Who is a real woman? - female body and sexuality on The via crucis of the body, by Clarice Lispector
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1984-1124.i29p39-54Keywords:
Clarice Lispector, Literature, Female body, Sexuality, EroticismAbstract
This work aims at investigating how the female body and sexuality is portrayed in the short stories He drank me up and Mauá square from the book The via crucis of the body (1991), by Clarice Lispector (1920-1977). Her book depicts a more complex outline of the female body, marked by sexuality and aging issues. We propose an analysis of how gender and sexuality discourses might affect character identity formation, strengthening or discouraging the hegemonic concepts of what it is to be a woman. This analysis is grounded on the feminist literary criticism (ZOLIN, 2009), on Butler’s (2003) notion of abject and performativity, and on Foucault’s (2015) and Paz’s (1994) contributions on body, eroticism, and sexuality. The analyses of the short stories point at the fictional trait of the sex and gender categories, to the extent to which any sex (biologically differentiated body) is an empty body if it lacks a gender that culturally gives meaning to it. Thus, if sex and gender are not natural, we propose a subversion, as the characters of the narratives do, to some extent, adopting performativity that exceeds binary boundaries, in the pursuit of freeing the body and its potentialities.
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