A performatividade do discurso feminino na obra o remorso de Baltazar Serapião, de Valter Hugo Mãe

Abstract

The present work analyzes the performativity of feminine speech on the book o remorso de baltazar serapião, written by valter hugo mãe. For this, we relate literature and language, and attribute meaning to reading, adopting the procedures proposed by the performativity of language applied to gender, a notion developed within the Queer Theory of Judith Butler, reread by Sara Salih. From the enunciative and pragmatic theories, we find in Butler (2003), and especially in Salih (2015), the most relevant theoretical foundation for our study, because, studying the queer, the stranger, studying the way gender identity is constituted, it can reflect on the female gender and its subject constitution, showing how a feminine gender's performativity of saying is presented. Considering the specificity of the literary and how structural elements can be significant and produce different meanings is that we analyze the narrator, time and space as mythical. Thus, we can understand the idea of myth as something that repeats itself infinitely, presenting itself with a character of exemplarity and independent of its historical relation, being able to exist in any place and time. Then, the concepts of time and space, in the mythical context, appear as something that tends to be repeated constantly. Zilbermann (1977) names this time as absolute and this space as totalizing, and points the impossibility to disintegrate time or to particularize space, and from this came the lack of a specific temporal and spatial marking when dealing with myth. We developed a research of bibliographic character about the book been studied, adopting an enunciative conception of language. But enunciation is associated with pragmatics, that is, we are based on the act of speech, the study of statements. For this, we use the notion of “recorte” proposed by Guimarães (2011) to evaluate the citacionality of female speech. With the notion we assume the impossibility of focusing on all the book, entirely. We realize that the constitution of genre occurs by citation, which is the repetition of signs produced in different contexts. The disappearance of the feminine character's name means to give up language as action, the constitution of gender identity, which is given by language. If we understand gender identity as performative, we perceive that the growing loss of right to language coincides not only with the erasure of gender, but with a dehumanization process. Therefore, we understand the book under study as a narrative model of feminine condition. The protagonist is a subject determined by the patriarchal society in which he is inserted; his life is guided by values of that society. By telling the story, he allows the reader to reflect about it, about the female condition and its silencing. Thus breaking with the circularity of myth and opening up a possibility of historicity. Replacing also the performativity of language: in front of this narrative, women, in particular, can reflect on themselves and construct themselves as subjects by the citacionality.