Silences break in Letters to my mother, by Teresa Cárdenas

Abstract

Amid an arena of daily confrontations, being a woman involves encountering the construction of categories, with gender being the most prominent in defining her experience (Connell; Pearse, 2019). Understood as a social structure, the category of gender is permeated by discourses, ideologies, and dominations arising from social and political technologies, producing, as one of its consequences, silences. This control mechanism is used, for example, to establish power hierarchies, create categories of repression and oppression, or sometimes silence marginal voices that have the capacity to break the unspeakable, transforming the tolerable into the intolerable (Solnit, 2017). Based on this premise, this article aims to understand the rupture of silences and silencing in the work Cartas para a minha mãe by Teresa Cárdenas (2021). Throughout the narrative, there is the sharing of both pain and fears and family silences, wich drive the character to your breakup, a process made possible through the writing of her diary-letters. In light of this, based on a bibliographic research approach with qualitative and exploratory features, it is necessary to refer to scholars such as Lauretis (2019), hooks (2021), Piedade (2017), Gonzalez (2020), Fanon (2008), among others. Therefore, the understanding of the rupture of silences imposed on the self-diegetic narrator through her writing and the discovery of a community originating from the sharing of pain and experiences throughout the narrative becomes evident.