‘La Callejera’: Streetwalks through Minas Gerais in Autran Dourado’s Uma vida em segredo (1964)

Abstract

Abstract This article offers an analysis of Autran Dourado’s short novel Uma vida em segredo (1964), and specifically of its protagonist, Biela. Inseparable from the ideological structures of her specific social location in the state of Minas Gerais at the turn of the twentieth century, Biela gradually becomes what Maria Lugones defines as ‘la callejera’, a female streetwalker of tactical, strategic and active subjectivity. Bielare rearticulates dichotomies of domination and subdual at multiple scales (body, house, city, region, nation) to reveal human experience as ‘grounded’ in specific time and place, and part and parcel of urban processes spanning from the Velha República at the turn of the twentieth century to the start of the dictatorship marking the novel’s publication in 1964.