Notes on an Aesthetics of Trauma in Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the mediatization of cases of woman shearing builds, in language and through language, an aesthetics of strangeness which reassures discourses that point out social, historical and cultural borders. In order to achieve this goal, two thoughts are articulated theoretically: the Bakhtinian thought, especially his insistence on the semiotic-ideological dimension of language, and Barthesian postulates, especially his understanding of the semiological construction of trauma. From the methodological point of view, two registers and the propagation of the shearing of women in two historical events are contrasted: in France, during the period called Liberation, in the 1940s, and in present Brazil, in Rio de Janeiros’s slums which live side by side with the culture of drug traffic. In this study, we try to answer the following question: after so many decades, how does this French post-war voice emerge in the Brazilian context, (re-)signifying the same practices? The analysis developed here shows that the “prose” of shorn women mobilizes different voices which, by imprinting their marks on utterances, stratify language and draw socio-cultural borders.

Keywords

• Dialogism
• Ethics
• Aesthetics
• Language
• Trauma