Diadorim e o corpo-neblina no sertão Rosiano: estórias, impossibilidades e outros problemas de gênero

Abstract

This MA thesis analyzes Grande sertão: veredas, especially through Judith Butler's concept of performativity. Riobaldo’s undefined and non-linear narrative is taken to be the rendering and origin of what it describes: Diadorim. The urge to identify in Diadorim a gender identity that implies coherence and continuity between her and other women, in the literary piece, relocates her disruptive potential by depriving the character of her "jagunça" reality, making it not only incongruous, but also fictitious. Hence, this reality is here rearticulated to conform to the thesis’s aim: to demonstrate how Diadorim embodies, as the work’s principle, the strategy of resistance that exposes the artificiality not of her acting, but rather – with it – of the categories that attempt to capture her, rejecting life’s contradiction and multiplicity of forms. The path is taken, in order to perceive Diadorim as the metonimy of the sertão, in three chapters: the first deals with the concept of performativity in order to clarify it and illustrate the gender deconstruction performed by Diadorim in the Rosian sertão. The second chapter discusses the presence of the "jagunça" as the fabrication of the novel and her body, a stage and a territory of disputes, embodies the plastic possibilities of the novel, whose formal unity, instead of proving the existence of a substance, is accomplished only through conventions and fictions. The absence of substance from the character and the novel are the conditions that allow her agency, clarified by the third chapter, as the space of possibilities of creation and existence in which Diadorim’s body is materialized as the grotesque feminine body (RUSSO, 2000). In conclusion, Diadorim’s presence on the Rosian sertão carries the difference and the different in the "jagunça" without circumscribing her to the constrained gender norms, but surpassing them.