A cidade (que não é) de Ulisses: o papel da mulher na cidade de papel

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s and early 1990s, there has been growing academic interest in the city, both by political rulers, architects, historians, geographers, social scientists, and even by us, linked to the science of literature, that we tend to analyze the textual representations of the urban space. When it is considered, however, as a central question, the female presence in the representation of this space, we are faced with a gap in studies investigating the role of women in the city, if as a character, not so much, in the context of literary works produced by women, this is a very scarce subject. In this perspective, I have as central interest in this study, the literary representation of the city of Lisbon in literature of female authorship, focusing on the novel A cidade de Ulisses, published in 2011 by the Portuguese writer Teolinda Gersão. In short, my objective was to investigate, in urban cartography, in which forms, through which channels, and in the midst of which discourses, the woman influences the construction of historical-literary knowledge about Lisbon. I did not intend, however, to work in the context of a univocal representation of a feminine identity; I pretended, before, to consider the narratives under the prism of a set of representations, invested by constant deterritorializations and reterritorializations of plural identities, which favor textual productivity. Gradually, I discovered that the problem was not so much the absence of the city in the literature produced by women, but that our inquiries and reflections on city of them, in restricting the urban space to the public space, were imbued by a normative analytical masculinity in the consideration of texts. And how is it to traverse the city that is not Ulysses, as it were of Ulysses? If in the city traveled by men, we take advantage of the answer that gives our questions, this was the motive and incessant doubt that motivated my course.