"Sextualities": Taboo, Transgression and Subversion in the Poetry of Maria Teresa Horta and Luiza Neto Jorge

Abstract

Our material experiences of our bodies and sexualities are fundamentally shaped by the ideological limits placed on them via the social hierarchisation of sexuality and the taboos that define which elements of the body and sexuality are acceptable or perverse. In this article, I compare the ways in which these limits are described and challenged in the poetry of Luiza Neto Jorge and Maria Teresa Horta. This article compares how each poet uses taboo elements of the female body to create new gender identities which would liberate the female body from the constraints placed on it under the strict political and religious social codes of twentieth-century Portugal. In particular, I will look at representations of the body and the use of language to empower the feminine in the poetry of Maria Teresa Horta, and to create a greater sense of fluidity in definitions of gender in the poetry of Luiza Neto Jorge. Using theories on sexuality from Foucault to Butler, I mean to address the question, to what extent one can claim that Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry constitutes a transgression of the limits of sexuality, whilst the poetry of Luiza Neto Jorge is a subversion of these limits? I will thus demonstrate how discourse can affect material experience, and compare the different ways in which poetry and language can be used to resist oppressive discourse and either redraw or completely obliterate the limits that define our corporeal and sexual experience by highlighting the poetic works of two of the most revolutionary of Portuguese women writers.