Entre opressões e atravessamentos: leituras interseccionais nos contos de Lindevania Martins

Abstract

This tesis analyzes the intersectional oppressions experienced by female characters in the short stories “Teresa decide falar”, “Fim de Expediente” and “Duas irmãs”, from the anthology Teresa decide falar(2022), and in the single-story book Longe de Mim (2020), by the Maranhão writer Lindevania Martins. The investigation is anchored in a decolonial and intersectional approach, based on the understanding that the colonial matrix of power, as proposed by Aníbal Quijano, continues to operate in contemporary times through the articulation of race, gender, class, and regimes of knowledge, producing hierarchies that materially and symbolically organize social life. Within this framework, the study analyzes how such power devices affect female subjects, constituting them in conditions of subalternation, while simultaneously questioning the fissures, displacements, and rearticulations that emerge within these very structures. This research is guided by the following question: how do the female characters in the short stories “Teresa decide falar”, “Fim de Expediente”, “Duas irmãs” and Longe de Mim develop strategies of resistance and re-existence in the face of the modern-colonial logic that articulates and naturalizes inequalities of gender, race, and class? To answer this question, the study proposes: (i) to unveil the mechanisms of production and reproduction of intersectional oppressions that permeate the daily lives of the characters; (ii) to analyze the forms of resistance that constitute situated practices of confronting structural violence; and (iii) to outline a decolonial profile of the characters based on their processes of re-existence, understood not only as reaction but as the production of other possibilities of existence and enunciation. by the writer from Maranhão, Lindevania Martins Methodologically, this research is basic in nature

and adopts a qualitative approach, based on bibliographic procedures and an exploratory- interpretative perspective, based on literary analysis guided by decolonial and intersectional

perspectives. To this end, the theoretical contributions of Aníbal Quijano (2005, 2007, 2009), María Lugones (2008, 2014, 2020), Walter Mignolo (2007, 2017, 2021) and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2016) are mobilized, with regard to the understanding of multiple colonialities (of power, knowledge and being), articulated with the contributions of Lélia Gonzalez (2018, 2019, 2020), Heleieth Saffioti (1987, 2002) and Rita Segato (2003, 2016, 2018), as well as Carla Akotirene (2022) and Grada Kilomba (2019), which allow for a more complex understanding of the relationships between gender, race and violence in the Latin American context. From this theoretical framework, it becomes evident how literary fiction operates as a critical space for destabilizing the colonial norm, by challenging the naturalization of subalternity and reinscribing subjected characters as loci of enunciation, memory, and agency. Female characters thus emerge from territories historically and epistemically marginalized by the modern-colonial system to reclaim their subjectivities and produce narratives that disrupt the regimes of silencing that constitute them. In this movement, experiences of pain, fear, and violence—far from being merely marks of subjugation—are reconfigured as material for critical elaboration and insurgency. In this way, the system that dehumanizes them is symbolically displaced, not only as an individual gesture, but as an operation that affects the social fabric, opening breaches for other forms of existence, belonging, and meaning making.