Among women: Reassessing Portuguese 'feminine' poetry of the 1920s

Abstract

This article revisits the dramatic shift that took place in Portugal's literary and cultural landscape in the early decades of the twentieth century due to the surge of published female authorship, primarily in the form of poetry. It seeks to challenge the heteronormative assumptions that have governed the interpretation of this archive both in canonical Portuguese literary history and in revisionist approaches by feminist scholars of Portuguese literature. The discussion centres on the case study of Virgínia Vitorino, the most acclaimed female poet of the 1920s in Portugal, whose largely gender-neutral love sonnets, read in the context of her covertly lived lesbian existence, enable an interpretation of Vitorino as an aesthetic and political intermediary weaving in and out of the intersecting cultures of compulsory heterosexuality and female homosocial desire.