The “politics” between desire and prohibition in the diaries of Maria Isabel Silveira (1880-1965)

Abstract

This article analyzes the diaries of Maria Isabel Silveira (1880-1965) from the perspective of feminist theories that help identify, in a collection of 62 diaries, the power structures that engender a woman of her class. Married to the writer and politician Valdomiro Silveira (1873-1941), whose personal collection was donated to the Institute of Brazilian Studies of the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP), Maria Isabel is rigorous and disciplined when writing about herself and, consequently, about her time. The voice that echoes from the pages is measured, controlled, and illuminates the social position, the dominant ideology, and the roles expected of women emerging at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, in cities such as São Paulo and Santos. In the diary writing, an authorial performance can be observed as a representational strategy. The use of codes when she wants to simultaneously record and hide becomes a resource. In Maria Isabel’s encrypted language, we find the term “politics” used to designate the menstrual period. The association of the term with the physiological state is an invitation to analyze the diaries as an archive of feminism. Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity is used to reveal language as a “constitutive act of subjective experience”.