Elizabeth Bishop’s Queer ecocriticism in "Bras/zil"

Abstract

This article demonstrates that, while Elizabeth Bishp voiced her reservations against the essentia­list logic of gender, she built an anti-essentialist poetics of gender to engage the vulnerability of her position as a poet of the Anglo-American literary establishment who, historically and thus unavoidably, represented the sovereign subject’s voice and gaze over Brazil. I argue for an eco­critial reading of the conflict between the poet’s stated refusal of a gendered authorial identity for herself and, by contrast, her construction of a gendered geopolitical identity for the other. My aim is twofold: to consider what happens when the normative genders of geopolitics are unsettled; and, finally, to feed the debate, proposed by Sil­viano Santiago, as to the ethical value of Bishop’s representations of Brazil.