Um palimpsesto de violências contra as mulheres em Elvira Vigna

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how violence against women is represented in the novel “Como se estivéssemos em palimpsesto de putas” (2016), by Elvira Vigna. To do so, we aim to unravel how violence is constituted in the work, considering that it manifests itself from the symbolic, physical and sexual annihilation of women. Our focus is to identify how the author, in the course of the text, unveils the symbolic-patriarchal economy that sustains the violence imposed by João's oppressive male identity on the narrator, the call girls and his wife, Lola. In light of this perspective, we take an approach based on the conceptions developed by Feminist Criticism, since it provides us an effective dialogue between literature and society, especially, as long as it breaks with the discriminatory character of the ideologies that limit the masculine and the feminine and proposes a hybrid and flexible gender identity as a survival strategy. Such breaking of traditional parameters is emphasized by the feminist studies of H. B. de Hollanda (2018, 2019, 2020); L. Zolin (2009); E. Xavier (1998, 2007); C. Gomes (2016, 2018) and by L. Hutcheon (1991, 1993), by tracing a critical, political and aesthetic reading of discourses and texts of female authorship. Accordingly, our theoretical and methodological subsidy explores concepts such as “gender violence”, according to R. Segato (2003); “masculinity excess”, worked by L. Machado (1998, 2010); “gender regulations and performances”, according to J. Butler (2003, 2014); “decolonization of gender violence”, proposed by M. Lugones (2014, 2020); and of “place of speech”, according to D. Ribeiro (2017). Such formulations allow us to question the regulatory norms and intersections of gender violence against women. In order to reach the objectives raised, we present, in the first chapter, how the slogans of the feminist movement are incorporated in literature written by women and how they are used as tools to question the ideologies of power of patriarchal society. In the second, we move on to identify the means by which the palimpsest of violence and the identities of the characters, who resist gender regulations with different feminine transgressions, are constructed. In the last chapter, we point out the decolonization strategies of this palimpsest and the historical-patriarchal structures questioned aesthetically by the novel's narrator, who shows male truths in an ironic and sagacious way. With this in mind, we defend the hypothesis that, by bringing to the fictional text the decolonizing look of gender, Elvira Vigna deconstructs the chauvinist paradigms and uncovers the subtleties of the various forms of violence against women by relating this violence to the fragilities and insecurities that surround the male competitive universe.