Sob o signo do furacão: por uma poiesis feminista

Abstract

The work weaves a feminist reading of what is here understood as poetic expressions opposed to violent practices, especially gendered forms of violence. Using some works by the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta and the novel Hurricane Season by the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor as the central materials of this study, the text comes and goes in evoking figures, symbols, and ideas traditionally associated with feminized bodies, which are here analyzed in the light of counter-hegemonic reflections on the act of looking, the blood, and the tongue. With attention focused on these parts—taken as the lines of force that make up the three chapters of this dissertation—and on their inscriptions in the selected works, the hypothesis is that the objects of analysis break down the separations between public and private, collective and subjective, natural and cultural, by approaching gender violence through concepts such as visibility and imagination, absence and presence, silence and voice. Thus, in tracing a path of investigation metaphorically influenced by the disruptive force of a hurricane—a phenomenon that simultaneously represents a planet in a state of emergency and triggers other possibilities for the future—I attempt to observe how manifestations of a kind of feminist poiesis—making—emerge from the world of violence in which we live by means of expressive forms that are more decentralized and disobedient to the established order.