THE VOICE THAT RESISTS SLAVERY:

gender and race in the trajectory of Maria Firmina dos Reis

Abstract

This article seeks a reflection on the trajectory of Maria Firmina dos Reis, a Brazilian literati who, for centuries, was relegated to ignorance. Through a theoretical reflection on gender and race issues in women's writing, depending on the history of women, we will reflect on the transgressions in the writing and other performances of the novelist from Maranhão, who was represented in different media paths. To perform such an analysis, we will appropriate the theoretical postulates of Simone de Beauvoir (2016a, 2016b), Virginia Woolf (2014, 2016), bell hooks (2019) and Djamila Ribeiro (2018), reflecting on how the issue of gender and race cross the trajectory of Maria Firmina dos Reis, which confronts historiographical and literary discourses about national production, in a narrative aesthetic that evokes abolitionism and blackness, in a writing that begins in the second half of the nineteenth century and goes until the first years of the later century.