Entre nós: mãos que escrevem com agulha e linha

Abstract

This thesis collects three essays that revolve around the metaphorical complex of sewing and its theoretical, critical, political, and ethical contours. In the first one, I revisit certain aspects of a literary tradition that connects sewing with writing, drawing on the thoughts of Ana Maria Machado, Tamara Kamenszain, and Roland Barthes, among others. Furthermore, I promote some sort of short-circuit between Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine and the concept of Escrevivência, coined by Conceição Evaristo. Thus, I envision the possibility of enacting costurescrita (sewing-writing), which I understand as the process of resewing the “self” into a form of writing I inherit from my mothers. Thinking, with Virginia Woolf, of memory as a skilled seamstress, I locate literature in between texts and textiles. Next, I investigate how sewing appears in Woolf's fiction, more specifically, simultaneously revealing and profaning the Angel in the House that haunts her oeuvre. In this reevaluation of femininity, needlework emerges in Woolf’s fiction as an activity that is loaded with eroticism, in dialogue with Georges Bataille and Audre Lorde. Here, I reopen the gateway to androgyny already announced in A Room of One’s Own, which makes room for the queer movement I undertake further on, with Sara Ahmed. Finally, in my last essay, I turn my attention to Cecília Reis’s oeuvre, whose outsideness is not captured by Woolf’s text: Reis helps me uncover some of the plantation memories that, according to Grada Kilomba, are hidden in black people’s psyches. Moreover, I am interested in the participation of men in this sewing culture I investigate throughout my entire text, following in the footsteps of art historian Joseph McBrinn. This helps me understand how my queer body inherits the feminine, disorienting an entire grid of heteronormative intelligibility that surrounds our bodies, trying to dress them in its rigid codes