Ana Carolina Eiras Coelho Soares

Sources, theses and publications on gender in Goiás: cataloging and description of collections

This project aims at researching sources, theses and publications on the theme of Gender in the region of Goiânia and the city of Goiás. The importance of this venture lies in the possibility of a systematic tracking of historical sources available for the development of future academic research, as well as performing a survey about the intellectual production developed on this subject in the region. The project is attached to the Gender Studies and Research Group of the Faculty of History, and intends to organize a database for citizens and researchers interested in gender issues and to subsidize actions aimed at valuing and preserving this documentation.

 

Violence consumed between speeches and silences: readers and readings of gender relations inequalities in bestseller literature

In this project, I propose to contribute to the debate of discourses and notions about "violence" and "pleasure" through focusing on gender studies analysis of best-selling novels sold in Brazil, in addition to other written accounts of the perception of love relationships, from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, trying to observe the narrative constructions of notions of pleasure and violence and articulating them to the primary social construction among the genders. The bestsellers reveal a construction of desired expectations about the behavior of genders, and have a mass dissemination and propagation of historically constructed sentimental and social ideals. If books read by women and men read teach them that it is necessary to "beat to excite", "to say no to say yes", "to resist and to conquer", it is necessary to conduct a historical and anthropological analysis of these publications, their writers, their reading and their readers to understand how this articulation of literature, which sells and is consumed on a large scale, despite feminist public efforts and policies, still propagates love based on the acceptance of female inferiority and a certain masculine violence, including domination during sexual intercourse. "But he says that he loves me" is the most recurrent literary justification for attenuating descriptions of extremely violent gestures and speeches that symbolically, and often physically, decrease the space of equality in love and sexual relations between genders. With this, there is a "pedagogy of feelings" in the romantic and erotic literature of the twentieth century that teaches how to love, get excited and have sex. One must think of how violence is intrinsic to the play of literary symbolism.