To Construct New Houses and Deconstruct Old Metaphors of Foundation

For my house to function, I demand as my primary duty that I be a phony, that I not exercise my revolt and my love, both set aside. If I am not a phony, my house trembles. I must have forgotten that beneath the house is the land, the ground upon which a new house might be erected. Meanwhile we sleep and falsely save ourselves.^#
—Clarice Lispector

The Brazilian Portuguese word sonsa is used mainly to describe someone who is a phony, who plays dumb. In the chronicle "Mineirinho," published in 1964, Clarice Lispector recounts the epic demise of a young man executed by thirteen shots fired by a police death squad.^# The despair over the execution of the bandit becomes, in Lispector's text, an interplay of inversions and tensions suggestive of a possible female condition: the obligation not to enact one's rebelliousness or love.^# Pretending is what allows the walls of the house not to tremble. Lispector knows, though, that those walls will not withstand the first gust of wind and that the locked door will go flying through the air. Years have passed, and the wind has torn off some doors. But the situation of women in Brazil is still beset by inversion and tension, and this pretending—this act of playing dumb—still helps to prop up so many houses built on rotten foundations.

The women artists whose work is discussed in this essay stopped pretending and in many cases instead shouted their truths to the four winds. They not only eschewed their passive role but also answered with vehemence. In the 1980s the poet Ana Cristina César responded to criticism from Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, who had questioned the femininity of the title of her book Luvas de pelica (Chamois gloves) with a parable: "With complete disregard for the physiological truth, the egg is said to lie still, awaiting the sperm's boisterous and courageous performance in order to be fertilized. No one mentions the egg's long, dangerous, and solitary journey down obscure tunnels."^# In writing about unspoken truths regarding female biology, César addresses the flawed anatomical argument for the eternal confinement of women. The poet also affects a reversal that renders explicit a female subjectivity (and biology) that everyone knows to be gender specific. Almost twenty years separate Lispector's text from César's. Lispector already speaks of a vital force, one shapeless and indeterminate, that emerges from an archaic and basic human substrate; the young poet uses a biological metaphor to address femininity, the image of the egg functions as a stand-in for a solitary woman traveling through the darkness.

The works by the artists analyzed here were created over the course of twenty-one years of dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85; fig. 1).^# As women these artists were oppressed by both patriarchal society and military power. Their radical proposals contested naturalized power imbalances with regard to gender relations and in the broader realm of a repressive society, tying their responses to questions of ethnicity and class. Women artists have been active in Brazil since the end of the nineteenth century and were crucial to the advent of late modernism in the country, but it was not until the 1960s that their production reflected self-awareness in relation to questions of identity.^# The process of modernization that began in the 1950s prepared the field of action for women with the expansion of the education system and, with it, the job market, facilitating the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, which had a profound effect in both the public and private spheres. Women began questioning prohibitions related to sexuality, family, and political participation.