Queer brazilian fictions: notes for a dossier

Abstract

The literary canon is still based on an exclusionary model – male, white, heterosexual, middle class – that ends up instilling invisibilities in literary life, as evidenced by the low presence of LGBTQI+ authorship in hegemonic publishers and/or LGBTQI+ characters exercising role of protagonists in narratives. In the contemporary scenario, in which the political agendas of gender and race/ethnicity studies showed their urgency, it is necessary to underline how representation and representativeness in the literature has been discussed. More than ever, the power of identification between reader and literature has been demonstrated in the construction and strengthening of individual subjectivities, a fact that makes it worrying that there are few works that LGBTQI+ people can target. Against the exclusionary canon, non-hegemonic characters in action would not be enough, but literary or literary criticism projects that questioned the normalizing devices and technologies of the body and gender would be necessary. This text, in this sense, aims to present minimally the questions that guided the call for a dossier of Brazilian fictions that had queer as a key to political and aesthetic reading.