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Sexual Difference and Gender Dysphoria in Eça de Queirós's "O Primo Basílio" and "O crime do Padre Amaro"

2017; Linguagem: Inglês

10.62791/tpmv4x70

2573-1432

Mark Sabine,

Gender, Sexuality, and Education

Abstract: In this study of O Primo Basílio and O crime do Padre Amaro, Mark Sabine reinvestigates Eça de Queirós’s discussion of the upbringing, social role, and sexual behavior of Portuguese women in his first two Realist novels. Drawing on recent scholarship that has approached this subject from psychoanalytic and revolutionary Marxist-feminist angles, it considers the novels in the context of the extensive medical, scientific and philosophical debates of the “woman question” that were precipitated in Great Britain by the publication of J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869). The article indicates echoes of Mill’s ideas in Eça’s critique of the upbringing of Portuguese daughters and discusses how Eça’s two novels present a subtle conception of gender not as an inherent biological characteristic but as a socially constructed, and multiple—rather than binary—identity system.