Writing violence against women: the descent into everyday life in Brasilian contemporary literature

Abstract

Inspired by Veena Das (2020) and her anthropological reading of the link between life and words in the record of violence in ordinary life, this work proposed a comparative reading of two books by Brazilian female writers: "Evetything is River" (Carla Madeira, 2021) and "The weight of the dead bird" (Aline Bei, 2017). In both works, the violent act committed against the woman structures the narrative order, intertwining the desire for possession of the female body with the occurrence of a trauma that manifests itself in the body of writing. The interest is in pointing out ways in which the fiction of contemporary Brazilian authors seems to emerge from everyday scenes of violence against women and reach a space for rearranging the sensible (Rancière, 2009), making literature a field of affectation for people already accustomed to witnessing everyday violence. The authors seem to operate a displacement of the violent act through the ethical-political positioning of literary writing, based on the violence staged in literature (Walty and Moreira, 2020), to new possibilities for mobilizing the reader.

Keywords:
writings of violence; gender violence in literature; women's literary production; contemporary Brazilian literature