Vênus nas ruas, Urano nas esquinas: Escrita afeminada em "Ovelhas Negras", de Caio Ferando Abreu.

Abstract

This dissertation explores “afeminada writing” as a queer aesthetic and political experience, through an analysis of Ovelhas Negras (1995), by Caio Fernando Abreu. It argues that the book’s formal and affective structure performs a poetics of deviation, destabilizing linear narrative, coherent subjectivity, and normative linguistic codes. Rather than thematizing effeminacy, “afeminada writing” is proposed as a mode of narration that embodies instability, theatricality, melancholy, and dissident eroticism. Drawing on theorists such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Paul B. Preciado, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Mario Perniola, along with frameworks from queer theory and performance studies, the dissertation identifies strategies of writing that stumble, tremble, and fragment. The voice that emerges is one that assembles and undoes itself, like an “afeminado” body. These hypotheses are applied to the analysis of Ovelhas Negras, a collection of censored, fragmented, and previously unpublished texts. Abreu’s writing is shown to be erotically charged and affectively unstable, operating through syntactic oscillation, narrative disjunction, camp aesthetics, and the eroticism of absence and loss. Ultimately, the study proposes that “afeminada writing” constitutes a queer aesthetics of becoming an “enviadecer” of language: a continuous unmaking of literary and existential norms. Ovelhas Negras is thus read not only as a queer book, but as a textual performance of dissidence, in which writing itself becomes a gesture of desire, exposure, and resistance.