Fragmented Mirrors: self-reflection and vertigo in lesbian narratives.

• Grant number: 24/22352-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Renata Soares Junqueira
• Grantee: Monalisa Almeida Cesetti Gomyde
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project is a follow-up to the research carried out in the master's degrees in Literature Studies (UFSCar) and Women's Politics (Univiversidad de Barcelona), in which I analysed, within a female symbolic universe, the processes of creation and authorship of works with lesbian signification. The aim is to broaden the scope of the investigation in three dimensions: to include questions about ethnic and racial differences based on decolonial thinking (Curiel, 2020); to explore the strategies and tools for formalising lesbian experience and imagination (Brossard, 2024); and to expand these questions to cinema, considering the interfaces between literary and audiovisual representation. The novel The Last Daughter (2020), by Fatima Daas, and the feature film Watermelon Woman (1997), scripted and directed by Cheryl Dunye, will be studied, so that a comparative analysis (Carvalhal, 2006) of the different narrative forms will provide ways of understanding the formal procedures of both in relation to their lesbian significance. The first hypothesis concerns the formalisation of the specular dimension of lesbian experience in the two works through procedures such as mise en abime (Bal, 1994). It is hoped that the literary and film analyses will answer the question of how lesbian ontogenesis can not only be thematised in the works, but also participate in their formalisation, reconciling, as befits the arts, the realms of form and content.This critical perspective will be supported, in addition to the critical fortune of the two authors (which is still not very extensive), by fundamental studies on the construction of cinematographic discourse and on the transposition of literary texts into cinema. In addition, some feminist studies and the theory of aesthetic reception (Iser, 1987) will provide valuable support, since the specular dimension to be investigated seems to occur as an intra and extra-textual phenomenon, particularly in the relationship between lesbian readers and spectators and the works (Kennard, 1986).