A voz que não conhece o fim: reverberações, pérolas e encontros no mar dos falatórios de Stella do Patrocínio

Abstract

This dissertation proposes listening to the voice of Stella do Patrocínio, a black woman institutionalized for almost thirty years in psychiatric colonies in Brazil, as an ethical and political gesture to confront racial, asylum, and editorial erasure. Based on her recorded conversations in the late 1980s, the work anchors itself in the echoes, repetitions, and noises that permeate her speech, understanding it not as a symptom, but as an archive of resistance and a performance of reexistence. Based on an interdisciplinary approach that articulates oralitura (Leda Maria Martins), necropolitics (Achille Mbembe), the device of raciality (Sueli Carneiro), and critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman), the research is built around listening as a method and fabulation as a possibility of presence. The dissertation is organized into three chapters, which follow a spiral timeline: the first focuses on gossip as insurgent performance; the second returns to the story of Stella's mortification and capture by the state apparatus and mental asylum; and the third investigates the contemporary reverberations of her voice through art, criticism, and the public scene. By straining the boundaries between memory, authorship, madness, and silencing, the work proposes an epistemological shift: listening to Stella as someone who allows herself to be traversed by a voice that never ceased.