From the fat woman to the priest: the marks of stigma in two short stories of Amar é crime, by Marcelino Freire

Abstract

This brief study aims to accomplish an analysis that investigates the relationships between stigmatized characters and the so-called “normal” characters present in the short stories Mariângela and Jesus te ama, from the book Amar é crime, by Marcelino Freire. The author stands out in the Brazilian literature scene not only for his agile writing, but also for his ability to make visible, in his work, the marginalized characters of Brazilian daily life, as well as making them capable of intriguing and disturbing the social entities and subjects who are willing to make these individuals deviate from what is fully accepted socially. For this, narrators, speeches, conflicts and characters are evidenced, in an attempt to demonstrate how the marks of stigma emerge in society and how they deteriorate the identity of those affected by them. So, theoretical concepts present in the works Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity, by Erving Goffman (2008) and Aesthetics of verbal creation, by Mikhail Bakhtin (2010) were used primarily. Through these, we seek to understand and describe analytically, respectively, how the relationships that emerge from the contact of the so-called normal and stigmatized, make these beings deteriorated and how the ideological discourses, passed on in the middle of this interaction, are able to decisively interfere during this process.