O Oriente de Os Lusíadas e a América dos descobrimentos e colonização: o feminino e a feminização da realidade

Abstract

This article begins by noting that the literary writing represents geographies and cultural landscapes of other locations, beyond its own reality and context, in rhetorical, imaginary and symbolic manner, reflecting ideological formations, political and cultural order. Following this idea, the article examines, through theoretical and critical assumptions, sought in the gender discourse studies and their engendering strategies of reality, the main trope of literature of discovery and conquest, namely, the feminization or sexualization of the ethno-anthropological reality to be conquered by means of its reduction to the feminine principle as regent of the natural world and the social and cultural reality. Based on these notions, the article proposes to examine representative texts of chronicles about America of the discoveries and colonization and the East of Luís Vaz de Camões’ The Lusiads, as writings which are committed to aspects of the ethnocultural and androcentric complex of the Western tradition.