"É como se fosse da família": representações do lugar da empregada doméstica em textos de Conceição Evaristo, Clarice Lispector e Preta Rara

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of a study on the ways in which domestic workers are represented in Brazilian Literature from a specific field of sampling, namely texts by the authors Clarice Lispector and Conceição Evaristo. I invested in contrasting readings of short stories from the book Olhos d'água (2017) and the novel Becos da Memória (2017), by Conceição Evaristo, in contrast to selected chronicles by Clarice Lispector in A Descoberta do Mundo (1973), as well as in the novel A Paixão Segundo G.H (2016). I sought to read the authors in a timely manner, understanding the historical distance of about 40 years between their texts, but also observing, through the book Eu empregada doméstica: a senzala moderna é o quartinho de empregada (I Maid: the modern senzala is the maid's room) (2019), by Preta Rara, that the subalternizing representations (SPIVAK, 2010; KILOMBA, 2019) that appear in Lispector's texts remain in the imaginary and in the treatment practices in contemporary Brazilian homes, notably, in the context of the emergence of a supremacist right. Based on the structures of oppression discussed and updated by the literature, this dissertation aims to highlight the importance of black female writers talking about domestic workers (COLLINS, 2019) and other socially exploited and invisible subjects, through a position that makes the speeches of people audible. subalternized erasing (SOUZA, 2017), thus, the structuring part of the representational canon of our Literature. By investing in the discussions undertaken here, I presented some elements of the functioning of what I understand to be the gears of this supremacist and colonial machine, which uses cultural, political and forms of socialization to naturalize the subordination of subjects seen as minority, especially black women. (CARNEIRO, 2005). The aforementioned machine is in practice in various objects of culture, such as Literature, and in studies related to it, producing and reproducing the constant reduction of subjects, placing black characters in roles of invisibility, subalternity and marginality. In this study, Black Literature appears as a means of erasing the control images (COLLINS, 2019) that prevail over our lives, pointing to structural racism (ALMEIDA, 2018) as the limit of the so-called hegemonic literatures.