Mattijs Van de Port Genuinely Made Up

Genuinely made up: camp,
baroque, and other

denaturalizing aesthetics in the
cultural production of the real
Matti j s van de Port University of Amsterdam
The link that Jean-Jacques Rousseau forged a long time ago between the real and the natural has
proved to be indissoluble. Time and again, contemporary constructions of the real mobilize all that
can be linked to nature. Inauthentic, by contrast, is that which is fabricated, made up, articial, the
all-too-evident result of human design. In Bahia, Brazil, the author encountered a completely different
mode in the cultural production of the real. Analysing the performance of a Bahian drag queen who
goes by the name of Gina da Mascar, the author discusses camp and baroque as registers that
foster a sensibility for (and appreciation of) cultural forms that are truly false. He shows how the
appeal of these registers their persuasiveness, their form of truth-telling resonates with the
sensibilities of people whose biographies are marked by radical discontinuities, and he argues that
these registers might be understood as a popular articulation of the Lacanian understanding that
symbolic closure is an impossibility.
Some years ago, on the occasion of the Gay Pride Parade, the Amsterdam zoo Natura
Artis Magistra (Nature is the Teacher of Art) had organized a guided tour to bring
homosexual relationships between animals to the attention of the public. In announce-
ments of the event, it was stated that there are quite a number of homosexual animals
in Artis, including gay cockatoos, monkeys, bulls, goats and elephants.
1
It was further
added that homosexuality is quite normal in the animal kingdom and that homo-
sexual behavior has been observed in I,,oo species. Clearly, the organizers sought to
communicate that nature itself contradicts the prejudice that homosexuality is a sin
against nature. Homosexual behavior is as much part of the natural order as hetero-
sexual behavior, so they seemed to be arguing.
2
Given that even animals do it, it is only
natural!
The rhetorical move in this argument suggests that where nature speaks, human
arguments lose their weight and import. The persuasive power of this rhetoric is
grounded in a long history of Western thought onthe natural, whereby the philosophy
of the Enlightenment declared the natural order to be the ontological ground of being,
and the Romantics repositioned that foundational essence in the inner self (Taylor
I,8,; Thomas I,,o). The natural has become the testing ground for what is genuine and
what is not. A reassurance of our understandings of self, other, and the world is to be
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , 8o,-88,
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sought in the way that nature resonates in us (Taylor I,8,: :,,), or, to phrase it
somewhat differently, in our attempts to reach symbolic closure the reassuring sense
that things are as they are because they could not have been otherwise the natural is
granted a leading role. Take the hippie-ish household where I grew up in the late I,oos.
Life-style choices would always move in the direction of home-made bread, unbleached
cotton, unshaved armpits, macram placemats, coarse earthenware plates, and freshly
picked eld owers: an aesthetics that introduced the comforting, reassuring presence
of the natural in a tumultuous world, where much that had seemed self-evident what
to believe, how to entertain relationships, which career-paths to choose, how to achieve
happiness had been questioned and rejected. A more contemporary example of how
we have all acquired Romantic sensibilities is the commercial success of Ioo per cent
natural products, which somehow promise that even the market forces unleashed in
the neoliberal world order might bring you back to your roots. Or one might think of
the way the exclamation goose bumps! has become an expression of ones genuine
appreciation of a concert, movie, or play: one no longer says I happen to like this, one
mobilizes an uncontrollable physical response such as goose bumps, which somehow
suggests that nature itself is passing judgement on the quality of the performance.
The attempt to ground homosexuality in the order of nature (and thus beyond
dispute) exemplies a similar Romantic logic. What is so intriguing about this latter
example, however, is that the attempt at naturalization clashes with another powerful
register of sense-making operative in gay circles that is known as camp. As I will
elaborate in more detail below, camp is characterized by its relentless attempts to undo
the naturalization of cultural forms and practices. It fosters a sensibility for the falsity
that is at the heart of much that presents itself as natural and it incites its adepts to
unmask the natural and expose it as yet another form of make-believe. Thus, in the
example of the Amsterdam zoo, a camp sensibility immediately draws attention to the
fact that the enumeration of the zoos allegedly gay inhabitants included cockatoos
(with their coloured feathers a highlyqueer species), bulls (virile, macho animals now
unmasked as mere muscle Marys), as well as elephants (allowing for all kinds of jokes
on the matter of size). It is through such campy re-framings that the attempted
naturalization of homosexuality is undermined. In a camp reading of things, animals
are no longer indexical of nature. They become allegorical gures of homosexual desire.
Camp is certainly not the only style that seeks to undo the naturalizations that
dominate a given cultural order. In their own particular ways, the baroque, many
modernist styles of the twentieth century, pop art, and punk are examples of aesthetic
registers that do not seek recourse to tropes of the natural to produce a sense of what
is given, incontestable, and real. They dismiss the thought that the natural is the human
default setting, life as it was meant to be or the way we really are. They reject
mobilizations of the natural as mere fantasies, which, while they last, may produce
symbolic closure, yet are destined to wither away. Instead, these aesthetic registers opt
for forms that are truly false, or, more accurately, forms that are true in their being
false. They thus highlight that faking it (playing a role that the larger culture has
already scripted and that your inner being somehow feels is not quite your own,
as William Miller [:oo,: :oo] once wrote) is all we ever do, part and parcel of our
constitution as social and cultural beings.
This revelation of the impossibility of symbolic closure in denaturalizing aesthetics,
which constantly reminds you that things might well have been totally different!, is
intriguingly reminiscent of the position taken by culture theorists such as Slavoj iek,
Genuinely made up 865
Yannis Stavrakakis, and Terry Eagleton. Inspired by the teachings of Jacques Lacan,
these thinkers take as a starting-point for cultural analysis the fundamental lack that lies
at the heart of the symbolic order. They keep pointing out that the symbolic order any
symbolic order fails in its attempts to subject the Grand Totality of Being to its
denitions of what reality is. Our ability to make sense of ourselves and of the world is
tied to structures of meaning that do violence to what William James succinctly called
the plenum of existence (cited in Jackson I,8,: ,). Our reality denitions are limiting:
they require that we repress certain perceptions, experiences, and understandings; they
depend on prohibitions and taboos to mystify their contingent nature; they demand
that we blind and desensitize ourselves; and they thus produce an innite realm of
impossible, non-sensical, or absurd sense-perceptions. Inevitably, so these thinkers
argue, this repressed surplus of meaning besieges the fortresses of meaning in which
we have taken refuge. In the Lacanian terminology of these thinkers, this-reality-
beyond-our-denition-of-reality is labelled the Real, a real that is not dependent on
human denitions as to what constitutes reality, and as such obstructs all human
attempts to reach symbolic closure.
The focus of these theorists on the failing of the symbolic order their camp
sensibility for the make-believe that goes into the cultural production of the real does
not, however, mean that they descry lack and incompleteness always and everywhere.
Quite to the contrary: focusing on the lack that is at the heart of all meaning produc-
tion, they insistently ask what it is that allows us to act as if mischief were not afoot in
the kingdom of the real and that all around the ground lay rm (Taussig I,,,: xvii).
Asking how people manage to keep the surplus of our understanding of reality at bay,
they have pointed out the pivotal role of fantasy in covering up the rents, ssures, and
black holes in the structure of meaning, producing the very coherence that reality
dees. They have also explored how symbolic closure is subjectively achieved in the
register of the imaginary the subjective, experiential mode of knowing of the mystic,
the athlete, the performance artist, the writer-in-ow; a being-aware-of-things that
does not depend on the discriminations and separations of the symbolic, and signals
our capacity to perceive subject and object, self and worldas being tailor-made for one
another (Eagleton :oo,: Io); the ability to perceive the world as beingon familiar terms
with us, conforming obediently to our desires and bending to our motions as obsequi-
ously as ones reection in the glass (Eagleton :oo,: Io).
It is exactly this investigation of what I would call the cultural production of the real
that makes the writings of these thinkers so exciting. Rather than arguing once more
that the worlds of meaning we inhabit are made up (our authenticities staged; our
communities imagined; our traditions invented), these scholars ask how these con-
structions come to be subjectively perceived as fully real. From a Lacanian perspective,
then, Romantic celebrations of the natural eld owers in a suburban living room,
unbleached cotton curtains, gay cockatoos in an Amsterdam zoo are fantasy forma-
tions. They produce symbolic closure by screening off just what little of a natural life
remains in contemporary living. Yet the more intriguing question to ask is: what might
the Lacanian approach tell us about the denaturalizing aesthetics mentioned above?
This, then, will be the central issue in this article. How to understand the appeal of
styles that highlight the fakeness of the natural; underscore the impossibility of sym-
bolic closure; and bring home to us that nothing can be taken for granted as things
might well have been totally different? What alternative trajectory in the cultural
production of the real do these styles propose? Wherein lies their persuasiveness? To
Mattijs van de Port 866
whom do these styles appeal? And last but not least: what alternative sensations of the
real do these styles produce? Exploring the denaturalizing aesthetics that dominates the
site of my eldwork Salvador da Bahia, Brazil I will show that nature is not the only
anchor-ground for the real. Asense of the genuine, the incontestable, the really real may
also be grounded in that other main ingredient of Lacanian thought: desire.
Gina da Mascars production of the really real
Bahia, Brazil, where I have been doing research for over a decade, is an interesting place
to ponder the authenticity of fake, the truth of falsity, the real of the made up. In their
aesthetic preferences, many Bahians opt wholeheartedly for the evident fabrication; for
that which is undeniably made up. The real of the natural is certainly an upcoming
discourse in the more alternative circles in the capital Salvador, and is increasingly
found in advertising, interior design, natural body products, eco tourism, and health
food discourses. On the whole, however, the natural does not seem to have much of an
appeal. No bouquets of wild owers in Bahia, but stify arranged oral decorations
that evoke images of a orist trying hard to simulate a plastic ower arrangement with
natural materials. No cravings for long walks on deserted beaches, where one can feel
reunited with nature, but the intensely social spectacle of densely populated sands, a
colourful and noisy amalgam of tattooed bodies, plastic beach chairs, umbrellas in
screaming colours, the articial smell of coconut tanning oil, and the blaring sounds of
boom-boxes. No homosexuals pointing to the animal world to claim their rightful
place in the order of the natural, but transvestites who artfully metamorphose their
male bodies with large amounts of silicone to arrive at female forms, yet would not
dream of having the nal operation.
A Bahian drag queen who goes by the name of Gina da Mascar (Fig. I) wildly
popular with the patrons who frequent a couple of down-and-out gay bars in central
Figure 1. Gina da Mascar. (Photograph by the author.)
Salvador epitomizes all of these tendencies. Her performances, which I have come to
appreciate as a bawdy, popular seminar on the failure of the symbolic order and the
Lacanian notion of the Real, are an apt starting-point to explore this alternative tra-
jectory in the cultural production of the real: to ponder the question how things which
are genuinely made up produce their own sensation of truth and the really real.
Gina da Mascar has little in common with the glamorous female impersonators and
hyper-feminine travestis who frequent Salvadors gay bars. Gina paints some of her
teeth black, suggestive of a dental decay that is immediately associated with the great
many marginais the homeless, the down-and-out, the crack users who roam the
streets of Salvador. The foundation she uses for her make-up is quite a few shades
lighter than the skin tone of Aldo Zeck, the man underneath the powder, whom I got
to know as a mulato from the neighbouring state of Alagoas. Her wigs are messy, teased
and spiked, and they frequently change their color: from black to red, and from
peroxide blond to blue. Many of her dresses are ragged, exposing a plump body with
every move she makes. Then there is her voice, which has something oddly metallic to
it, a monotony reminiscent of cheap plastic baby dolls that speak a sentence when you
pull a cord on their back. It is a voice that is well suited for the rackety world that is
Ginas habitat: the Beco dos Artistas, a blind alley in central Salvador with a couple of
lower-class gay bars where one always has to shout to make oneself heard (Fig. :).
On a little video on YouTube the drag queen is being asked to introduce herself:
So who is Gina da Mascar?
Well ... What shall I say? Im still looking for a denition, but I havent found it yet! In fact, all that
I know is that she is lost. For a long time I have been searching for the treasure that is Gina, but in fact
nobody knows who she is or where she came from.
3
Figure 2. The Beco dos Artistas, Salvador da Bahia. (Photograph by the author.)
Respect.Performanceartistsshouldhavetherst(andthelast)wordabouttheircreations.
In my allegory, however, Gina da Mascar will be staged as Failure Incorporated. Failed
hair-do, failed make-over, failed etiquette. Failed femininity (not to mention masculin-
ity). Failed drag queen (Gina metamorphosed out of the glamorous drag de luxo called
Nina Blanch). Failed Bambi, given the unsuccessful attempt to upgrade her caressability
by painting enormous Walt-Disneyish eyelashes on her face. Moreover, in the world that
is the Beco dos Artistas, where the majority of people are black and poor, and where
whatever of the latest one has managed to purchase at such middle-range clothing stores
asSarttoresorLojasAmericanasisalreadycauseforlong-drawnooooohs!andaaaaahs!,
Gina da Mascars bedraggled sartorial appearance is also: failed person-of-colour-
wanting-to-look-white, failed modernity, failed consumerism.
Hey, Gina, who is the sexiest man of them all?
The one who I picked up yesterday in [the squatter settlement] Gamboa! His nails were about ,o cm
long! And a bath? Hadnt taken one for two months. He was such a treat!
Her shows, every Wednesday night in a bar annex nightclub called The Backstage, are
again a grand spectacle of Failure. Gina da Mascar constantly aborts her own
ambitions to be a proper drag queen by unplugging the sound-system while singing
playback, or by suddenly walking out of her own little dance routine. She smells her
armpits to check her body odour and grimaces with disgust. She farts in her micro-
phone. Her hands seem to have an agenda of their own, as they keep ngering her body
at intimate places. Her sentences seem to be going nowhere. Her politics are corrupted
the very moment she articulates them. When asked what she plans to do for the New
Year, she states:
Well have lots of sex with love, lots of sex with sex, well seriously play the whore (vamos fazer putaria
com sriedade)! And well put on a condom. Well put on a little plastic bag from the Bompreo [a
major supermarket chain in Bahia], well put on a little plastic ice-cube bag (um sacolinho do
geladinho). For in the end, all that matters is to come!
Gina da Mascars performance would be misrepresented by solely pointing out the
issues of gender and sexuality she addresses. In her interactions with the audience,
every imaginable category, identity, role, or act is broken open so as to reveal its
imperfection. Ladies bags are conscated and publicly inspected as to their contents
(You nd their identity cards, with photographs of what they looked like years ago, half
a piece of bread with tomato, a condom, the kind of money they bring to an evening
out. I call this part of the show intimidade (intimacy), Aldo Zeck said in an interview).
Ruthlessly, Gina defaces any carefully built imago. Mercilessly, she shows the hopeless-
ness of all attempts to put up a convincing performance in the terms that culture
provides. Better not be dragged onto her stage and be submitted to one of her inter-
views. Undoubtedly, she would insinuate that those gringo anthropologists do the
strangest things to get laid by a nego (big black man) from The Backstage (or some-
thing to that effect). For it is desire of the sexual, lustful kind that is the one and only
phenomenon Gina seems to take at face value.
Gina, what is it that you want most for people in the new year?
All of the best! The happiness that is sized :, cm or more! From behind, from the sides, from the
front! The important thing is to come. Darling, dont hold back, give yourself to what is so fantastic!
Her audiences devour this spectacle. They revel in it, as they shout insults and obsceni-
ties at the top of their voices, spurring Gina on to go even further in her radical
proposition that everything but the :, cm-sized-tool-to-happiness is fake. They let
themselves be pushed on stage, cheered on by friends, vaguely pretending to be hesitant
and unwilling, then to let themselves be undressed by Gina. Literally: all the way down
to their (oftentimes remarkably fashionable) underwear or further. Yet the undressing
is also a kind of unfaking, an unpacking of the pose so as to get to the real of things.
Nice shirt. Hmmmm! Nice underwear! And where are you from? Ah! Valria [a poor,
semi-urban neighbourhood at the far limits of the city]! People! This one is from
Valria!
Occasionally, even Ginas own project of staging failure fails. Thats when things
really start to chafe. For instance, I recall how one evening, Gina switched to another,
more serious register to seek public recognition for her Art. The claim was fair enough,
considering the radical stuff she does. Coming from her mouth, however, this
re-erection of Art as a category of Unquestioned Cultural Value and the desire to be
included in that category undermined a performance that sought to expose such
categories all categories as mere make-believe.
Understanding camp/understanding montado
As a seasoned homosexual, I immediately recognized the performance of Gina
da Mascar as an example of camp. This was my kind of humour, my kind of
world-making: I instantly understood this kind of fun and mockery, and joined in with
the laughter. As a right-minded anthropologist, however, I urged myself not to jump to
conclusions: the notion of camp cannot be transposed to the Beco dos Artistas just like
that. To begin with, in this setting hardly anyone could tell you what camp is. When I
asked Aldo Zeck during our interview, for instance, he had no clue as to what I was
talking about.
The expression in Bahian Portuguese that comes closest to the notion of camp is
montado (literally: assembled). To characterize Gina da Mascar as such is to high-
light her made-upness; her make-up, her wigs, her over-the-topness; indeed, the ines-
capable fact that she has put herself together. Yet, as stated, this made-upness is
being performed in a setting where notions of the natural and the articial, the real
and the made-up, appearance and essence are not grounded in the Romantic herit-
age, and therefore understood differently. So what to make of my instant, intuitive
recognition of the humour in Gina da Mascars performance (This is camp!)? Was
my observation that these performances seamlessly tted the spirit of camp a mis-
reading of a local genre that can only be understood and analysed in its own terms?
Was I roaring with laughter for all the wrong reasons? Or do seasoned Dutch homo-
sexuals and bawdy Bahian transformistas share experiences that allow for joined
laughter?
Camp has almost exclusively been discussed within the framework of Euro-
American gay scenes. In her pioneering essay Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag wrote
that the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artice and exaggeration (I,,o:
:8o, italics mine). Camp sees everything in quotation marks. Its not a lamp, but a
lamp; not a woman, but a woman. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to
understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the
metaphor of life as theater (I,,o: :8o). This theater that is camp is indeed one big
exposition of hair-sprayed dos, plastic roses, articial suntans, garish colours, and the
glitzy kitsch of fake diamonds. The acionados of the style prefer French poodles to
German Shepherds, Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe, the pumped-up muscles of Tom of
Finlands drawings to the sensuous photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Camp is to
take seriously ABBA love songs, Versace sunglasses, and the chemically induced bliss of
Viagra and Ecstasy. Camp is also indulging in the veritable verbal duals that take place
late at night in gay bars, where sharp-tonguedqueens delight in tearing apart each and
every appearance so as to reveal the fake and make-believe that go into a public
presentation of self. Camp, in brief, situates truthfulness in that which is false. And by
doing so, it is an all-out attack on that which grants cultural forms a semblance of
self-evidence.
It is important to note, however, that camps constant incentive to reveal the pose,
the made-up character of that which presents itself as natural, can never be equated
with mere cynicism or irony. To the contrary, the leitmotif in camp that fake is the
greater truth never mitigates a sentimental yearning for reconciliation with nature.
The declaration that the natural is false only fuels a desperate faith that somewhere,
over the rainbow a reunion with nature might come about. No one articulates this
better than Agrado, the transvestite from Pedro Almodvars famous movie Tudo
sobre me madre (All about My Mother). On her thoroughly re-formed body, she
stated:
I am very authentic ... The reshaping of my eyes, eighty thousand pesetas. Nose, two hundred
thousand. A waste of money, as a year later someone punched it. ... Breasts, two, because Im not a
monster. Seventy each. Silicones in my lips, forehead, cheeks, hips, behind. Hundred thousand for one
litre of that stuff. You do the counting yourself, I long lost track ... Chin correction, seventy-ve
thousand. Permanent laser hair removal as women too descend from the apes sixty thousand per
treatment. All I want to say: it costs to be authentic ...
All the joking and self-mockery in this scene cant conceal that Agrado offered all to
carve her dreamed-up self in the esh. The body, indexical of our natural constitution,
becomes, in camp, the locus of a desire for exactly that which the style dismisses as
impossible: a reunion with nature. Camp is to shed tears real, warm, salty body uids
in the full awareness that Maria Callass arias are larger than life. Camp is the body
that gets excited over the pictures of Tom of Finland, however much the mind may have
concluded that these horse-hung and pumped-up males only exist in the exaggera-
tions of fantasy. Camp is to keep up the sentimental dream of True Love in the
darkroom. Camp is to disassemble everything to conclude that, indeed, in the end only
the happiness-that-is-:,-cm-long stands rm.
Taking into account these desirous dimensions, camp is not only homosexual resist-
ance against the conventions of a hetero-normative world. Camp is also a deeply
nostalgic style. One might even say that it is the aesthetic of a diasporic community that
cherishes an impossible desire for the self-evident, natural forms of existence from
which gays have been exiled. This melancholic dimension of camp permeates Esther
Newtons classic study, Mother Camp, discussing female impersonators in pre-
Stonewall America. For all of their wit and sharp-tongued attacks on mainstream
normativity, these drag artists were convinced that their cravings and ways of being
were unnatural. Camp allowed them to question the natural, showing it to be an act,
and by doing so, says Newton, camp made living immoral, unnatural lives bearable
(I,,:: I,o). Yet camp did not liberate them from a Romantic legacy which equates the
natural with the real, nor did it provide them with an alternative to be as Agrado put
it authentic.
It is exactly this nostalgia for a reunion with the real of nature that I found missing
in the Beco dos Artistas, and it is this absence of melancholy that gives montado
aesthetics a different feel. In Salvador, as stated before, the natural is not constantly
mobilized to upgrade the reality calibre of cultural constructions. Beyond a small,
cosmopolitan elite, which is in touch with Romanticist conceptions of the natural, I do
not nd many Bahians making the inward journey to register the way that nature
resonates inside (Taylor I,8,: ,oI) and to thus nd a solid ground for conceptions of
self. The fact that things are obviously constructed, plastic, or unnatural does not
immediately kick them out of the order of the real. Alex Edmondss wonderful study of
cosmetic surgery in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, shows, page after page, the ease with
which many Brazilians change their bodies through plastic surgery (Edmonds :oIo).
This re-making of the body is not problematized much in the Brazilian setting. Of
course, says Edmonds, there are jokes about siliconadas (women who inject silicon in
their bodies to arrive at perfect female shapes) who turn the sambadrome in Rio (the
venue where the great carnival parades are held) into silicon valley, or about the
eco-hazards of burying such women, and there are the occasional comments that
liposuction and silicone have robbed beauty of its authenticity (:oIo: ,:). The over-
whelming evidence of Edmondss study, however, shows that when it comes to beauty
practices, people are not at all bothered by the artice of beauty. To the contrary, they
proudly display newly made breasts and butts, unhampered by the thought that these
would be somehow less real.
Another study that discusses Brazilian understandings of the natural and the arti-
cial is Don Kulicks ethnography of travestis in Salvador.
4
Kulick states that articiality
and naturalness exist in an uneasy and agitated relationship in travesti thought (I,,8:
:oo). On the one hand, travestis recognize the ideal of looking like a natural woman.
Despite the fact that travestis use highly articial means to attain the bodies they
possess, says Kulick, they still esteem naturalness (I,,8: I,8). He also mentions a
widespread conviction among travestis that individuals who do not require a great deal
of articial aid to become beautiful are even more impressive than those who do (I,,8:
:oo); and that natural forms and natural femininity are desirable (I,,8: :oI). On the
other hand, however, Kulick reports that the making of the femininity of the travesti is
highly appreciated. Travestis pride themselves that they occupy [the] feminine space
better than women do (I,,8: :o,); that they are more attractive than real women
because they work harder to be one (I,,8: :o,). Instead of being merely a woman, they
consider themselves to be mulherssima. Kulick understands such travesti talk about
being super-women as compensation for the uncertainty of not having what men
want, a buceita (the vagina). Articiality, he says, is admired but naturalness is revered
(I,,8: :o). As noted before, I have not found such Romanticist notions in the Beco dos
Artistas. In fact, all that Kulicks own rich ethnographic material shows is an unresolved
tension over the issue, not the taking up of a nal position (and I cant help but wonder
to what extent the issue of naturalness was introduced in the scene by the ethnogra-
phers questioning in the rst place).
In Gina da Mascars performances, the opposition is between artice well done,
which results in a gorgeous, glamorous woman (tudo arrumadinha, as Aldo Zeck
described his earlier creation Nina Blanch, all neatly made up), and artice gone
wrong, leading to a monstrous gure (When people call Gina gostosa [sexy, desirable],
she gets upset and irritated, because she knows that people are being dishonest with
her). The ideal of the natural simply does not appear in her show let alone recon-
ciliation with nature. Thus, when during the interview with Aldo Zeck we discussed the
stripping naked of volunteer boys from the audience that is a xed part of the show
(God only knows why they allow Gina to do it!, he exclaimed), he told me that what
Gina does is unmasking tirar as mscaras. Yet what remains after such stripping in
the Bahian setting is not a naked body that indexes our belonging to nature. Judging
from Ginas utterings and actions on stage, the body in montado aesthetics is indexical
of ecstasy, lust, orgasm, experiences of bliss, as well as a container of the abject, of waste
and disgusting excretions. This body indexes what Lacanian thinkers would call jouis-
sance, the amoral pleasure that can be derived from evading the social and moral order;
from escaping meaning; from being liberated from the social and the socially
produced self (Fiske I,8,: ,o). Rather than conrming our belonging to nature, says
Julia Kristeva, this body draws us towards the place where meaning collapses (I,8:
[I,8o]: :).
Remarkable as the contrast may be between camp (with its melancholic resonances)
and montado aesthetics (reminiscent of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque), this difference
should not be made absolute. Both aesthetics produce a body that is an effect of the
failure of the symbolic order, rather than an instance of the natural. Both aesthetics
respond to the existential condition that the worlds of meaning we inhabit are human-
made, forever lacking in their pretension to encompass the totality of life, and, conse-
quently, forever producing anomalies (such as homosexual desire). And in camp, as
well as in montado aesthetics, the body is rst and foremost a container of desire: a
yearning that is so strong, so undeniably true and uncompromisingly real, that at times
one wonders whether this celebration of fake is all about the fuelling of such desires;
whether the appeal of these aesthetic forms rests in their capacity to replace the lack in
all world-making with the real of desire.
Baroque
Seen from another angle, the cultural production of the real that I found played out
in the Beco dos Artistas might be understood as being baroque. Introducing this term
is to situate Gina da Mascars performance in the dominant aesthetics of the old
colonial capital of Brazil, where curve, excess, and over-the-topness is all over the
place. It is to link the whirling, excessive style of Ginas appearance and shows with
the exuberant golden ornaments that decorate the interiors of Salvadors churches;
with the waving patterns of the calada portuguesa that bedeck Bahian pavements;
with the curly forms of relationality that Bahians opt for; with the preference for
exuberance and glitz among the Bahian popular classes (which ethnologist Pierre
Verger famously called the street-baroque of Bahia); with the heightened sensuous-
ness and bloody carnality of baroque religiosity; as well as with the endless celebra-
tions and processions that punctuate the Bahian calendar, culminating in the
collective ecstasy of Carnival (which inspired another commentator to qualify Bahias
baroque as a barroco rebolado: ass-shaking baroque).
5
To point out the baroque of
Gina da Mascars performance is not, however, a mere attestation to the fact that she
is heir to an aesthetic impulse that, for historical reasons, dominates the Bahian public
sphere. On closer inspection, the particular understandings of the real that come into
being in a baroque register of world-making are strikingly similar to those that came
to the fore in my discussion of camp and montado aesthetics.
A rst similarity is that, just like camp and montado aesthetics, the baroque impulse
underlines the concoctedness of human-made worlds. This is immediately visible in
the ways in which baroque artists celebrated the articial and the mannerist in their
artistic productions. They were fascinated with the incongruent, the disharmonious,
the monstrous; tended to indulge in excess, heterogeneity, fragmentation; preferred
deceptive forms such as the labyrinth, the metamorphosis, the fold, the curve, the
trompe loeil; as well as shallowness as in the opaque surfaces of the richly decorated
faade and emptiness as in the ample use of the emblem (Buci-Glucksmann :oo:;
Calabrese I,,:; Deleuze :ooo [I,88]; Ndalianis :oo; van de Port :oII). All these stylistic
devices and strategies helped to convey an image of the world as a place that nds itself
in a state of loss, a place that is lacking immanent meaning and at the brink of all-out
fragmentation.
Some authors have suggested that this peculiarity of baroque expressivities must be
understood historically. They argue that baroque aesthetics are expressive of the rst
cracks in that sacred canopy that had endowed the world with an aura of being self-
evidently part and parcel of Divine creation (Berger I,o,). The baroque came into
being in the world of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and religious wars: a
world where convictions oppose and relativize each other (de Certeau :ooo [I,,o]: o)
and where entire groups are no longer sure about obvious facts that were previously
taken for granted by a social order and an organization of values (:ooo [I,,o]: :). The
baroque is also the art of the world of the voyages of discovery, which forced people to
come to terms with new worlds, where strange peoples worshipped unknown gods
(Valle :oo:); as well as of a world where an emerging scientic paradigm sought to lure
us out of our enchanted garden, and position us as inquisitive observers in front of the
world (rather than in it). Given these historical circumstances, baroque forms are
expressive of a world where a taken-for-granted omnipresence of the Divine is waning;
an epoch in which people felt that the unquestioned, immanent presence of God in the
world was vanishing. As Walter Benjamin (I,,, [I,o,]) put it (and many authors after
him): the baroque is permeated with the notion of an absent truth (see also Cowan
I,8I; Wolin I,,). The truth and reality of the Divine was not (yet) questioned, but the
God of the baroque had receded to an inaccessible plane, handing over the world to the
imperfections of the human order. It is this very lack in the human capacity to render
the world meaningful and coherent that is central to a baroque notion of what is real.
This brings me to the second similarity between camp and baroque articulations of
the real. Clearly, the baroque worldview, which highlights the imperfection of human-
made worlds, and puts an absent God centre-stage, plays on peoples desire to establish
a relationship with that God, the one power deemed capable of bringing about a
harmonia mundi. Another set of expressive forms typical of the baroque sought to
accommodate (and stimulate) this yearning. The famous trompe loeil ceilings of
baroque churches are a good example. Baroque visuals, says Ndalianis, are character-
ized by a refusal to respect the limits of the frame (:ooo: n.p). Expressing innity, these
ceilings underscore the gap between God and humankind. Yet, simultaneously, they
speak to the desire to contact that unreachable God. Indeed, looking up to these
ceilings, registering the slight dizziness they induce, the possibility to be connected to
the innite becomes sense-able. This fuelling of a desire to contact an absent God
repeats itself over and over in baroque aesthetics. It is found in the feverish cults of the
saints, deemed capable of accessing the realm of the Divine, where they might act as
mediators on behalf of believers (Arajo :oo8); in the appeal of prophets and vision-
aries, so signicant in Brazilian popular Catholicism (Narber :oo,); in the baroque
mystics with their ecstatic and erotic bodily languages, transgressing the norm to
immerse in their object of desire; and, last but not least, in the constant references to the
miracle, the impossible becoming possible through which God afrms his power over
the world (I dene the possible!), but not his presence in the world (as the miracle
always evokes an elsewhere beyond human comprehension).
Both these dimensions of baroque aesthetics are discernible in Gina da Mascars
performances. The drag queen who highlights the contingency of the cultural order in
her constant unmasking of identities as mere posturing also evaluates her own exist-
ence in ecstatic, near-mystical utterings (foi babado, um segredo s, luxo!, it hap-
pened, it is one big secret, its a splurge).
6
She juxtaposes the deceitfulness and
inadequacy of cultural forms with a yearning for the jouissance and heavenly bliss of the
orgasm. Sighing divino, divino after having performed fellatio on the microphone, she
closely follows the baroque idea that the absent Divine is the sole force that is capable
to bring about a harmonia mundi.
The resemblances between the montado aesthetics of the Beco dos Artistas and the
baroque are hard to miss in a state like Bahia, known for its rich baroque heritage.
However, the historical specicity of my case should not blind us to the fact that
entanglements of the notion of baroque and camp are found in other places and
settings as well (a recent exhibition of Jeff Koonss kitschy and camp artworks in the
baroque palace of Versailles is a telling example;
7
or the frequent characterization of
Almodvars lms in terms of both camp and baroque). This observation is in line
with a recent call to consider the baroque as an aesthetic impulse that exceeds the
specicities of time and place. As Omar Calabrese (I,,:) argues, the historical
Baroque was but a particular manifestation of an aesthetic impulse that can be found
in many epochs and places (the Hellenistic period in antiquity being the well-known
example, the baroque mosques of Istanbul another). In Calabreses view, the baroque
is best conceived as a trans-historical category of the spirit, which sets itself up
against the spirit of the classic. A similar argument is made by the Dutch art historian
Frank Reijnders, who, in a wonderful little book called Metamorfose van de Barok
(I,,I), has shown how the spirit of the baroque lived on in the realm of ne arts as
the anti-art, whose impulses kept (and keep) undermining romantic notions of arts
totalizing visions of the sublime. Time and again, the baroque impulse sets out to
show the falsity of the promise that the artwork enables the beholder to partake in the
mysteries of the world. The continued relevance of baroque forms of world-making is
also evidenced in the many postmodernist thinkers who have discussed and/or picked
up the style, the ethos, and the sensibilities it expresses (Chiampi I,,8; Day I,,,;
Ndalianis :oo).
This consideration of the baroque in more generalizing, trans-historical terms
allows for the thought that camp/montado aesthetics and baroque are not so much two
strikingly similar aesthetic registers, but rather two modalities of one and the same
aesthetic impulse: the impulse to reveal, rather than veil, the breaches and impossibili-
ties of the cultural orders that reign over our lives (cf. van de Port :oII). Like the
naturalizing registers of world-making with which I opened this article, these registers,
too, are caught up in what I have called the cultural production of the real. Yet these
registers reject the natural as the privileged form in which the real can be discerned.
Real is the human condition to have to make do with cultural forms that are forever
lacking. Real is the burning desire for something or someone who might undo this
unhappy state.
The failure of cultural form
Pondering the particularities of camp/montado aesthetics and baroque registers in the
cultural production of the real directed my attention to a rich anthropological litera-
ture from the I,,os on tricksters, fools, clowns, freaks, cross-dressers, jesters, anti-
heroes, and other inverted or anti-structural characters. Re-reading Barbara
Babcocks insightful work on symbolic inversions (Babcock I,,,; I,,8) and ritual
clowning (Babcock I,8) with the performances of Gina da Mascar in the back of my
mind, I was immediately struck just how much these performances t Babcocks
descriptions of the trickster, who by his mere presence throws doubt on the nality of
fact (I,,,: I,) and reveals our stubborn unwillingness to be encaged forever within
the boundaries of physical laws and social properties (I,,,: I8,).
In almost all cases, and to a greater or lesser degree, says Babcock, tricksters are
situated between the social cosmos and the other world or chaos (I,,,: I,,); they tend
to inhabit crossroads, open public spaces, doorways, and thresholds; are frequently
involved in scatological and coprophagous episodes which may be creative, destructive
or simply amusing; oftentimes exhibit some mental and/or physical abnormality,
especially exaggerated sexual characteristics; have an enormous libido without pro-
creative outcome; have an ability to disperse and disguise themselves and a tendency
to be multiform and ambiguous; tend to be of uncertain sexual status; follow the
principle of motley in dress; are generally amoral and asocial; and in all their
behavior, tend to express a concomitant breakdown of the distinction between reality
and reection (I,,,: I,,-oo).
All of this immediately applies to Gina da Mascar. As I have pointed out, her shows
in the Beco dos Artistas highlight the failure of culture itself, the lack that is at the heart
of all meaning production. Everything she does seeks to remind her audience that the
social-cultural classications and orderings through which we come to a sense of
normalcy are contingent and lacking. In the words of Barbara Babcock,
[T]he trickster tale affords an opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity. Its
excitement lies in the suggestion that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and
subjective. It is frivolous in that it produces no real alternative, only an exhilarated sense of freedom
from form in general, though it may well provoke thought of real alternatives and prompt action
toward their realization (I,,,: I8).
The fact that trickster tales are found all over the world (cf. Doty I,,,; Radin I,,o)
indicates the apparent universal appeal of a gure that highlights a discontent with our
condition of being cultural beings. Seen through the prismof the trickster debate, camp
aesthetics, montado aesthetics, baroque aesthetics and, why not, the cultural analysis we
do lose much of their specicity: they are instances of those counteractive patterns of
culture (Geertz I,,,) through which people remind themselves that no cultural order
manages to capture reality in its entirety, that symbolic closure is an impossibility, and
that this very fact while threatening dominant reality denitions offers possibilities
for change and renewal.
And yet, an analysis of a trickster-like gure such as Gina da Mascar should not
conclude by pointing out how her performance can be inscribed into what seems to be
a universal repertoire. For the more interesting question to be asked and it struck me
that this question is never asked in the literature that I referred to is how these
trickster-like gures and anti-structural performances resonate with the particular
biographies and life-experiences of the people who embrace them. Who are the people
who appreciate the real that styles such as camp and baroque articulate? And why is it
that these particular people deem such understandings of the real persuasive? In other
words, how are aesthetic preferences the persuasiveness of the natural, the credibility
of fake connected to the histories and biographies of the people who display such
preferences, and the subjective experiences that these histories and biographies bring
forth?
The real of desire: derailed biographies and the persuasiveness of the
made up
Esther Newton, in her classic study of female impersonators in the United States, makes
the point over and over again: Gay people ... know that the possession of one type of
genital equipment by no means guarantees the naturally appropriate behavior (I,,::
Io,). This knowledge, grounded in a process that is popularly known as the coming out
of the closet, is key to an understanding as to why camp speaks to gays such as myself.
In the terms that were introduced in this article, the coming out is the nal step in
a gradual process whereby a person comes to realize that he
8
had been trying to make
himself over to a symbolic order that did not acknowledge his sexual orientation. To
come out is to acknowledge and make public an acceptance of the fact that the real of
ones inner experiences did not t the symbolic order, and, conversely, that the reality
conceptions of the symbolic order could not accommodate ones inner experiences.
Looking back at my own coming out, I can say that this breaking out of the social does
at least two things to ones perception of the world. First, it forces one to face the lack
in the symbolic order. The world as you had been made to understand it had no place
for your sexual desire. In other words, your narration of the world could not accom-
modate your experience of the world. Second, a coming out positions the real of desire
over and above the real of ones upbringing. In Lacanian terms, this means that the
genuine is located beyond the symbolic order, in the dimension of being that is called
the Real. As both points are important to understand the persuasive power of camp, I
will elaborate them.
The simple fact that most homosexuals were never raised to be gay suggests that,
however diverse histories of a coming out may be, they are all imbued with feelings of
alienation. Coming out always implies a break with a Self that had been raised not only
to be a heterosexual man, but to be naturally straight. After all, hetero-normativity is
more than a collection of ideas and norms, given that these ideas and norms were
naturalized by having been inscribed in the sensuous body. To turn boys into real men,
boys bodies need to eat, drink, walk, sit, stand, gesticulate, look, dance, and speak in
masculine ways (Bourdieu I,,o [I,8o]; Mauss I,,,). Coming out of the closet impli-
cates a breach with this natural, embodied masculinity, and leaves no other conclusion
than that this naturalness of masculinity was a mere sham. Unsurprisingly, then, gays
are susceptible to a style that articulates a suspicion towards everything and everyone
who claim the label natural. The shared experience of the demasqu of the symbolic
order an order that presents its denitions of gender and sexuality as natural, yet has
proven itself to be an instance of make-believe is exactly what camp articulates. There
is an immediate link between the derailed biographies of gays and their appreciation of
a style that seeks to place everything between brackets.
Which brings me to the second point I want to make: the demasqu of the symbolic
order directs the search for the real beyond the symbolic order, in the realm of desire.
To come out is to subject oneself to ones desire, to declare this drive to be more genuine
than social denitions of what is appropriate, natural sexual behaviour for men.
Clearly, embracing this desire is propagated in the gay scene, which tells you in a
thousand different ways that you are your desire. Yet Lacanians convincingly argue that
there are dimensions to desire that cannot be encapsulated by the symbolic; and it is
exactly because of these dimensions that desire becomes an anchor-ground for alter-
native notions of what is real. Terry Eagleton, for instance, suggests that we ought to
disconnect desire from the object towards which it is directed, because it is thus that we
are able to look at the force itself. This force, he says, reveals itself as an empty,
intransitive yearning whose various targets all turn out to be arbitrary substitutes for
one another (I,,8: I,). Pure desire cannot be reduced to anything else. It does not
pertain to the symbolic order. Eagleton takes it to be entirely without meaning and
glacially indifferent to all the objects in which it invests, which it uses simply for its own
fruitless self-reproduction, and describes it as a nameless hankering, unfulllable by
any of its particular objects, intent on simply keeping itself in business and thus
shattering whatever is hastily produced to keep it quiet (:oo,: I,o). And yet, for all of
its ungraspable and non-articulable qualities, the real of desire is incontestable. In this
it resembles death, which is also beyond representation death is the last thing we
experience, in more sense than one while being at the same time brute reality (I,,8:
I,). Slavoj iek describes desire as a rock upon which every attempt at symbolization
stumbles and the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (I,8,: Io,).
Moreover, this real of desire is something which I can experience from the inside of my
body with incomparably greater immediacy than I can know anything else (Eagleton
I,,8: I,).
An understanding of the cultural production of the real in denaturalizing aesthetics
such as camp and baroque needs to take into account this particular dimension of
desire. Highlighting the lack in the symbolic order, these aesthetics fuel a drive whose
reality cannot be argued with, and which cannot be reduced to anything other. They
keep desire centre-stage to introduce a sense of the real in a biography full of ssures
and rents, and in a world where the made-upness of things is all too visible.
To illustrate the kind of stability that the real of desire may bring to a world where
certainty seems absent, I might return once more to my own experiences as a gay man.
If there is one thing in my life that I do not doubt, it is the direction of my sexual desire.
That desire is directed towards men. I am myself rather puzzled by the unwavering and
exclusivist goal-orientatedness of this desire. For whatever self-knowledge is worth, I
know myself to be a person who doubts everything. Moreover, as an anthropologist, I
have learned to deconstruct (and thus relativize) every essentialism that crosses my
path.
And yet, I can only conclude that the direction of my desire my homosexuality
is immune to all attempts to deconstruct it. As stated, I fully realize I am part of a
homosexual subculture that instructs me to embrace this desire time and again; which
has set up a whole industry to fuel that desire; which tells me in a thousand different
ways that I am this desire. Yet these exhortations only take effect because they are
grounded in that nameless, imageless, immaterial drive that is desire: a drive that had
manifested itself in me uninvited, unwanted, and in deance of the way I had been
brought up to see the world. That desire, I am able to tell myself, is not made up. It is
genuine. That I nd myself embracing that desire, making it the solid base of my
identity, fuelling it over and over again, need not be surprising, for the foundation that
it provides me with is unshakable.
Obviously, not only homosexual lives are marked by derailed biographies; just as
gays are not the only people who had to part from a cultural order that had seemed
natural and given. Recall Michel de Certeaus (:ooo [I,,o]) insight that baroque forms
spoke to the experiences of people in tumultuous times and places. These forms
ourished in worlds where major revisions on humanity and the world were in the
making; where people found themselves caught betwixt-and-between irreconcilable
paradigms and enmeshed in violent social and political upheaval. If one asks what, in
the case of Bahia, the specic life conditions were that fostered a receptivity for baroque
renditions of the world, one immediately thinks of the regions immense slave popu-
lation, subjugated to extreme powerlessness, and condemned to a life of gruesome,
radical ruptures. Roger Bastide summarized the conditions underlying the life experi-
ences of slaves in Brazil as follows:
The black was forcibly uprooted from his land, shipped to a new habitat, integrated into a society that
was not his own, in which he had found himself in a subordinate economic and social position.
Slavery shattered his African tribal or village community and its political organization and destroyed
the forms of family life, leaving nothing of the original social structures intact. He entered a new
system of stratication in which the white man occupied the summit, the free mestizo or the caboclo
[person of mixed Brazilian and European ancestry] the intermediate level, leaving to him the lowest
position of all, that of the slave (Bastide I,,8: ,).
One can see why an aesthetics that rejects the possibility of harmony in a human-made
world, and seeks redemption in an inaccessible beyond, must have had its appeal in a
slave society such as Bahia. Yet one might also think of the tribulations that befell the
Bahian population as a whole: the omnipresence of sudden and premature death in
colonial society owing to natural catastrophes, epidemics, or sudden eruptions of
violence events that ravaged whole communities and left deep cleavages in peoples
life histories and trajectories.
Traumatic experiences and life-disrupting calamities and catastrophes feed the spirit
of baroque, reinforce its impulses, animate its forms of world-making, lend credibility
to its readings of the human condition. Indeed, there is an intriguing correspondence
between discussions on calamities, the traumas they provoke, and the present discus-
sion of baroque renditions of the real. Calamity has once been described as the
unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering (Stav-
rakakis I,,,: o8). In a similar vein, many authors have argued that at the heart of
trauma lies the realization that the social, moral, and cultural orders that had always
been taken for granted were in fact founded on make-believe. War, violence, epidemics,
earthquakes, and other trauma-inducing events and occurrences cause the breakdown
of the fabric of consensual reality [and the] coherence of everyday life (Kirmayer I,,o:
I88-,); the shattering of a victims fundamental assumptions ... the core of [his or her]
conceptual system (Janof-Bulman I,,:: ,,), the massive disintegration of the individu-
als symbolic world (Janof-Bulman I,,:: oo); and the loss of the basis that enabled
victims to oversee and predict events and happenings in their life world (MacFarlane
I,,,: ,,). This loss of a stable world-reading in trauma, the sudden revelation that the
world is not the place one had always thought it to be, strongly resonates with the
baroque insistence on the absence of immanent meaning in human-made worlds.
Such examples suggest that the cultural production of the real through the register
of the natural is not always persuasive. The groups that I have mentioned have learned
lessons about the falsity of that which presents itself as given and natural; and in their
aesthetic preferences they testify to that understanding.
In conclusion
How do people come to a sense of the really real? How do they nd ways to counter the
contingency of all meaning? After decades of deconstructive labour in anthropology
departments a work that found traditions to be invented, authenticities to be staged,
and communities to be imagined these questions about subjective experiences of the
real have gained an increasing urgency.
Studies on processes of authentication or what I prefer to call the cultural pro-
duction of the real have frequently pointed out the importance of naturalization: the
veiling of the human-made character of reality denitions by recruiting signs of the
natural. In this essay I have wanted to argue that there are other registers in the cultural
production of the real. Focusing on the performances of the Bahian drag queen Gina da
Mascar, I found camp and baroque to be examples of registers that reveal, in a most
aunting manner, the made-upness of the interpretative frameworks through which we
get a grip on reality. As they unmask the natural as yet another fabrication, it may seem
that these aesthetics are not at all in the service of the pursuit of the real. However, when
we look at what these registers do at the level of the subject i.e., what kind of
experiences they produce it turns out that they, too, are preoccupied with the cultural
production of the real. Highlighting falsity generates an unstaunchable desire for that
which is real. This desire is directed towards fantasy objects the perfect man, true love,
God, Divine intervention, the lost paradise and it mobilizes the body to produce, in
sexual or religious ecstasy, eeting moments of jouissance, moments where experience
takes one beyond classications as to what is real and what is false. Yet what is more
important, perhaps, is that desire itself realizes a sensation of the real: for the drive that
is pure desire deeply felt and undeniably present is equally beyond the reach of the
human imagination.
What naturalizing and denaturalizing aesthetics share is a pronounced distrust
towards human-made worlds, the assessment that the symbolic order is the realm of
make-believe, forgery, and deceit. Both contend that the symbolic order does not give
access to the real. Denaturalizing aesthetics, however, are far more radical in their
articulations of the real, as they dismiss the natural as yet another gment of the human
imagination, and seem to push for an almost Nietzschean beyond all categories of
thought.
In order to nd out who is susceptible to one or the other register in the cultural
production of the real, a discussion of the subjective experience of cultural forms was
necessary. I have suggested that groups with radical fault-lines in their (collective)
biographies turn out to be susceptible to an aesthetics which underlines the fake of
human-made worlds, and holds out the real of desire as the existential ground of being.
Just as Western gays developed a camp aesthetics to come to a more persuasive notion
of the real, peoples with war-ridden and trauma-inducing histories turn out to char-
acterize their ethos understood in Geertzian terms as the tone, character, and quality
of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood (Geertz I,,,: I:,) with terms that
refer to this ungraspable, tragically impossible, yet thoroughly enjoyable desire for the
undoing of the breaches. Serbian merak, Bosnian sevdah, Andalusian duende, German
Sehnsucht, Portuguese and Brazilian saudade, Turkish hzn, and Armenian karob are
all terms which declare the desire for an impossible wholeness to be at the heart of the
nation and its subjects.
The more overall goal of this essay, however, has been to show the relevance of
Lacanian thinkers such as Slavoj iek, Yannis Stavrakakis, and Terry Eagleton for
anthropological theory. Their proposition that the human condition is marked by the
fact that we have to make do with structures of meaning that are always lacking is a
more promising starting-point from which to study the cultural production of the real
than the anthropological insistence on the power and efcacy of cultural forms. To start
ones analysis from the impossibility of symbolic closure is not to say that lack and
incompleteness are the sole items on the list of human experiences. To the contrary, the
very fact that people manage to come up with more or less coherent, stable, persuasive,
and even authentically felt notions of self and other, world and universe, forces the
analyst to explain how such experiences of wholeness come into being. With their
wonderfully insightful descriptions of the pivotal role of fantasy in covering up the
rents, ssures, and black holes in the structure of meaning, and with their sophisticated
discussions of the Lacanian notion of the Real, these thinkers offer important clues as
to how anthropology might move its analytical capacity beyond the repetitive proce-
dures of the constructivist paradigm.
NOTES
I would like to thank my colleagues Niko Besnier, Lotte Hoek, Birgit Meyer, Annemarie Mol, and Johan
Roeland for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and express my gratitude to MatthewEngelke and
the anonymous reviewers from the JRAI for their valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript.
1
http://www.spitsnieuws.nl/archives/tech/:oo8/o,/homodieren_in_artis.html (last accessed ,I May :oIo, no
longer available on-line).
2
For an elaborate discussion of the use of natural tropes in discourses that seek to legitimate homosexu-
ality, see Lancaster (:oo,).
3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAoLjj,gzfo (accessed :, August :oI:). The following three interview
extracts with Gina are also taken from this source.
4
Aldo Zeck told me he is not a travesti but a transformista, a difference he explained by saying that, unlike
travestis, he only cross-dresses for the occasion. At home I dont dress as Gina, he said.
5
O rebolado barroco da nossa miscigenao. O fotgrafo baiano Silvio Robatto une sagrado e profano na
Pinacoteca do Estado de So Paulo, Correio da Bahia, I: March :oo:.
6
As note ,.
7
See http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/o,:,:8,,,,,88,oo.html (accessed :, August :oI:).
8
Or she, yet I would be curious to learn more about the resonance of camp (or the lack thereof) among
lesbians.
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Authentiquement maquill : camp , baroque et autres esthtiques
dnaturalisantes dans la production culturelle du rel
Rsum
Le lien tabli de longue date par Jean-Jacques Rousseau entre rel et naturel reste indissoluble.
Rgulirement, des constructions contemporaines du rel mobilisent tout ce qui peut tre li la nature.
loppos, est inauthentique ce qui est fabriqu, maquill, articiel, qui dcoule trop manifestement
de lintention humaine. Bahia, au Brsil, lauteur a rencontr un mode compltement diffrent de
production culturelle du rel. En analysant le spectacle dune drag queen de Bahia nomme Gina de
Mascar, il discute des registres du camp et du baroque , qui suscitent une sensibilit aux formes
culturelles vritablement articielles et favorisent leur apprciation. Il montre comment les attraits de
ces registres, leur pouvoir de persuasion, leur forme de vrit sont en rsonance avec la sensibilit de ceux
dont la biographie est marque par des ruptures radicales, et avance que lon peut comprendre ces registres
comme une formulation populaire de la notion lacanienne selon laquelle la clture symbolique est une
impossibilit.
Mattijs van de Port works at the University of Amsterdam and the VU University Amsterdam. In the latter
institution he holds the chair of the anthropology of popular religiosity. Van de Port has carried out research
in the former Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and for the last decade in Bahia, Brazil. His current research
project focuses on the diverse ways in which the notion of the permeable boundary is put to work in the
making of social-cultural worlds.
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijdsvoorburgwal :8,, :o:: DK
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email protected]

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