Catholicism, Avant-garde and women. The refemenization of the religion in Norah Borges and Adalgisa Nery works

Abstract

This article researches the trajectory of two important figures of the Latin American avan-garde: the Argentine plastic artist Norah Borges and the Brazilian poet Adalgisa Nery. Inserted both in the cultural but also religious contexts of their countries, they deal with the patriarchal paternalism that governs the two spaces, the revitalized Catholicism in the thirties and the modern art and literature, that bring the legacy of the avant-garde experiments of the twenties. Playing with the scope and limits of their feminine “attributes”, they imagine other creative and religious ways in their works and, in doing so, invite to refeminize religion from another angle: the valorization of feeling as the construction of an affectivity not hegemonic in the case of Norah and the openness to the flesh and the rest forgotten as a gender critic in the case of Adalgisa.