Investigations of the sexual Other generally attempt to explain sexual practices by characterizing
their practitioners as “homosexual” or “gay.” Jossianna Arroyo, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the
University of Michigan, went beyond this approach during her March 28 colloquium presentation,
“Brazilian Homoerotics: Cultural Subjectivity and Representation in Gilberto Freyre.” Arroyo explores not
just sexual practices but also the construction of the Brazilian nation through a reading of Gilberto
Freyre’s two novels, Dona Sinhá e o Filho Padre (1964) and O Outro Amor de Dr. Paulo (1977).
Through her close reading of Freyre, Arroyo delves into the heart of the father of the ideology of
“Racial Democracy” to explore the contradictory, the impure, the hybrid, and the chaotic in Latin
American literature. Arroyo argues that the patriotic desires of these countries shaped literature as a
national project, and, moreover, that nation-building projects such as Freyre’s were written to represent
and solve the heterogeneous character of their countries, particularly those related to race, gender and
sexuality.
Freyre‘s study, Casa Grande e Senzala, 1934 (The Masters and The Slaves), was fundamental to
the racial dynamics of the Brazilian national project during the Estado Novo (New State) period of
the 1930s and 40s. With that book Freyre gave birth to the theory (that many argue is a myth) of
Brazilian Racial Democracy, and to this day he confounds both foreign and Brazilian scholars
studying race. Arroyo argues that for Freyre, “cultural subjectivity is based on a homosocial alliance
that erases racial lines to build a ‘national brotherhood.’” Arroyo suggests that in Freyre’s novels
what we see is a discourse of “repressed sexuality” within a patriarchal system.
Thus, Arroyo examines the quasi-transparent homoerotic aspects of Freyre’s novels, quoting
narratives of love and sexual feelings between male characters. Interestingly, during archival
research Arroyo found cuts in the manuscript made by the publishing house, which eliminated
passages where homoerotic subtext is more overt – and she read some of these excised passages in
her presentation.
While Arroyo shows the father of racial democracy queering himself, she does not conclude
that his texts are homosexual in order to place the novel, the characters, or the author in a
category. On the contrary, she places Freyre’s homoerotic narratives in a more interesting and larger
context that involves Freyre’s attachment and commitment to his nation, a nation that Arroyo sees as
culturally hybrid in the realms of race, gender, and sexuality.
Arroyo does not compromise her analysis by attempting to translate cultural practices. Rather, she
complicates the understandings of miscegenation by offering to it a homoerotic component that does
not disturb Freyre’s literary and intellectual formulations.
Arroyo’s essay “Brazilian Homoerotics: Cultural subjectivity and Representation in Gilberto Freyre” is
part of the forthcoming anthology LusoSex: Nations, Sexualities and Genders in Portuguese Speaking
Countries (eds. Fernando Arenas & Susan Quinlan; University of Minnesota Press; 2001).
Marcelo Montes Penha is a PhD Candidate in the American Studies Program at NYU.