A microfísica das relações familiares: infância, mulher e família nos contos de Vera do Val

Abstract

This thesis analyses family social representation in the way Vera do Val portraits its theme in her tales in the book Rio Negro Stories. According to Foucault’s idea of genealogy, it is comprehensible that historical subjection imposed on popular groups does not forbid them to have influence upon social representations and the meaning assigned to family in the social Amazon rainforest region. Therefore, literature acts as a rich document source capable of expressing the symbolic production field which crosses family relations’ microphysics that we aim to investigate. Furthermore, under this bias, the female and child characters receive a major attention whose narratives emerge through conflicted voices’ articulation disposed of a power game which counteracts hegemonic strategies that have as their main objective to make calm and docile in a sense of keeping under restrain against the instituted and formal order the resistance practices that enforce as counter powers/knowledge producers of new subjectivities and social dynamics. Moreover, by establishing correspondences between regional social and cultural formation context and family images as they appear in the literary text, it was possible to unravel in Rio Negro Stories, a social theory on the family concept in the Amazon rainforest.