Mãe of thousand affections: The reinvention of family in O filho de mil homens, by Valter Hugo Mãe

Abstract

This article focuses on the work O filho de mil homens (2011), by Valter Hugo Mãe, with the aim of analyzing how loneliness, when transmuted into affection, raises the creation of other possible worlds in and from literature. In this sense, the text addresses issues related to dehumanization associated with the vulnerability of bodies that do not fit the standard, establishing contact in a very fruitful way with several other texts that mark history of Western literature. It is in the wake of this great conversation that the article seeks to think about Mãe’s work and the perspectives that emerge from its reading. The origin and nature of affections are closely related to the subjects’ way of life, and it is, above all, in the encounter of differences that the work provides us with another way of redefining the world and the meaning of family. To this end, the approaches of Foucault (1976), Delumeau (2009), Agamben (2007), Spinoza (2017), Nietzsche (2009) and Chauí (2000) will be of significant importance. In addition,there were contributions of Bachelard (2018) and Bakhtin (1998).