O cuidado de si através da literatura autobiográfica: "Não conte para a mamãe" e violência sexual na infância

Abstract

Taking Toni Maguire's “Don't Tell Mummy: a true story of the ultimate betrayal” (2012) as an object of study, the present dissertation aims to analyze the importance and impact of writing, especially the autobiographical, in the lives of people who have suffered sexual violence in their childhood, in order to discuss how writing can result in the care of the self (Foucault, 2004), and thus creating an endeavor related to health (Deleuze, 2019). Therefore, based on bibliographic and cartographic investigation, in which the researcher allowed herself to be affected by her research while developing it in a non-linear manner, it was initially sought to analyze how childhood and family archetypes engendered by Western modernity perish in the face of realities apart from those generated by the current hegemonic power, which does not take into account the diversity of bodies, experiences, ways of being in the world, etc. After that, the aim concerned a deliberation regarding how sexual violence incites traumas capable of reverberating throughout the lives of those affected by it. These traumas, most of the time, remain silent, and, the potentially traumatic occurrences, once in the public knowledge, can often be denied by other people, including the perpetrators, who aim to keep the strength of their power and, in this way, erase their fingerprints from their crimes. Along this path, writing emerges as a form of reinscription into the world and, consequently, of reinsertion of bodies and subjectivities silenced in society and history, as was the case of the author studied here, Toni Maguire. Thus, it is acknowledged the fact that, as a literary genre, the autobiography presents a possibility of breaking the victim’s silence; promoting their own (re)construction through words; telling the story from the survivor's perspective, of those who resist and confront the oblivion and negationism imposed upon them. In conclusion, literature is understood here as a space for the care of the self and the fabulation of what is missing: the (re)existence of the writer.