Entre o anjo do lar e a puta comunista: transgressões, militância e resistência de mulheres em “A Torre das Donzelas”

Abstract

The present scientific research wished to analyze, using the documentary film Torre das Donzelas (2018) as its central object, aspects of transgression of social norms, political activism, and survival and resistance strategies of women who fought against the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 and were imprisoned in the women's wing of the Tiradentes Prison in São Paulo, designated for political prisoners. The context of the time already had important advances regarding the recognition of women, such as the right to vote in 1932, legal equality between sexes in 1946, and the autonomy of married women in 1962, but there were still several challenges regarding women's rights, their recognition, and their participation in society. During the period of the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, the regime harshly repressed popular and political demonstrations, which particularly affected women who were fighting for their rights, whether in their mobilizations or when they were identified as subversive, whose stereotype was distant from the bourgeois feminine idealization. With the promulgation of Institutional Act number 5 in 1968, the intensification of political repression coexisted with strategies to combat the regime, which relied on the mobilization of young people, including women, who joined revolutionary guerrilla groups. Directly or indirectly, they became involved in these struggles and experienced limits and potentialities of action marked by their gender condition. In this sense, the objective of this work was to understand how women's activism during the civil-military dictatorship period contributed to re-signifying and breaking historically constructed limits by patriarchy. Understanding the limits of this research, as there were many ways in which women acted during this period, the documentary film Torre das Donzelas, directed by Suzana Lira, and excerpts from the testimonies were used as the object of analysis, considering the importance of the work in projecting a little-known history of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, which is the story of imprisoned and persecuted women, their survival strategies in the face of imprisonment, torture, and violence at the Tiradentes Prison, the importance of female unity and solidarity, and the reflection on the relevance of the fight for human rights and the need to keep alive the memory of those who resisted authoritarianism to guarantee democratic freedoms in this country.