Meu corpo ainda quente, de Sheyla Smanioto: mulher, corporalidade e violência

Abstract

This master's thesis is aligned with Cultural Studies, specifically Feminist Criticism and the study of women's writing. The corpus of the research is the novel Meu corpo ainda quente, by the contemporary Brazilian author Sheyla Smanioto. The work was published in 2020 and is set in a fictional city, supposedly used by the Brazilian military dictatorship to dump bodies tortured and killed by the regime. In the city of Vermelha, people live in a “blasé” way with the bodies that are piled up and scattered in the streets. The main purpose is to analyze the representation of the female body and violence in the historical context of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. To follow this path, we seek to understand the way in which discourses about the body are structured in women's history, in addition to contextualizing how the Military Dictatorship in Brazil is told in the contemporary literary writing of Sheyla Smanioto, pondering the forms of control of the women's bodies through violence. The critical theoretical foundation finds support, among others, in Hannah Arendt (2021) to understand violence in totalitarian regimes, in Michel Foucault (2014) to apprehend the ways of maintaining state power through the control of bodies, in Heleieth Saffioti ( 2015), Gerda Lerner (2019), Judith Butler (2019), Michelle Perrot (2019) and Pierre Bourdieu (2020) in order to understand how patriarchy operates on women's bodies through the use of violence. With regard to methodology, the research has a qualitative character and is bibliographic in nature, whose course is to interpret the selected work in the light of the chosen theorists. Countless historical and social reasons have silenced the voice of women in Brazil and in the world. Hearing/reading reports, memoirs and narratives dealing with this historic moment told by men is quite common. A project that aims to study a contemporary literary work that revisits this past through a female lens offers the opportunity to perceive another side of this story, one that has rarely been told.