Grafitos de banheiro: uma leitura sobre as representações de sexualidade, amor e gênero na contemporaneidade

Abstract

The process of diversification of research sources used in the History of Written Culture has become increasingly notorious. Daily, personal and marginal writings, that were previously disregarded and whose status as historical sources had not been recognized, are gaining the attention of researchers. Given this scenario, a space is opened here for us to deal with bathroom graffiti, a marginalized writing practice. This work aims to analyze the discourses that manifest themselves on the doors of the public toilet's stalls through the practice of writing bathroom graffiti, in order that, from them, we can indicate the possible representations of sexuality, love and genre that these discourses evoke in the context of contemporaneity. Understanding bathroom graffiti not only as a contemporary vernacular writing practice, but also as part of a historical saga, this work also seeks to establish continuity relations between them and the Pompeian graffiti, paying attention to the fact that both practices of writing present a great recurrence of the themes of sexuality and love, as well as references to gender issues. In the analytical process, images of bathroom graffiti of a sexual-loving nature, which are available in tumblr Grafitos de Banheiro, are used. Since it is intended, when possible, to establish a counterposition between the bathroom graffiti produced in the contemporaneity and the Pompeian graffiti produced in Roman Antiquity, examples of Pompeian inscriptions of sexual-loving nature, which are available in the book Amor e Sexuality: male and female in Pompeian graffiti (2005), by Lourdes Conde Feitosa, are also used in the analysis.