Narrativas sobre mulheres: amizade, hospitalidade e diáspora em textos bíblicos fundacionais

Abstract

Some narratives from the Bible tell the stories of seven female characters: Sara, Hagar, Rebecca, Tamar, Sifrah, Fuah and Ruth. These women share geographic and inner exile, which presents itself as a condition inherent to a great part of the human beings. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to investigate the roles played by these women in the inauguration and maintenance of genealogies of biblical peoples in their exiles. The study of the survival strategies they have devised allows not only a more comprehensive understanding of these narratives, but also a perception that their actions have contributed to the transformation of established and, not rarely, oppressive traditions. Based on the concepts of friendship, hospitality and diaspora, this dissertation makes use of texts that have been constructed in the context of post-modernity, in which displacements and the play of differences are constant. Among the authors that deal with the issues related to these concepts and to these historically bound situations the names of Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida, who are part of this dissertation, may be cited. Even though the Bible has been traditionally seen as a patriarchal narrative, one in which the main events turn around male characters, the actions of these women are seen as paradigmatic. In the narratives of the women under study, there is conflict, loss, fear, survival desire, and silence. Therefore, it can be said that the roles played by women in the context of diasporas of other times and places and their literary representations have these stories and their fictionalizations as matrices.