O sexo dos tubarões, by Naná DeLuca, or Writing that Delights

Abstract

We will analyse the novel O sexo dos tubarões [The Sex of Sharks] by Naná DeLuca (2017), based on the concept of minor literature developed by the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977), and literature as life / health, discussed by Gilles Deleuze (1997). These seem to us to be appropriate keys to analyses a structure that deterritorialises the major language – Brazilian Portuguese, territorialised in the cis-gender heteronormative template – to tell a tale of identity transit: that of a child into a shark, an animal that has been stigmatized and viewed as a monster by humans. In this individual case the narrative structure is greatly magnified to reveal a people in movement through its use of an allegory which, in Deleuzian terms, becomes a powerful "machine of expression" in an LGBT-phobic society.