Description:

Lecture by Professor Idelber Avelar, Tulane University, "Strategies and Represntations of Masculinity in contemporary Brazilian Fiction." The Brazilian narrative produced in the 1970s often depicted men having to ask what it was that constituted them as such. Amongst the copious scholarship on Brazilian fiction written under dictatorship, however, there are hardly any studies devoted to the question of masculinity and its representation. The talk will analyze representative moments in the depiction of masculinity - as well as its connections with national history - in three selected contemporary Brazilian writers: the heroic, sacrificial activist portrayed in O que é isso, Companheiro (1979) and the post-feminist men of Crepúsculo do macho (1980), both by Fernando Gabeira, the entrance of gay literature into mainstream Brazilian prose fiction with Caio Fernando Abreu's Morangos mofados in the 1980s, to the emergence of writers such as Cristóvão Tezza, who has written a courageous depiction of the crisis of masculinity and fatherhood in his O filho eterno (2007). This essay attempts to track down displacements on the representation of men in Brazilian literature from dictatorship to democracy, and it is part of a book-length project on masculinities in contemporary Latin American Literature, from the left-wing guerrillas of the 1960s to the so-called "crisis" in masculinity in the 2000s.

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