Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (Oct 2021)
Body in strips: transgender fictions and self-fictions on the strips of laerte coutinho
Abstract
Laerte Coutinho was preparing the release of her book Muchacha (COUTINHO, 2010) when she gave an interview to Bravo! Magazine declaring herself a crossdresser. Since then, her work and life have been objects of many discussions in and outside the academic milieu. Nowadays, an openly transgender person, Coutinho has had approximately fifty years of career and a vast work in the fragmentary form of strips and short comics stories, where we can see occasional representations of her body. The self-discovery processes of her own desires permeate her work, where characters played as transvestites while the author was experimenting with “woman’s” clothes and accessories. In this work, I intend to observe a selection of comics by Laerte in which transgender bodies are shown, in particular strips and books published after 2005.
