Beyond/below language: some questions surrounding Brazilian literature written by black women

Abstract

The contributions of Teresa de Lauretis (2019) with regard to the cultural conceptions of masculine and feminine, which form a gender system, produce a symbolic system or meanings responsible for organizing cultural values and hierarchies over cultural contents. In this way, the “sex-gender system” (Lauretis, 2019) is related to both political and economic factors in societies, which is why, following the reflections of Norma Telles (1992), gender always matters, as does race, class, sexuality, etc. While both the sex-gender system and the colonial system interfere with models of knowledge and relationships, which are structured in such a way as to produce advantages for some people and (many) disadvantages for others, this work intends to take the Brazilian literature produced, above all, in recent centuries by women – with an emphasis on black authors – as a fruitful field for tensioning these systems. If figures like Maria Firmina dos Reis and Carolina Maria de Jesus – among many other black writers obliterated by criticism and time – are exemplary for the debate, Conceição Evaristo and, more recently, Marilene Felinto, Cristiane Sobral, Jarid Arraes – to name a few some names – contributed and have contributed to the production of ruptures, of counter-narratives to a disruptive practice of the canon.