"Os poemas ficam nonsense": Canonical Gender in Angélica Freitas' Um útero é do tamanho de um punho

Abstract

Um útero é do tamanho de un punho (2012) is a worthy successor of Freitas’ inaugural book of poems, Rilke Shake. It maintains the fighting wit that characterized Rilke Shake, but situates Freitas’ satirical critique within the female body. As the title indicates, Freitas writes from a position of unapologetic womanhood, aligning the uterus with the fist and thus reconfiguring the symbol of woman’s reproductive potential with the promise of belligerent transformation. The poems in the collection satirize notions of gender essentialism, heteronormativity, and gender performance by deploying a quotidian female subjectivity that engages in a categorical resistance to externally imposed expectations. The link between the two projects is visible throughout Um útero’s many poems, but it is accomplished most immediately in its epigraph. The pair of quotes selected—a line from a well-known German opera song titled “Seeräuber Jenny,” and the satirical phrase, i piri qui—condense and contain Freitas’ ideological stance. This paper will examine how the tension generated by the two quotes, each independently ensnared in a rich history of mockery, results in a sophisticated critique that utilizes humor and the Western literary canon to reveal the canonical construction of gender.