The call of the jungle

This article is published in number 25/26 of Vanity fair, on newsstands until 4 July 2023.

It’s not really clear at the beginning of the Jungle Book (in the cartoon version), so that Mowgli cannot remain, as he wishes, with his wolfish adoptive family in the forests of northern India. The pair of heterosexual wolves who are supposed to play the role of mom and dad immediately slip away for the good, it seems, of the pack, unwilling to risk their own safety for the different, stranger puppy.

To explain the question remains a much more human animal couple of Parent 1 and Parent 2, who are not part of the herd and therefore form, with Mowgli, a further family, free from the constraints of species identity: the bear Baloo and the panther Bagheera.
Although for the latter, since the lemma “pantero” does not exist in Italian, the grammar oscillates between masculine and feminine throughout the film, they are both male. It is Bagheera who finally explains why the man cub must be accompanied to the village even if his new family nucleus, unlike the fearful sovereign herd, would be willing to protect him from the mad tiger (another male for which the feminine is often used). The point, as Bagheera puts it, is that Mowgli must have the opportunity to consciously choose between jungle and village, and therefore she must know the latter. To make the bear understand, Bagheera tells him that after all he wouldn’t marry a panther. And Baloo replies, with genius and perhaps a wink, that he really isn’t sure, because no panther has asked him to marry him yet.

This is the joyful power of queer families with which, in hindsight, we all grew up to a certain extent: that of multiplying options, of untying ties, of guaranteeing children multiple citizenships in worlds at war with each other. So does the other crucial same-parent Disney couple, the one formed by the warthog Pumbaa and the meerkat Timon (always two males) in the savannah of Lion King, to the tune of Elton John. It gently saves Simba from seemingly irreparable trauma and imminent death, but above all it frees him from the unbearable urgency of Mufasa’s legacy, raising him so well that, in due course, he’ll be able to take on that legacy without falling prey. of Uncle Scar’s nefarious instincts. He too will be able to fall in love with Nala, not because she is betrothed with whom the dynasty requires him to reproduce, but because he really likes her. And he will be able to decide to ascend the throne by will rather than by destiny, with the help of the funny stepparents who even almost sacrifice themselves to the hyenas to support him in his choice, which they did not initially share.

If Hamlet, who Simba is obviously inspired by, had such a queer family, perhaps his would not have been a tragedy. The concept of queer family tends to oppose that of the traditional family. But this is misleading, because queer families are by no means new and they, too, participate in a tradition. The family of poetic genealogy that Dante meets in limbo and that Raphael painted in the Stanza della Segnatura is basically queer, like those of only philosophers or only homicidal women imagined in the republics and islands of Plato and Ariosto.

Disney’s conservative brand, unable to explicitly represent any type of alternative to heterosexuality even in its boldest characters, nevertheless provides us with numerous queer families in addition to the emblematic ones from which I started: the fairies, parents 1, 2 and 3 , who raise Aurora by renouncing magic, the wizard and the owl who unleash Groats from servitude to a benevolent but provincial patriarch, the satyr, and the pegasus who offer Hercules what neither the biological family of divinities nor the adoptive family of humans can really understand, the maternal little dragon who, in contravention of the dictates of the bigoted ancestors, helps Mulan to transgress the rules of gender and heteronormative honor, finally moved when she saves China. In this popular and widespread tradition, growing up is a goal for which neither the resources of the family that happens to you, nor of the one that may have chosen you are sufficient (think of Medusa and Snoops in Bianca and Bernie). It also takes a family that chooses you, and that mutually chooses you, to aspire to fairy-tale heroism. And in fact, even more than cartoons, queer families tell them well, especially superheroes, whose stories Disney has been buying for some years.

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The great epos of the contemporary queer family, without a doubt, is that of the X-Men. Not only because it makes superpowers a minority trait, in which generations of fans have read a metaphor of their disability, their sexual orientation or gender identity, of the cultural and racial diversity that marginalized them in the oppressive context of so-called normality. But also because the X-Men sagas multiply family models, overcoming the binary simplicity of the opposition between queer and “traditional”. Within the queerness of finding themselves expelled, as adolescent mutants, from a family of origin incapable of understanding you, the X-Men add a further choice of field, similar to that between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: this is Professor X, who educates his boys to use their anomaly to defend those who, for it, discriminate against them; beyond Magneto, more radical, who cultivates mutant pride and tells the normals not to hinder their emancipation. My favorite, in this tradition, is Mystica, even more radical when she reproaches the two leaders for having recreated two models of normative patriarchy in their respective families: a new binary, equally rigid and to be fluidized.

Because it’s not enough to be different to be queer: you need to have the strength not to force Mowgli either in the village or in the jungle, to be proud of your power without forgetting that someone will make us pay for it, to protect strangeness both from the orthodoxy of the norm and from normalization of difference – to remember, as the Dog Park Dissidents sing, a mantra: «Not gay as in happy / but queer as in fuck you». This has taught me my queer family, which since I was 16 has sheltered me without ever trapping me, which loves me without asking me to choose: being yourself does not necessarily have to be an exile, a war or a tragedy. Hakuna matata. The bare essentials. Mutant and proud. Happy Pride!

Alessandro Giammei is a professor of Italian literature at Yale University in the United States. With In Toti Scialoja’s workshop of nonsense (edizioni del verri, 2014) won the Harvard Edition of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize. He collaborates with Domani and his latest publication is the essay Male stuffEinaudi (2023).

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