“NA MINHA CASA, NÃO!”: negociações de performatividade de pessoas assumidamente LGBTQIAP+ na família cisheteropatriarcal

Abstract

The family is often the first space of contact, socialization, learning, and understanding of the culture we are embedded in. The social imaginary's understanding of what constitutes a family stems from a colonial and cisheteropatriarchal ideal, which organizes the members of these units into rigid hierarchies of power and binary gender role distributions. In a family context guided by a cisheteropatriarchal organization, members may be compelled to conform to reproduce the normative expectations of society. This research investigates the existence of implicit or explicit pacts of gender and sexual expression and performance between LGBTQIA+ individuals and their primary families that do not embrace their gender identity and/or sexuality. To conduct this study, I engage in a dialogue with theorists Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig to reflect on the normativities of heterosexuality, and with queer theory scholars Judith Butler, Leandro Colling, and Eve Sedgwick to discuss performance, performativity, and the closet.The study has a qualitative character, and I chose autoethnography for data construction and analysis. This involved using personal diaries, photographs, and self-made illustrations from 2012 to 2023, complemented by the lifeline technique to separate significant events that were part of the data. Throughout the dissertation, I discuss the concept of performative pacts, listing resources used to maintain these pacts. I also argue about the duality of living these performative experiences. On the one hand, the pacts represent an attempt by society to imprison us in the normativities of heterosexuality and cisgenderism. On the other hand, they also serve as shields that we use to escape experiencing violence in our nuclear families. I conclude with contributions to the discussion on what we can define as a family, given that LGBTQIA+ individuals are constantly challenging these definitions.