A mulher no topo: a representação feminina nos Fabliaux medievais franceses dos séculos XII e XIV.

Abstract

This work aims at carrying out a study about six medieval fabliaux in order to verify how women are represented in these texts. The fabliaux circulated between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Northern France. These are short comic narratives, written and composed of domestic quarrels, clerical lusts, and especially female trickery episodes. These texts appear along with other literary productions of the Middle Ages (lais, exempla, chanson de geste, canso and romance) and were generally presented as a vehicle for the spread of the discourse of hatred and aversion to women, known as misogyny. arratives where female protagonists were placed as inferior to the opposite sex are not infrequent. To support such discussion we will take as a starting point Badinter (1985), Scott (1991) and Bourdieu (2014) who present gender as a category of historical analysis. Besides these, Gaunt (1995), Perfetti (2006) and Woods (2010) collaborate in the presentation of female profiles which are different from those that are commonly presented by current scholars dedicated to studying fabliaux. Our proposal is to show that, in addition to the discourse of female inferiority, the narrative presented may show us another female role/profile. This new view will be possible through the hierarchical inversion, presented by Bakhtin (2013) as carnavalization. The subversion of the hierarchical order will allow us to show and realize the protagonist of the fabliau in an empowered way. Through comedy, she assumes another role within the masculine discourse, presenting herself as creative, smart, intelligent, tricky and able to overcome challenges.