O assédio sexual no romance industrial de Amando Fontes

Abstract

This research analyzes the different forms of violence against the proletarian woman in the regional novel, Os Corumbas (1933), which records the norms of control proper to a patriarchal society. The values of the woman's body are tied to the idealized patterns of virginity and motherhood. Among the aesthetic aspects of this work, we highlight how the social space is used to delimit the paths of the female characters: the house, the street and the factory. The industrial space will be explored as a place of harassment for women who are victims of both bosses and coworkers. With this peculiarity, the novel brings to the surface the tragedy of a family of retirantes who sees the daughters lose their virginity without getting married. In this space of macho values, the characters Rosenda, Albertina and Caçulinha are harassed and raped by men who take advantage of the fragile economic situation of the family to impose sexual exploitation as a way of surviving. Methodologically, we dialogue with the concepts of "male domination", by Pierre Bourdieu, to highlight the values of the patriarchal culture; the typology of the "female body", defended by Elodia Xavier, to classify the types of violence against women; the social marks of sexual harassment of Lia Zanotta Machado, to identify the social justifications of sexual violence against women, and studies on gender violence in Brazilian literature by Carlos Magno Gomes to map the aesthetic features in Fontes' work. Didatically, this dissertation is divided into two chapters. In the first one we will re-read the critical fortune of Amando Fontes, by looking at the fatality and commenting on how the narrator characterizes the woman's body in the social space; and in the second one, we will detail how sexual violence is imposed as a way to demean the woman's body against class and gender patterns and to highlight the social consequences of sexual harassment suffered by women workers.