A escritora mais proibida do Brasil – Cassandra Rios: uma existência lésbica nas fissuras do silenciamento

Abstract

This research presents the results obtained over the course of the Master’s program in History at the Federal University of Grande Dourados (UFGD), within the concentration area History, Region, and Identities and the research line Frontiers, Identities, and Representations. Grounded in the field of Women’s History, the study sought to analyze the trajectory and lived experience of Cassandra Rios as a fundamental component in the constitution of a lesbian identity in Brazil. Accordingly, it drew on the author’s autobiographical writings, reports from the Public Entertainment Censorship Division, and materials from the periodical press to understand the moral, cultural, and political issues that shaped the context of censorship and marginalization of Cassandra Rios’s lesbian narratives, which earned her the epithet of the most banned writer in Brazil during the military dictatorship. To begin this analysis, the first step was to elaborate on a problem-biography of Cassandra Rios, investigating, based on the writer's experience, broader questions about literature, sexuality, gender, public morality, regimes of visibility and invisibility, among others pertinent to broaden the debate concerning 20th-century Brazil. Subsequently, drawing on the concepts of circulation and reception from Cultural History, the research sought to identify the temporalities and spaces of circulation and the meanings ascribed to the erotic narratives and to female homosexuality present in Cassandra’s works, as well as the criteria that underpinned the prohibitions. On the basis of these considerations, it is concluded that Cassandra Rios — despite operating in a repressive context and prior to the institutionalization of the lesbian movement — inscribed lesbian desire in the public sphere. Thus, her works contributed to the legitimation of a lesbian identity in the Brazilian context, and the study of her experience as a woman and writer makes it possible to expand the historiographical debate, both by problematizing the clash between eroticism, gender, and the authoritarian state, and by advancing the historicization of LGBTQIAPN+ subjects marginalized in traditional historiography.