The current family sociability has been regulated by modern values: intimacy, affection and care. Those are the foundation of the development of the concept of family (ARIÈS, 1962), a discourse that has produced the idea of what is a family and how their members should relate to each other.
Furthermore, the consolidation of its monogamous and (cis-)heterosexual configuration is contemporaneous to the deployment of sexuality (FOUCAULT, 1978). In this sense, this institution can be perceived as a place where bodies have been produced and cared to attend certain expectations and norms of gender and sexuality.
Bearing that in mind, for this presentation, I intend to discuss the sociability between LGBTQIA+ people and their families considering the ways their parents have proceeded in order to normalize their performances of gender and sexuality. To this end, I will focus on the way they construct their experiences in narratives. Specifically, I will present a narrative of Carlos, a gay and cisgender man, about an emergent conflict with his mother as the silence regarding his sexuality starts to break. I have talked to Carlos about his family experiences in an interview, a part of my concluded master degree research, in which I analyze narratives about repression practices suffered by Brazilian LGBTQIA+ people in their relatives.
For my presentation, I will focus on the structural aspects of the narrative, the discourses to which it indexes and the interaction between me and Carlos, exploring the contributions of the field of Narrative Analysis (DE FINA, 2009; BIAR, ORTON, BASTOS, 2021) and Queer Linguistics (MOTSCHENBACHER, 2001; BORBA, 2015) to approach the process of construction and regulation of identities.
From Carlos's story, we can perceive how performances not aligned with cis-heteronormative expectations trigger a constant process of control and repression which operates reinforcing a heterocentric family sociability. Besides that, narratives and stories such as Carlos allow us to realize that, despite the hegemonic discourse about the family being an environment of intimacy, affection and care, it may find its limits in relation to gender performances and sexualities.
References:
ARIÈS, Philippe (1962): "The Family", in: ARIÈS, Philippe: Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 339-411.
BIAR, Liana de Andrade. ORTON, Naomi.; BASTOS, Liana Cabral (2021). "A pesquisa brasileira em análise de narrativa em tempos de 'pós-verdade'",in: Linguagem em (Dis)curso, 21 (2), 231-251.
BORBA, Rodrigo (2015). "Linguística Queer: Uma perspectiva pós-identitária para os estudos da linguagem", in: Revista Entrelinhas, 9 (1), 91-107.
DE FINA, Anna. Narratives in interview (2009). The case of accounts: For an interactional approach to narrative genres, in: Narrative Inquiry, 19, 233-258.
MOTSCHENBACHER, Heiko (2011). Taking queer linguistics further: sociolinguistics and critical heteronormativity research, in: International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 212, 149-179.
FOUCALT, Michel (1978). The History of Sexuality: v.1 An Introduction, New York, Pantheon Books
