A punição simbólica: representações das masculinidades no conto Diga às mulheres que a gente já vai, de Raymond Carver

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the representations of masculinities in the short story “Tell the women we’re going”, by the American writer Raymond Carver, published in the collection Beginners, in 2009. Mobilizing the nomenclature proposed by Ricardo Piglia (2004), Carver figures as one of the essential names of the brief form in American postwar. This tale tells the story of the friendship between Bill Jamison and Jerry Roberts, two working-class men who, when going out for a walk and after engaging in typically male activities, one of them rapes and kills a teenager. Thus, based on the theoretical assumptions of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985), Michael Kimmel (2005), Raewyn Connell (2013) and Judith Butler (2010), we intend to analyze the meanings of masculinities experienced by the characters Bill and Jerry, which, articulated to the dense homosocial microcosm built by the two men, operate in the propagation of violence, in the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity, and in the consequent symbolic punishment imposed on the female gender by this universe, in the narrative fabric of Carver's short story.