Políticas e poéticas da transgressão: corpo e escrita em Ana Miranda, Arundhati Roy e Jeanette Winterson

Abstract

In Ana Mirandas Amrik (1997), Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things (1997) and Jeanette Wintersons The Passion (1987) created around the same time by writers from Brazil, India and England politics and poetics of transgression become interconnected in many ways. From a comparative perspective, I explore this dynamic having as a basis the fact that these works reveal an equivalent concern with the transgressive intertwinement of body and writing. Considering the portrayal, also common among these three works, of protagonists represented by subversive figures, I discuss the development of disruptive processes perpetrated on the systems that oppress and subordinate subjects, especially patriarchy. Then, I examine the movements of disorder depicted in these literary texts, also through the body and writing, that attempt to question and destabilize totalitarian discourses. I dwell, in particular, on the issue of the rewriting of history from the margins, as an element that enables the emergence of voices often silenced, and on the questioning of the gendered concept of madness, which, across time and space, still emerges as a sign that retains asymmetrical power relations. With the aim to provide a contemporary reading of these narratives, I base my analysis on gender studies, with a focus on feminist literary criticism and psychoanalytic theories.