Considering the oppressed body in Isabela Figueiredo’s A Gorda

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a translation of Isabela Figueiredo’s novel A gorda. If literature is not essentially a place of emancipation, I strive to translate it, as a political practice of reading, from the notion of gender, according to theories that diagnose and problematize the condition of women’s bodies as objects of oppressive discourses and practices. Therefore, I begin with the hypothesis that the way Isabela's novel was written approximates it to the notion of “self-writing”. In this way, the novel becomes the expression of a speaking body, which contrasts with the notion of the woman as subject.