Declinações plurais da feminilidade. Representações de mulheres subversivas nos romances de Cassandra Rios

Supervisor/s: Adriana Bebiano and Doris Wieser

Doctoral Programme: Feminist Studies

Funding: FCT

The present research work aims to propose a literary analysis of a selected part of Cassandra Rios' novels. After long decades of being harshly denigrated by the Brazilian dictatorial military regime (1964-1985), in recent years her pseudonym has been rediscovered thanks to initiatives that are trying to promote the revaluation of Rios' author persona - an endeavour that is clearly and strongly tied to the renewed academic interest in Gender and Feminist Studies as well as Queer theories. This research seeks to give a contribution to the debate in an area that is asserting itself as a new framework for Brazilian literary criticism and theory, focused on Cassandra Rios' novels. By seeking and choosing a different critical trajectory, regarding what has been previously theorized, the main goal of this work is to approach some of the most important issues portrayed by Rios in her novels, such as: women's identity construction, with an emphasis on conceiving and representing women as a heterogenous social and cultural group that combines different ways of experiencing and reproducing a form of womanhood that thereby becomes fluid, multifaceted and subversive, not linked to biological myths of femininity; aspects more specifically related to the LGBT+/queer field of study, including lesbianism and bisexualities in women, which will be analyzed from an alternative perspective that aspires to overcome the binary logic that confines their existence as an antithesis to heterosexuality or sets them one against the other, thus contributing to the maintenance of the patriarchal system and heteronormativity's hegemonical stability, and creating negative effects on lesbians and bisexual women's right to exist and to be perceived as two different, unquestionable identities. The use of lesbian feminist theories (Rich, 1980; Wittig, 1981; Calhoun, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1998; Nestle, 2003) will be essential for a successful development of the thesis, as much as queer theoretical proposals, such as Butler's (1990; 2004), especially when applied to Latin-American contexts (Viteri, Serrano and Vidal-Ortiz, 2011; Rea and Amancio, 2018).