Insubmissas: personagens femininas e relações de gênero em contos de Benjamin Sanches

Abstract

The present dissertation has as object of study eight short stories from the book o outro e outros contos, from Amazonian writer Benjamin Sanches, published in 1963. Using the Feminist Literary Criticism, within the field of Cultural Studies, the dissertation analyzes the construction of the women characters in the book. To this end, it seeks to understand how gender relations are established in society throughout history and how these mechanisms permeate literary creation, enabling the representation of aspects of social reality in fiction. The research is divided into three interconnected thematic chapters the first being a discussion that specifies the issues of the body and sexuality in the female experience, the second debates the ideologies that guided and guide this female experience in society, and the third emphasizes the relationship between female transgression and submission. For each chapter, short stories that exemplify how each theme is found in the book were selected. Authors such as Pierre Bourdieu, Simone de Beauvoir among other historians, philosophers and feminist critics, such as Susana Bórneo Funck, Constância Lima Duarte, Naomi Woolf and Susan Faludi were used as a basis to analyze the Sanchean characters, the context in which they were built, as well as the way in which they are inserted in the questions about the role of women in society. This structure allowed to understand that the Sanchean characters, built in a historical moment that inspired important social changes in general and for the history of women, are moving between the conditions of submission and transgression, rehearsing emancipations that, however, do not materialize. The characters are still cloistered in the conditions that patriarchal society has relegated to women, exemplified by situations captured in a sensitive way by the author, who is a man, but manages to represent the nuances that encompass the female condition.