Travestismo: um corpo queer no espaço literário

Abstract

This paper analyzed and compared the novel "Orlando: a biography" by Virginia Woolf (1928) and the short story "Triunfo dos pelos" by Aretusa Von (2000), winner of the competition organized by the Edições GLS (Grupo Editorial Summus). This work could understand how fragmentation of identity happens in the subject through the transvestism of the characters in both stories. The characters of the analyzed works live their transitional identities, the various forms of sexuality, but the position of each in society show different directions through historical, cultural, social and temporal differences. By establishing a dialogue between the intersections of male and female relationships and socio-cultural narratives, it could understand the relationships between language and society, ideological supremacy in social systems: legal, religious, educational and journalistic producing behaviors, values, such as the imposition of the subject, as can be a man or as can be a woman in a certain place, space as a way to affirm the authenticity of gender as a binary, among other factors to be analyzed in this paper. The term "transvestism" is often used to explain the change of identity of a character when it wears or disguises itself with the opposite sex clothes. According Sarduy (1979) transvestism comes to be, also, the act of "dressing up to pretend to be." In both narratives the characters confirmed the imposition of gender as a binary, but "Orlando" the subject not being man should be women, cultural network that wove that society, seeking the uniqueness of this subject. In "Triunfo dos pêlos" from the fragmentation of the identity of the character, one can see that the character sought the identity of the other, without either denying the authenticity of her/his own identity.