O riso como resistência : ‘A menor mulher do mundo’ como analogia do espaço da mulher na academia

Abstract

The short story “A Menor Mulher do Mundo”, written by Clarice Lispector, presents the contact of a woman, member of an unknown tribe, and a researcher trying to observe her as his object of study. The present work aims to investigate the presence of women in the academic context, identify the marks of coloniality present at the structure of knowledge development and seek for the places of resistance found by women to recover the subject status in academia, constructing an analogy with the relationship between Pequena Flor and Marcel Petre, both characters of Lispector’s short story. The method implemented to conduct this analysis is bibliographic review, making use of the concepts of Fractured Locus, coined by Lugones (2014), dialoguing with the concepts of Colonial Difference (Mignolo, 2008) and Coloniality (Quijano, 2005), also finding support on the feminist methodologies of Curiel (2004) and in the subject/object duality observed by Mohanty (1988), intending to find connections between these concepts and the aforementioned analogy. Therefore, this analysis expects to identify, in the narrative and also in the academic structure, the influence of factors such as epistemic privilege, otherness and agency on maintaining the space occupied by women in academia. In conclusion, this work intends to question the position where women are inserted in the knowledge production: if as an active subject of this field or as an object of study of whom opinions and theories are inferred about.