Gender Discourse and Desire in the 20th Century Brazilian Womens' Literature: 29 (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures) - Tapa blanda

Ferreira-Pinto, Cristina. Gender, Discourse and Desire in Twentieth-Century Brazilian Women's Literature. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2004. 208 pp. Ferreira-Pinto's study of gender, discourse and desire in Brazilian women's narrative sheds light on the challenges creative writers of the twentieth century have encountered in their attempts to articulate a female erotic voice free from the restrictions imposed by phallocratic ideology. The author begins with an introduction to the aesthetic, creative and cultural considerations female poets and fiction writers have employed as they approached new forms of representation [End Page 229] of the female body, sexuality, and desire. In Chapter One, Ferreira-Pinto turns back in time to the nineteenth century to examine how male canonical writers Jose de Alencar, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, Aluisio Azevedo and Machado de Assis reinforced fixed gender identities for women. The works of the masters, which portray women as the sensual mulatto, the seductress, the pure married woman, or the perverted, sexually frustrated lesbian, served as a departure point for contemporary women writers to respond to these myths of a feminine ideal. Thus, Ferreira-Pinto casts the project of twentieth-century women writers as an exploration into the possibility of the existence of a social and psychological reality for women that might result in empowerment, sexual fulfillment and agency. Ferreira-Pinto's definition of eroticism in the second chapter shares commonalities with feminist thinkers Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, Rosalind Coward and others who view the erotic as an aesthetic endeavor that privileges a mutually consensual exchange between equals, regardless of sexual preference, while the pornographic is seen as the depiction of domination of one subject by another (160). Although revisionist critics acknowledge that Gilka Machado's erotic poetry of the early twentieth century set the stage for the development of a gynocentric erotic

This study by Cristina Ferreira-Pinto explores the poetic and narrative strategies twentieth-century Brazilian women writers use to achieve new forms of representation of the female body, sexuality, and desire. Female writers discussed include: Gilka Machado, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Marcia Denser, and Marina Colasanti. While creating new forms, these writers are also deconstructing cultural myths of femininity and female behavior. In order to understand these myths, the book also presents new readings of some male-authored canonical novels by Jose de Alencar, Machado de Assis, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, and Aluisio Azevedo. The specific focus on female sexuality and desire acknowledges the intrinsic link between sexuality and an individual's sense of identity, and its importance for female identity, given the historical repression of women's bodies and the double standard of morality still pervasive in many Western cultures. In the discussion of the strategies Brazilian female poets and fiction writers employ, Ferreira-Pinto addresses some social and cultural issues that relate to a woman's sense of her own body and sexuality: the characterization of women based on racial features and class hierarchy; marriage; motherhood; the silencing of the lesbian subject; and aging. Ferreira-Pinto's analysis is informed by the works of various and diverse critics and theoreticians, among them Helene Cixous, Teresa De Lauretis, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldua, Georges Bataille, and Wilhelm Reich.