Entre o trauma e a escrita: resistência e autoria feminina nas obras de Claudia Lage e Ana Kiffer

Abstract

Contemporary Brazilian women’s writing has established itself as a field of narrative dispute, especially when it challenges official ways of recording the past and of instituting regimes of remembrance and silencing. In this context, this research undertakes a comparative study of the novels On the wall of our house (2024), by Ana Kiffer, and The endless body (2019), by Claudia Lage, investigating how these works elaborate experiences marked by historical traumas and gender-based violence through narrative strategies that articulate memory, trauma, investigation, and writing. The central aim is to understand how the narrative voices construct quests — for traces, documents, gaps, and remnants — that confront official history and its mechanisms of erasure, bringing forth forms of remembrance that resist factual linearity and interpretive closure. The focus of this study therefore falls on experiences intrinsically related to the feminine — highlighting the marks of gender violence, silencing, and the inscription of trauma in the body and in language — observed in the formal and ethical choices of narration. This is a qualitative, interpretive, bibliographic study, based on the reading and analysis of the corpus in dialogue with the theoretical framework presented. Concepts of history, trauma, and memory draw on studies by Seligmann-Silva (2000; 2022), Halbwachs (2023), and Figueiredo (2024; 2025) to discuss modes of narration, the tensions between remembrance and forgetting, and the ethical implications of saying. Drawing on readings such as Rago (2013), Zolin (2009), Xavier (2019), and Woolf (2022), the study sought to understand contemporary women’s writing as it constructs the narrative account as an ethical space for reflecting on experience and the past. In light of this, with theoretical contributions from Barthes (2017), Vecchi and Di Eugenio (2020), Cury and Padilha (2024), Fiuza (2014), among others, the final section sought to identify how the two authors mobilize metalanguage in their works as a mean of reflecting on and rearticulating the traumatic past. The hypothesis advanced is that, by shifting the center of narration toward historically marginalized experiences, these novels reconfigure the archive and expand the possibilities for articulating the past, turning writing into a critical practice of resistance and a reopening of memory.