A RELIGIÃO E O LUGAR SOCIAL DA MULHER NOS ROMANCES DE MIA COUTO: TERRA SONÂMBULA E A CONFISSÃO DA LEOA

Abstract

This work explores the social relationship of Mozambican women based on religiosity and spaces arbitrarily marked by the female body. The Mozambican woman represented in the works Terra sonâmbula (1992) and The leoa's confession (2012), by Mia Couto, portrays female subordination, including during the country's independence process, in which they actively participated in armed struggles. Mozambican society, influenced by Portuguese colonization, incorporated responsibilities to the female subject that, in addition to overloading, excluded women from the most privileged places in social life. Motherhood and domestic tasks were assigned to women with the help of the Christian religion imposed by Portugal. Birole (2018) deals with questions about gender inequalities in domestic work. Casimiro (2004) associates the exclusion of Mozambican women in the labor market to the country's policies that value the family nucleus in which patriarchal orders are subjected through cultural practices. Thus, in Farida, from Terra Sonâmbula and Mariamar, from A Confession of the Lioness, we will discuss how religion, cultural practices, motherhood and domestic work subject female existence in Mozambique in modernity.