In the theater room, “You must call me Diadorim”

Abstract

In a first moment, starting from the fact that Diadorim is a subjectivity crossed by the other’s look - that is, it is not a subjectivity that narrates itself, but a subjectivity whose “being” is put, in face of a first-person narrator, as “being-for-others” - it is necessary to inquire to what extent the revelation of his body as being a woman-body contributes, in the way in which Riobaldo-narrator weaves the threads of the past, to the accord between feminine and otherness. Therefore, it is a matter of investigating the adjustment established, in Rosa’s novel, between the feminine and its condition of “the absolute Other” as Simone de Beauvoir discusses. In a second moment, in addition to examining what the novel talks about (its adjustments and pacts), it is necessary to unravel what the novel conceals. In other words, more than capturing Diadorim in a gender identity, albeit provisional - Diadorim neither seems to perform the standards of masculinity imposed by his peers, for this reason receives the epithet “the delicate”, nor Diadorim “becomes a woman”, but she is, discursively, “made” a woman, in the advent of her death - we intend to demonstrate that what the novel conceals is the scandal, manifested already in the name “Diadorim”, of the disorganization of the norms of gender intelligibility. At this point, we will take Judith Butler's studies on the topic as theoretical assumptions.