O legado poético em construção de Rupi Kaur e a instapoesia de autoria feminina em língua inglesa

Abstract

This research investigates female-authored Instapoetry in the English language through the work of Rupi Kaur, widely regarded as a pioneer of this phenomenon. The writing of the IndoCanadian poet inaugurates a space in which women develop new ways of self-representation, while also connecting to the work of other female Instapoets who similarly mobilize recurring thematic axes and images, understood here as commonplaces, in order to challenge and rewrite sexist patterns. The identification of this shared rhetorical project made it possible to delineate the concept of the Instapoet adopted in this dissertation and to compile a survey of Englishlanguage women authors on Instagram, positioning themselves each in their own way, to understand and better analyze this “post-Kaur” landscape. After establishing and applying exclusion criteria, the study focused on a critical reading of the works of these three key authors: Amanda Lovelace, Nikita Gill, and Whitney Hanson. The analysis examines both how these voices intertwine in the construction of feminist narratives and the ways in which they engage with violence, process memory, and make use of elements of healing to reimagine women’s presence in the world. Across all these poetics, a recurring pattern was identified: naming violence and abuse; refusing the naturalization of pain; transforming trauma into a process of repositioning; and insisting on representations of strength, autonomy, belonging, and collective identity. Instapoetry thus emerges as a space in which women expose problems and wounds but also construct narratives of empowerment and agency capable of fostering identification and affirming alternative imaginaries of the feminine. From a theoretical perspective, the study draws on works such as those of Roger Chartier (1998; 2002), Katherine Hayles (2009), and Regina Zilberman (2018) to understand digital textualities, their material supports, and modes of circulation. In dialogue with Sara Ahmed (2022), Nirmal Puwar (2004), Alison Jaggar (1989), and Margareth Rago (2013), the research adopts a feminist lens that allows the selected poems to be read as practices of resistance, processes of experience-making, and the construction of “feminist dwellings”. To account for the rhetorical dimension of the poetic projects analyzed, the study engages with the works of João Adolfo Hansen (2019), Francis Cairns (1972), Francisco Achcar (1994), and Raíra de Vasconcelos (2021), articulating the notion of topos with the repetition of specific motifs and images. These function as strategies of political persistence and as mechanisms for constructing a cultural memory that, when revisited and collectively built with others, reveals a subversive attempt to imagine a new reality that is more just and less exclusionary for women.