Body in strips: transgender fictions and self-fictions on the strips of Laerte Coutinho

ABSTRACT

Laerte Coutinho was preparing the launch of her book Muchacha (COUTINHO, 2010) when gave an interview to Bravo! Magazine declaring herself crossdresser. Since then, her work and life were object of many discussions in and outside academic milieu. Nowadays openly a transgender person, Coutinho has approximately fifty years of career and a vast work in the fragmentary form of strips and short comics stories, where we can see her body represented occasionally. The self-discovery processes of her own desires permeate her own work, where characters played as transvestites while the author were experimenting with “woman’s” clothes and accessories. In this work, I intend to observe some comics by Laerte where the body appears staged, in particular strips and books published after 2005.

KEYWORDS:
Laerte Coutinho; comics; strios; trans body; authorship