O armário entre jovens gays no sertão do Pajeú

Abstract

The closet constitutes an epistemological device that not even the movements/affectations of perceiving oneself outside of it are capable of transposing it. This regulatory structure at the individual and collective level, not only of gender and sexualities, defines modes of public-private sociability, anchored in the homo/hetero binarism and compulsory heteronormativity; in addition to producing historical regimes of (in)visibilities that acquire new configurations from one context to another and forge micro and macro political systems whose guidelines can change between people who live in it and resist oppression, violence and discriminatory acts. In the hinterland of Pajeú, an interior context strongly marked by sexist, Christian and LGBTQIA+phobic social practices, young gay men from Serra-Talhada are not exempt from the effects of this regulatory and epistemic system; and their experiences in the closet are nothing more than the knowledge or lessons learned by them through experiences and practices woven into this device. With these questions in mind, this dissertation proposes to understand the closet experience among young gay menfrom Serra-Talhada from the interior context of Sertão do Pajeú, in the sense of investigatingthe closet configurations in this territory, analyzing how the exercise of political participation helps in the process of coming out of the closet. and describe the sociability strategies used by such people to produce life, survive, resist oppression. For this, we placeourselves in the critical perspective of social psychology, intersectional feminist epistemology and racialized queer theory, as a theoretical-epistemologicalmethodological research resource. And, from the practice of bell hooks' dialogue, from the incorporation ofelements of what Paulo Freire addresses on the perspective of dialogicity, we arrive at a dialogue that links; that emerges through what is said and is woven in relation, in the sharingof questions formulated by both participants, in listening to the answers, comments, ideas and experiences of both who are there to produce the research data, with a central focus in what we propose to answer as a problem of scientific investigation – that is, what is the experience of the closet among young gay men from Serra-Talhada in the interior context of Sertão do Pajeú? Thus, we entered the field to dialogue virtually and individually throughthe Google Meet platform, with 05 young gay men from Serra Talhada, soon after digital signature of the TCLE; therefore, we transcribed each of the recorded conversations and their interpretation was carried out through intersectional analysis, from three paths that reflect the objectives of this study, namely: a) the configurations of the closet in the backlands of Pajeú; b) the sociability strategies experienced by young gay men from Serra-Talhada and c) the exercise of political participation as an aid to the process of coming outof the closet. Therefore, this investigation led us to conclude that: i) in the backlands of Pajeú, the closet is seen as an epistemological device, with different meanings for each of the young people; as this is linked to their life trajectory, to the context in which they live and to the intersectional cuts of race, gender, class, among others that cross them; leading them to subjectivate conceptualizations about the closet that range from the idea of it as a place of safety, comfort and survival, to a definition that takes it as an environment of denialof their own sexuality. ii) That the sociability strategies used by them start from their own tactics and subjection, to the point of creating trenches and ways of survival, resistance andprotection of life, in the face of omission and psychosocial discrimination. iii) and, that theexercise of political participation through LGBTQIA+ social movements in the backlands of Pajeú help young gay men to come out of the 14 closet as they enable LGBTQIA+ people in care, reception and training processes on gender and sexualities, etc.; and, the construction of spaces to talk and listen about oneself and the experiences of others, thus producing networks of friendships and relationships of belonging, capable of tensioning andbreaking with oppressive mechanisms of invisibility and silencing of their dissident existences.