but there, you see, is another string
to be pulled from the underside
and we’ll just keep at it-
sewing and mending as if life
could go on forever, a bit of frayed
fabric like a warning: better
lift up your head and
get on with things, my girl!