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Beyond Binaries

Sex, Sexualities and Gender in the Lusophone World

by Paulo Pepe (Volume editor) Ana Raquel Fernandes (Volume editor)
©2019 Edited Collection VIII, 306 Pages

Summary

This volume sets out to investigate queer literature and cinema, exploring in particular the intersection of issues of gender and Lusophone culture. The essays collected here present individual case studies within a queer theoretical framework, examining the ways in which queer identities are constructed and addressed through different types of cultural production. More specifically, they consider Portuguese and Lusophone socio-cultural contexts and the representation of gender in popular culture, as well as the centrality of literature and cinema in the subversion of heteronormative social norms.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Aout the editors
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Introduction: Revisiting Identities (Paulo Pepe / Ana Raquel Fernandes)
  • Part I Queering The Canon
  • ‘The lover becomes the thing beloved’: Queering Love in Os Lusíadas (Denise Saive)
  • Novas Cartas Portuguesas: Mariana Alcoforado and her Hysterical, Lesbian and Nymphomaniac Avatars (Alda Maria Lentina)
  • Beyond Manhood: The Fluctuating Queerness in Jorge de Sena’s Sinais de Fogo (Paulo Pepe)
  • Part II Poetry Of Resistance
  • The (In)Visible Currents of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge (Fernando Curopos)
  • ‘Poeta castrado, não!’: Queerness and Masculinity in the Poetry of Ary dos Santos (Mark Sabine)
  • A Poetics of Resistance: Four Exceptional Voices in Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century Portugal (Ana Raquel Fernandes)
  • Part III Contemporary Intertexts
  • Now and at the Hour: Pain and Transfiguration in Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me (António Fernando Cascais)
  • Identity, Gender and Sexuality in Helder Macedo’s Natália (Maria Araújo da Silva)
  • Is our Future our Past? Futurity Theory and the Novels of valter hugo mãe (Anneliese Hatton)
  • Part IV Beyond Portugal
  • Queering Pan-Americanism: Counternational Politics in Tulio Carella’s Recife Diaries, 1960–1961 (Severino J. Albuquerque)
  • Queer Identities at the Margins of Literature in Portuguese-speaking Africa (Emanuelle Santos)
  • Gender and Sexuality and Beyond the Latest Cape Verdean Literature (Mário César Lugarinho)
  • Intersecting Labour, Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Lusophone Colonial-Postcolonial Continuum (Miguel Vale de Almeida)
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index
  • Series Index

Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes
(eds)

Beyond Binaries

Sex, Sexualities, and Gender
in the Lusophone World

image
Peter Lang

Oxford · Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · New York · Wien

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pepe, Paulo, 1986- editor. | Fernandes, Ana Raquel Lourenço, 1978- editor.

Title: Beyond binaries : sex, sexualities, and gender in the Lusophone world / [edited by] Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes.

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: Reconfiguring identities in the Portuguese-speaking world ; 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018004403 | ISBN 9781787076150 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Portuguese literature--History and criticism. | Gays in literature. | Gays in popular
culture. | Queer theory--Portuguese-speaking countries. | Postcolonialism--Portuguese-speaking
countries. | Portuguese-speaking countries--Civilization.

Classification: LCC PQ9018 .B49 2018 | DDC 869.09/3521--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn. loc.gov/2018004403

Cover image: Alex Williamson

Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN

ISBN 978-1-78707-615-0 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-715-7 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78707-716-4 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-717-1 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2019

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without

the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,

and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Aout the editors

Paulo Pepe is a Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Do Pop ao Teatro de Rua: Revoluções Ibéricas de Género em António Variações e José Pérez Ocaña and has also published articles on aspects of gender in the Iberian context.

Ana Raquel Fernandes lectures in English at the Universidade Europeia in Lisbon and is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. She is the author of What about the Rogue? (Honourable Mention, ESSE Book Awards, 2012) and has also published on aspects of British and Portuguese contemporary fiction.

About the book

This volume sets out to investigate queer literature and cinema, exploring in particular the intersection of issues of gender and Lusophone culture. The essays collected here present individual case studies within a queer theoretical framework, examining the ways in which queer identities are constructed and addressed through different types of cultural production. More specifically, they consider Portuguese and Lusophone socio-cultural contexts and the representation of gender in popular culture, as well as the centrality of literature and cinema in the subversion of heteronormative social norms.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes

Introduction: Revisiting Identities

part i Queering The Canon

Denise Saive

‘The lover becomes the thing beloved’: Queering Love in
Os Lusíadas

Alda Maria Lentina

Novas Cartas Portuguesas: Mariana Alcoforado and her Hysterical, Lesbian and Nymphomaniac Avatars

Paulo Pepe

Beyond Manhood: The Fluctuating Queerness in Jorge de Sena’s Sinais de Fogo

part ii Poetry Of Resistance

Fernando Curopos

The (In)Visible Currents of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge←v | vi→

Mark Sabine

‘Poeta castrado, não!’: Queerness and Masculinity in the Poetry of Ary dos Santos

Ana Raquel Fernandes

A Poetics of Resistance: Four Exceptional Voices in Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century Portugal

part iii Contemporary Intertexts

António Fernando Cascais

Now and at the Hour: Pain and Transfiguration in Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me

Maria Araújo da Silva

Identity, Gender and Sexuality in Helder Macedo’s Natália

Anneliese Hatton

Is our Future our Past? Futurity Theory and the Novels of valter hugo mãe

part iv Beyond Portugal

Severino J. Albuquerque

Queering Pan-Americanism: Counternational Politics in Tulio Carella’s Recife Diaries, 1960–1961←vi | vii→

Emanuelle Santos

Queer Identities at the Margins of Literature in Portuguese-speaking Africa

Mário César Lugarinho

Gender and Sexuality and Beyond the Latest Cape
Verdean Literature

Miguel Vale de Almeida

Intersecting Labour, Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Lusophone Colonial-Postcolonial Continuum

Notes on Contributors

Index←vii | viii→ ←viii | 1→

Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes

Introduction: Revisiting Identities

Although the twenty-first century is well underway, sex, sexuality and gender remain controversial and taboo subjects around the world. Even if certain cultures seem to be more forthcoming in discussing aspects of sexuality, holistic discussions remain in short supply. When open conversations on sexuality are held, they frequently focus on heterosexual, monogamous and marital issues; traditional, heteronormative values remain enshrined in custom and law. Binary categories such as men/women; homosexual/heterosexual; normal/abnormal continue to hold sway, as does the accompanying stigma.

The essays in this volume, Beyond Binaries: Sex, Sexuality and Gender in the Lusophone World, mark an attempt to break the silence and break down these categories, pointing instead to acts of resistance (inchoate or full-blown) to normativities of sex, sexuality and gender within the Lusophone context. At various moments in history, individuals and communities in the Lusophone world have challenged established norms for both sexual behaviour and gender expression, even though their opposition may have passed largely unnoticed.

With the exception of Fernando Arenas’ and Susan Canty Quinlan’s edited volume entitled Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese Speaking World (2002), and Cascais and Ferreira’s edited volume on queer cinema (2014), as well as a collection of essays by Ana Luísa Amaral (2017) in which she questions various identities, crisscrossing particularly in the first part feminist studies and queer theory, no general book-length work on queerness in the Portuguese-speaking world has been available to either scholarly readers or the wider public. It is hoped that some of the essays in the present volume will begin to redress the balance, drawing attention to the existence – and significance – of queer resistances, thus advancing knowledge of the subject. Indeed, one of our aims is to provide examples of←1 | 2→ high-quality research for scholars of Lusophone gender, feminist and queer studies. Future studies will certainly provide more material for research linked to these fields, but we hope that the articles gathered in this volume will lay a solid foundation for such endeavours.

In English-speaking contexts, ‘queer’ originated as an epithet, most often used as an insult to those who identified as or were perceived to be homosexual. However, since the 1990’s, especially in the United States of America, some communities have retrieved the term ‘queer’ in a more positive and intentionally countercultural political move. Furthermore, since the same decade, ‘queer’ has emerged as a recognised field of study, not only in the western European academic tradition, but also in Portugal (see Santos, 2006; Cascais, 2014).

Queer rejects the heterocentric logic of aligning identity categories as well as narrowing methods of articulating identity. Moreover, queer always resists the dominant discourses of identity as well as counter modes of identification such as lesbian, gay, which usually reinstate the same binary logic of dominant, heteronormative discourses (Butler, 2001; Halberstam, 2005; Sedgwick, 1993). Finally, queer articulates the fluidity of gender and sexual identities and it also acknowledges the multiplicities of human desires and identities. Queer argues that moral, political and social institutions are oppressive through the maintenance of heterosexuality as the dominant, normalized sexual identity. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, the overriding impetus of queer is to blur these gender and sexual binaries (homosexual/heterosexual; men/women/ normal/abnormal), and deconstruct these fixed categories.

In the first part of this volume, entitled ‘Queering the Canon’, the authors propose new interpretations of canonical Portuguese texts in order to bring out queerness. The authors of this section focus on different works from different periods, which further underscores the usefulness of queer readings. Denise Saive adopts an unequivocally postmodern, if not postmillennial critical approach to Camões in her article ‘“The lover becomes the thing beloved”: Queering Love in Os Lusíadas’, discussing conceptions and deconstructions of masculinities in Portugal’s most canonical poem. Through her analysis, Saive also demonstrates how Os Lusíadas reflects the mood of the second half of sixteenth-century Portugal, due to the fact←2 | 3→ that the young king Sebastião was unmarried. In this scenario, there was understandable uncertainties about the future of Portugal: the absence of a legitimate heir to the throne could, and in fact did, produce a crisis of succession.

This section would not be complete if it did not present new insights into one of the most important cultural and literary landmarks in the history of the Portuguese fight against both fascism and patriarchalism. Where Amaral (2001) sketched out the theoretical framework of a queer reading of the seminal work by the three Marias – Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa – Alda Lentina offers a different approach in ‘Novas Cartas Portuguesas: Mariana Alcoforado and her Hysterical, Lesbian and Nymphomaniac Avatars’. Indeed, her detailed close – and queer – reading opens up new interpretative pathways into the work that would become a beacon of feminist thought in Portugal and abroad.

Details

Pages
VIII, 306
Year
2019
ISBN (PDF)
9781787077157
ISBN (ePUB)
9781787077164
ISBN (MOBI)
9781787077171
ISBN (Softcover)
9781787076150
DOI
10.3726/b11404
Language
English
Publication date
2019 (May)
Keywords
Queer Studies Lusophone Culture Gender Studies
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2019. VIII, 306 pp., 1 fig. b/w

Biographical notes

Paulo Pepe (Volume editor) Ana Raquel Fernandes (Volume editor)

Paulo Pepe is a Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Do Pop ao Teatro de Rua: Revoluções Ibéricas de Género em António Variações e José Pérez Ocaña and has also published articles on aspects of gender in the Iberian context. Ana Raquel Fernandes lectures in English at the Universidade Europeia in Lisbon and is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. She is the author of What about the Rogue? (Honourable Mention, ESSE Book Awards, 2012) and has also published on aspects of British and Portuguese contemporary fiction.

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