MILITARY DICTATORSHIP AND QUEER THEORY IN STELLA MANHATTAN, OF SILVIANO SANTIAGO

Abstract

The gay literature in Brazil has as one of the starts the polemic publication of The Black Man and the Cabin Boy[1] from the naturalistic Adolfo Caminha and, from that, it has been an increased, in small steps, of the numbers of literature works that involved homosexuality in its compositions.  From that, in this article we did a critic reading of the work Stella Manhattan, a romance released in 1985 by the Brazilian author Silviano Santiago, that in its narrative present a gay boy that is exiled in the United States after the installation of the military dictatorship of 1964 and starts to work at the Brazilian consulate in New York.  Santiago publishes his work after the end of the dictatorship Brazilian period and didn’t was affected, because homosexuality was saw as a disease, but other author like Cassandra Rios, had their works censured by the military. Therefore, we intend to approach the homosexuality thematic present in Stella Manhattan, correlating with the studies of Queer theory, and with the historic context present in Santiago’s romance. The analyze made has as base the studies from Berlant and Warner (2012), Lopes (2004), Judith Butler (2016), and others.

[1] Tradução feita em 1982 por Edward Lacey.

[1] Tradução feita em 1982 por Edward Lacey.