Just Between Us by Guillermo Núñez Noriega

Author:Guillermo Núñez Noriega [Nuñez Noriega, Guillermo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816598885
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

That experience with Pedro impacted me profoundly. I have not stopped thinking about it ever since it happened. I think that Pedro’s confession moved me so much because through it I was able to get in touch with an unconscious desire on my part as a researcher that had to do with the need to validate my own intuition about male intimacy. Here was this man who holds around him the quintessential aura of male virility, confessing to me his deep feelings about a dimension of his emotional life that he suppresses and denies publicly. As he calls it, a “wound” that he cannot show on account of the censorship produced by the politics of gender.

I am compelled to make a confession of my own: now that I am writing about this, I feel that the most personal dimension of this research project has been precisely the “discovery” that my own sensibility is not that different from what other men experience. Or rather, that other men are not so different from me, except that in my case I was able to break the barriers of that emotional censorship and made a commitment to transform the politics of gender that regulated my emotions. I realized that it was somehow the presentation of myself in everyday contexts that gave Pedro the confidence to provoke an encounter wherein the subjectivities of one another could be exposed as we each feel them. Ironically, I was observing Pedro to know the other in his normative expression of manhood, and that “other” was observing me in order to assess whether I was the right person to reveal what the construction of such an image of manliness has entailed. Pedro constructed his own knowledge of me to, in turn, expose himself and thus find complicity and echo—in other words, to establish intersubjectivity.

After this event, I noticed how in small ways, Pedro’s behavior changed after his confession. This effect is not surprising: it has been well documented how the research process changes both the investigator and the research subjects. As a matter of fact, my presence in Pedro’s community brought about changes in many other unexpected and small ways. I noticed that several men other than Pedro also observed me. Many others speculated about me, asked questions, and sought out my company. The process of gathering knowledge about these men entailed an interrogation of the prevailing gender politics that attempted to keep silent, or at least make seem natural and universal, what it means to be a man.

The gesture initiated by Pedro to make his confession—that “between us” space (acá entre nos) that he called out to show me his wound—signaled the invention of a metaphorical space of complicity for the encounter of subjectivities and for a process of resubjectification. In that space, a sui-generis knowledge of men as gendered subjects becomes possible. The between us space marks a path and a methodology for the production of knowledge about men and manhood. At the same time, the between us gesture marks a space of intimacy.

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