Urano nas esquinas, Eros na escuridão: máquina da pegação

Abstract

This is a study of sexual practices between men and their relationship to space, the gaze, and time, based on literary narratives. I mainly use autofictional publications to problem-atize how the practices of “cruising” — “pegação” — are linked to sexual hegemony. My aim is to investigate the cultures of public sex based on the concepts of spatiality, visibility, and temporality. Inspired by cartography, my methodological approach — qualitative and trans-disciplinary — is based on documentary analysis and field diaries, affirming an embodied and imaginative mode of essay writing, defined here as “autoerotography”. This study is theoreti-cally based on schizoanalytical, Foucauldian, and queer perspectives, which consider sexual subjectivity as a collective assemblage, a historical production, and a political field in dispute. I draw on publications by Tulio Carella and Luís Capucho to analyze the workings of the “cruising machine”, probing how it generates an alternative sociability to bourgeois conjugality and disrupts its moral order, which cannot be reduced to a sexual identity. I think about how, in the face of urban force fields, the cruising circuits subvert the functions and uses dominant-ly determined for the body, objects and space. By historicizing sexual perversions, I examine how the techniques of visibilization participate in the disciplining and control of bodies, at the same time as they are subverted as critical strategies for the production of pleasure, revealing the erotic structures of power. In particular, I work on books about cruising and the HIV/AIDS epidemic as objects of direct action in the world, in the manner of a “politics of the penumbra”. I question how fetishism and the BDSM scene relate to sexual and gender norms, exploring how they make explicit the fictional character of supposedly transcendental truths. Starting from the viralization of a public sex scene between men on social networks, I discuss how psychology has participated in the construction of a temporal notion of the “meaning of life” that relegates its practitioners to the abject field of “meaningless life”. Final-ly, I support the thesis that the lucubrations engendered by the cruising machine can establish “unreality” in the world, wounding “heterocapitalist reality” by exhibiting a new truth, even though, in the contradictions between contemporary neoliberalism and neoconservatism, the cruising system assumes an ambiguous position. With this, I hope to be able to contribute in my own way to the academic and social debate around sexual dissidence