Motherhood, desire, and writing: feminine subjectivation in the novel The weight of the dead bird

Abstract

This article examines the processes of subjectivation of femininity and motherhood in contemporary society through an interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, taking as reference the novel O peso do pássaro morto (2017), by Aline Bei. Anchored in a qualitative and document-based methodological approach, the study is structured around three analytical axes: the portrayal of motherhood outside normative ideals, permeated by violence and resentment, the protagonist’s trajectory toward the assumption of a desiring position and writing as a modality of psychic elaboration. The analysis reveals how motherhood can be shaped by impossibilities and ambivalences, while also opening space for processes of transformation. The protagonist does not embody an idealized model, but follows a trajectory marked by attempts, failures, and reinvention. Writing, particularly feminine writing, as emphasized in this study, emerges as a means of sustaining forms of life that resist normative frameworks, and is construed as a political act of narrating the contemporary. Within this context, the writing of letters, frequently without a recipient, appears as an effort to symbolize experiences that lack a place, thereby contributing to the proposed intersection between literature and psychoanalysis as possibility of listening to marginalized experiences.