A POLÍTICA CULTURAL DOS AFETOS: LITERATURA LÉSBICA BRASILEIRA E AS RELAÇÕES INTER-RACIAIS

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how affects, especially those organized around love, happiness, and desire, operate in interracial lesbian relationships represented in contemporary Brazilian lesbian literature. The research is grounded in Cultural Studies, Affect Theory, and the intersectional perspective, also articulating the concept of assemblage to understand how the affective experiences of lesbian women, intertwined with markers of race, gender, and sexuality, are produced, regulated, and represented in literature. The first chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological foundations of the analysis, highlighting the contributions of Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant to the so-called investigation of affects, particularly Ahmed's understanding, which allows us to consider affects as performative, situated, and politically implicated forces in the production of subjectivities. The second chapter delves deeper into how the brevity and episodic structure of Brazilian lesbian literature relate to precarious modes of existence and the reproduction—or subversion—of normative affective regimes, especially the white imperative of happiness, which operates as a device for controlling and erasing otherness. The analyses, tensions and reflections indicate that contemporary Brazilian literature constitutes a space for affective and political negotiation, where discourses on love, desire, happiness and subjectivities are permanently crossed by the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality. The dissertation thus contributes to debates on literature, affections and representation, above all by highlighting that affections, far from being neutral or purely private elements, are central to the reproduction and contestation of the social and racial hierarchies that structure the literary field and cultural practices in Brazil.